Cultivate External Referrals
Build relationships with those in a position to refer you business.
Recurring Technical
Newsletter
Communications
Either in print or via email, providing engaging content is a great way to reinforce your brand and let centers of influence know that you are always available to help any of their clients.
Making local professionals, such as CPAs or attorneys, your brand ambassadors is about creating a relationship that benefits you both. Given the risk of any money management referral, the perceived risk for the first referral will be high. The rules are still the same:
Does the referrer understand your services well enough that they won't feel foolish bringing them up?
Does the referrer believe their referral will reflect well on them?
Does the referrer know that you'll be able to respond quickly?
Even if the answers are all yes, a referral to trust or wealth management is hard to make because it entails larger risk in the case of failure.
To overcome this barrier and reduce the perceived risk, it's important to demonstrate your expertise in the field of the potential referrer.
Merrill Anderson's technical estate planning newsletters do just that, with our in-house authors and notable industry authors creating content that is newsworthy, reactionary to recent legislation, and understanding of the fine line between being technical enough to be interesting to someone with a primary focus on estate planning, but not so technical that someone with a secondary focus on estate planning would lose interest.
Not sure who they are? We can provide you with a carefully vetted mailing list of estate planning professionals in your area that is tagged with information about their profession and focus.
We can place our content in your brand, handle print production or email template creation, and mailing or email distribution. Our services and licensing agreements are tailored to each client's capabilities, so you only pay for the services that you want and will perfectly supplement your existing efforts.
Build your following.
LinkedIn Connections
Social media marketing has been growing quickly, and each tool has its own focus.
LinkedIn provides a mechanism to build a network that professionals can feel comfortable commenting or sending messages to one another, including introductions. It's also a way to document your professional reputation, and provide professional connections a way to make a referral that leads directly into a digital representation of the person they are making the referral to.
This tool is underutilized, because of the difficulty of creating reoccurring content, danger of creating contrary presentations since employees own their own LinkedIn accounts, and because the perception of value and of what is appropriate is not yet standardized.
We can help overcome some of these barriers so that you will have confidence that building a follower base is worthwhile, and relying on them to help you bring the benefits that you provide to their follower base is worth the time commitment.
We can place our content in your brand, handle print production or email template creation, and mailing or email distribution. Our services and licensing agreements are tailored to each client's capabilities, so you only pay for the services that you want and will perfectly supplement your existing efforts.
