The Financial Broker
A Guide to Marketing your Business
for Financial Brokers
How to develop and deliver a structured
and creative marketing plan to boost the
income levels of your business.
This booklet is sponsored by Irish Life.
This report is a guide to Marketing Planning for Financial Brokers
who are Members of P.I.B.A. The Professional Insurance Brokers
Association of Ireland
Irish Life are delighted to be partnering with PIBA in
sponsoring this guide to Marketing your Business for Financial
Brokers.
The last few years have been tough so we have consistently
challenged ourselves to be your number one supporter by
coming up with supports to help you develop your business in
an easy and profitable manner.
We believe that this guide to digital marketing
compliments this vision and will be a valuable guide to
assist you in an easy to understand style.
Tony Lawless
General Manager Brokerage
Irish Life
eBusiness has become part of every day life for small businesses and their customers
and hopefully this guide will demonstrate how Digital Marketing can compliment
your existing sales and prospecting process.
While most life and pension clients don’t buy online, many do search online before
deciding whether to talk to someone and to whom, and we believe that eBusiness
used correctly can be an enabler for you and your business.
We hope you enjoy this guide, and we look forward to continue to working with
you to demonstrating why Irish life is your number one supporter
This guide was developed to assist PIBA members in developing and delivering their
marketing activities. It focuses on the development of a marketing plan and the
delivery of traditional marketing activities, and should be read in conjunction with
PIBA’s “A Guide to Digital Marketing and Social Media Planning”. ”.
Sales and compliance are uppermost on PIBA members’
minds – specifically too little sales and too much
compliance. Compliance will likely be a permanent
focus of PIBA into the future but we felt it was
important to address the area of marketing and sales
given the challenging economic environment. This is
the reasoning behind these guides.
In this guide, Eamonn Twomey gives a comprehensive
guide to what might be called “traditional” marketing
for Financial Brokers. Much of this you will know, but
Diarmuid Kelly
- Chief Executive (PIBA)
the guide will enable you to comprehensively review
and refresh your marketing in a structured way. You
may also find some new ideas and inspiration to get into gear.
In the complementary ‘Guide to Digital Marketing and Social Media
Planning’, Noel Keogh gives a comprehensive guide to digital marketing and
social media. Many of these methods are mainstream (email and websites),
whilst others are aimed at the next generation down. However, Financial
Brokers will get clear guide and overview of the area which will enable you to
make the appropriate strategic decisions about use of these methods in your
business.
Lastly, we have a guide to compliance in marketing. This gives an outline of
the Consumer Protection Code and Data Protection rules in relation to
marketing. It is vitally important that any marketing conducted complies
with the rules in this area.
I would urge you to read all three documents and write a brief marketing
plan for your business for the next 12 months. Most importantly you should
resolve to take action in a constant and structured way, whilst continually
re-assessing your methods to see what best works for your firm.
I believe these documents will be a valuable resource for Financial Brokers.
PIBA would like to thank the contributors and Irish Life for their assistance
and support with this project.
Diarmuid Kelly
CEO, PIBA
1
contents
About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Executive Summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Part 1 – The Marketing Planning Process
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
The Planning Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Research Phase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Market Positioning and Guiding Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Clarifying your Marketing Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Part 2 – The Marketing Toolbox
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Doing the Housekeeping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
The Marketing Activities Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
The Benefits and Pitfalls of each Marketing Activity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Part 3 – Completing the Marketing Plan
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
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About the author
Eamonn Twomey
Eamonn Twomey established StepChange, a marketing and
strategy solutions business for financial brokers, in 2011.
For the previous 27 years, Eamonn worked in a variety of
senior sales and marketing roles in the broker channel in
both the UK and Ireland with Irish Life and Friends First.
StepChange offers a unique combination of knowledge
of the financial broker environment overlaid with sales
and marketing expertise.
Eamonn Twomey
StepChange has developed a marketing planning mechanism specifically for
the financial broker market, a methodology that enables StepChange and the
broker to collaboratively develop creative, deliverable and results-driven
marketing plans for the broker’s business. The focus is consistently on the
bottom line impact that the plan will deliver. StepChange also then works
with financial brokers to deliver the activities under the plan to ensure that
maximum impact is achieved, having deep experience in the delivery of the
full mix of both offline and online activities by financial brokers.
You won’t waste your valuable time having to explain the ins and outs of the
industry. In fact, StepChange will bring important insights that can add
hugely to a broker’s activities and has experience of what does and doesn’t
work. What will this result in? Gaining a greater understanding of your
business, you’ll end up delivering the right activities, based on the specific
marketing objectives of your own business in a timely and cost effective way.
In addition, StepChange works with financial brokers and life assurance
companies, addressing a broad range of commercial challenges in the areas of
strategy, sales and distribution and marketing.
www.stepchange.ie
4StepChange Ltd, Kinnitty, Thormanby Road, Howth, Co. Dublin
t +353 1 8396972, m +353 86 2519895, e info@stepchange.ie
3
Executive Summary
As financial brokers struggle against the backdrop of Ireland’s
economic woes, they face the day-to-day challenges of new clients
being harder to find, existing clients being harder to hold onto and
everybody being more price sensitive. However, brokers realise that
the response to these challenges can lie within their own control and
that marketing their business effectively is central to this response.
To market your business effectively, you must avoid just diving in and
doing marketing activities. Instead you must have a robust plan that is
appropriate for your business in the current market environment. This
guide takes you in detail through a robust marketing planning
methodology to enable you to develop a structured marketing plan
for your business.
This planning process includes an initial research phase to be
completed. This encompasses understanding the medium term
objectives of your business, analysing the external impacts on your
business over which you’ve no control, understanding what makes
your business different to the rest and clarifying who your target
audiences are. Each of these is covered in detail in this guide. Once
this research is completed, you then need to articulate how you want
your financial brokerage to be perceived by the external world – your
market positioning. After this, it is time to identify the actual
objectives of your marketing plan.
The cornerstone of a robust marketing plan is crystal clarity of your
marketing objectives. Once you are clear on what your goal is, it’s
relatively straightforward to identify the right set of activities to
achieve the goal. The different activities then need to be considered in
terms of their appropriateness for your plan, examining the benefits
and pitfalls of each. Finally the plan needs to be captured in a
structured fashion and in a suitable format to ensure that it becomes
a living document into the future.
4
part 1
The Marketing Planning Process
Introduction
Financial brokers are faced with a wide range of challenges today: a
stuttering economy, increased overheads and costs in your businesses
in areas such as compliance and insurance, and consumer confidence
and spending on the floor. That’s not mentioning the wealth
destruction, falling incomes and sharp rise in unemployment that
we’ve seen in recent years.
These are examples of really important factors that are impacting the
success of financial brokers’ businesses today. As a result, the
commercial environment for brokers is hugely difficult in comparison
to the Celtic Tiger era. New clients are harder to find, existing clients
are harder to hold on to, everybody is more price sensitive. However,
the one valuable service that is now needed by clients more than ever
is the impartial and independent advice that you offer. The challenge
for brokers today is to have a compelling business proposition for
both existing and prospective clients, and then to get out and tell
them about it! That’s where this guide comes in…
The purpose of this guide is to help you bring your proposition to
market in the most compelling way possible for your various
audiences. It will give you the mechanisms to develop a really robust
marketing plan for your business and will then give you an overview
of the benefits and drawbacks of a range of marketing tools that you
might potentially use to achieve your marketing objectives.
The end result? By following this roadmap, you’ll have a much greater
level of insight into your business, you will gain much more clarity
with regard to what you’re trying to achieve through your marketing
efforts and you will then be enabled to identify the right set of tools
to achieve your objectives. This should result in a greater return from
your marketing activities with less wastage of time and money.
5
This first part of the guide is focused on the planning stage and how to
go about developing a robust marketing plan for your business. The
aim of this section is to help you to identify the right set of marketing
activities for your business. The key to achieving this is to be crystal
clear on the objectives of your marketing efforts.
To help you identify these objectives, this section of the guide covers
the initial research phase that you need to complete to provide a firm
foundation for the plan, before giving you pointers on developing a
unique market positioning for your firm and identifying some working
principles to support this positioning.
Based on the findings of your research phase and your desired market
positioning, this section of the guide will then help you to identify the
all-important objectives of your marketing plan. Once you are very
clear on the objectives, it’s actually quite straightforward to identify
the right set of activities to implement to help you achieve your
objectives – this is covered in detail in Part 2 of this guide. Part 3 of
this guide then covers the actual capturing of the plan.
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The Planning Process
So where do you start? In order to achieve a robust marketing plan,
you need a robust planning process. The diagram below sets out a
process to be used, the aim of which is to stop you from just diving in
and starting to deliver marketing activities! Instead the key to a
successful marketing plan is gaining clarity of the objectives of the
plan. Once you know what it is that you want to achieve, only then
can you identify the right set of marketing tools to be used by your
brokerage.
By completing three preliminary phases: the Research Phase, your
Market Positioning and your Guiding Principles, you will ensure that
you identify the right marketing objectives for your business. As a
result of putting in this time at the outset, your chances of developing
a robust plan for your business will be hugely increased. So now we’ll
examine each of the steps of the planning process in a bit more detail.
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The Research Phase
Central to the development of a successful marketing plan is ensuring
that it takes account of the wider market circumstances, the
attributes of your particular business and indeed the business
objectives and target audiences of your business. The research phase is
really important as it provides a firm foundation for the marketing
plan and ensures that the plan is based on carefully considered reality,
rather than ‘gut feel’! This research phase is really worth the effort –
in reality you should probably allow 3-4 hours without distractions to
complete this properly. To achieve the desired results, the following
four areas should be examined:
1. Medium-term Objectives
The first step in the research phase is to articulate and write down
what the medium-term objective of your business is, over a 3-5 year
timeframe. This goal should be very clear and unambiguous. To
achieve this, make sure it is a SMART goal:
• Specific – What is it that you want to achieve? Is it a number of
clients, income levels, geographical reach?
• Measurable – What is the actual figure that you want to achieve?
• Attainable – Make sure the goal is achievable! While it should be
stretching, a completely unrealistic goal will end up being ignored.
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• Relevant – This goal is the future of your business! Make sure that
the goal truly reflects where you want your business to be in the
future.
• Time-Bound – Have a clear date set for when the goal should be
achieved. This will ensure a real focus for everyone working
towards the goal.
Why is it important to identify this objective? First of all, it gets you
thinking about where you want your business to be in the future – in
fact most brokers complete this stage quite quickly as they intuitively
know where they want their business to be! Secondly though, this
goal becomes an important sanity check for the marketing objectives
to ensure that they are relevant. For example, if your medium-term
objective is about deriving a specific income level from your existing
clients, there’s a problem if your marketing objectives are around
increasing your brand profile nationally!
2. The External Environment
The next part of the research phase is to understand what’s going on
outside of your brokerage and the impact of these events on your
business. There are a lot of factors impacting your business over which
you have little or no control. However, you ignore these factors at
your peril as you could miss some golden opportunities; or indeed, on
the other hand, you could be put out of business by ignoring the
world outside of your own office! To examine these external impacts
on your business, an often-used tool is one called ‘PEST Analysis’. This
tool enables you to examine external impacts on your business (over
which you’ve little or no control) across the 4 dimensions of:
9
So how might each of these dimensions affect the world of a financial
broker? Some examples might include:
Political
• What impact will the Consumer Protection Code and other
regulatory and compliance requirements have on your business?
• If your business is very focused on pensions, what impacts will the
levy, changes to tax relief (past and future) and thresholds have on
your business?
Economic
• Where do you believe the market cycle to be? This will influence
the advice you give and indeed should influence your marketing
approach and messages.
• Marketing in a recession is very different to marketing in a boom!
You need to consider all of the impacts of the current recession on
your clients and how these translate, both in terms of
opportunities (yes, there are some!) and challenges for your
business – unemployment, redundancies, income reductions etc.
While they are negative factors, consumers need advice on how to
manage their new financial situation.
Social
• There is overall a negative view of our industry. While you can’t
change this on your own, you can influence your own clients’
thinking in this regard. Do you cross your fingers and ignore this or
do you actively work on building a trust proposition for your
clients?
• As a result of the financial turmoil of recent years, the focus has
moved in most clients’ minds from asset accumulation to
consolidation and hanging on to what they have. It is really
important that this feeds through into your advice and marketing
proposition.
10
Technological
• Technology is a fantastic enabler to giving the world a view of your
business, and the Internet is now a primary research tool for
prospective customers. Is your web presence sufficiently strong to
leverage this opportunity, or is it in fact a disincentive for clients
to do business with you?
• Technology offers great communication possibilities with your
clients and prospective clients through your website, email, social
media etc. How are you leveraging these opportunities?
These are just a very small sample of the types of external impacts on
your business. The piece of work to be completed by you here is to
identify the full list of relevant impacts under each of the four
dimensions and then to consider how these are impacting upon your
business in particular. A number of these will then feed through into
the next research section, understanding the particular attributes of
your own business.
3. Your Business Profile
This is a critically important part of the research phase, identifying the
particular attributes of your business and what makes you different
from the other financial brokers that you are competing with! To
achieve this, you should complete a SWOT Analysis, which looks at
your particular business in terms of:
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The strengths and weaknesses will typically be factors that are internal
to your business while the opportunities and threats will typically
relate more to factors specific to your business but in the external
marketplace. The textbooks will suggest that you should only include
factors that are unique to your business; however this is difficult for
financial brokers who are surrounded by such a high number of
competing firms. As a result, you should identify factors that
differentiate you from your typical competitors – these could be other
financial brokers in your area, others chasing the same target market
etc. At the other extreme, this is not an exercise in simply listing every
area that you are good and bad in. Instead only capture those factors
that differentiate you from the rest. Some examples of areas to
consider include:
• Strengths / Weaknesses: Client base, brand, assets, staff, service
capability, geographical presence etc.
• Opportunities / Threats: Access to specific client groups, introducer
relationships, other financial brokers, banks etc.
This part of the research phase should take up the most time by a long
way, as it requires you to really examine your business in detail.
4. Target Markets
The final stage of the research phase is to identify the customer groups
that you want to reach through your marketing plan. You cannot
ignore this phase and simply hope that your marketing efforts will
reach your desired audience. Instead your choice of marketing
activities will be based to a large degree on who it is you are actually
trying to reach. You will most likely have multiple target audiences
but your challenge is to get as specific as possible about each
audience – who they are, what their particular attributes are, can you
identify sample ‘faces’ within each audience – this will help you as you
decide the best marketing mix to reach them. Target audiences
probably fit into 3 main categories:
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Existing Clients
For many brokers, their existing client base is the main focus of their
marketing activities. However your client base is not one
homogenous group. You need to segment your client base along
sensible lines as you may have different marketing requirements for
different groups within your client base. You potentially might
segment your client base by factors such as:
• Geography
• Value to your Business
• Premium Levels
• Product Type
• Business Potential.
New Clients
It’s not enough to say you’re open to any new client. In most cases,
of course you are! You need to be clear about the groups of people
that you are trying to target as this will help you to decide both
your marketing objectives and your marketing activities. You might
target new clients by:
• Geography – are you looking for clients in a particular region?
• Client Profile – are you looking for corporate clients, personal
lines clients etc.?
• Product Category – Are you seeking corporate pension clients to
match your expertise?
• Client Groups / Occupations / Affinities – are you specialising in
one of these areas?
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Introducers
Are there other business people in your network with whom you can
build mutually beneficial relationships as a source of business for
each other? These of course include accountants, solicitors, general
insurance brokers etc. If gaining business through introducers is a
significant opportunity for your business, then capture them as a
target market! You will need to build credibility and communicate
with them at least as well as you do with your end clients –
otherwise these relationships will never deliver the results that you
want.
And that then is the research phase completed! Assuming this has
been done properly, you will now be in a position to move forward
through the planning process, confident in the knowledge that all
relevant factors have been considered.
14
Market Positioning and Guiding
Principles
While these two areas are completely inter-related, they are best
looked at one at a time.
1. Market Positioning
A quick marketing lesson to help you understand this important area!
An excellent definition of positioning is:
“Positioning is not what you do to a product; it is what you do to the
mind of a prospect”.
Ries and Trout (1972)
We see this subconsciously in every product / brand that we touch.
Ryanair is positioned as a low-cost carrier, Gucci as a luxury goods
manufacturer; Volvo is positioned for safety. There has also been
clever repositioning by brands over the years – do you remember
when Lucozade was a drink for when you were sick instead of being
an energy drink?
Does this apply to financial brokers? Absolutely it does: it is vitally
important that you are clear on what your market positioning is / will
be. You then need to ensure that this positioning is delivered by
everyone associated with your business. Volvo’s positioning will not
endure if they have significant safety issues; the same applies to you.
Your positioning must be relentlessly delivered, every time. To help
you identify and articulate the positioning of your business, you need
to consider questions such as:
• What should people think about when they see you / get in touch
with your business?
• What makes your business different?
• How do you act differently to justify this positioning?
• How do you brag about your business?
15
A word of warning: don’t pick a positioning just because it’s trendy!
The critical point again is that it is relevant to your business and is
credible. There is no point having a positioning that you cannot
deliver – this will just result in you being in the dreaded place of
overpromising but under-delivering. What are potential positioning
areas for financial brokers? They could include the likes of:
• Expertise in certain product lines, customer segments, areas of
the market.
• Provision of a local service in a geographical area, being
accessible to customers.
• A superior service proposition / quality of advice.
• A particular cost proposition / remuneration structure.
Your positioning statement should then be captured in no more than a
sentence or two. It shouldn’t become a mantra to be learned off by
heart and parroted out to clients! Instead it should be a galvanising
statement that succinctly describes your business and is credible to
clients and to everyone else associated with your brand – yourself,
your employees, in fact anybody representing your brand. Your
positioning is as strong as the weakest link – everyone throughout
your business must buy into it or else they will fatally undermine it.
16
2. Guiding Principles
These are effectively rules that you put in place throughout your
organisation (and with any suppliers representing your brand) to
support your market positioning. Once you gain everyone’s buy-in to
the market positioning, the guiding principles become the rulebook
that ensures the positioning is consistently delivered. They become the
‘lines in the sand’ that people are not allowed to cross, for the benefit
of your brand. Typical guiding principles may be based on qualities
such as:
• Fairness to clients
• Professionalism
• Service Quality
• Expertise
• Focus on customer relationships.
There are of course a whole range of potential guiding principles that
might be appropriate to your particular positioning. The key is to
identify the right ones for your business, to communicate these
consistently and often to everyone associated with your brand and to
monitor that everyone is sticking to them. If not, get out and train
your people again!
Remember: You need to comply with the relevant Data Protection rules.
Please refer to the PIBA Compliance Marketing Guidelines.
17
Clarifying your Marketing
Objectives
Having completed your research phase and having identified your
market positioning, you are now in a position to identify your allimportant marketing objectives. If you’ve been rigorous to this point,
typically you will find that the objectives for your marketing activities
simply fall out of the work completed and are staring you in the face!
However, we will now look at some typical marketing objectives for
financial brokers.
These are probably the 6 most common objectives, with the ones
highlighted in blue being the 3 most common in the current market
environment. Following is a quick overview of each:
• Brand Building: Increasing the general awareness of your business
and product offerings among your target market and the wider
public.
• Drive Sales: Converting prospects from leads into actual sales,
including the sales and marketing tools to support this process.
This is when you are in front of prospects.
• Drive Leads: Increasing the number of prospective clients for your
business both from inbound and outbound marketing activities.
Getting more people in front of you!
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• Develop Partner Relationships: Building mutually beneficial
relationships with accountants, solicitors and general insurance
brokers.
• Connect with Existing Clients: Increasing your retention of .
existing clients and cross-selling opportunities.
• Change Market Positioning: Changing the positioning of your
business in the eyes of your customers and the wider market. For
example, changing from being seen as a mortgage broker to being
recognised as a financial broker.
Some of your marketing objectives may be appropriate for only part
of your target market. That’s ok! For example, you might have an
objective such as, “To implement a client engagement programme for
our top 50 clients”.
The important task now is to identify the right objectives for your
business. While you might think that 5 or 6 of them are appropriate
for your business, there are undoubtedly one or two (or possibly
three) that are much higher priority. Remember that for each
objective you will have a number of marketing activities, so identify
and focus on the important ones at this stage. As you address them,
you can then look at the rest. If you try to address too many
objectives, each with a number of marketing activities, you run the
risk of being overwhelmed by the task at hand. Narrow your
objectives down as much as possible and make your job manageable.
At this stage you are clear on what you want to achieve under your
marketing plan. Identifying the right marketing objectives for your
business is really important as it gives you the best chance of
delivering the right set of marketing activities to achieve the desired
results. You also can be confident that these objectives are based on a
solid research platform and the desired positioning of your business.
19
part 2
The Marketing Toolbox
Introduction
At this stage, you’ll be glad to know that you’ve broken the back of
developing your marketing plan! Getting clarity on those allimportant objectives for your plan is really the bedrock of a robust
marketing plan.
Now that you know your objectives, the next step is to identify the
best set of marketing activities to help you achieve the objectives.
These will then be slotted into the plan.
In this section, the guide covers some necessary housekeeping first of
all and then each of the main marketing objectives that you are likely
to identify. For each of these objectives, there is an optimal set of
activities to be undertaken to help you achieve the objective.
The focus of this guide is on offline marketing activities only. Some
reference is made to a wide number of digital tools to be considered.
These are very important tools as part of the overall marketing mix for
financial brokers. However these have not been analysed in this guide
and instead you should refer to PIBA’s “A Guide to Digital Marketing
and Social Media Planning”.
Each of these offline activities is examined in turn, giving an overview
of the activity, the benefits of each and some potential pitfalls to be
aware of. This will help you to identify the right set of activities for
your chosen objective and will give you some pointers on maximising
their impact and, in turn, your chances of success.
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Doing the Housekeeping
Before you start diving in and thinking about creative marketing
activities, it’s worth pausing for a moment. Have you considered that
every customer interaction effectively plays a part in your marketing
efforts, as it will help or hinder the positioning of your business in
your customers’ minds? As a result, it is worth quickly considering
each of the following and deciding if you need to do some work on
them, as they could potentially undermine some of your efforts as you
work on the more exciting activities.
First Impressions Matter!
• Will a visit to your office have a positive or negative effect on
visitors? Is it a professional, tidy and clean environment?
• Is your signage good?
• How welcoming is the first person a visitor meets at your office?
• Are you proud handing over one of your business cards? Are they
fully up to date and made with good quality paper?
• Are your brand name and logo still relevant to your business and
are they consistently used across all platforms?
• Are you happy with your headed paper?
• How professionally is the phone answered at your office?
• How happy are you with your website?
• How complete is your LinkedIn profile?
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How good is your data?
• Do you have phone numbers and email addresses for all of your
clients to support your marketing efforts?
• What data / results do you have from previous marketing . .
campaigns?
• Do you know the source of every lead, as this should help to
choose and guide future marketing activities?
• What processes are in place to keep these lists up to date?
What Lasting Impression do you leave?
• How good are your financial advice reports, both in terms of the
quality of the content and also the look and feel?
• How professional are your client review reports?
• How will your documents arrive in the post to your client? In a
dog-eared envelope or in a professional corporate folder?
• When presenting to a client, how professional are your
PowerPoint presentations?
As mentioned above, these are worth addressing. It probably won’t
make sense to hold off on all other marketing activities until all of
these are remedied but they certainly should be dealt with as early as
possible.
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The Marketing Activities
Overview
If you go back to the planning process for a minute (see the diagram
below), you will see that at this stage you have achieved the key task,
which is identifying your marketing objectives. The next step is to
identify the right set of marketing activities for your chosen
objectives.
As mentioned in the introduction to this section of the guide, online
tools are now a critical component of any marketing plan, but these
are examined separately in PIBA’s “A Guide to Digital Marketing and
Social Media Planning”.
Overleaf is an overview of the main marketing activities that should
be considered under each of the marketing objectives. Following this
is an examination of each of the offline tools in turn.
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Marketing Activities
The Benefits and Pitfalls of each
Marketing Activity
In the “Marketing Activities Overview”, you can identify the most relevant
set of potential activities for each of the objectives that you’ve defined for
your marketing plan. You’ll now see set out below some thoughts in relation
to each of the offline marketing activities contained in the Activities
Overview.
24
ADVERTISING
Description: Increasing brand recognition and product
messages through paid content in media
channels including press, radio, TV, online,
magazines etc.
Benefits
Pitfalls
• Potential to get messages out to a
wide audience.
• Wide choice of media channels.
• Opportunity to use creative
messages.
• Opportunity to connect with
prospects unknown to the
financial broker.
• Expensive – can be very!
• Difficult to target effectively at
the preferred audience – now
easier online.
• Opportunity for brief messages
only.
• Hard to measure the impact.
• Very cluttered environment.
PUBLIC RELATIONS (PR)
Description: Provides exposure to your audience using
topics of public interest and news items that
do not require payment to the media
provider. Benefits Pitfalls
Benefits
• High credibility as viewed as
gaining exposure based on merits
of message alone.
• Can allow lengthy and complex
messages to be discussed and
explained.
• Highly engaging if communicated
well.
• Can enable ongoing relationships
with media (newspapers, radio
stations etc.).
• Opportunity to connect with
prospects unknown to the
financial broker.
• Free!
Pitfalls
• Takes a lot of time to cultivate
effective ongoing media
relationships.
• Often a ‘live’ environment –
potential for ‘curve balls’ and
fewer second chances!
• Choice of right medium is critical.
• Hard to measure the impact as no
direct results.
• Competition – Many ambitious
-3financial brokers seeking these
opportunities!
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SEMINARS / CONFERENCES
Description: Inviting your target audience to hear
presentations of relevant content as decided
by you, delivered by a range of speakers
including yourself.
Benefits
Pitfalls
• Great opportunity to showcase
the capabilities of your business.
• Gain captive time with your
target market.
• You can select messages that will
enhance your business and sales
opportunities.
• Great networking opportunity.
• Potential to introduce new clients
to your business.
• Can be hard to attract the right
audience – content and speakers
must be right.
• If executed poorly, will reflect
poorly on your business.
• Speaker quality and their message
is key – if poor, this will turn off
your audience.
• Often no direct link to sales – can
be expensive.
NETWORKING
Description: Where groups of like-minded business people
identify, create, or act upon business
opportunities for the gain of members.
Benefits
• Opportunity to meet groups of
people within your target market.
• Opportunity to showcase your
business to individuals within the
networking groups.
• Gain captive time with your
target market.
• Opportunity to build mutually
beneficial relationships with other
businesspeople.
• Potential to introduce new clients
to your business.
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Pitfalls
• Some people find it hard work!
• You must find the right groups –
not just groups of financial
brokers!
• You’ll fail if you are only looking
to ‘take’ from the group. You
must ‘give’ too!
• You must perfect your market
positioning to differentiate
yourself from the rest.
• Can be a slow burn turning your
network into clients.
CORPORATE ENTERTAINING
Description: Thanking existing clients by inviting them to a
social occasion, either individually or as part
of a wider group event.
Benefits
• Opportunity to say thank you to
clients.
• Opportunity to learn more about
your clients, outside of a formal
business meeting.
• Opportunity to engage the
partners and children of clients.
• Opportunity to ‘stick in their
minds’.
Pitfalls
• Quality of the event is important
– poor quality will reflect poorly
on your brand.
• Devil is in the detail – small
factors stick in the mind of
guests, positive and negative!
• Mix of guests is important.
• No direct link to sales and can be
expensive.
CORPORATE PRESENTATIONS
Description: Similar to a Corporate Brochure, developing a
top quality presentation that introduces your
business when presenting to new clients.
Benefits
• A very professional introduction
to your advice meetings with new
clients.
• A very useful ‘scene setter’ that
can help to put clients at ease.
• Can be easily tailored for
different clients.
• Can be easily tailored for use
with potential business
introducers.
Pitfalls
• Quality again is the critical
factor. Done well, corporate
presentations are a real asset,
done badly, they are a detractor.
• You need to consider your
presentation method – paper
slides, laptop, iPad?
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CORPORATE BROCHURES
Description: Developing a highly visual, top quality
brochure that showcases the people, skills
and capabilities of your business.
Benefits
Pitfalls
• A very professional introduction
to your business with prospective
clients.
• A reminder to existing clients of
the wider capabilities of the
business.
• A showcase of your
professionalism with potential
business introducers.]
• A professional ‘take away’ for
callers to your office.
• Quality is critical. This is your
professional showcase so it must
be excellent quality.
• They can be expensive – costs
include design and print and
maybe photography.
• May need to be updated as
personnel / product set / business
focus changes.
PRODUCT BROCHURES
Description: Brochures developed by you or by life
companies to promote the features and
benefits of particular product lines.
Benefits
• Will help to promote a particular
product line with prospective
clients.
• Very useful as background
information on a product line for
clients.
• Will demonstrate professionalism
in your approach, better than a
handful of fliers!
• A strong asset to a wider product
sales campaign.
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Pitfalls
• They can date quite quickly as
legislation, tax rates etc. change.
• They can be time consuming and
costly to produce.
• Important to get the balance
right between overly technical
(difficult to read) and overly
simple (not informative enough).
CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR)
Description: Delivering a positive impact through your
business on the environment, consumers,
employees, community or charities.
Benefits
• Paints a very positive picture of
your business among a wide
audience.
• Can build a strong spirit among
employees and staff through
engagement in the CSR initiative.
• May attract new clients who
prefer dealing with socially
responsible brands.
• Can yield positive PR benefits.
Pitfalls
• No direct link to sales.
• May have a cost in terms of time
or money, depending on the
initiative.
• Important to associate your
brand with the right initiative /
charity.
SPONSORSHIPS
Description: A fee paid (typically in sports, arts,
entertainment or causes) in return for access
to the commercial potential associated with
the body / event.
Benefits
Pitfalls
• Will give you exposure to
participants / supporters of the
sponsored event / team.
• Will be seen by a wider audience
through promotion of the event /
team.
• Can yield corporate entertaining
opportunities with key clients
and employees.
• Can yield positive PR benefits.
• No direct link to sales – can be
hard to measure the benefits of
sponsorships.
• Can be very expensive.
• Important to associate your
brand with the right event /
team.
• Important to leverage every
opportunity presented by the
sponsorship – it will be up to you
to do so!
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DIRECT MARKETING CAMPAIGNS
Description: Contacting clients or prospective clients
directly by mail / email to promote a
particular product or service.
Benefits
• Very focused on a particular
product line.
• Will engage all salespeople as the
catalyst for a push on a
particular product.
• The message will arrive as you
desire it to be received.
• Very measurable in terms of
response rates.
Pitfalls
• Quality again is key. Poor quality
will be seen as junk mail / spam
and will detract from your
business.
• Rigorous follow-up must happen.
• Can be costly, particularly for
offline campaigns.
Remember: In relation to Direct Marketing, you need to comply with the relevant
Data Protection rules. Please refer to the PIBA Compliance Marketing Guidelines.
TELESALES
Description: Where an agent solicits potential customers
to buy products or services, either over the
phone or through a subsequent face to face
appointment scheduled during the call.
Benefits
Pitfalls
• Can be a good source for lead
generation.
• You have complete control of the
message / products to be
promoted.
• Different scripts / approaches can
be tested to optimise chance of
success.
• Very measurable results.
• You are outsourcing so risk poor
representation of your brand.
• Leads generated can be poor
quality resulting in wasted time
and money.
• To improve chances of success,
you need to engage and test
different scripts etc.
Remember: In relation to Telesales, you need to comply with the relevant Data
Protection rules. Please refer to the PIBA Compliance Marketing Guidelines.
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CUSTOMER SURVEYS
Description: Inviting a group of contacts to participate
individually in a survey to enable you to
present back findings in relation to the
group as a whole.
Benefits
• Can yield important information
about your clients and their
thinking.
• They offer a great opportunity to
engage your clients with the
findings.
• Can provide very useful material
for seminars / conferences.
• They provide excellent PR
opportunities.
Pitfalls
• Poorly prepared surveys will
annoy participants and result in
low participation.
• Doing the survey is not enough –
you must present back the
findings for full impact.
• Can be expensive to see the full
process through.
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part 3
Completing The Marketing Plan
Introduction
In this final, short section of the guide, you’ll see the important items
to capture in the actual writing of your marketing plan – at the end of
the day we all know that if it isn’t written down, it won’t happen!
In the author’s humble opinion, the days of 20 page marketing plans
are over! There are countless such plans gathering dust in desks and
on shelves in financial brokers’ offices everywhere. An effective
marketing plan is a short, action oriented document that clearly sets
out what needs to be done and is developed in such a way that it is
easy to review its effectiveness on an ongoing basis.
This section sets out what should be included in your marketing plan
to make it effective. The good news is that if you follow this approach,
you’ll get your plan on to a maximum of 2 pages!
The real work then begins – implementation!
1. Priority
You first of all need to decide which are the most critical activities to
deliver above all others. They may not be the most urgent activities,
but over the lifetime of your plan (probably 12 to 18 months), they are
the most important. These ones must happen!
2. Estimated Cost
You need to estimate the cost of each activity as you probably have a
limited marketing budget available. This might take some ‘ringing
around’! You then need to compare the likely cost of the activities
with your available budget. Often there will be a shortfall, and this is
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where choices must be made. Obviously your high priority activities
should remain on the plan. You then need to look at the rest and
choose whether you ‘water down’ the activities under each of your
marketing objectives or, indeed, remove one of the marketing
objectives for the lifetime of this plan.
You should also consider the cost in terms of the time required to
deliver the activities. Will you have this time? If not, you may want to
outsource this work, which you will need to budget for.
3. Delivery Date
When is the actual activity to be delivered? If it is a long project, it
might also be worth capturing when you will start working on the
activity and some interim milestones. This is really important as it will
keep you focused on the activity.
Some tips? Put in an actual date, not just a month (or worse still
“Quarter 4”)! Also make sure that these dates find their way into your
calendar or to-do list.
4. Delivery Responsibility
Who is actually going to take responsibility for delivery of the
activity? This must be one person’s name! There needs to be a single
owner for each activity to make sure they get delivered. Shared
responsibility creates ambiguity and things start falling through
cracks.
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5. Measure of Success
The most important point is kept until the end: what gets measured
gets done. If you don’t set target outcomes for each of your marketing
activities and then track the results against those targets, how will
you know whether it was successful and if it should be repeated in the
future?
This is where marketing gets a really bad name! As John Wanamaker,
considered the father of both the modern department store and
modern advertising, said,
“I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted … I just don’t
know which half.”
No, it’s not always possible to link your marketing activities back to
sales but there are a wide range of other targets and metrics that you
can use to measure the success or otherwise of each of the activities
that you’ve chosen. These include measures such as:
• New client numbers
• Levels of cross sales
• Customer satisfaction measures
• Website traffic
• Online presence
• Delivery of plan.
If you include each of your chosen activities and complete the above 5
areas for each, you now have a very robust marketing plan!
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Conclusion
Hopefully this guide has given you a methodology to ensure you can
maximise the impact of your marketing efforts. To ensure success, you must
have a robust plan, and the cornerstone of a robust plan is crystal clarity of
your marketing objectives. Once you have the objectives in place, the choice
of the right activities will easily follow. These activities then need to be
planned and delivered in a structured fashion.
To ensure you have identified the right objectives for your marketing plan,
it’s really important that these are based on your required market
positioning. Again this is how others will perceive your business so it is
important that this is based on solid foundations. These foundations are built
by the completion of the research phase at the outset – understanding the
medium term objectives of your business, analysing the external impacts on
your business over which you’ve no control, understanding what makes your
business different to the rest and clarifying who your target audiences are.
Each of these is covered earlier in this guide.
Now a new challenge begins, and that is implementing your plan creatively
and rigorously to fully leverage the planning work that you’ve completed.
This requires commitment to the plan and meticulous follow-up. Don’t file the
plan away! Keep it visible to ensure that you or whoever is delivering the
plan on your behalf remains on track to ensure you maximise the results from
the plan.
Finally, remember help is always at hand. There are many dedicated
marketing people (including the author!) available who would be delighted to
advise you or indeed help you in the development and delivery of your plan.
The very best of luck!
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