Financial advisors are struggling. Behind every investor unhappy with his/her portfolio is a financial advisor struggling to service clients in an environment that is almost un-serviceable. Just check out this search on Twitter to see what’s going on in that world. Clients are unhappy, assets and down, and there is almost nowhere to turn to find growth right now. Service should be your number 1 priority. Keeping clients is easier than bringing in new ones, as the saying goes.
But what about prospecting now? It’s hard to get out and meet people knowing that the world is huring but here’s one easy social media idea to start building a following and get new prospects into the sales cycle.
Check out Meetup. It’s been around for awhile but I think it’s great for helping provide a steady stream of new people into your network and potential clients down the road.
What is Meetup
Meetup is the world’s largest network of local groups. Meetup makes it easy for anyone to organize a local group or find one of the thousands already meeting up face-to-face. More than 2,000 groups get together in local communities each day, each one with the goal of improving themselves or their communities. (from Meetup’s About page)
What’s it good for
Meetup is good for a couple of things:
- Scheduling and managing ongoing financial seminars: Meetup allows you to schedule new events and handles everything from getting RSVPs, to providing driving directions to the seminar. to accepting payments for attendance. This is the bread and butter of the system. Send invites out to prospects through the Meetup system and use Meetup to run the back office planning piece for the seminar. You’ll be able to see who’s attended which seminars and collect feedback from your attendees.
- Bringing new people into your seminars: This is where Meetup does its magic. When a user signs up for Meetup, they input some demographic details into the system as well as their interests. It works like this — someone who signs up at Meetup says he/she lives in a specific locality. When new events are scheduled in that locality that may overlap with this user’s interests, he receives an email from Meetup alerting him to your event. This brings tons of new people into the fold and provides great exposure for your events.
Tips to make it work for your practice
- Pick a topic that has crossover interest: don’t stick to just the “Asset Allocation for Dummies”. This will appeal to a broader audience on Meetup that doesn’t want to be sold hard on anything. Use a niche topic that begins to establish you as an expert in something.
- Schedule monthly seminars: I’ve found that for Meetup to work its best, you want to create a core constituency of devoted seminar attendees. Say, 8-12 people that come regularly to learn and share with the group. With this core in hand, you’ll be more successful in bringing in new attendees who will see that there is a rhythm to the group. To get to this level, you’ll need to create a consistency to the group. I suggest running a seminar monthly.
- Get attendees involved: You can offload some of the work of Meetup onto a deputy attendee who is committed to the class. Get them to talk the class up and get attendees to invite their own friends. The stronger the bond between the attendees, the larger and more exciting the group will become.
- Make the class about the attendees: Tailor the classes around what skills/issues the group is interested in. It has to be about them and not about you. The core group will most likely never become clients but it’s the new attendees that stop in and check out your group and see that people trust you that may ultimately join you.
