We’re committed to providing you with the right tools to help successfully grow your practice. One of these tools is marketing your practice and building your brand. A key component of building your brand is your unique value offering.
How do you define your unique value offering? It usually starts with your story.
What is your story? Why are you in this business, and how did you get to where you are today? Who helped you along the way? Why do you care about helping people? These are the underlying questions that prospective clients think of but don’t always ask. As we develop your brand, we want to inspire prospects to ask you about your brand, logo, and website, which should prompt you to tell your story.
Almost every financial professional I have worked with has a story. It’s the reason they became a financial professional, and it’s what drives them every day to make a difference. Your story typically uncovers whom you want to help and why. It is also what makes you and your practice unique.
What kind of story should you use?
- Personal life experience: Is there an element of your early life that prompted your commitment to being better with your finances? Is there a select group of people that you feel passionately about helping because of something in your personal experience? Determine which of these stories had the greatest impact on your desire to become a financial advisor.
- Watching others: In some cases, it wasn’t your own life experience, but the experience of others, that created your desire. Perhaps you have a brother who went through a terrible divorce and was left financially destitute. Maybe this situation caused you to become a champion for people experiencing divorce. It could be that you have some friends who lost the bulk of their inheritance simply because of poor or inadequate council. Situations like these can inspire our passion and prompt us to take action.
- Prior employment: In other cases, it’s your former career that inspired you to focus on financial planning. Over the years at your last job, you became familiar with the challenges that your clients faced and watched them mismanage their money and lose what they worked so hard to achieve. Your experience can be a powerful story to tell your clients and the catalyst for why you changed careers. It can also be a powerful tool when connecting with other business owners or potential clients in similar fields.
- Your experience helping people: I’m sure you’ve experienced several real-life situations that validated the importance of proper wealth planning: clients who came to you too late or lost money due to improper planning. Any experience that made an impact on you can help to define your market and develop a compelling story.
These are just some of the sources from which you can discover your story, your unique value offering. Take a moment and really think about why you got into this business, and why you are so driven to help your clients. This will help you identify yourself as someone who stands out, not just another run of the mill financial advisor.
