Gentle Rain Affluent Marketing Blog

For decades, financial and insurance advisors have used marketing seminars as a key method for introducing their services. Which raises the question, “When marketing financial services-Do seminars still work?”

Last night I had the opportunity to attend a seminar put on by a relatively well-known financial advisor. What he did well (and where the missed opportunities were) will perhaps be helpful to you as you plan your next seminar.

Venue. At first glance the choice of location was great. A private meeting room in an upscale golf club in a wealthy community was “spot on” as a venue. However, as the meeting started, the group next door started up with a terrifically loud movie that was either about Australian Aborigines or the fall of Saigon (Or perhaps some bizarre mixture of the two.)

Regardless, for the first half hour, the group’s attention was less focused on the speaker, and more on the only partially muffled soundtrack coming from next door.

Lesson? Check on who your neighbor is going to be and what they’re going to be presenting. As the old saying goes “The Devil’s in the details.”

The room was set up theater style with about 150 chairs, most of which were filled. (A testament to the organizations ability to attract attendees.) However the cheek-by-jowl nature of the chair arrangement, defiantly made the environment seem…in a word…crowded.

Now was this necessarily a bad thing? Not really when one looks at the market the group was going after.

As their collateral stated, they were seeking investors with a minimum of $15,000 to invest. Not a lot of money. Thus this event was primarily directed to new investors or those with relatively modest amounts of capital. So the seating was probably not viewed as a negative. (However there was a bit of a disconnect between having the event take place in a very elegant setting but having the seats jammed so close together.)

If one were focusing on affluent and ultra-affluent prospective clients, I would keep the venue selection the same, but organize the room so that it seated 30-35 guests. And that’s a deliberate choice of words. The event I attended last night,  definitely had “attendees”. The events I’ve visited that target affluent investors definitely had “guests”. That’s a true distinction in everything from how the invitations are made, to the room arrangement, to the content of the presentation.

So let’s talk a bit about that. The content of last night’s presentation matched up well with the audience. No time was spent on tailoring the talk to the specific need of the audience since lower-market events tend to attract a butcher-baker-candlestick maker group. Virtually impossible to customize a talk to that diverse a group, so there’s no real point in trying.

However if one were targeting the affluent market, you would want to take a different approach.

Remember that they key to marketing to the affluent is make sure they feel that you are catering specifically to them. Thus you would want to open with the issues of commonality that this affluent group faces. This would be even better if you sub-niched your marketing to, for example,  “affluent women business owners”. This would enable you to begin your presentation with specifics that make the guests feel that they we truly listening to an advisor who understands their unique needs.

So overall I’d give this presentation a good solid “B”. In terms of message-to-market match, it was well done.

However it does beg one important issue.

These financial advisors are going to a lot of effort to attract very small investors. At $15,000 a pop (and yes I realize that some-but probably not a lot-have more than $15,000 to invest) you need to get 34 of them to equal one investor with $500,000.

There’s an old saying in marketing that unless you can automate and remove the human labor element from the process, it takes just as much effort to attract a small fish as it does a big whale.

Marketing seminars by definition are labor-intensive endeavors. Thus I’m not sure that using them to focus on the small investor necessarily is the best use of money time and effort. (In fact I question why any advisor would focus on the small investor unless they simply do not have a process or plan-or self confidence- for targeting the affluent.)

I contrast this with high-end events, which attracted a very small number of prospective clients, but had a much higher potential result. I go into this in more detail in the Gentle Rain Affluent Marketing Advisor. You can learn more by clicking here.