The Observer
First featured in Money Marketing
Your Marketing Plan Is Like An Advice Plan
You would never invest without a plan. Yet many advisers market that way. You know plans are important. You wouldn’t let a client retire without one. So, why are you marketing your business without one?
Marketing may feel like a different world to your profession of financial advice, but a good marketing plan has all the same characteristics as a good financial plan: understand your customer, uncover their objectives, devise a strategy, then deliver through short-term tactics, such as regular monthly contributions to a pension. Marketing plans work in the same manner: a long-term strategy with objectives, delivered by short-term tactics to achieve long-term results.
Know Your Customer
While marketing doesn’t have a legal obligation to know its customer, not doing it is akin to marketing malpractice. All good marketing plans start with developing an understanding of the target audience as it shapes strategy, message and tactics.
If you're targeting business owners, start by understanding the types of businesses they run, their size (by employees or turnover), the common problems they face, and what media they consume. Build an understanding of your target audience; know them, their jobs to be done, and, importantly, their pains and issues.
Where possible, avoid simple demographics, humans are more united by behaviour and situation than we are by simplistic demographics like age and gender.
One of the hardest truths of marketing is that a narrower, clearer audience will increase conversion. “Anyone with money” is a tempting market, but it’s too broad to effectively market.
Volvo doesn’t target all drivers; it targets ones who value safety: families.
Define the Objective of the Plan
Much like “planning for retirement” is an objective - yet not a useful one, “develop more business” is just as useless for marketing. A proper objective comes with measurables so you can track the success of your actions and maintain focus.
“Save £750,000 to retire comfortably at 63” is a proper objective. Continuing our example, a marketing objective could be: “Sign up 200 business owners to our newsletter in 2026 as qualified prospective leads.”
Objectives must link directly to a commercial outcome and not be vanity metrics.
Delivering a Plan Through Tactics
Marketing tactics are as wide and varied as the financial solutions available to your clients. Much like your experience in financial advice helps you quickly rule options in or out – an AIM portfolio isn’t right for a 35-year-old saving for their children’s education - the same judgement can be applied to marketing tactics.
If we continue using business owners as our example, tactical options that might help include:
Advertising or writing in SME-focused press
Quarterly guides, such as “How Business Owners Can Extract Profits Tax-efficiently”
Using LinkedIn to share insights and build visibility
Running local clinics or webinars with email sign-up
For our objective of signing up 200 business owners, a combination of quarterly guides and LinkedIn activity makes sense. Why these two together? Business owners already use LinkedIn professionally so presenting in-depth guides highlights your expertise while capturing contact details. Plus – and a key marketing principle - one guide can be broken down into dozens of posts, articles and email content.
Always try to get at least two bites of the apple.
Track & Review
Like an annual review, set a schedule to track progress and ensure your tactics are working. You wouldn’t provide a retirement plan to a 40-year-old client and then check in at 65 to see if it all worked out.
Marketing needs similar consistent monitoring to ensure tactics are performing as planned - reviewing which activities are working, which aren’t and what should we do more of. Are newsletter sign-ups tracking to target? Is LinkedIn engagement generating conversations? Adjust as circumstances change, just as you would rebalance a portfolio.
Plan for Success
Marketing isn’t a dark art, nor does it have to be hard. And you already have the skills needed to deliver many of the most effective tactics. It’s about disciplined action, not perfection or award-winning creativity.
Not every month or year on the road to a successful retirement plan perfectly matches the plan, but over the long term, a good plan and disciplined action deliver results.
When marketing is treated like a financial plan it becomes predictable, measurable, and commercially useful. Advisers don’t need to become marketers. They simply need to plan like advisers.
