Offering Your Services: Creative Ways To Reach Out And Find New Clients

Posted on Dec 18 2015 - 8:25am by Toby Peters

Business

If you are a chartered accountant or a financial advisor, getting new clients in the door can require a great deal of marketing creativity. Certainly, the traditional approaches involving pay-per-click advertising, direct mail marketing, website marketing and networking are all valid. Financial services providers are intelligent people, though, and you are bound to find that all your competitors do what you do. You need to explore newer ways of positioning yourself for more business.

Ask everyone you meet for referrals

A study recently published in the New York Times reports that the average person knows 600 people. Whoever you meet, they are likely to either need financial services themselves, or know someone who does. Certainly, anyone would be hesitant to pass on the name of a financial professional they didn’t have personal experience with. Nevertheless, when you have even a passable personal relationship with a person, they likely to pass your name on, simply because people tend to like to help others. Asking people to pass your name on is also a less embarrassing way of asking them if they want your services.

Belong to a nonprofit

Nonprofits need accounting work done, or need financial advice that they are willing to pay for. Of course, you cannot get on the board of a nonprofit, and then have them direct business your way — it would go against conflict-of-interest laws. Nevertheless, organizations do often like to hire within their ranks, because such accountants tend to have sympathy for their cause. The conflict of interest problem can usually be taken care of in creative legal ways.

Become a public figure representing your field

Whether you are an accountant or financial advisor, you can work hard to position yourself as an authority in your field, obtaining speaking engagements television appearances and good articles in respectable magazines. When you are a public face of your field, you automatically become an authority in people’s eyes. Many people tend to be eager to do business with professionals who are acknowledged authorities.

Run a modern operation

Obtain the best CRM software for financial advisors available, and run software for performance reporting, risk profiling, rebalancing and data-gathering. Running a modern operation can be an excellent way to generate word of mouth.

Invest heavily in search engine optimization

It isn’t possible to find success in any business today without a deep commitment to making it to the top of search engine results. It won’t do at all to hire a below-average SEO service the way many small businesses do. It’s important to hire the best, invest whatever it takes, and learn a great deal about SEO yourself. There’s no other way to ace it — SEO is a field that moves extremely quickly, and it can be hard to tell the difference between a true professional and a pretender. You need to know about the field yourself to judge.

About the Author

Toby Peters is a financial advisor. He likes to share his insights on the web. His articles appear on many business websites.