Financial Planning Leads and Building Your Client Base Faster Than You Dreamed Possible!

Financial planning leads can be purchased or you can generate your own financial advisor leads.

You can buy leads for financial planning here (choose annuity leads). You can turn your annuity prospects into financial planning prospects easier than you can sell them an annuity, in my opinion*. And you should buy leads if you are not filling up your appointment book. But I've got news for you top gun. You can generate your own leads as well.

Generating your own financial planning leads is not difficult. As a matter of fact, you have a distinct advantage as a planner/advisor*. You just have to know a few tricks of the direct response marketing trade, and have a few bucks to invest in your own financial planning lead generation system (I should say systems because you really should have a few mini systems in place: Thank you marketing, referral marketing, cold lead or dead lead marketing, and upselling).

The best place to start your financial planning leads quest is with your current client base. Send a newsletter, and use it to help build your list. Make sure it's NOT Boring, has interesting topics unrelated to financial planning and products, and builds your personality and credibility. This is very easy to do, and exceptionally fun!

I know, you are thinking, 'That's a slow process' to generate financial planning leads. And you're right. But you will get a consistent flow of leads from the newsletter because people will read it and be reminded of you and call you, and refer their friends. In addition you'll have an insert every so often that asks for your clients friends and family to fill out and refer their friends. This will work like gangbusters if you make an effort in your newsletter. I promise. Keep with it. It will work.

Now with the financial planning leads 'stuff' you really want to hear. How to get financial planning leads using common and little known marketing tools and media.

There are many forms of media and many marketing techniques for generating financial planning leads in these media. So, it goes without saying that we could spend a week in a classroom going over just one or two media. But I will try and keep it simple, and provide a few ideas for you to test.

SIDE BAR: Focus on direct response marketing and measuring response in all media that you testing for financial planning leads. Not branding your name. You can't generate leads branding your name, because (and I'm sorry but this might hurt a little bit) nobody cares about you or your business. They want problems solved...

Direct mail financial planning lead generation: Get a list of targeted prospects, and send a letter that asks for your prospect to respond in some way. You can ask your prospect to send in a return reply card, call you directly, go to a website, or call a voice recording (message). You can even use a combination of these.

By the way, you should read this 401k leads article as well. It's a perfect supplement to this financial advisor leads article and it has addition tips and tricks.

The key is to target a hungry audience. Do not target everyone because your message will get diluted and response will plummet.

You can target a demographic, an industry, etc. For example, if you want to target seniors you should get a list of seniors who are most likely to be in need of your services.

Do your research on this target group. What keeps them up at night? What are they interested in the most? What are they optimistic about? Find out their hot buttons and touch upon these in your letter.

Write your letter like you were writing to a friend. Do not write your letter like it was the president of a giant insurance company bragging about how wonderful he or she is.

Hot Tip: For every 'I' or 'We' used in your sales letter, write 4 'you's'. Always write like your prospects are questioning every sentence with, 'What's in it for me?'.

Use this same formula for postcards.

Website financial advisor lead generation: Build a financial planning lead generation website, and buy traffic (there is a huge opportunity to generate qualified local leads this way). In addition, create articles that are search engine optimized do that you generate free traffic from the search engines.

Hire an seo firm to do the work for you. But be sure they are good at what they do, and that your site is not too overdone.

You want it to be totally focused on financial advisor lead generation. So that means you have to have a very obvious mechanism for your prospects to give you their contact information. In exchange you must give them something of value like a special report, video, etc. (use this in your letters or postcards as well).

There are a dozens of ways to generate financial planning and financial advisor leads. Direct mail and the internet are two of the most popular forms for this. Start there and then test newspapers, coupons, free publicity, and other media.

For more tips and information like this, get our free referral marketing mini course.

*Annuities are a financial product. If you can sell an annuity to an annuity lead, good for you! But let me ask you a question. Are people interested in an annuity, or are they more interested in paying less taxes, building wealth 'hands free' so they can retire early, and pay for their children's college education? Do they want a cash value life insurance policy, or do they want to slash their taxes, build wealth, and keep the government from taking over half of their estate? The answer is that people don't want products. They want solutions to their financial problems. As a financial planner, you have an advantage because it's easy for you to position yourself as a problem solver versus a product pusher...which people do not want. Focus on this and you'll get a flood of financial planning leads and referrals.