Constructing Your Marketing Parthenon

When it comes to marketing, the key is to be really good at all the tactics and the individual pieces. These are things needed to construct your “marketing parthenon.” Whether it’s a live event, a webinar, a referral system, you need to be really good at the tactics and elements. In the past, I have organized some incredible events with loads of clients coming in from far and wide, only for it to get cancelled due to a tornado or something. The same can happen online, you can have everything set up and ready to go, then the internet drops out and cancels the entire thing.   I’ve had marketing events that worked incredibly the month prior, completely flop. Other times I’ve had strategies far exceed expectations. 

However, if you have a lot of stuff going on and a load of different events, then one or two things flopping won’t hurt you as much. You are just losing one stream of new clients rather than your only stream. You should never be utterly dependent on one single event, one single media, one single strategy. Have a bunch of stuff going on all of the time to create new client flow. Be consistent and ongoing with your efforts.

In an ideal world, you have a palette of prospects. You have people to choose from. You can be selective. You can pick and choose. This is why so many people are really afraid of niching. There is the feeling that you need to go out and get absolutely everyone you can get. You can’t be afraid of really targeting in and creating the customers that will make your business thrive, and the customers you can confidently provide a great service for.

You don’t want to run your practice out of a fear of scarcity.

You must operate with expectation of abundance if you want to be successful.  An expectation of abundance is when you expect there to be enough leads coming in, no matter what. How you do that is by having enough things happening simultaneously, that you are not dependent on any one process. Not only should there be different things going on at the same time, but you also need to make sure that each of your strategies is actually effective. After all, there is no point in having ten sources of marketing if none of them is actually working. Even if you are great at live events, if your marketing is ineffective then none of the clients you want will actually show up.

Out of the twenty or thirty different marketing things you can do, as I explained earlier, you want to make sure that each and every one is as effective as it can be. That way, you will feel good about maintaining these twenty streams of marketing and will eventually reap the rewards. So many people claim to have tried this and to have tried that, claiming it does not work. The truth is, often it does work and can work, you just missed the little pieces to complete the jigsaw, little pieces that make all the difference in the world.

Your Parthenon of Marketing

Visualize your marketing plan as a “Parthenon” of different strategies and tactics. Each month some may fail, others create mediocre results, and some may be home runs.  The reality is that that order may well be reversed next month.

All you have to do is look back to the Covid shutdowns.   For Advisors the market crashed, clients were panicking.   Oh, and by the way your AUM took a huge hit.    If you were dependent upon dinner meetings, guess what you were dead in the water.

However, if you were on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, using Direct Mail and were nurturing a huge prospect list, then there was MORE OPPORTUNITY than ever.   While some crashed others hit new records.    That’s the difference between having that Marketing Parthenon going on as opposed to being dependent upon one or two strategies.

When I meet with a new client, my first question for people is always, ‘What have you done in the past?’

What have you done?

What were the results?

What should you do?

I hear every day about advisors or other businesses who have done something VERY effective in the past.  Our joke is that it “Worked So Well, They Never Did that Again.”   You’re likely guilty,  If you’ve been around long enough.  

I bet there are things you USED to do that would work just fine again, get it “off the shelf,” dust it off and, IMPLEMENT.

On the other hand, plenty of advisors close themselves off to doing a certain thing or trying a certain method because they think it failed the last time. Often, it did fail, but it’s the reason behind the failure must be studied.    Did it get advertised well?   For an event, how many showed up?  Were they the right people?   How’d I do on lead capture. How many did you turn into appointments? How many of those did you actually have a meeting with? How qualified were there? How many turned into a client?

In working with clients I immediately insist upon very accurate numbers.   A daily “statistics” sheet that keeps track of all of the marketing numbers.  How many visitors to your website, how many opt-ins, how many made an appointment, how many discovery meetings, how many converted to a new client.    Keeping accurate numbers and bench marketing against what’s possible makes a huge difference.

In 98 per cent of cases, the failure comes from a mistake in the system rather than the concept of the system itself.

If you are having a tremendous success rate once you get a face-to-face meeting with a potential client, but are still experiencing problems, the question is at what point in the process is the problem.   Too few leads?   Crappy follow-up?   Low show rate?   The more people you get in front of you, the more you can close but, you’ve got to figure out where the deficits are in your lead conversion process.

Often an advisor is creating plenty of traffic, but have sloppy conversion rates at each stage.  Sloppy follow-up on new leads.   Scheduling problems.   Failure to adequately nurture prospects. The majority of the time, fixing these sloppy ratios rarely require any more work or money to fix the closing ratios. What it requires is tracking the numbers.  The know-how to fix the challenges.  And the proper implementation.

The difference between a really successful business and an unsuccessful business, even if they are both advisors working equally as hard, is that the former has a better strategy. This better strategy comes in the form of more marketing activities, with each of those being done correctly, with successful conversion strategies.

Of course, sometimes it comes down to a bad strategy being a bad strategy. But most of the time, results could have been drastically improved by implementing better tactics within the strategy. If you tweak the tactics in a positive way, your results can multiply by five, ten, one hundred, etc.

As Dan Kennedy says, “Once you go into business for yourself, you are now forever and a day in the business of marketing whatever it is you’re doing.” After all, it is not the expert in planning that creates money-making opportunities but the person who can get the clients in the room in the first place. High Producers create new client flow and are able to close sales. Also, the person who can put the systems in place to keep the clients and multiply the clients by turning them into referrals. Retention and referral is the name of the game.

Too many businesses outsource marketing without thinking about a grand plan. You can be our LinkedIn marketing person. You can be on Twitter. You can be on Facebook. There is nothing wrong with outsourcing, but you must first master the marketing and understand the process. Logging on and spending an hour a day randomly clicking around Facebook is not going to bring you marketing success. You don’t have to be an expert or a programmer, you just need to be smart and understand marketing in order to intelligently outsource with a plan in mind.