The Massive Opportunity for Growth That Advisors are Avoiding

No matter your profession, skill level, expertise or determination, it will mean next to nothing if you do not get in front of enough of the right types of people.

Longtime favorite marketing strategies in the financial industry includes seminars and educational client events. 2020 introduced a whole new opportunity for the adaptable advisor in the form of webinars and virtual meetings.

At White Glove, I have had the opportunity to get a firsthand look at what marketing messages are most successful for advisors in all aspects, quality, attendance and conversions.

There is a massive opportunity right now that advisors are actively avoiding. 

In 2016, White Glove introduced the seminar topic Taxes in Retirement. From a marketing perspective, we saw a massive improvement in attendance as well as the desired demographics of audience over Social Security events. Even so, we ran into great resistance from the advisor community. There was real fear that they would be asked questions that would be suited for a CPA. It took months to coach and work with advisors on understanding the key benefits of this topic. Those benefits, in short, were allowing advisors to talk about many retirement vehicles by showing the possible tax implications those vehicles came with.

It was only after significant investment of time and energy helping advisors learn the benefits did that mind frame pivot and that topic caught fire. Advisors started seeing massive success, and all but overnight, our events changed to close to 90% tax focused retirement planning. Many advisors were reluctant to continue focusing on Social Security. Taxes as a topic has reigned as White Glove’s most requested topic from 2017 to today. 

This popularity of topic comes with its own set of issues. Marketing saturation in some areas has become apparent as advisors have now become so comfortable with this topic that they rarely look for alternatives. Anytime you consistently repeat a marketing message in a given area you risk causing marketing saturation, in turn causing your own poor results. Timeframes between successful events become longer and longer, costs rise and attendance starts to dip. 

If you are working in a specific geographical region, a rotation of topics is best to avoid these issues and maintain a flowing stream of qualified prospects.

So now enters the opportunity that most advisors are actively avoiding, Estate Planning. Your first reaction may be one of these concerns: ”How many people really must worry about that since many rules only apply to extremely high asset levels?” “How does that relate to what I do? I send all my estate planning questions to my local EPA? Trusts, wills, probate, oh my…”

Take the following ideas into account before you dismiss this opportunity: 

No one is educating your community on how to protect and ensure generational wealth. Many advisors take estate planning concerns and pass those clients to an Estate Planning Attorney. This is a great deal for the EPA. They get nice warm leads and don’t have to host seminars or webinars to get in front of prospects. The result, most EPAs don’t proactively educate their community.

Your ideal clients have concerns. Sure, they may not have 11 million in assets, but that doesn’t mean they are not concerned how to ensure their hard-earned wealth makes it down to future generations. As an advisor, you understand what levels of wealth bring on significant changes to plans, but that doesn’t mean that your ideal prospects know what those are. 

Estate Planning is your key to offering something DIFFERENT than your competition.  As it stands today, 9 out of 10 advisors are getting in front of prospects talking about taxes. If you don’t want to blend into the crowd, be one of the few educating on this topic that speaks directly to your ideal client base.

You have solutions. A client cannot create a generational wealth plan without having a strong financial plan and full scope of assets. You can help with this. In addition, blended families lead to a great opportunity to discuss insurance. Don’t let yourself get hung up on the items that only an EPA can do and ignore the great value you can bring to those conversations.

So how does one start to get into this highly qualified market of affluent prospects who need help? Seminars and webinars are seeing great attendance rates for Estate Planning topics, and in addition, the data from White Glove shows these attendees have the highest average net worth over any topic currently offered.

Here are two tactics to get started adapting your business to convert prospects that have generation wealth and estate planning concerns:

The old standard, partner with an EPA and share not only stage time but also run the first appointments together. The bonus to this is when two professionals present together, they are able to build up each other’s credibility without coming off as braggadocios.

The “Plan Method” is a strategy where you stress, through your seminar or webinar, the need for a solid financial plan to protect assets and provide for future generations. Estate plan, generational plan, financial plan- these are all just plans. To your prospects, if you focus on the need for a plan- not a specific solution, you are able to run those first meetings without an EPA. Advisors I have worked with are seeing success positioning wills and trusts as a commodity that they can assist clients with, using resources in their network, once the advisor has complete understanding of the full financial plan.

With the high quality of attendees seen at Estate and Generational Planning seminars and webinars, I am confident that these topics will be highly successful for the first advisors that adapt to the opportunity.

To learn more about seminar and webinar options in your area please visit White Glove

For more information on marketing trends take a listed to my podcast Be Advised

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.