May Week 2: Your retirement branding statement

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Week 1: Define your practice’s retirement market opportunity.
Week 2: Create your retirement resource branding statement.
Week 3: Identify your top-five retirement services
Week 4: Create a communications follow-up that reinforces your brand

The problem:
Capturing the assets of retiring baby boomers involves positioning yourself as a trusted adviser who is knowledgeable about retirement. You can do that by branding your practice so that you highlight your retirement expertise.

Last week:
We helped you define your practice’s retirement market opportunity by reviewing your top clients to find out what their retirement needs might be. By determining whether your best clients are already in retirement, near retirement or planning for a retirement that’s several years in the future, you learned who your target audience or audiences will be, which will help shape your brand.

This week: Create your retirement resource branding statement.
Let’s start with the basics: What’s a brand? The dictionary defines it as a class of goods or services identified by name as the product of a single firm. For a financial services practice or business, a brand embodies the unique set of qualities that identify what you do, who you are and how you are different from others.

Branding an advisory practice is tricky for two reasons. First, all advisers essentially use similar commoditized products and services (mutual funds, variable annuities, insurance) in the course of their work. Second, most advisers are leery of specializing in either a market segment (doctors, lawyers, divorcees) or a product (municipal bonds, options) for fear of limiting their prospects and turning away business.

Unfortunately, by trying to be all things to all people, many advisers wind up being nothing in particular to everyone — clients and potential clients can’t readily distinguish one adviser’s expertise or special knowledge from another’s. Branding your practice helps your business stand apart from the rest by clearly defining what you do and who you do it for. Because retirement — whether planning for a long-off retirement, transitioning to an imminent retirement or living in retirement — is so central to most advisory clients, incorporating retirement in your branding makes sense. And that means including retirement in your branding statement, which is the concise written statement defining to clients and prospects the value your team brings to them and the impression you would like the public to get.

If you already have a branding statement, a retirement resource aspect can be woven in based on the work you did last week to find out how your most important clients use your business to meet retirement needs.

If you don’t have a branding statement, let’s develop one.

Almost like a news story, a branding statement should answer a few basic questions: Who? What? Why? When? Where? How?

More specifically, it should answer the kinds of specific questions that clients and potential clients wonder about when they approach a financial services provider. For example: Who are your clients? Who are you? What do you do? Why do clients come to you? When do they come to you? Is there a geographical component to your business? How do you do your work?

Think about those questions and other essential whos, whats, whys, whens and hows in the context of your business. When you overlay the retirement-related services you perform for your best clients, the answers to many of these questions will become apparent.

Warning: If, like many advisers, you think your branding statement is something like, “We help affluent clients meet their financial needs,” you’re not going deep enough with your questions. Every adviser targets affluent investors, and most advisers offer a wide range of services. You must be more specific in order to capture the minds and hearts of current and potential clients.

Here are some examples of effective branding statements:

Branding statement example 1:
XYZ Practice
We specialize in providing physicians and other medical professionals in New England with financial solutions that help them run their businesses more effectively, meet their financial goals and provide for a secure retirement. Our professional staff consists exclusively of certified financial planners who are compensated exclusively on a fee basis, which means our advice is totally objective.

Branding statement example 2:
Smith & Smith
We are an independent financial planning and investment firm that delivers peace of mind to Cleveland-area entrepreneurs and their families. Our experienced advisers work to protect and increase our clients’ assets while providing for their comfortable retirement, their legacies and the retirement needs of their employees.

Branding statement example 3:
The Cornerstone Practice
Our team brings more 120 years’ combined financial services experience to help clients meet their needs for sound financial plans and a secure retirement. Affiliated with one of the largest securities firms in the country, we specialize in working with active and retired military personnel across the country.

As you can see, all three branding statements answer most of the basic questions, and all have a retirement component. Your branding statement should strive for the same comprehensiveness, while being succinct and distinctive.

After you complete your branding statement, you might want to develop a more complete branding document that fleshes out the statement. This more complete document can be used in brochures and other marketing material.

Let’s see what a broader description would look like for The Cornerstone Practice.

Broader description:
The Cornerstone Practice (include a team picture with names)
Mission
Our firm is dedicated to serving active and retired military personnel with customized wealth management and retirement solutions.

Team
Our team offers more 120 years’ combined financial experience. It consists of the following principals:
• Tom Smith, CEO and retired U.S. Marine officer.
• John Tower, senior wealth advisor and military retirement specialist.
• Sue Smith, investment analyst.
• Mary Jones, client and retirement services manager.

Process
We work closely with clients and their families to provide investment plans, wealth management strategies and retirement-lifestyle-planning solutions. We meet with new clients at least three times to ensure that we understand all their needs. At the first meeting, we get to know the client and their family, and gain an understanding of their financial goals and retirement needs. At the second meeting, we conduct a complete financial checkup. The final meeting is a review of our financial recommendations, including retirement plans and resources.

Services
We offer three levels of service based on clients’ needs and their assets. Depending on the service level chosen, clients can pay fees based on assets under management and/or hourly consultation, or commissions on investments purchased, or a combination of both.

Having a branding statement and a longer explanation of your services that incorporates retirement planning will go a long way to positioning you as a retirement expert.

Next week, we’ll discuss identifying your top-five retirement services.

Maureen Wilke has helped thousands of advisers increase the value of their businesses. The founder of Wilke Associates Inc. (www.connectedadvisor.com) in Glen Ellyn, Ill., Maureen has spent nearly two decades in executive positions in wealth management, sales and training. She has been associated with several highly regarded firms, including Nuveen Investments, and currently advises many product and advisory firms on issues of practice management and adviser productivity.

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