A Primer on Asset Performance
The table below provides a performance summary of major investment assets and portfolios over the past 39-years (1970-2008) .
The first portfolio is the traditional 60/40 portfolio which invests 60% in large US stock and 40% into bonds. The second portfolio is an age-based 60/40 portfolio where the investor’s age determines the percent allocation to bonds with the remainder invested in the 60/40 portfolio.
The last portfolio is an age-based multi-asset portfolio which combines all seven assets in equal portions. The investor allocates his or her age to bonds and the balance to the multi-asset portfolio. So, for example, a 40 year old would invest 40% of their portfolio into bonds and the remaining balance of 60% into the multi-asset portfolio which utilizes all seven assets in equal portions. A 65-year old would invest 65% of her assets into bonds and 35% into the multi-asset portfolio.
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Smart, Practical and Affordable Marketing Techniques to Grow Your Practice – Part 1
How do you think about marketing and its application to your practice? Do your current marketing efforts effectively help you reach your firm’s goals? Do you have a workable marketing plan? Are you aware of the wide array of accessible marketing tools available to help you? How can you and your staff market your services effectively and affordably ?
This is the first in a series of articles to inform you about creating the right RIA marketing and business development mix for your business. These articles will address many of your questions about how smart marketing can raise your firm’s awareness, generate prospect interest and help you grow.
This first article explores basic marketing principles and marketing planning. Subsequent articles will focus on:
- Simple Steps to Building a Effective Marketing Plan
- Marketing Techniques to Generate New Clients
- Who Are You? The Importance of a Compelling Brand
- Public Relations as a Low-Cost Way to Generate Awareness of Your Firm
- Effective Advertising Planning and Execution
- Using Live Events to Grow Your Practice
- The Web as a Foundational Component to Your Marketing Strategy
- The Right Marketing Communications Mix For Your Practice
- Marketing to Maximize the Potential of Your Existing Clients
- Marketing Resources Available to Help Achieve Your Firm’s Goals
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Maximum Impact Marketing
Overview
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you enjoy marketing. You appreciate clever ads like the ones you see for Super Bowl commercials and recognize good marketing talent when you see it. If you’ve studied marketing, you know that marketing is about delivering a message or telling a story to your intended target audience. If you’ve done any marketing, you would probably agree that referrals are the most effective form of marketing. You may not get as many referrals as you would like and you may not be completely satisfied with the quality (size) of the referrals you do get. If any or all of these statements are true, you will benefit from reading this. The purpose of this paper is to share what we believe is the secret to getting more and better referrals. We will also describe a system called Referral Builder that will enable you to create and sustain a pipeline of qualified prospects for your business. If you apply the suggestions outlined in this paper, your marketing plan will produce better results with less effort.
Maximum Impact Marketing Philosophy
Before we get to the system itself, let‚Äôs establish a baseline for you. There are a few key points you must be aware of if you want to reap the full benefits of this system. Collectively, these constitute our marketing philosophy…
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Want to be Successful at Marketing? Assign Responsibility
There is no one element that will guarantee marketing success. Even if you master all of the fundamentals, there is still an element of luck that is required for success. You can have the greatest marketing campaign in the world, with hundreds of prospective clients calling your office each week, then something will change, like a market crash, and all of that comes to an end. There is no way to guarantee marketing success. Even if you use a marketing program that has been proven to work for other advisors in other markets, there is no guarantee that it will work for you. Your personality may not compliment the program, or the prospective clients in your community don’t respond to that particular sales technique. Because there is no “one-size-fits-all” for marketing success, it is important to develop a strategy that works for you and your business.
In past articles, I have discussed different elements which increasing likelihood of marketing success such as creating an action plan, consistently marketing and touching your contacts throughout the year (clients, prospects and COIs). One of the most important things you can do to increase likelihood of success is one I have not discussed previously and that is to assign responsibility. Choose someone in your office who is responsible for the execution of your marketing. Depending on the size of your firm, you may want to hire a full time marketing coordinator for this role. If that is not in your budget, look to someone in your office who has an aptitude for marketing and the capacity to oversee your campaigns. If these two options are not feasible, considering hiring a marketing consultant to help you draft and execute your marketing strategies. Find someone who can help with the internal processes (referral process, client communication) and not just someone who specialize in branding, advertising and PR. It is these internal campaigns that can be the most successful but take significant time to implement.
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5 Step Process to Design Client Meetings for Success…
Individual meetings with prospects and clients are the back bone of the wealth management and financial planning process. Your level of success will greatly depend on how prepared you are to conduct those meetings and the professionalism you exhibit during each meeting. As a professional advisor, you should develop and adopt a general planning process that your practice will use to navigate the clients through the full planning cycle. This general planning process must be integrated into and be complemented by a variety of meetings that will be needed along the way.
The Advisor must fully understand the impact each meeting will have on the overall planning process and the role those meetings will play in managing their client relationships over the long term. As prospects and clients go through the planning process and various planning cycles the advisor will find it necessary to conduct a wide variety of individual meeting types that all must be effective at delivering results. The advisor will need to provide logical meeting structures and be able to explain in great detail how each meeting fits into the overall planning process. The more skilled and prepared an advisor is to conduct those individual meetings, the easier it will be to keep their clients on track to achieve success. Although each individual meeting will be different in scope and nature most can be categorized by type from a short list of common meetings you will have.
Over the years, I have identified six different types of individual meetings that are the most common within my own personal practice.
- Discovery Meeting
- Plan Presentation Meeting or a Recommendations & Solutions Meeting
- Solution Implementation Meeting
- Follow-Up/Next Step Meeting
- Progress Report & Review Meeting
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