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22nd April, 2026 - Webinar replay

Why marketing strategy eats tactics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

Phil Bray 

Morning, everybody. It’s Wednesday, it’s the 22nd of April, and it’s sunny. Welcome to our April webinar. Today, we’re going to be talking about marketing strategy and why it eats tactics for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So you’re all very, very welcome, as is Dan and Abi. We’ve got the team back together again after last month. I don’t think you were here Dan, last month. So we got the team back together again. And what are we going to be talking about? Well, we’re going to be talking about marketing strategy, and it’s pretty simple agenda today we’re going to talk tactics versus strategy. Why strategic approach wins every time. And then we’re going to get really action orientated and talk about the five steps that you can start taking to develop your own marketing strategy for your business. So as I say, a really small agenda for today, but hopefully packed with value. Now I know from a few emails that I’ve had before today’s session, that we have a few newbies on here today, a few people where this is your first Yardstick webinar. So Dan is going to talk to you about how we do things and the initiation ceremony that we do.

Dan Campbell

Oh, wow yeah, forgot about the initiation for the newbies, right? Well, let me rattle through my notes then for them. So a warm welcome to any new faces in the crowd. I mean, if you registered for the webinar because it had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the title, I hope you’re not too hungry, because this one’s all about marketing strategies. Although, if we’re lucky, Phil might give us a live cooking demonstration. So let’s see if we have any time at the end right? So what do we all need to know for today’s session? Well, first things first, we’ll be recording the webinar today, so don’t worry too much about making notes. Focus instead on getting stuck in. There’s a couple of ways you can do that. There’s a Q&A box. There’s a chat function. Zoom is always changing their settings. So if people could put a couple of notes into the chat box, so we know it’s working that’s always appreciated. And of course, it’s a nice safe space we’ve got here on the webinars. So we encourage plenty of questions, plenty of comments. Don’t hold back. There’s no such thing as a daft question. If you’re thinking it, somebody else absolutely is, and they’ll be really glad that you asked it. So thanks Colin, thanks Karen, thanks GP. Yeah, we’ve got the chat box working. Look at that, Phil. So we’ll be reading the questions out at regular intervals. We’ll have a little bit of time at the end that we can sweep any up. So before we wave goodbye, we’ll make sure we get to your questions. And of course, I mentioned earlier that we are recording today’s webinar, so you’ll receive a neatly packaged follow up email at the end with a video link, all the important notes and resources we mentioned. Of course, we have Abi to thank for that, who’s always working away and furiously behind the scenes to make that happen. So Phil, tell us why marketing strategy eats tactics for breakfast, lunch and dinner please.

Phil Bray

I will do. I feel as though I’ve set myself up with this title for this webinar. Okay, so tactics versus strategy. Let’s start with the definition of both, and then we’ll talk about why I believe a strategic approach wins. So tactics, they are specific marketing activities. It might be website, social media, search engine optimisation, generally chosen at random without a clear plan, objective or a reason. So they are: “I could do this, I could do this, I could do this.” And people diving straight in and giving it a go. Strategy, for me, is characterised by a structured plan that ultimately does include tactics, but it starts off as a structured plan with objectives. So we define the objectives then work back from your current position to build a plan, to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to get to. So in your world, in the financial planning world, it’s the difference between recommending a product and building a financial plan to achieve the objectives. So we’ve got a lot of financial planners on this call, and let’s pick on one of you. Mr Elson, Andrew Elson, let’s pick on you. If a prospective client picks the phone up to you, and says “I want you to set me up a VCT.” You’ll have the meeting with the client, chances of that client walking out of that first meeting with a VCT brochure under their arm? Teeny tiny, it’s not going to happen. What they will walk out with is an understanding of the financial planning process and hopefully a desire to move forward with the financial planning process so that Andrew, you will write them a financial plan to achieve their objectives, which you will uncover during the fact finding process, while also looking at their existing provision. So for me, it’s what you guys do day in, day out with your clients. You talk to people strategically about their objectives and how to achieve them, rather than diving straight into tactics or indeed giving them what they want to start with, and that’s the definition for me. That’s the difference between the two, and trying to put it into your world hopefully helps. But why do I think a strategic approach is more important? The first reason, it’s ultimately faster. Diving straight into tactics does create the illusion of you are taking action, and it creates the illusion of making progress, but there’s quite a high chance that the tactic that is chosen, actually is the wrong tactic to begin with, or tactics that are chosen are actually the wrong tactics. Generally speaking, when people come to Yardstick with an initial enquiry about using our services, they will generally lead with “we need help with”, and then they’ll tell us what it is, social media, brand building, SEO that’s a favourite, that sort of thing, if we then take them down the strategy route, quite often the case, the thing they originally thought they wanted does not make it into the strategy because they don’t need it. So working strategically ultimately is faster, because you stand a much, much better chance of making sure that the right tactics are in the plan, so you get the tactics right straight away, rather than picking the wrong tactics and going down the wrong road. The difference, I guess, between blindly driving down a road chosen at random, or actually pulling over to the side of the road and consulting a map or your satnav. And because it’s ultimately faster, it’s ultimately more cost effective, because marketing tactically is trial and error marketing. Spend a bit of money here, allocate some time to it, see if it works. It’s unlikely to work. Money wasted, time wasted. So investing money in a strategy, and investing money and time in a strategy is ultimately faster and ultimately more cost effective, because you take fewer wrong turns. It also helps you to provide focus. Map provides focus. The financial plans that you write for your clients provide focus. And guess what? Marketing plan, marketing strategy, using the terms interchangeably, create greater focus too, because they provide a lens through which we can look. So if a client of ours, who we have written a marketing strategy for, comes to us and says, “could we do X, Y or Z?” We have a lens through which we can look and say “right, is it going to help us achieve the plan? Do we need to do it or not?” And it means we give into magpie marketing far less frequently. Magpie marketing is being distracted by shiny new things. “The firm down the road is doing this. Why don’t we do it? Let’s do this.” So the strategic approach provides a greater focus and avoids magpie marketing, while ultimately being faster and costing you less. It’s easier to measure against the agreed objectives. We’re going to talk about setting objectives in a minute. So it makes it much easier to understand whether you are on track to achieve your objectives. I did a lot of calls yesterday with clients where we have objectives set about number of new enquiries, number of new clients, AUM, and we can see whether they’re on track to achieve that, because as part of the strategy process, we set those objectives. And all of those things mean, I believe you have a much higher chance of sustained success. Sure you might pick some tactics that are lucky to start with. Chances are you won’t, but it could happen, you’ve got a much higher chance of sustained success if we start strategically. And as I’ve said already, you guys build financial plans for your clients, you help them understand their objectives, you review what they’ve got right now, and you help them bridge that gap. So why would it be any different for your marketing? The answer is it shouldn’t be. Dan, anything we need to deal with before we go on to talking about building a marketing plan? We’re good, Dan. Cool. So five steps to deliver your marketing strategy, and this is where we are going to get really action orientated. Hopefully you’re going to leave with things that you can do today. So five steps. Step number one, agree what your objectives are, and we’ll give some examples of that in a minute. Then we need to develop detailed client personas. You shouldn’t start developing a plan until you’ve done those two things. Agree what success looks like. Agree on your destination, your objectives, and then agree who you want to work with to achieve those objectives or arrive at that destination. Too many people dive straight into marketing without actually thinking who they want to work with, and that causes huge problems. Then step number three, understand where you are now, so complete a data led review of your current marketing, and then build that strategy. And we’ll talk about how we do that to get you from where you are now to where you want to get to. And then finally, let’s agree how you’ll measure those results so you can see whether you’re on track or not. So those are the five stages. We’re going to unpack each of them as we work through this. So in my experience, and if anybody’s on this call who has different objectives from their marketing, do put something in the chat. If I’ve missed something here, you think “this is what I want my marketing to achieve”, then whack it in the chat for me. But in my experience, firms generally want their marketing to achieve one of three things, most firms, more than nine out of ten when they come to us, want their marketing to generate new enquiries that turn into new clients that will then increase the AUM of the business or their fixed fee income, their retained fixed fee income if they’re a business that charges fixed fees ongoing, rather than percentages. So I would say more than nine out of ten firms, when they come to us, want to increase their AUM levels or fixed fee levels. And I’m going to show you an example in a minute of how you can set targets if that is your objective. We have some firms come to us, and we know other firms may be on this call, want their marketing to improve their recruitment. We know the supply and demand issues in financial services when it comes to recruitment, and we also know that spending money on recruitment consultants, while sometimes absolutely necessary, it’s expensive, isn’t it? So some firms come to us and want to be able to show themselves off, make them more appealing and interesting to potential recruits, whether that’s administrators, paraplanners, advisers, planners, support staff, etc. And there’s definitely a link there. We’ve done a couple of webinars about this, about how you can use marketing to improve your recruitment. And then some firms we work with want to market and get new enquiries from advisers who are thinking of retiring or selling their business. The firm we’re working with wants to acquire client banks, other businesses. I would say the recruitment in the acquisitions, maybe five to 10% of firms that we work with, that’s their marketing objective. Maybe 95% want to grow through additional AUM or fixed fees. So if you guys have got a different objective for your marketing do put it in the chat, because I’d be interested to hear it. So what I want to do now is unpack the growth objective to show you how you would go about setting that objective. Now, this is a little bit like a GCSE maths question, so we have a few slides in a few steps, and if anybody wants to contact me after the webinar, I’ll run these numbers for you specifically given your circumstances. But hopefully this is relatively straightforward to follow. So see, this is a case study as well as some theory about how to calculate a target. And what we want to do is we want to create a target for the number of new enquiries and number of new leads, same thing, that a firm needs to hit their objective. And what I put in here is a mythical objective that this firm wants to take on an extra £10 million of new money from new clients in the next 24 months. So it doesn’t really matter what the numbers are, they’re for illustrative purposes only. We have some clients who have got a naught on the end of that £10 million, others who would be very happy with that, but it’s a mythical case study. So how do we get from an objective of £10 million of AUM in 24 months to an objective that your marketing can hopefully achieve? So there’s a few steps we need to go through. Step one, we need to understand the average AUM per client right now, that’s a really simple calculation. You take the firm AUM, how much AUM the firm has got right now divided by the number of clients. I would use households as a number, rather than individuals. And there’s an example, £34 million and change divided by 125 clients gives you an average of £275,000 per client. Pretty simple maths. Most people on this call here should know what your firm AUM is and how many households you deal with. So it shouldn’t be a problem getting that data. Step number two, we then need to calculate the average number of new clients that you need to achieve the objective, in this case, of £10 million. Again, pretty straightforward. Divide the Aum target £10 million by £275,000. So here, and I’ve not put this to decimal points, we’ve got round numbers. It’s 36 new client households over two years, 36 new client households over 10 years. So we now know how many new clients we need, assuming that those new clients bring in the same average AUM as the existing clients. Hopefully everyone’s still with me after those two steps. Step three, we need to think about the conversion rate, and this is the conversion rate or the rate at which new enquiries get converted into clients. And the way you calculate this is to take the number of new clients in the last 12 months, households again, and divide that by the total number of new enquiries you’ve had over the same time period. A couple of caveats here. It needs to be the total number of enquiries, every single enquiry, no exceptions, because if you start taking people out of that calculation, because it was a poor enquiry, you couldn’t get hold of them, you got a refund from Unbiased whatever it is, you’re starting to falsely push up, falsely increase your conversion rate. It’s not a true figure. So the total number of new clients in the last 12 months. Most people on this call will have that information. Divide that by the total number of new enquiries over the same time period. Now you should be recording every single new enquiry that comes into your business on your back office, a sales based CRM or a spreadsheet. We’ve got a spreadsheet to help you do that, Abi maybe we can put that in the follow up. So in this example, I’ve come up with a mythical number of a conversion rate of 23.75%. If you don’t have this data, use one in four. Use 25% conversion rate as a proxy for that number. So we now know the average AUM per client. We know the number of new clients that you need. We know the conversion rate. It’s very straightforward in step four to calculate the total number of new enquiries that you need. And that’s simply a case of dividing, in this case, the number of new clients by the conversion rate. So 36 divided by 23.75% means in this case, we need 152 new enquiries in total. And that’s equivalent to 76 a year. So this firm needs a total of 76 new enquiries per year coming into the business. That’s six and a half a month, something like that. We now need to think in steps five and six, where these are going to come from. But Dan, I think we got a message from Fabian that we probably should deal with now.

Dan Campbell

Yeah. So Fabian asks, “would it not be better to use qualified enquiries i.e. ones we want to work with instead of every enquiry?”

Phil Bray

No, I don’t think so. Because you will always get enquiries from people that are not right for you. You will always get enquiries from people who are right for you but don’t proceed because they’ve chosen somewhere else. So I think to get a true picture of where you stand and what your marketing is generating, you should be recording every single new enquiry, and looking at your conversion rate there. I think if you’re looking at the conversion rate of good enquiries, you create a falsely positive picture. It’s a little bit like going to a client and only showing the performance of funds in their portfolio that’s above benchmark. It’s creating a falsely positive picture. So the only true way of knowing exactly what the output from your marketing input is, is to look at every single lead that’s coming in. I do think, caveat to that, I do think though, you should have a column on your enquiry recording spreadsheet about whether you want to work with the client or not, so you can see the proportion of all enquiries that you actually want to work with. If that proportion is high, your marketing is doing a good job. If that proportion is low, your marketing messages need to change. Sorry. Fabian, that was a long answer to a short question,

Dan Campbell 

And just on that, so Nicola asks “do you include the number of clients you’ve converted that year into the number of new enquiries in step three?”

Phil Bray

The last 12 months. So look at the number of enquiries over the last 12 months, number of enquiries, number of clients over the last 12 months, and divide one into the other. And to be fair, if you wanted to get a longer term conversion rate, and you’ve got the data, you could do the last 24 months, you could do the last 36 months. The key thing is that the time period for which you are looking at clients converted and new leads are the same. And is there anything else Dan?

Dan Campbell 

Just a comment from Neil saying “I generate a decent amount of leads from my office location, but only a percentage of those qualify as actual leads.”

Phil Bray 

Yeah, we’ve seen that. I can think of a firm we work with, where they were high street. And every single new enquiry, when we did the analysis, every single new enquiry that they got, the source was walking and it was literally people walking through their door were poor quality and didn’t convert. Two points there. First, it told us that we needed to change the messaging on the outside of their office. And second thing, this goes back to your point Fabian, if we only recorded the good enquiries, those people that walked in that were not the right fit, we wouldn’t have known that they existed, and therefore wouldn’t have known we got a problem with the messaging on the office. So those first four steps help us calculate the total number of enquiries, the total number of leads that the business needs. Step number five and six show us where these are going to come from. Now, the best new enquiry, the best new lead, the ones that are easiest to convert and have got the lowest cost of acquisition are referrals from existing clients. Therefore, that’s where your growth strategy should look first of all. So in step five, what we’re calculating is what portion of the total lead target we think is realistic to get from referrals from existing clients during the year. So I would use a figure of 25%, one in four. So what we’re saying there is that your referral strategy should aim to produce one referral that gets in touch with you, really important, that gets in touch with you out of every four clients that you’ve got. And if you’re collecting the data, you’ll be able to calculate where you are. So in this case, I would say a benchmark of 25%. You want your recommendation rate to be 25% during the year as a minimum. I’ve seen firms get 50 or 55%, so 125 clients, 25% we expect to get 31 referrals per year from the existing client bank if you’re doing the things that you should be doing. Unpack that in a bit. Therefore step six, we know we need 45 additional enquiries from other sources. So the key numbers here that you will be measuring if we were to plot these into a plan. 275, so we’re monitoring whether the AUM for new clients is the same or higher or lower than existing clients. We know what the total number of new enquiries is a year. I think it was 76 a year, and we know where they’re coming from as well. We know what the conversion rate is. We know what the recommendation rate is. So it’s giving us numbers that we can monitor. We can check our performance against. But the key thing is, for this business, they need 76 new enquiries a year. We expect 31 to come from referrals, 45 from other places. And that calculation, if you got the data, it’s a five minute job to do it. That calculation gives us a destination and objective to build a marketing plan to achieve. As I say, it’s also a good GCSE maths question. Dan got something from Quinn.

Dan Campbell

We do, yes. So Quinn says “when I get enquiries, I typically ask them to complete a digital fact find before we arrange an online meeting with them to test their sincerity. Would you advocate this, or do you feel this could be a little off putting?”

Phil Bray 

I think there’s two answers I give to this, Quinn. There’s my gut feel answer, and then there’s an answer that you could give if you’ve got the data. My gut feel, and this is just personal preference, and there’ll be plenty of other firms on the call who can give their opinion, but my gut feel is I would reduce the level of friction as much as possible with that first meeting. I would try and make that first meeting the process for having it, the process for booking it just as super smooth as possible and put as little friction in place. If you find you’ve got an issue, I don’t know with people booking in that aren’t right for you etc, you’ve got a couple of ways of solving that problem, improve the marketing, or put a bit of friction in place. But my gut feel, I probably wouldn’t do it, but have a look at your data. For every 10 leads that you get, how many complete that digital fact find beforehand? Is it a barrier? Look at your data, is it a barrier? Are you sending 10 out, and only getting one back? I would just have a look at the data for what you’ve got. My gut feel though upfront, would be not to put the friction in place. But there might be times, let’s say you were over subscribed, you got too many leads that a bit of friction might not be a bad thing.

Dan Campbell

Yeah, and Andrew mentions they “add a pre-meeting form when they’re not quite sure somebody’s right for them as a filter.” So obviously, if they want, they can let them straight in but if they’re unsure, they can put that filter in place.

Phil Bray

Give you an example here at Yardstick, when a new lead comes to us, we don’t ask people to complete any digital fact find or forms beforehand. We will do a little bit of digging, a little bit of due diligence ourselves. If we think the firm is squarely in our target audience, then probably Abi will reach out and arrange a meeting. If we find that they’re not in our audience, then we’ll send a polite “we’re not right for you”, but we want as little friction in place at that point, we want to start talking to people. Personal opinion only. Okay, so step one is setting the target, what do we want to achieve? Step number two is to develop detailed client personas. Now when I talk about this, you get a lot of moans, grumbles, “do we really need to do this?” And bluntly, yeah you do if you want your marketing to be effective. If you don’t know who you’re talking to, if you don’t know who you want to attract, how do you know what their triggers are, what their challenges are, what their objectives are, what their objections are, what social media channels to use, what tone of voice to talk to them in. How do you know all that stuff? So really, really important that you think about who you want to be working with. And it is a hill I will happily die on, that you can’t market your business effectively without knowing who you want to work with. And I think you’ve got two options here. The first is you dive deep into a niche. So we have some people on this call who are diving deep into a niche. Matt, Matt Campbell, think you’re on the call mate. You, myself and Kate did a session with FT Adviser about niche marketing a long time ago, six weeks ago, something like that. And there’s some huge benefits of niche marketing. And Abi, maybe if you can put a link to the podcast that Matt and Kate and I did in there, that’ll be good, but you could dive straight into a niche. So examples of niches might be doctors, dentists, vets. Yardstick is an example of a niche. We only work with financial advisers and planners, and people who supply services to financial advisers and planners. So that’s one option. Option number two, is you go slightly broader and work with a target audience. So for example, a typical target audience for a financial planner, “we work with people thinking about retirement, at retirement and who are in the active phase of retirement.” So what’s that? 50 to 75 to put broad numbers on it. Now they’re target audiences. It’s excluding some people at the edges, accumulators, people who want mortgages, that sort of stuff. Now what you can do there, to narrow that down a little bit further, is add on a local overlay. So “we work with people who are thinking about retirement, at retirement or in retirement within five miles of our office.” Now that doesn’t mean that if you get a good enquiry, who’s happy to work with you by Zoom, or you’re happy to go to them and they’re 100 miles away that you wouldn’t do it. You probably absolutely would, but it’s not what you’re targeting. It’s not who you might aim marketing at. So two options here, go niche or go target audience, but please do pick one and then when you have, start to develop detailed client personas. Start with basic identifiers, age, location, stage of life, kids, that sort of stuff. We don’t need to go into really granular detail. I have seen client personas literally where it talked about the type of pasta this person ate. Now we really don’t need to go into that granular detail, but I do think we need the basic identifiers. We then, and this is super important, need to think about their triggers for taking advice. What is it that happens to them or what is it that changes about their thinking that means that they get in touch with you? Is it a big birthday? Is it a life event, redundancy, job change, that sort of stuff? Is it another reason? Just a gut feel that they need to be doing something? So what’s their trigger for taking advice? You need to understand that, because you need to talk to them about those triggers throughout your marketing and on your website. Think about some of the reasons they might not take advice. Why might they not come to you? Why might they not take advice full stop? So start to think about those sorts of things. How much somebody charges, fees might be a barrier. Just never having spoken to a financial planner before, that might be a barrier. So think about the reasons they don’t take advice. Then think about their challenges and aspirations, the things that get them out of bed in the morning, the things that keep them awake at night. And again, we need to be empathising with those things on your website and through your marketing. Show you are the person, the expert they need in their lives, to solve the challenges and achieve the aspirations. Then link to reasons not taking advice. Think about some of the misconceptions they might have about financial planning, some of the worries, the fears that they have, think about where they go for sources of financial information advice at the moment, and then start appearing on those. And then think about how they prefer to be communicated within which channels. Do they prefer written communication? If it’s written, do they prefer that to be electronic or printed? Do they watch videos? Do they listen to podcasts? Which social media channels do they hang out from? And when you’re producing these, AI is your friend. AI can help with a lot of research here. Websites like Statista are great, where you can go and look stats up for social media usage etc. But do put the hard work in to think about a niche. Think about your target audience, and then, once you know, headlines who it is, start thinking about this, sketch it out on paper, and it works really well. Number three, this is where we look at your existing marketing and where we create a data led review of your current position. The first thing I would be doing is doing a competitor and peer analysis. So where do you fit into the ecosystem of similar advisers? So if your niche is dentists, do a Google search “financial adviser dentists”, and start looking at your peers and competitors. If you work in a local area, do a search on Google. Do a search on maybe Unbiased, VouchedFor and start looking at the firms locally, and what I would be doing is put yourself in the shoes of a potential client when you’re doing this competitor peer analysis. And look at how impressive they are on the consumer’s digital journey to their door. Number of Google reviews, VouchedFor reviews, the quality of their website. Do they have any negative links on Google? Do they have client testimonial videos on their website? All those sorts of things that we know impress consumers. Have a look and look at your peers and competitors. See how much of this stuff they’ve got and compare it to you. Start looking at your new enquiry data, if you’ve got it, and if nothing else comes out of this call, everybody start recording every single new enquiry that comes into your business. So important, we’ve got the spreadsheet across the top of it, you’ll see the data fields that you should be recording, just so important to start looking at the data, looking at your conversion rate, as we did in step one, start looking at the conversion rate by source. If you’ve got multi adviser firms, start looking at conversion rate by advisers. And just dig deep into the data. There’ll be lots of lessons that will improve your marketing. And then here as well, develop a differentiator list. We have written blogs on this. Abi if you wouldn’t mind, sticking it in the follow up. That would be good. There are no USP’s in financial planning. People will go searching for USP’s like the Holy Grail, and they just don’t exist in financial planning. You know what? That doesn’t matter. You don’t need to find a USP that you do, and only you do, and nobody else does for you to market your business successfully. What you do need to do is show, in my view, what makes you different, what makes you different to other firms. And there’s all sorts of different things that make you different to other firms, and what we’ve done to help you in the blog about the differentiator list, there is a long list of things that are potential differentiators. Copy and paste that list into a Word document. Delete the things that don’t apply to you, add anything else in that does apply to you that’s not on the original list, and there’s your differentiator list that becomes a checklist that you can use throughout your marketing. If you’re writing an award entry, print your differentiator list and work out which ones you put in. If you’re building a new website, get your differentiator list, tick them off, what’s in there, what’s on the website. So three things to begin with, when it comes to this data led review of your marketing and then dive into a bunch of other stuff. Go and have a look at your website as before. Go and look at what social proof you’ve got from a client driven social proof perspective, we would recommend having three things, client testimonial videos, online reviews, Google and VouchedFor might have said that once or twice in the past six years and client survey results. Now, there might be other types of social proof that you could have, awards, accreditations, etc. Go and look at your SEO and AIO, how well do you rank for your niche or your target audience? Is AI recommending you? Go look at your social media output, online visibility, basic stuff. Can someone find you? Look at online directories. There are a bunch of online directories that you are probably listed on, that you might not know you’re listed on or it’s a long while since you looked at. For anybody who gets their accreditations through the PFS, go and have a look at the PFS Find an Adviser Directory, and I’ll bet you 50p that your listing is out of date or has some missing things on it. Look at referrals. Think about what you’re doing to encourage more referrals, or are you just kind of taking what comes? Look at your newsletters and communications. What’s the open rate? What’s the click to open rate? Are new enquiries being added in? What are the most well read types of articles? Do more of those. Do less of the other stuff. And of course, look at things like GDPR compliance. Before we go on to step four. Dan, I think Guy’s got a question.

Dan Campbell 

I think you might have answered Guy’s question. Guy asked “how much does reputation matter? Would testimonials and social proofing make a big difference?” But then Guy mentions, “could just see you’ve mentioned about social proofing on the next slide.”

Phil Bray 

I think it makes a massive difference, Guy. We do some research every year, into 500 randomly chosen websites for financial advisers and planners, and the proportion of firms who tick those three boxes are just teeny tiny. Most firms don’t have client testimonial videos, for example, but they are gold for getting your existing clients to talk about the benefit of working with you to prospective clients. Your Google and VouchedFor reviews are incredibly important for impressing people on that digital journey to your door. So social proof, I just think, is massively important. There was this Which survey, 89% of people are more likely to do business with somebody a firm that has a business that has online reviews. So I think they’re massively important from that perspective. But they’re a massive differentiator. If you’ve got them, you’re going to set yourself apart from most others. Another long winded answer, a short question, Guy, very very important. So number four, need to then build the strategy. So the work we’ve been doing so far has been leading up to this point where we start building the strategy. And for me, there’s two steps here, two sub steps. The first is to fix the marketing foundations. So let’s go back to that example I used earlier with Andrew. I’ve got Andrew up. I’ve said “I want this VCT”, and actually, quite rightly, Andrew sat me down, slapped me around the face, told me I don’t need a VCT, but has said that I need a financial plan. If at that point, Andrew finds that I don’t have a will, no powers of attorney. My mortgage is on standard variable rate and and my savings are in an account that is highly taxed, and I’m not using cash ISA’s, all that sort of stuff, the basic stuff, Andrew will be sorting that out for me, as well as developing a financial plan to help me achieve my medium and long term objectives. The same is true with your marketing. So the first part of building a strategy is to fix the marketing foundations. So if you try and lay bricks on really shallow foundations, you don’t get a solid house. The same is again true with your marketing. We need to fix the marketing foundations. So what comes under the heading of marketing foundations? These are all important. They’re in no particular order. Your website is incredibly important. Your website is your shop window. It is where people make decisions about whether to work with you or not. A shoddy website will cost you more money in lost leads than the cost of building a proper website. Your website is not a commodity. It is not a box to tick. It is selling you 24/7 or should be selling you 24/7 to the right type of people, there might be tweaks we need to change with branding. Dan, you’ve seen, we’ve seen plenty of examples of where you’ve seen someone’s branding and think “that isn’t going to work, and we need to make some changes” to it rarely means changing the name wholesale, and it often means going from version 1.0 to 2.0 of the branding. Collateral, what do you give to clients? Is it impressive? Does it help them? Newsletters, that’s a foundational piece of work as well. Your newsletter should be sent monthly. It should be sent to clients, prospects, professional connections, and it has a variety of different jobs. Enquiry recording, might have mentioned that a few times in this session, but again that’s a foundational piece. If you are not recording the output of your marketing input, how do you know what’s working and what’s not? It’s the equivalent of investing money and never looking at it again. Your Google business profile on the right hand side of the Google search results page when someone looks for your business is your Google business profile. Is yours filled in? Does it have Google reviews on there? Does it have a description, in 750 characters that explains what you do, who you do it for and why people use you? And then going back to what you talked about, Guy, your social proof, incredibly important to have run client surveys, got online reviews, Google and VouchedFor, client testimonial videos, all that sort of stuff comes under the foundational piece. And in my view, it’s just incredibly important to do this stuff first, because why would you try and market your business? Why would you spend money pushing people to a sub par website or a Google profile that doesn’t look right? You’ve got to do this stuff first before we move on to the next. So we then need to move on to the next and we know, in the previous example that we had that we needed 76 new enquiries. 30 something were coming from referrals. 40 something were coming from other sources. And when it comes to referrals, you should have a strategy that is built on three things, client education, client communication and client appreciation. Education, communication and appreciation.  The education element should be built on educating clients who to recommend you to, how to do it and when to do it. Now, most firms that we work with and they first come to us, are not maximising this potential. They’re taking what comes to them, and they are getting referrals because they’re doing a good job, but they’re doing nothing strategically to increase the number that they’re getting. And for me, this is about having conversations with clients about referrals, not asking, not going back to 1995 and having conversation, asking clients for referrals and expecting to come out with names, numbers and email addresses. This is about having conversations with clients about who to recommend you to, how to do it and when to do it. It’s about sending regular reminders once a quarter about those three things. It’s about showing appreciation at three different points. When the referral is received, a handwritten thank you card and when the referral converts, a personalised gift. Let’s ditch the hampers and champers, it should be a personalised gift. When the referral converts and leaves your Google or VouchedFor review, send a screenshot of it to the client who made the original introduction, closes the loop and validates their decision to make the introduction in the first place. So there’s a bunch of things that you should be doing to increase the number of referrals that you get, and then, and only then, should we consider adding other new tactics in place. And we see some firms who don’t need additional tactics because they can hit their objectives through referrals alone. If you can’t hit your objectives through referrals alone, then you do need to consider other tactics, and those tactics are entirely dependent on who you want to be working with. So let’s say your target audience is those three people glide path retirement, at retirement or already retired in your local area. Then your tactics would focus on that local area, there’s a bunch of stuff you can do, a long, long list to do in the local area. If anybody follows Sean Standerwick at MLP, he put a really good post on LinkedIn in the past couple of days about what they’re doing to market their business locally. And it’s really really good, go and have a look at that. If you want to target specific audiences, doctors, dentists etc, then there’s a bunch of things you can do there as well. You’re probably more online, it’s less physical, it’s less analog, because these people could be based anywhere. And those other tactics would be a combination of different things. Online, it might be things like SEO, AIO, social media, online advertising, Google and social media ads. In the local area, it might be local advertising. It might be sponsorship. Might be some of the good stuff that Sean’s doing. There’s a bunch of different things. You should only consider those tactics when you’ve exhausted the referrals and you’ve got that referral strategy in place, and only if you actually need these additional tactics. Then, and you need to do this at this stage, agree on how the results will be measured. So for me, this means you need a marketing KPI dashboard, or KPI dashboard, and we do have a template of this again. Final request, Abi, if you could stick that in there follow up, that would be cool. And the dashboard that we would recommend you use, it’s split into two sections. Top half is marketing, bottom half is sales. So what would be in the marketing part of the dashboard, website data, looking at number of visitors, quality of visitors. Online reviews, Google and VouchedFor. Are they coming in? Are they being replied to? Has something happened that means they’ve stopped coming in? Social media engagement, for those firms who are running them, webinars, how many people are signing up? How many people are showing up? How many of those people are new in your audience? Any paid campaign engagement. So for example, I was on the phone, we did a meeting yesterday with a firm that we work with in the US. We run some social media, some Facebook advertising for them. And we’re looking at the number of guide downloads, cost of the guide downloads, impressions, all that sort of stuff. Content and newsletter engagement, open rates, click to open rates, what’s popular, what’s not. And we should be using these, all this data to make decisions about your marketing. And then second half of the dashboard, bottom half is sales. Are we getting the lead numbers that we need? Are we getting, in this case, six and a half a month? Are new clients coming in at the rate we need, whether ongoing clients or transactional clients? Then an ongoing measure of conversion rate. The AUM, is that where we wanted to be? £275,000 in the example and then ultimately fees, both initial and ongoing, so you can start calculating things like return on investment. So you don’t need to go and build your own marketing KPI dashboard. We’ve done that bit for you. You do need to start populating it and we’re at a point in the year, what, late April? Where actually, it’s probably not too big a job to go back to the start of the year and back date it. So those are the five steps to building a marketing strategy. And for me, this is a tortoise versus hare. I couldn’t find a picture of a tortoise versus a hare in blue anyway, so we got the verses on there, but this is a tortoise versus hare conversation and we all know what happened in that race. There is no doubt a strategy takes longer, and you will spend time, money, blood, sweat and tears, developing that strategy. But the payoff is massive. Your marketing costs will be lower. You’ve got a much higher chance of lasting success, and it means you will be much more focused and much less likely to give into that temptation of magpie marketing. So whilst taking action might make you feel good and feel as though you’re running, chances are you’re running in the wrong direction. If you dive straight into tactics. Much, much, much better to take a bit of time out, pull over to the side of the road, consult the map and work out where you’re going, and head off in the right direction straight away. In your world, you build and implement plans for your clients. You build and implement financial plans for your clients. Why would your marketing be any different? Practice what you preach. Whether you take the DIY route, you can go and do this yourself. You can absolutely go and do this yourself if you’ve got the time, skill and inclination, or you could engage an expert, and there are a lot of marketing experts around who specialise in the financial services space. We have a tried and tested process. Promise, there’s only one slide on this. We have a tried and tested process. We call it the Ignition Marketing Strategy. We’ve taken 130 firms through it. It’s available whether you’re in the B2B or the B2C space. If you’re an advice and planning firm in the B2C space, that works. If you are selling your services into financial advisers and planners, we’ve got a B2B option as well. We do the plan over the course of three meetings, discovery meeting, where the client often feels stuck, and don’t know what they’re doing. Strategy, presentation, they start to feel a sense of relief as they start to see the plan forming, the fog lifting, and then hopefully the wrap up in the implementation, they start to feel excitement about what they’re looking forward to and the potential results. So if anybody wants to talk about that, it’s a paid for piece of work. But if anybody wants to talk about that, send Abi a message, abi@theyardstickagency.co.uk, and Abi will be very happy to chat to you. Equally, Abi is very happy to chat to you now about our bloody wonderful guest that we’ve got coming up next month.

Abi Robinson

What a segue, Phil, that was nice and was planned. This guest really doesn’t need much introduction, does he? So we are absolutely delighted next month that we’re going to have the very opinionated, the very wonderful and no doubt, very sweary, Mark Ritson joining us on the 27th May, and it’s a bit of a build on what we’ve been talking about today, because we’re going to be covering again, why strategy, in Mark’s opinion, should come before tactics, and how new tactics and new platforms and must do’s can make marketing feel really relentless, and how that means that many advisers, planners, support firms, end up doing more but getting less. So we’ll get Mark’s opinion on what we’ve covered today, why we need to spend more time on positioning, the biggest mistakes that people make with their marketing that we see, measuring results, again more of what we talked about, but also about price transparency. Why disclosing your fees can be a real competitive advantage, how to look different in a crowded market, and when we’re thinking about the distinction between brand building and short term sales, how can we allocate resources effectively between the two? So that’s the brief that we’ve got for Mark. We have no doubt it will go off on a tangent, but it will be a fantastically exciting one, no doubt. So I’m only talking this long so you can find your phone and scan the QR code, but don’t worry, I will also put a link in the follow up email and it will be a pleasure to see you. We are very, very excited.

Phil Bray 

Thanks Abi. Yeah, Mark’s going to be great. Right Dan, any final questions? We’ve got three minutes left, so any final questions?

Dan Campbell 

Wonderful yeah, let me pick some good ones then to end. So let’s go with David’s question. David asks “I’m already getting some referrals. What types of things should go into my strategy to get more?”

Phil Bray

That goes back to what I talked about earlier. Quick list, conversations with clients, educating them on who to recommend you to, how to do it and when to do it. I would do those at the end of every annual review meeting. Showing appreciation at those three points, handwritten thank you card when the referral is received, a personalised gift when the referral converts and sharing Google and VouchedFor reviews. I’ve seen quite a few firms use some incentives or charitable schemes where they’ll make a donation for every referral received. Keep that topped up. Quarterly updates to your clients, thanking them for referrals, confirming again, reconfirming those three things, who to recommend you to, how to do it and when to do it. So those are the places that I would start. There’s a few other bits and bobs, but those are the places that I’d start. And for me, it’s a case of thinking strategically, getting on the front foot when it comes to referrals. And because hope, crossing your fingers and hoping is not a referral strategy. And this stuff works. We’ve been doing it long enough now to show we’ve got data that shows that this really does work and increases the number of referrals received.

Dan Campbell 

Amazing. Thank you. Let’s go for another one shall we? Jane asks “where is the line between strategy and tactics?”

Phil Bray

That’s a good question. That’s a good question. And I think for me, strategy is about understanding what you want to achieve, who you want to achieve it with and where you are now. Then tactics are the things that get you from A to B. So for me, putting it into your world, the financial plan including the cash flow is the strategy piece. The products, the investment portfolios etc are the tactical pieces. So maybe that answers the question.

Dan Campbell 

Perfect. Do we have time for one more?

Phil Bray

Go for it.

Dan Campbell

Okay. One of the many Matt’s in the audience asks “what do I do if I don’t have any existing clients to get referrals from?”

Phil Bray

That’s a really good point, and it’s a bit of an issue. So I think there’s two things. First is you’ve clearly got to, still need to do the foundational pieces, still got foundational work. But, clearly you’ve got to skip that step around referrals immediately and go straight into the tactics to target your target audience or the niche that you’re looking for. But then as you start taking clients on from the other marketing tactics, you can then start to implement a referral strategy. And you can start implementing a referral strategy from that first client that you take on from other sources. Abi, I said that was the last request, I’m sorry. I wrote a couple of pieces for New Model Adviser at the start of the year, or late last year about marketing your business when referrals aren’t an option, perhaps you could just pull those up Abi and stick them in the follow up as well. Right everybody, I think we’re good. Council House bells in Nottingham are ringing. We’ve got Ruth’s favorite marketing expert on the webinar next month. You’ve got the QR code there. Go and sign up for it guys, Mark’s going to be fabulous. Thanks today to Dan, to Abi, to everybody else for the questions. Hopefully it was useful. Any follow up questions that we didn’t answer, just ping an email across to us. We shall see you next month. Cheers, guys. Bye, bye.

Dan Campbell

See you again soon. Bye.