5 Steps to Build Your Personal Brand as a Financial Advisor

In the same way you think of sleek smartphones when you hear “Apple” and 2-day shipping when you hear “Amazon”, potential clients will have a vision when they hear your name. You’re building your brand whether you’re actively managing it or not, based on your words, actions, work ethic, and results. And in the world of finance, a personal brand can be the thing that boosts your client growth and supercharges your revenue or the thing that keeps your pipeline empty. Follow these five steps to build a personal brand that’s an asset to your business.

What is a personal brand?

A personal brand is a unique identity and reputation you’ve built for yourself – it’s what you’ve become known for by your peers, clients, and potential customers. Building your brand can come from your values and how you express those, your work ethic and commitment to customers, your personality, and your level of expertise among many other factors. This is the thing that differentiates you from every other person that does what you do. 

Why is it important? 

Building a recognizable, consistent brand can give financial advisors an edge over the competition, bringing in additional business and turning customers into lifelong clients. Studies have shown that it only takes a prospect seven seconds to get their first impression and decide if they want to work with you or not. And once someone forms a negative first impression of you, it can be very difficult to overcome. This is why being proactive about your brand and reputation is key to success.

Five steps to build your brand:

1. Know your client. Before you can decide how you want to be perceived, you need to clarify who it is that you want to serve. What are their goals and where do they live? Do they have a family and what is their income level? What is their current financial status and what challenges are they facing now and might face in the future? These questions are a great start to building your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which can inform the most important things your ideal client needs and how you can best serve them.

2. Create a unique identity and voice. Now that you know what clients you’re looking for and what they need from you, you can begin crafting your brand to match those needs. Start by leveraging your firm’s brand assets to remain consistent with corporate guidelines – in the absence of these you should identify logos and colors that align with your intended brand. Your voice is how you speak to and about your customers, and this should be consistent across all communications. To assist with this, cultivate a technology stack that helps enable these consistencies, whether with templates or by organizing conversations. Finally, create your value proposition – why should someone work with you?

3. Build a solid online presence. Be present on many platforms from social media and email to text messaging and blogs. Highlight your expertise via thought leadership contributions and share helpful articles written by other industry professionals. You should also showcase your clients – with their permission – to dive into their goals and how you helped them achieve success. 

4. Make customer service a priority. A key area of differentiation for any service provider is how you respond to customers and enhance their experience with you and your company. Many consumers prefer to self-serve as much as possible, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to stay up-to-date. Leveraging a channel they’re already comfortable with, such as text messaging, helps meet the customer where they are and gives them the space to carry the conversation in their own time. An SMS API or online platform like Esendex allows your customers to engage in two-way conversations for quick, timely responses to customer inquiries and keeps the conversations organized for easy management. Leveraging business text messaging also allows for clear, proactive communication about meetings, fees, or upcoming transactions and gives the customers a platform on which to provide feedback and answer customer service surveys. 

5. Regularly monitor and evaluate your brand. After you’ve spent some time working on your brand, check in to determine your progress. Has your presence expanded? What feedback have you received from your surveys? Have you seen an uplift in inquiries since you began focusing on this? Answer these questions honestly and make an action plan to address any concerns or highlight other key areas for which you’d like to be known.

Branding is an ongoing process

Cultivating a personal brand isn’t something that is ever finished. It’s an ongoing action that should be built into your daily work life as a financial provider, but leveraging communication tools such as SMS can help make these new processes easier. Looking to get started on your next text messaging campaign right away? Check out these top 10 SMS templates for financial advisors.