Make Marketing a Key Component of Your Success

Julie Sharnowski:

I think clients really, at the end of the day, want peace of mind. They want to be able to sleep at night. They want to know that we're helping them with financial guidance.

When we came on board four years ago, I was with an enterprise that associated with LPL and we moved 75 advisors and eight different financial institutions. And I was responsible for the financial institutions. Notre Dame Federal Credit Union was one of our clients. So, about a year ago, I took the position as program director at Notre Dame.

The first thing I did with the program is just evaluate where we were with everything. So, I looked at all aspects of the program—the advisors, the training, everything—because I really wanted to integrate as much as possible into the financial institution and be that go-to department for them. And at the same time, how do we grow the program?

When we think about growth, it's how many members can we help with their financial advice? We also look at some metrics like growing our assets under management, growing our revenue, things like that. If we can help more clients, the assets and the revenue tend to follow that. So, I focus on how many more clients can we help?

For Marketing Solutions, we had, I started with the program about a year ago, and one of my initiatives was to evaluate the different aspects of the program and one thing that stood out to me was we did a very good job of marketing to our existing clients. Our advisors, our clients knew our advisors, but we didn't do as good a job building the brand outside of our existing clients.

So, one of the things that I really wanted to do was build that brand recognition. At the same time, our Credit Union decided we're going to rebrand our investment program to better align with their wealth management offering. So, we were going to go from Private Member Group to Mission Investment Services. So, there were two things that happened right there that really led us to Marketing Solutions.

Number one, we wanted to build visibility. Number two, we needed to build a new brand. Another benefit we got out of that though was—my job is to bring on new advisors who want to join our team—and it showed our new advisors how serious we were, and made the commitment to the investment program by working with Marketing Solutions. So, we had a professional-looking website. We had social media pages. So, they knew that we were investing into our investment program. So, from a recruiting standpoint, that's really valuable.

It saves us a lot of time, you know, because there's resources that we didn't have the ability to tap into that Marketing Solutions does have the ability to tap into. Plus, they were able to create this plan with us, in conjunction with us, that kind of matched our brand, and execute on that plan. So, the cost really wasn't a factor when we considered all the things that we were getting for that. So, by putting together that plan and us outsourcing the execution of that plan, our advisors could focus really on their clients and working with those relationships, which was valuable.

I would say any financial institution that's looking to grow their investment program, recruit new advisors, would be a good candidate. Now, whether you have an internal marketing team that's doing it now or not, I think you should consider it because the Marketing Solutions team is an extension of our internal department. So, they're providing a different level. They're working in conjunction with us. So, any financial institution that's looking to grow, you're looking to recruit, you're looking to be visible, should look at this program.

Our marketing consultant does do a lot of the legwork. She helps build the calendar. She helps us with execution, with content strategy. So before, we didn't really track really the results of our marketing efforts. Now we're able to see if we do an email campaign, what are the results? If we do a social media campaign, are we getting more followers? You know, so we're able to take that knowledge and build from there.