Prospect Marketing? These Online and Offline Communities Are Prospecting Goldmines

Our blog on “Keeping Your Prospect List Full Without Emptying Your Pockets” laid out the reasons why externally hosted speaking events are an excellent way to keep your prospect pipeline full. They require no financial investment from you and, once you’re booked, all you have to do is give a thought-provoking talk to a roomful (hopefully) of attentive prospects.

Getting invitations to speak is the biggest challenge, but there are ways to make it easier. One is to take advantage of your personal network. "How Your Personal Network Can Keep your Pipeline Full” Another is to leverage online resources to find the abundant opportunities present in your brick-and-mortar community.

Yes, Another Reason to Spend Time With Google...

When it comes to speaking engagements, you have an advantage as a financial advisor. Your area of expertise is one that few people really understand but everyone needs to know something about it. There are probably dozens of events happening in your community every week attended by prospects you could address.

Google will help you find potential host groups in your area. It’s a good place to start. Deirdre Van Nest shared an extensive list of groups at which advisors she knows have spoken:

• Chambers of Commerce
• Business groups
• Community education
• Community college—individually and as a guest for others who have a course
• Divorce support groups
• Lunch and Learn events: corporations, nonprofits, government
• C-Suite executive groups: Vistage, Convene (Christian CEO peer group)
• Industry events and associations
• Local nonprofits
• Church groups
• High schools (to parents with college-bound kids)
• Women’s groups
• Moms’ groups
• Public school employees
• Frontline employees and managers in corporations
• Family-owned business owners
• Physicians
• Dentists
• Hospitals
• Senior programming and senior living communities
• Vendor events

You’ll probably find even more options when you look.

...And Social Media

Once you’ve found suitable groups in your community, start tracking them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and watch for interesting small- to medium-sized events that offer great opportunities to connect.

Many organizations put out a “call for speakers” when planning events. You can often find these through Twitter or Google searches. Or you can set up alerts through one of the apps that will monitor these search terms and identify you immediately.

LinkedIn is a great resource for locating key contacts within groups and organizations. Even if you can’t find someone called “event planner,” get creative. Find someone who might reasonably know their way around the organization and ask for their help.

You can also use social media to market your availability as a speaker. Add “Public Speaker” to your profile headlines, post about your speaking experiences, even embed short speaking videos in your posts.

Then Optimize the Time You Spend With Clients

All of the marketing, speaking and prospecting you do is aimed at scaling your business to help more clients live the lives they want. United Capital works with financial advisors who are passionate about this goal. We develop digital tools that can help you understand your clients more deeply, build and manage customized portfolios, and keep them on track with their entire financial life.

Our system also includes tools to help your office share data across all your applications — financial planning software, portfolio accounting systems and CRM (Client Relationship Management) — and automate your workflows. This minimizes administrative time and maximizes time guiding and counseling —every committed advisor’s goal.

Learn more about how we help advisors like you.

For Financial Professional Use only. This document and any attached materials are the sole property of United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (United Capital) and are not to be used by you other than to evaluate United Capital’s service and/or products. United Capital Financial Advisers, LLC (“United Capital”), is an affiliate of Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC and subsidiaries of the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., a worldwide, full-service investment banking, broker-dealer, asset management and financial services organization. This document and any attached materials are not to be disseminated, distributed, or otherwise conveyed throughout your organization to employees without a need for this information or to any third parties without the express written permission of United Capital.