Caveat: this article has been written specifically with financial advisers in mind but will also be relevant for similar professionals and service providers.
As long as you see yourself as the gatekeeper of information, your relevance is limited. We are already comfortably in an age where information is digitized, aggregated, distributed and accessible on a scale that we’ve never seen or experienced before.
The challenge is to now become a gatekeeper of value. It’s not academic education our clients need, it’s emotional engagement and connection.
Here are three ways to use your online communication platforms to start establishing and reinforcing yourself as a gatekeeper of value.
KEEP THINGS PERSONAL
From your website, through to your email campaigns and social media posts, keep it as personal as possible. This speaks to authenticity and accessibility – valuable traits that your network will be looking for in an increasingly digitised era.
On your website, ensure that your images have high people-value and that your wording engages with your readers; copy that only speaks about you and your business limits the personal touch. Your readers need to see themselves in your website.
For email campaigns – avoid replicated subject lines (like: Monthly Newsletter, Tim’s Regular Update) and keep your salutations personalised to each individual client (ie. Dear Tim, not Dear Valued Client or Dear TIMOTHY NEIL SLATTER).
And then, as you extend this to social media, tag contacts when addressing them or if you’re posting something that you believe will be relevant to conversations that you’re having with them. And, if you’re comfortable, offer some personal vulnerability to your own growth and journey as it pertains to the post that you’re sharing.
KEEP IT CONSISTENT
Regular communication that is proactive and delivered frequently is crucial to the sustainability of relationships, and adding value to your network and clients.
On your website, posting blogs on a weekly or fortnightly schedule is helpful to support your conversations with clients, but also to help search engines rank your website higher when people are searching for you.
Monthly email campaigns are currently the best place to add value to your network in a personalised and strategic manner.
We have found that posting three times a week on Social Media, is a great place to start. If you’re writing weekly blogs – this is much easier to do than if you have no blogs to share. Your social media strategy should by optimized so that you can sustain posting on a consistent basis.
This regularity in engagement builds and maintains the perception that you’re always trying to be available and add value, but… if your content is not pitched correctly, you will only be seen as a gatekeeper of information, and not of value.
This is why your content needs to be engaging. It’s not about simply sharing loads and loads of content – it’s about choosing the right content to create and share.
KEEP IT ENGAGING
What does engaging content look like?
This is not a generic or easy answer as it will most likely be different for every industry. However, there are universal approaches that start well for an entry point and we have found work really well for financial advisers. One of these approaches is to be more conversational, and less transactional in the pitch of online communication.
For the most part, sharing general information about products or services (often known as educational material) is not very engaging and can feel quite ‘salesy’. Mostly because this information is already readily available to your clients, but also because they will be used to receiving this information from the product providers, linking it to a sales journey rather than a relationship journey.
It is likely that your clients will experience more value from you helping them understand what information is valuable to them, and which information is not. This means that you want to create and share information that will spark conversations with your clients and extended network.
To achieve this, sharing your personal opinion on a subject or event, or speaking to the value of your advice through life transitions is powerful and effective.
When you’re able to create, engage and share these conversations; you become engaging. And, you become perceived as a gatekeeper of value and not a gatekeeper of information.
