Pop Quiz: Think of a soft drink brand. What’s the first one that came to mind? Chances are, it was either Coke or Pepsi. Why? Because those companies have spent decades and billions of dollars to become top-of-mind in the soft drink market.
This could not have been accomplished without strategic brand positioning by their marketing teams. They know they’re not just selling a beverage but rather the image and feelings it can evoke based on this carefully crafted brand positioning. Otherwise, polar bears drinking soda would seem downright strange rather than endearing.
While it’s likely that your financial advisor marketing budget doesn’t include Hollywood-caliber commercials, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the importance of your branding strategy.
Here are 5 Brand Positioning Tips for Your Financial Advisory Firm:
Brand Positioning Tip #1: Evaluate Your Current Financial Advisor Branding
Even if you don’t have an official brand positioning strategy, your financial advisory firm almost certainly has some branding elements, such as a logo. While consistent branding is a way to get prospects to recognize your financial advisory firm across channels, brand positioning takes it a step further by capturing what your firm represents, the core values, and how those things benefit your clients.
It’s critical for financial advisors to establish a certain level of trust from the very start of any branding/communication efforts, given the delicate and confidential nature of working with people’s finances.
If your current advisor marketing doesn’t have a strong or consistent branding element, then now is the time to make that change. Without it, you could be, at best, wasting marketing dollars and, at worst, missing potential new client relationships.
Additionally, while the above soft-drink company example is based on the number of sales over the customers' quality, the opposite is true for financial advisor brand positioning. And this makes it that much more important to get the positioning right to appeal to that ideal target audience.
Brand Positioning Tip #2: Define Your Audience
Brand positioning for financial professionals is the most effective when it’s created with a specific audience in mind. While some content marketer strategies are meant to appeal to a subset of your overall target audience, the USP should be all-encompassing— meaning that it should appeal to your entire audience, not a subset.
There’s a time and place for detailed targeted marketing with multiple audiences, but it’s not when developing crucial elements of your overarching branding principles. If your USP is too narrowly defined, you risk alienating part of your target audience, which could also be potential clients.
Brand Positioning Tip #3: Define Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
Before crafting your financial advisor brand positioning statement, you must define your unique selling proposition or USP. In short, your USP is why someone would choose your financial advisory firm over others. Your brand positioning is then crafted around your USP to define and demonstrate the benefits of partnering with your advisory firm.
After all, there is no shortage of financial advising and investment firms trying to gain the same audience's attention. Why should they choose you? Having an area of specialty or a niche within the financial investment space can be a major benefit. And if you don’t have a niche—find one!
How? The trick is thinking like a prospective client: What information are they searching for? Is that information available from a reliable source? Is the information accurate? Is the content high quality? If not, this is an opportunity to create a niche based on a need that was not me, or at minimum, could be done better.
Brand Positioning Tip #4: Create Your Financial Advisor Brand Positioning Statement
Now that you have identified how your firm stands out from the competition, it’s time to turn that into a statement demonstrating how this USP will benefit your target audience. And since your USP was ideally crafted with this “ideal” target audience, the two should have a clear connection.
These benefits should resonate with your target audience and are meant to appeal to them in a way that only someone who understands them and their financial needs could.
Pro Tip: If you’re having difficulty figuring out how your USP will benefit your target audience, you may need to reconsider one or the other.
Brand Positioning Tip #5: Create Content that Aligns with Your USP and Brand Positioning Statement
Content is at the heart of brand positioning, as with most of your worthwhile financial advisor marketing efforts. After all, without the content to back it up, a financial advisor's brand positioning statement is only that, a statement.
That’s why the financial advisor content you produce and share not only needs to be relevant, accurate, and timely—but it also needs to support your USP and financial advisor brand positioning. This content can be anything from blog posts, infographics, videos, whitepapers, eBooks, or even seminar or webinar recording playbacks.
The good news is that you already have financial advisor content that can be reworked to align with your newly created USP and brand positioning statement. Or, you could have been so on the mark that your content already works as-is. In fact, even if your existing financial advisor content doesn’t work with your updated brand positioning, or if you simply don’t have that much existing content to work with in the first place, you have options.
By joining forces with a digital marketing partner, you can enhance your financial advisor content library in a fraction of the time it would take to produce it in-house while also serving your clients and their needs. Don’t let your lack of time hinder creating successful financial advisor brand positioning that will benefit your financial advisory firm for a long time to come.
