As a financial advisor, you work with a variety of vendors to support your marketing strategies. You may hire someone to produce a radio show, manage your Facebook campaign, or put together a seminar. While many of these vendors are excellent at what they do, it can be frustrating when you don’t understand the marketing strategies they’re outsourcing, and you’re forced to blindly trust that they’ll deliver.
Brandon Stuerke, a consultant to advisors, calls this “blind trust.” He encourages advisors to pursue one of three options to avoid wasting time and precious marketing resources.
The first option is to get educated yourself. There are many online resources put together by experts where you can spend the time learning through courses, online videos, and training about anything in the world, such as how to use Facebook campaigns, put together a seminar, or do a radio show. Before you hire someone to produce a radio show for you or manage your Facebook campaign, spend the time to get educated so that you can work with that vendor from a position of strength and not from a position of dependence.
The second option is to hire someone internally to help you run your marketing team and vendors. For a lot of the advisors, it doesn’t make any sense to try to become an expert in all these things because they’re so successful at what they do, just providing planning. They can hire a full-time marketing person in-house, a CMO, to help them.
The third option is to hire a fractional CMO or fractional chief marketing officer. This person can act as a business fiduciary to consult with you about the vendors that you’re hiring, the campaigns that you’re running, and the results that you’re seeing, so that you can be informed and educated.
While hiring a fractional CMO may seem expensive, you could certainly make the case that they will more than save you that in wasted ad spend and marketing costs. This option is probably the one that makes the most sense for advisors.
In summary, as a financial advisor, it’s important to avoid blind trust when working with vendors to support your marketing strategies. Take the time to get educated, hire someone internally, or hire a fractional CMO to help you avoid wasting time and precious marketing resources.
