9 Marketing Resolutions to Make for 2019 – Part Three

6) “In 2019, I will work smarter, not harder.”

You’ve heard the saying, “there’s an app for that?” Well…it’s true! For almost anything related to marketing, there is an app or a service that can help make it easier. Some of them are kind of abstract and not necessarily something you would know to look for or know how to find until someone tells you they exist. Here are some of my favorites:

• Rev.com: Writing just got easier. With Rev, you send in an audio file, and they transcribe it word for word – for $1/minute. For folks who are slow writers, this is a god-send. You get your file back as a Word document, so you can go through it and edit and format it. Even if you talk through something and later decide it wasn’t good, you can easily delete that out to generate a blog post that is well-written and personal. This works great for transcribing audio from a video that you made to provide as a written transcript too! We’ve been using this service here at LMG for years now, and it’s incredibly helpful. We’ll oftentimes record important phone calls so that we can always rely on the audio for great notes, and when we’re doing things like interviewing someone for their bio, recording the call and using this service allows us to listen and ask insightful questions without struggling to get down exactly what the person said.
• Hearsay, HootSuite, or Sprout Social: For those of you who are posting to your business social media pages on a regular basis, these scheduling programs and others like them make it so much easier. You can schedule out your content for weeks in advance and not have to worry about posting (or forgetting to post) every day. Having a service like this allows you to work on your posts all at once, which takes significantly less time because you can “get in the zone.” Of course, you can always go back and edit your posts or add to them before they’re scheduled to go out. Hearsay has become the gold standard in the financial services industry because of their compliance-review interface, and Facebook also lets you schedule posts ahead of time.
• Customer Relationship Manager (CRM): The one that our agency uses is no longer accepting new customers, but their parent company, Basecamp, is. Many of our financial services clients are also using Salesforce, too. Either way, having a CRM is amazing, because it allows you to make notes about your clients, their preferences, their contact information and statuses of the projects you’re working on for them.

  Imagine if you were to go to a meeting and the person you’re meeting with remembered you like Diet Coke and had one waiting for you – wouldn’t that make you feel incredibly important to them? Or what if a client called and asked your receptionist the status on their written plan, and the receptionist could look it up in your CRM while you were in a meeting? These are the kinds of things you can keep track of in a CRM that help you deliver ‘raving fan’ service.

  We know that most of our clients already have something like this in place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually using it. So this year, commit to using your CRM, and look into segmenting your clients. Segmenting your clients can allow you to identify those who you’ve done an insurance policy for, but maybe they’ve never sat down with you to talk about financial planning. Or maybe they work with you for their investments, but they don’t have insurance! With a segmented database, you can reach out to those folks specifically, whenever you want, with tailor-made content and commentary.

These tools and others are a huge difference maker in any business. Look for tools that take your repetitive or labor-intensive tasks and makes them easier. More often than not, someone has already thought of it and has a solution standing by. Some of them come at an unreasonable premium, so be sure to shop around and look at reviews. If you can commit to being consistent with a few tools in place, you’ll find that you can spend more time working on things that matter and less on menial tasks.

7) “In 2019, I will work on making sure my brand is consistent in everything I and my team do.”

Having a consistent brand identity is more than just making sure your logo and business cards match. It extends to everything you and your team does. How do you greet your clients when they come to your office? How do you dress for meetings? What’s your office environment like? How do you end your emails? How do you answer the phone? What do your social media channels look like? What kind of car do you drive?

We all know that confused minds don’t buy, and if you’re exhibiting one persona via email or when you first meet someone, and then a totally different persona when someone is in the office with you, they’re likely to look elsewhere for an advisor. Work with your team so they know the standard of your company’s brand identity and do regular spot checks to ensure things are running smoothly and accordingly.

Another way that you can determine if your brand is consistent is by stepping back and looking at everything that has been created for your business. This includes your website, business cards, letterhead, brochure, folder, intake forms, social media, and anything else. Put it all together and ensure that it has a unified look that represents you well.