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INPractice for May: Branding your practice to include retirement
Week 1: Define your practice’s retirement market opportunity
Week 2: Create your retirement resource branding statement
Week 3: Identify your top five retirement services
Week 4: Create a communications follow-up that reinforces your brand
The problem:
Over the next two decades, 76 million baby boomers will leave the workplace and enter retirement. Do your current and prospective clients know that you are a retirement resource?
All this month, we have been discussing how to brand your practice so that you highlight your retirement expertise.
Last week:
We asked you to identify your top five retirement services. Taking those services, we then wove those services into a comprehensive offering – and narrative – that you can explain to your clients as a follow-up to your branding statement.
This week:
Now it's time to create a communication piece that your can use as part of a program to reinforce your brand. The written piece you produce will serve as a short but memorable and repeatable story about your practice and the services your offer, including the retirement ones. It will drive home the brand you have created for your business.
First, create a one-page, two-sided document with your practice description from the Week 2 on the front and service levels on the back.
Consider using heavier paper and folding the sheet in thirds, creating a small brochure.
(Before you do this, of course check with your firm’s compliance department to make sure that everything you intend to use is approved.)
If your firm has preapproved professional-looking designs, fine. If not, consider using an professional graphic designer at a print shop. One website you might fine helpful is stocklayouts.com, which displays a wide array of professionally designed brochures.
Let’s look at the Cornerstone Practice we discussed in Weeks 2 and 3.
They simply used their logo, a team photo, mission/branding statement and expanded marketing message on the front of their brochure.
By the way, here’s their branding statement again:
Our team brings more 120 years’ combined financial services experience to help clients meet their needs for sound financial plans and a secure retirement. Affiliated with one of the largest securities firms in the country, we specialize in working with active and retired military personnel across the country.
And here’s their expanded marketing message:
To help provide a well-planned and enjoyable retirement, our clients can count on us to provide the following retirement services:
1. Retirement rollover planning
2. Estate planning partners
3. Retirement income reviews and tools
4. Health care plans and options
5. Lifestyle resources, including information and referrals about relocation, retirement employment and nutrition
On the back page of their brochure, Cornerstone outlines the levels of service they offer (again, check with your compliance department before you include this message).
It is important to differentiate the levels of service you provide in order to set and meet client expectations realistically.
Clients realize that you must offer a wider and deeper range of services to those who have more assets and aren’t offended by seeing in black and white just how you segment your clients. In fact, many may decide to give you more of their assets to attain a higher service level.
Here’s how Cornerstone does it:
Platinum-Level Retirement Services (for those with assets exceeding $1 million)
• January/February Retirement Rollover Planning – assessing income needs, lifestyle planning, health care resources and relocation strategies.
• Semiannual financial checkup.
• Annual October Financial Review with estate-planning partners.
• Group family meeting or event (i.e., review assisted-living options).
• Quarterly investment newsletter.
• Client lifestyle seminar (i.e., Nutrition or Gardening is Golden)
• Beneficiary Review.
• Insurance and Lending Review.
• Opportunity to be on Client Advisory Board (networking opportunity).
• Annual client appreciation event (i.e., December charity event).
Gold-Level Services (for those with assets between $500,000 and $1 million)
• Quarterly newsletter e-mailed (this can be your firm’s newsletter or use www.marketwatch.com.
• Retirement Rollover Planning Seminar – this is a larger group session designed to help you uncover unknown retirement assets and help lower-level clients with their planning. This will include a health care assessment and resources.
• Annual financial reviews (the lower 30% may be via phone or with your client services manager)
• Send an annual questionnaire for completion before the review to identify any new assets or plans.
Sharing Your Story
Once your marketing brochure is complete, identify four or five communication opportunities for it.
One top adviser in Chicago displays her branding statement and marketing overview in a clear rack with her business card at the charitable events she helps sponsor, at seminars she hosts and in her office lobby.
Here are some other ways to use it:
• Set up a display rack in your lobby and fill it with the brochure and business cards.
• E-mail it as an attachment with your annual review letter.
• Display it at all events, seminars and meetings.
• Attach it to statements.
• Send it with a note to people you meet at networking events.
Communicate your brand at every opportunity and encourage clients to e-mail it to friends, family and colleagues.
Coming up in June and July – making lifestyle seminars your competitive edge.
Maureen Wilke has helped thousands of advisers increase the value of their businesses. The founder of Wilke Associates Inc. (www.connectedadvisor.com) in Glen Ellyn, Ill., Maureen has spent nearly two decades in executive positions in wealth management, sales and training. She has been associated with several highly regarded firms, including Nuveen Investments, and currently advises many product and advisory firms on issues of practice management and adviser productivity.
Read our weekly online columns:
MONDAY:
IN Practice by Maureen Wilke
WEDNESDAY:
OpINion Online by Evan Cooper
THURSDAY:
IN Retirement
FRIDAY:
Tech Bits by Davis. D. Janowski
