Sheri Fitts
Sheri Fitts
Sheri Fitts, founder and CEO of Sheri Fitts & Co. in Portland, Oregon, is a marketing, sales and brand expert who aims to help financial professionals make client engagements more meaningful to their business and more effective to their bottom line. Fitts’ expertise in the retirement plan and wealth management industries has been gained over a nearly 30-year career on both the buy and sell sides. Managing Editor Judy Faust Hartnett chatted with her about the particular importance of marketing for advisers now.
PLANADVISER: Why do you say retirement plan advisers need to take on the role of marketer today?
Sheri Fitts: I believe that marketing’s sole purpose is to sweep the path for sales conversations and that not having consistent outreach leaves an adviser’s practice up to the whims of the market.
The question advisers have to ask themselves is, are they being included in conversations? Or in the conversations of prospects? If they’re not doing consistent marketing, they’re not top of mind, and their sales will suffer as a result. Alternatively, when advisers invest in marketing, they generate the opportunity for conversations. Then it’s up to the advisers what they choose to do with those conversations.
PA: What exactly do advisers need to do to market themselves?
Fitts: Retirement plan advisers should be visible in any way they want to be, whether it’s through newsletters, social media or going to conferences.
They need to create ongoing, consistent content. It’s crucial to their practice. They need to view themselves as a media company, which I know is going to make their heads explode.
Many years ago, we sold by using the Yellow Pages [a business telephone directory], starting at the letter A. Today I hear advisers saying, “I don’t want to create content. It’s hard. I don’t want to do social media. It doesn’t work well. I want somebody else to do it for me. I just want to be an adviser.”
That’s fantastic. Then what I’d say is, go find a place where you can be an adviser and you’re supported by a bigger brand and organization that will do the marketing for you. It’s likely you’ll still be required to sell—which means, you’ll still need to market in some capacity.
PA: What type of content do advisers need to create to get in front of prospects and start conversations?
Fitts: Statistic after statistic points to email marketing working for advisers. Now, when I say email marketing, sometimes advisers think of the four-sentence emails we get from somebody who wants to generate appointments or help us with Google ranking—the emails that come out of nowhere. I’m not saying that; I’m talking about content marketing, inbound marketing or thought leadership marketing—they’re all really the same.
The purpose? Build a solid foundation of helpful, meaningful content that’s of interest to the audience. Use email to distribute that content. Address the issues and worries that your prospects are facing.
An excuse I see advisers use to avoid the effort of doing this is to complain about compliance. If they write original content and they put it through compliance and compliance decimates it, they see that as a reason not to write content anymore. I just see that as a reason to get better at writing compliant content and creating a relationship with compliance.
Many advisers are unclear what their prospects and clients really care about, and, as a result, their content is just noise. I always say, we need to do a better job in our industry of figuring out what potential clients’ monsters are. What scares them?
PA: Is email marketing more important than social media?
Fitts: Advisers own their email list. Advisers don’t own social media. So imagine being an adviser who built his or her business on Twitter, and now Elon Musk changes the rules of the game. Poof goes their influence. However, if they put that energy into building an email list, they aren’t at the whim of another platform.