What makes your firm different?

You might not expect me to say this as a staunch advocate of low-cost, evidence-based investing, but videos about index funds aren’t going to win you lots of clients. In-depth articles on the Capital Asset Pricing Model certainly won’t.

Should financial advice firms be producing and sharing educational content about investing? Absolutely. There’s an urgent need for engaging content that helps investors to achieve better outcomes. Every firm, in my view, has a duty to provide it.

Firms that do provide investor education will also reap the benefits. Educated clients make better clients; they’re more likely to trust you, and to stick with you and their investment strategy, when markets fall.

But what I’m talking about here is something different. It’s about winning new business — generating leads and then converting prospects into clients.

For me, winning business is all about what marketing people call your unique value proposition, or UVP. What do you offer? Why is it unique and valuable to your clients?

Once you’ve worked out your UVP, you then need to communicate it effectively, again and again and again.

In October 2018, Pershing carried out in-depth research on adviser value propositions in the United States. It surveyed more than a thousand high-net-worth investors, and asked them to rate the value proposition of 100 top advice firms.

Perhaps the most interesting finding was that more than 60% of those surveyed said they thought advisers made all the same promises, making it hard to distinguish between them.

For ambitious advice businesses, herein lies a huge opportunity. If you can 1) ensure that your firm really does have something distinctive and valuable to offer, and 2) keep communicating that UVP through targeted content marketing, you shouldn’t have any problems attracting the right clients.

I delivered a short presentation on this subject at The Evidence-Based Adviser in Birmingham in March, and here’s a 17-minute video of it. I hope you find it useful, and if you do, please share it.