Motivating Marketing Ideas: If It’s Good Enough for Tara …

www-web_optimizedA few months ago, I was privileged to be introduced to Tara Hunt of Truly Social, while collaborating on a Canadian evidence-based advisor firm’s marketing and communications (or “marcomm,” as we in the biz call it, because it sounds so much snazzier).

While you may or may not be in the market for a full-on engagement with a marketer of Tara’s stature, she shares a ton of excellent stuff for free on her YouTube channel. I encourage you to visit her channel and click on the “subscribe” button toward the upper-right corner of her page. You’ll then be notified whenever she adds new material.

Her most recent video, “Marketing is NOT an afterthought” was as insightful as usual.

In particular, as someone who generally prefers books over video (Shhh, don’t tell Tara!), I perked up at her recommendation of the fast-reading “Talking to Humans” by Giff Constable.

How fast? I watched Tara’s video earlier this afternoon, downloaded the $0.99 Kindle copy of Constable’s book immediately thereafter (or there’s a free PDF version), and am writing this post about an hour later.

Don’t let the attractive price or brevity fool you. If “Talking to Humans” is good enough for Tara, that’s certainly good enough for me … and you.

From my perspective, the book isn’t really about marketing as much as it is about understanding who your existing and would-be clients are, what they really want out of life, and how you may be able to best help them with that.

Client discovery, in other words.

“Here’s what customer discovery is not,” writes Constable. “It is not asking people to design your product for you. It is not about abdicating your vision. It is also not about pitching. A natural tendency is to try to sell other people on your idea, but your job in customer discovery is to learn.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Constable’s book should provide you with some worthwhile new ideas to spice up your practice development. It’s divided into two parts: A fictional case study to introduce the essential ingredients to client discovery, and a second part that is packed with practical tips on how to proceed.

All that, and Tara’s video will also treat you to a classic video clip of The Odd Couple’s Felix Unger parsing the word “assume.” Do you remember that one? Don’t assume you’ve got nothing to learn from “Talking to Humans.” Give it a read today.

Have You Met My Good Friend, TESS?

Love it or hate it, every firm needs it. I’m talking about branding. Whether you’re building a fresh website, adding signage in your office or streaming out reams of corporate communications, the branding that accompanies it is to your firm what that “canstockphoto11443547-branding-cow-webresCircle-K” is on a steer’s butt. Your colors and fonts, your artwork, style guides, logo, firm name and more come together as your branding. “This is us and ours!” it says, loud and clear.
Your choicest words are also integral to your firm’s branding, otherwise known as your tagline. This is where I typically come into the mix. I love to corral the hours of conversation I hold and pages of notes I take when discovering a firm, into the select handful of words that magically embody the essence of who you are and what you stand for.

Given the labor of love an excellent tagline entails, it’s well worth taking two important steps as you prepare your precious words: Continue reading “Have You Met My Good Friend, TESS?”

An Evidence-Based Investing Conference Discount for EBA Group Members

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A Wendy’s Wednesday Whimsy

This week’s post is dedicated to killing two birds with one stone. If you are an advisor who really should be (or already are) a member of our Evidence-Based Advisor’s LinkedIn group — and you are interested in attending the inaugural Evidence-Based Investing Conference in New York City on November 15 —  have I got a deal for you.

Given the similar names, there’s naturally some synergies to be explored between our EBA group and the EBI Conference, don’t you think? The event’s hosts did, so they have extended a special invitation to our group, along with a $400 DISCOUNT off the regular registration rate. Any advisor who is an EBA group member can attend for the reduced rate of $1,095 (regularly $1,495).

To find out what code to use to receive the discounted rate:

(1) Request to join the EBA group.

(2) Look for the featured post with the discount code included.

(3) Register for the EBI event by September 30.

Boom, see you there.

Why might you want to attend? Because we’ve carefully curated this EBA group as a forum of relatively like-minded advisors, we’d like to see a strong showing of us at an event that is, after all, celebrating a term we’ve collectively embraced as our own.

Continue reading “An Evidence-Based Investing Conference Discount for EBA Group Members”

Good News, Bad News, Client News

www-web_optimizedIn a past post, “Client Communications and Current Crises,” I explored when to reach out to your clients during scary market news. My advice was that “right away” was the best way, despite any misgivings you might have about what to say when the trouble may still be brewing.

Another important way to make your crisis communications more effective is to sustain a regular stream of good-news reach-outs in between. In so doing, the crisis-driven ones won’t seem out of context when they arrive. They’ll just be one more exchange in your ongoing conversation.

Continue reading “Good News, Bad News, Client News”