Financial advice firms in Scotland and Northern Ireland are getting creative when it comes to growing their brands and attracting new clients. Four of them got together to outline their views and strategies – on everything from podcasts to tweets that reflect their personality – at a virtual roundtable hosted by Citywire in association with PIMCO.

The use of multimedia – hosting a regular podcast or recording video clips to educate clients and increase website traffic – was a big talking point.

Professional podcasts

Statistics gathered by PIMCO’s marketing department show that 70% of financial advisers in the UK listen to podcasts, albeit not on a regular basis, and 25% listen to a professional podcast every week.

Jennifer Ellis, director of Wellington Wealth in Glasgow, regards Pete Matthew’s Meaningful Money podcast as a good example of what an adviser can do in this space. Wellington Wealth has ‘grand plans’ for its own podcast but wants to hone its video skills first.

‘If you’re trying to attract younger clients, I think video is essential,’ says Ellis. ‘We joined the NextGen video challenge to try and improve our videos because the last thing we want to do is put out something that we’re not happy with and that we feel is detrimental to our brand.’

McCrea Financial Services  prefers to capitalise on the expertise of others by gleaning insights from other people’s podcasts. Director of business development Elaine Hamilton listens to a range of personal finance podcasts, from Matthew’s Meaningful Money and Cash Chats with Andy Webb to the Financial Wellbeing Podcast, BBC Radio 4’s Money Box and This is Money.

‘Podcasts are great and definitely have a place,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure they have a place for us other than to sometimes share them with clients.

‘There’s nothing to stop you personalising and sending information that you think is helpful, but for me, it’s all about working with the big organisations that have the resource to do podcasts and taking from them the trends and the information we think would be useful to repackage and put out there for our own clients and prospects.’

All about video

Video is a tool that is increasingly being used or considered for marketing and communications. Predominantly, it is seen as an education medium – to enlighten prospects as to what a financial advisory firm could do for them.

‘For us, it’s all about video, it’s all about finding ways to talk through what we can do in a warm, friendly way,’ says Hamilton. ‘Video is great where you’ve got two people talking to each other about the way we can help them.’

Ellis agrees that video will play a bigger part in future – not necessarily to generate more business, but to help people understand financial planning. ‘It’s got to be good quality and entertaining as well and not just factual. People want to be engaged.’

As a bonus, and something that people may not realise, is that video content can boost a company’s rankings on search engines, she adds.

Thomson Cooper in Edinburgh has plans to embrace video. ‘Different parts of the business have been recording short excerpts and it’s something we’re keen to develop,’ says financial planner Richard Libberton.

‘If you have a specific, dedicated part of your website that explains, this is what we do, this is what your initial meeting’s going to look like and back that up with some videos to show what a client experience might look like, then that demystifies some of the process for new clients coming to the firm.’

Others are using video to better communicate with existing clients. Kerry McCaughan, a chartered financial planner at Belfast-based Johnston Campbell, recounts the experiences of two colleagues – an investment specialist who recorded videos to settle clients’ nerves amid last year’s market meltdown and a fellow financial planner who has started recording himself talking through cashflow modelling scenarios to send to clients as an audio-visual reminder of their reviews.

‘As well as them having the review document, they’ve also got this little video going through the cashflow modelling – here’s where the client is going to be in X years – and that seems to have gone down quite well,’ says McCaughan.

Online presence

A clear online profile that brings a financial planning firm to life is also seen as a key brand-building tool. McCurdy visits many adviser websites as part of his role and finds a close correlation between the level of effort that has been put into a website and the desire to build a long-term brand.

‘There are a lot of firms out there at the tail end of their life – they don’t put a lot of effort into their websites or their online presence and invariably, these are the businesses that are bought up or cease trading,’ he says.

‘People who take pride in their business, see the relationship they have with their clients as going past their own working life and want to build a brand and build a business that will last… those invariably are the people who put an effort into building their presence, building their website, building their online profile.’

Wellington Wealth has built and maintains its website in-house – testament to the fact that a proposition can look slick online without a large budget.

‘It’s my job on the train – you don’t need a big agency to have a presence… but you do need to have something that’s quite clear in terms of where you sit in the market,’ says Ellis.

A strategy that Johnston Campbell has found useful to attract new business amid Covid-19 headwinds is to put calls to action in each section of its website.

‘It’s a lot more interactive,’ says McCaughan. ‘It means that if someone comes to our website with a retirement query, for instance, they are led through a series of steps and calls to action and are able to launch a calculator.’

That has had a measurable impact on new business. The same can be said of McCrea’s social media activity. It aims to strike a balance between financial and non-financial posts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Non-financial ones tend to focus on its charity work or lend support to local sports teams.

‘We use our social media to be the human face, to be the warmth, to be the creativity, to have a bit of a giggle,’ says Hamilton. ‘It’s the personality, if you like, behind the brand and is fundamental for us.

‘If you go to our new client log and look at the enquiries we get, they absolutely come through and they come through particularly after we’ve run a player of the month competition or after big games. There is a very direct correlation that we can measure in terms of using those channels to promote and engage with that supporter base.’

Brand ambassadors

As well as its website redesign, Johnston Campbell explored various client acquisition strategies during lockdown, including pay per click and buying in leads. Disappointing results saw it conclude that the best business generation strategy remains client referrals and professional introductions – a sentiment echoed around the virtual roundtable.

‘When the pandemic came, we were very much on the front foot, reassuring our clients,’ says Libberton at Thomson Cooper. ‘If you can engender that sort of trust and respect with your clients, they’re more likely to be your best ambassadors and pass on a good word.’

Johnston Campbell started to do webinars with professional connections, but instead of ‘death by PowerPoint’ adopted a more conversational approach.

‘We have our investment specialist and business development manager basically just having a conversation and the attendance has been really good,’ says McCaughan.

When lockdown lifts, Wellington Wealth is looking forward to hosting face-to-face client events, past examples being a gingerbread man ‘crafternoon’ tea at Christmas and an Antiques Roadshow style event with a local auctioneer.

‘It’s more to say “thank you” to clients than to generate business, but inevitably, it does because people talk about the event,’ says Ellis. ‘By being individual, it seems to bring in business.’

McCrea ‘can’t wait to get back to the hospitality, to the rugby’, enthuses Hamilton, but plans to employ the best of both physical and digital worlds. A virtual service will be offered to people who have difficulty travelling or less complex needs – for example, mortgage advice.

The ‘Wealth’ word

When it comes to conveying to the public what a firm does, semantics can hinder or help.

‘A simple example is, are we financial planners, are we financial advisers? Are we wealth managers, are we investment specialists? Immediately, that tells you that we have very mixed messages out there,’ says Hamilton.

McCaughan concedes that some would-be clients had mistaken the company for an accountancy practice. In a bid to provide greater clarity and target its services at a particular client group, Johnston Campbell has recently added ‘Wealth Management’ to its name for certain activities, such as webinars.

‘We have a very narrow sweet spot where we like to engage people and adding the “wealth management” bit to the brand helps people to focus on that,’ explains McCaughan.

The inclusion of ‘wealth’ in Wellington Wealth is deliberate, too. ‘It [wealth] is something that people either strive for, they want to maintain or they want to preserve and pass on – it seemed a very appropriate word to put in our title,’ says Ellis.

‘Our services are wider than just wealth management, but most clients come in for help with money. They don’t necessarily know what they need.

‘Many are approaching retirement and want to know, what they can earn? I’ve got all these different pensions, I’ve got this big bag of paperwork, what does it mean? We go through it and make sure the client knows what they have to make it easier to grasp and ultimately, get their objectives fulfilled.’

Big picture

Looking at the bigger picture, are financial planners doing a good job of marketing the profession as a whole? The answer for Libberton, central Scotland chair for the Personal Finance Society, is a resounding ‘no’.

‘There’s still a huge advice gap in the UK and if we were doing a really effective job, then people would understand what financial planners do, what sorts of services they provide and there would be a greater awareness of it out there,’ he says.

For Hamilton, the jury is out. While larger financial planning practices with dedicated marketing resources have greater ability to communicate their competences, smaller firms are often so focused on providing the ‘right’ advice to existing clients that they neglect to tell everyone else how they do that.

But it seems that even for big firms with deep pockets there is no simple solution: marketing is challenging and should be seen as an ongoing and long-term strategy.

‘We’re the biggest bond manager in the world but still at PIMCO we get companies coming to us asking us for global equity mandates,’ says McCurdy.

‘It can be difficult to get your message across to everyone, but what I see is that financial planners, once they get clients in front of them, do a superb job about telling them what they can deliver for them.’