We explain why client interviews are your secret weapon, how to build a messaging framework that truly differentiates your firm, and the common mistakes we see advisors make when trying to communicate their value. If you're struggling to articulate what makes your firm special, this conversation provides practical strategies you can implement right away.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss messaging for RIAs.
Transcript:
Stephen Beach: All right, everybody. Thanks for tuning in. My name is Stephen Beach. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Craft Impact. Today I have Faustin Weber with me, one of our marketing growth strategists. We wanted to talk a little bit about messaging today.
Messaging can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We just wanted to talk about how we look at messaging and how it underpins what we do from a digital marketing standpoint, how it feeds our work with financial advisors. Hopefully you as an advisor or managing partner at an advisory firm might find a couple unique ways to look at it or action items from this conversation.
Why don't we dig in Faustin? When we say, "Okay, Mr. and Mrs. Advisor, we're going to work on your firm's messaging," what does that mean to you? What does that mean to Craft, and how do we start that work?
Faustin Weber: It's interesting because it's definitely evolved a lot, especially since we've started working with financial advisors exclusively over the last four years. I remember coming in, Stephen, and we were taking on clients in different types of industries. There was often a disconnect in terms of how the company talked about themselves and what they actually did.
We used this StoryBrand narrative process, which is a great process where you put the client in the hero role. So many businesses want to put themselves in the hero role, where in fact, you want the client to be the one that goes through the hero's journey. The company is really just the guide, right?
That works so well for many different companies, but we realized when we started employing this process with RIAs that there are a lot of similarities between what the RIAs do in comparison to each other. When you compare these independent firms with Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch type advisors, there's obviously a huge contrast between the comprehensive financial planning and investment management, the overarching wealth management that RIAs offer versus the service that the Morgan Stanley-type advisors offer.
But when you start comparing the RIAs to themselves, there are a lot more similarities and overlaps. They have a lot of CFPs on staff, there are a lot of CFAs on staff. They might outsource their investments, but a lot of the investment approaches are pretty similar.
So we ran into a problem with how we would approach messaging. How do you differentiate one advisory firm versus another? We ended up employing a streamlined process at the beginning when we take on a new client. One of the key things - and I think this was your idea originally, Stephen - is that we set up interviews with our client's clients.
Stephen Beach: Yeah.
Faustin Weber: Usually about five to seven interviews. We usually ask our clients to find a mix of their clients that have been onboarded recently with the firm and then clients that they've had for a few years. A lot of times the clients have followed them as they become independent over the last five to ten years.
We also ask the clients that we're working with to pick clients that might fit into their niche or persona that they want to attract more of, like their ideal client. This has been huge for us in figuring out exactly what differentiates the firms that we start to work with, because we can talk to clients of different demographics, where they'll share insights on what they find valuable, what they find really differentiates the firm that they're working with from others in the space.
They'll talk to us about how they evaluated and compared different firms as part of the sales process. A lot of great insights that the advisory firms themselves didn't know! And then we'll really dig into the platforms that they use. Are they on LinkedIn? Do they consume financial information on social media?
What do they really think about the client newsletters that are being sent out? Would they consider consuming a video-type approach, or would they follow some of the content if we start sharing it on different social platforms? That becomes the foundation for a lot of our messaging work - we hear it from the clients themselves.
Stephen Beach: I was just going to dig into that for a second - why do we do that? I think it's really become more and more important in the last couple of years. Even within the RIA space, a lot of firms think that they're unique and they are, but it can be hard to flesh that out, to really get that down in writing or to somehow convey how you are unique versus the firm down the street or the next firm that claims to do the same things that you do with the same niches.
You could go to ChatGPT or Claude or any of these AI tools now and say, spit me out a messaging plan for my target persona. Let's say it's pre-retirees - a very common one. "I need clients who have a million dollars or more in investible assets, and they are 50 to 65 years old." It'll do it, and it'll do a pretty darn good job, too.
So, how do we extract something more than that when that has become so ubiquitous? Anybody can do that. It's free and it takes one minute.
I was inspired by the fact that I used to be in sales myself. So I'm a sales rep turned marketer, and that is core to why I approach it this way. Only because I was in sales - I was front lines, talking to the prospects, to the people who really drove the decisions.
That information, I heard it firsthand because I was the one meeting with them. And then I would want to feed that to my marketing team, which at the time was just me as well. So I kind of blended the two.
So all my marketing content then became a reflection of the real conversations that I had with prospects, which is the most valuable content you can produce - something that your prospects actually care about. And to be a hundred percent sure that they care about it, you ask them and they tell you.
So it's kind of like straight from the horse's mouth. That should be our guiding principle or our North Star - what do the prospects really care about? And as you said, they'll tell us, especially because we're a neutral third party. What do they see as the most value in? What do they not see value in? Why did they choose the advisor versus others?
All the things you mentioned - where are their watering holes for where they're going to get their information, how do they prefer to be communicated with.
One awesome thing, too, that we've found with these interviews is they'll give us these golden nuggets if we just ask open-ended questions. "If you were this firm, what would you do to try to attract more clients like yourself?" Man, they come up with some really good ideas.
Sometimes they'll say, "If Mr. and Mrs. Advisor want to come over and host a wine and cheese night at my house, I'd be happy to invite all my friends and the people from the neighborhood. They could come over and hang out for a couple ofhours, maybe do a little presentation." Perfect. Let's bake that into the plan.
It's pretty simple when you think about it - just trying to listen to the prospects or listen to the clients that we want to replicate, and then use that to fuel our marketing strategy and specifically the messaging. We know that they're going to resonate with it because they've told us firsthand.
Faustin Weber: Just thinking about a golden nugget from a recent series of client interviews, one client who has been long-term with one of the new firms we started working with just fed back to me. He was talking about how he referred the advisor a lot early on, but he shared, "I don't even think that they're looking for referrals anymore. I'm not even thinking that they want any new prospects because I feel like they're probably so overloaded with all the ins and outs of what they're doing on a day-to-day basis."
I was able to bring that back to the firm who just hired us as a marketing agency so that they can get more leads, and say, "Let's think about how to potentially systematize your referral process so that there's no confusion about the fact that you're actually looking for new clients."
At the same time that we are interviewing our clients' clients, we're also doing workshops with our clients themselves and hearing about what they think about their value proposition, what they think should be their target client. We're able to merge what the clients' clients are saying and what our clients are saying into an overarching messaging guide to start and lead all of our marketing work.
We've streamlined that over the years. We've gotten it down to who we are - things like who the client thinks is their key differentiator, their values, their voice and tone, how they want to appear in terms of their collateral, and how they present themselves with their overall branding.
We put together a word bank and a bunch of statements that encapsulate their style, tone, and who they are, essentially that they can pull from for all their marketing collateral. And then one of the key pieces, I think that's a big differentiator for RIAs, is the "who we serve" or essentially "who we help."
I think the more niche - I know that different firms, and we've talked about this a little bit, Stephen - as firms grow and they get bigger, they become almost less hesitant sometimes to really nail down a niche audience or nail down a specific type of client that they're looking for in their marketing efforts.
I think you start off at the beginning, you take on anybody that will listen, and then you get bigger and you still want to - you don't want to leave anybody out when you're thinking about who you should be targeting. But it actually becomes more efficient for you as a differentiator if you really flesh out one or two types of personas that you want to go after that have different challenges.
You mentioned pre-retirees earlier, Stephen. But tech professionals in their thirties and forties, or senior to mid-level executives that are part of the big four accounting firms - the more niche you can really go into, and specifically how you help them, the better your messaging becomes overall.
But there's always some pushback with that. Don't you think, Stephen? Always a little bit of worry about leaving somebody out when you start niching down like that in your messaging.
Stephen Beach: For sure. I mean, how do you thread the needle to kind of serve your existing client base who might not be a member or colleague at one of the Big Four? But they're a great client and they've been your client for seven years. You don't want to make them feel estranged or not recognized with everything that you're doing.
But I think you have to segment your messaging that way. You can do it with intelligent marketing - try to set up personas, and maybe you have three different tracks of personas, with unique messaging for them. A really tactical example would be email lists - if you're able to segment your email list into those three different buckets, then each of those audiences could have their own messaging. Some will overlap, of course.
If it's market commentary, I don't think you need to tailor market commentary towards one person or the other. But if it's some kind of specific way that you help solve their unique challenge, or you're asking for a referral in an email or making it apparent that you're looking for more clients at their company, you do that with a segmented email and you obviously wouldn't send that to persona B or persona C.
Even on your website, having different pages for the different personas or niches. It can be really hard - what do you put on your homepage? We've had this discussion quite a bit. On the homepage, where do you focus?
I think it's really helpful to kind of talk that out as a leadership team. When we do these internal workshops, there's a lot of value in just getting everyone in the same room and talking about it as a group, then pairing it with our interviews and trying to marry those two things so we can decide a good path forward.
A lot of firms want to make an update or they each have their own idea about what it needs to be, but it can be really valuable to step back, slow down for a second, talk about it, and then document it into a marketing strategy or messaging strategy, and then start to execute.
So it's like threading the needle, I think, firm-specific - how hard you want to go into the niche. There's a lot of other factors.
Faustin Weber: I think you make a really good point about the current client base in terms of thinking about your overarching marketing strategy. Let's say you find a lot of value in going after business owners, but you have a much smaller client base where you could potentially find referrals within that business owner community.
Maybe you don't want to spend too much time consolidating all of your marketing efforts around business owners if you're looking for the short-term gains of people who have money now, like the corporate executive route. Or maybe you have a client base that's full of pre-retirees and retired prospects who have a lot of colleagues, or former colleagues if they're retired, that have a lot of friends and family that are within that target bracket.
And you want to really hone in on pre-retirees so that you can queue up referrals where you have collateral, whether it be PDFs that you send out, or to your point, Stephen, persona-based web pages that your referred prospects can find and see that value proposition. Maybe you want to focus there.
So I think that the entire workshop process that we start off on - really allowing all the leadership team members to share their thoughts on that - leads to a foundational guide and focal point for who we're going to be going after with our overarching marketing strategy.
Once you know that, and once you know what your clients' clients are saying, you can build out a more comprehensive plan around that target audience, factoring in all the different ins and outs of what platforms they use, how they consume information, what kind of content is mostly going to attract them.
I want to make sure we get in the "what we do" part. I think that's an important part of figuring out exactly how you differentiate yourself. Let's say that you are going after tech professionals, for instance, and you have a specialty or expertise around equity compensation. I think that's really important to come out as part of your messaging across all the different platforms and content that you share.
So really thinking through not just all the services we offer, but specifically how our services meet the needs of our particular target persona. That's really important.
And then "how we do it" is our last one, and that is, I think, sometimes the key differentiator even amongst RIAs - what does that process look like when a client goes from the moment they have that first discovery call all the way through becoming a client? What does the onboarding look like? When they become a client, is there a systematic planning process that they experience on an annual basis? Is there something special about what you do for your client before they become an official client and sign?
Those are all things that are really important to flesh out as part of your messaging, because those are all key differentiators that can be represented across all of your collateral. I think we call that a client success map, right?
Stephen Beach: The last part. Yeah. Client success map. What's the journey you take them on from prospect to client, and then in the years that they are a client, how do you work with them on a recurring basis?
I think it's really important to tie it all together into a guide. Because if you don't have a brand guide, what ends up happening? Same concept - you'll start to have stock imagery over here, illustrations over here, black and orange colors over here, and green, yellow colors over here, and everything starts to become disjointed.
The more you go and the more people you add to your firm, the same thing with messaging. What do your advisors say if somebody goes up to one of them and says, "Hey, what do you guys do?" in an elevator - is that person's answer the same as all of your other advisory team's answers? If you can't confidently say yes to that, then there's a lot of value in a messaging guide.
Part of it is what we use for digital marketing - it's a foundation for how we're going to write and produce collateral, generate copy for your website and emails and social. But the other part is a keyword phrase bank, like you said, something that your team can hold onto, maybe a two-liner elevator pitch statement, quick little phrases that people can refer to. Everyone's on the same page, so when they're publicly facing clients or COIs or whoever it may be, you're all pulling from the same guide.
That's why we do it. StoryBrand is a great messaging framework. It's written by Donald Miller, who wrote Blue Like Jazz. Very simplified framework, seven-step process. The book is an easy read. I would encourage people to check it out.
Simon Sinek's "Start with Why" - there's a lot of really talented people in our space who talk about extracting your story. Deirdre Nest is in our office space over here in St. Pete, Florida, and she does a great job of extracting your "why story" as an advisor. Why do you wake up every day and do what you do? That really helps with differentiation.
But whatever it is, I would encourage people to come up with a framework and dive into it because over time, the bigger your firm grows, it'll become disjointed if you don't have something to tie back to - this anchor or guide that underpins everything.
For us, we generally work on this for the first four weeks with a new client. We mix in other quick wins so that the client can start to trust us and see our value. But we're doing this foundational messaging work on the front end so we can produce social copy, collateral copy, and website copy much more efficiently, as opposed to starting over on each piece.
It's where we kick off from each time. The way we do it has adapted over time, like you mentioned. But I think it's really valuable, and for us it's a lot of fun. It's a really great way to get to know the client as well, and get to know the client's clients. Anything else you'd like to add?
Faustin Weber: Just that in those first four weeks, we couple the client interview key themes and takeaways, so we give some specifics around what the clients' clients are saying per interview, but we also are able to consolidate and synthesize the key themes.
We take that in addition to an overarching audit of all the firm's collateral platforms, website, traffic, and everything that you can think of. So we take the workshops from what the clients are telling us, the advisory firms are telling us, what the interviews say, and the overarching audit to put together a comprehensive marketing strategy. It all ties in together - it's all part of our initial process.
Stephen Beach: What would be some examples of key themes? You go through 10 interviews with different clients, and you start to hear the same things - what would be some examples?
Faustin Weber: Key themes would be like, everyone's kind of worried about this initial advisor that they followed with the transition, usually the founder or CEO of the firm. They're a little worried about what happens if that person leaves, for instance. So we say to ourselves, okay, we've got to really build up the credibility of the entire team and emphasize that in our marketing.
Another great takeaway from a recent client is, "I really understood the value in the initial planning process, but then I'm paying this annual fee for years 2, 3, 4, and I'm kind of having a hard time understanding what the value is after that."
So that's a good piece of client feedback that doesn't necessarily lead to marketing collateral, but something very important for retention and potential referrals. We get all sorts of great themes that come from these interviews, and it continues to be a super valuable part of the process for us.
Stephen Beach: Love it.
Faustin Weber: All right. Thank you so much.
Shameless plug for Craft on Tap
Client interviews orchestrated by an unbiased third party can help you determine if your messaging is on point or missing the mark. This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies for RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch
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