Referral Marketing Reimagined: The Impact of Wealth I/O on Advisor Growth

Introduction:

In preparation for the upcoming Kitces Office Hours Digital Marketing Showcase on March 15th, 2024, I wanted to quickly show how Wealth I/O empowers advisors to enhance firm growth through a referral engine that works.

This marketing engine enables advisors to approach their existing clients for referrals with intention, moving beyond generic requests by incorporating clear and compelling calls to action.

I'll show how a tech-enabled approach that fuses video marketing, interactive design, and content marketing can help augment an advisor's referral marketing strategy.

Approximately 48% of new clients for financial advisors come from client referrals, making it one of the most popular growth strategies with a success rate of 96%.

But....Only about 1 in 10 financial advisors proactively ask their clients for referrals.

This low percentage highlights a significant opportunity for advisors to enhance their client acquisition strategies by actively seeking referrals. [Source: Buffalo Funds]

The problem is that most advisors need to equip their clients with the right tools to help them get more referrals.

However, I'd be kidding myself if I didn't mention that relying solely on referrals may not be sustainable in the long term due to limitations like the type of clients your current base can refer or the finite number of referrals each client can provide.

We get that, which is why we think that combining content marketing, hyperlocal digital advertising, a referral strategy, and a client communications system can drive long-term growth.

You need all the moving pieces to drive growth. For this article, I will only focus on the referral piece.

When advisors talk to clients about new referrals, every step of the referral request must be intentional, clear, and specific, providing clients with suitable tools to make it easy and practical to refer prospective clients.

Let me show you a user story of how an advisor is using Wealth I/O's referral funnel to find a consistent pipeline of prospects:

Funnel Step 1: Advisor Cards

Ryan is an advisor who equips existing clients with his Wealth I/O referral links for different use cases:

For ex. Ryan offers clients a referral link to his digital business card for colder prospects.

A website is too generic and often overwhelming for a prospect of this type.

Wealth I/O's digital business card lets Ryan create a video message with a specific call to action of his choice - whether that's a direct call to action to book an appointment or to educate and add value to the prospect using one of Wealth I/O's built-in widgets - the Financial Intelligence Number.

The digital business card for advisors is like a mini-website, but it's clear and straightforward. The footer can add a disclosure and your FINRA/SEC profile link.

Funnel Step 2: Financial Intelligence Number Widget

Once a prospect watches Ryan's welcome message and the 60-second video explaining the Financial Intelligence Number (FiN) concept, they can find their FiN through a short interactive quiz that connects back to Ryan's scheduling page.

Funnel Step 3: FiN-Path

Once the prospects find their FiN, they can enter the funnel's final phase, "FiN-Path." We sandwiched video marketing here as well - both before the questionnaire begins and after it's complete, Ryan can direct the prospects towards clear calls to action.

Before submitting the video message, it's more geared towards the benefits of FiN-Path.

After submitting, the video message is geared toward the value of the human advisor, prompting prospects to book an appointment.

One of the more defined use-cases of using video marketing is to remind the prospect why they should submit more data to him.

FiN-Path is a short questionnaire that transforms the responses from the prospect into actionable steps, like alerts. They are categorized into three groups: things the prospect is doing well on, short-term checkpoints for them to work on, and high-priority items that require immediate attention.

It's a shareable link that clients can use to refer friends, family, and co-workers who know they need to talk with an advisor and are willing to either go through the questionnaire with the advisor on the appointment or fill it out before the appointment.

Advisors can use it anyway they like.

Funnel Step 4: Writing follow-up emails

Wealth I/O's AI Copilot helps advisors write better follow-up emails.

We can all agree that follow-up is where the rubber meets the road.

And...follow-up is challenging. Steps 4 and 5 of the referral funnel aim to help the advisor save more time following up and delivering continuous value.

This feature helps advisors save tons of time from pouring over all the data points from their referral products.

Though these emails are not auto-sequenced, we are working on a simple email automation chain that will let you do that.

Funnel Step 5: Client Communications with the My Financial Pro App

While we're working on automating the copilot-generated emails for follow-up, advisors can also offer prospects access to their own client nurturing app called "My Financial Pro."- for larger firms, this app can be completely white-labeled.

This lets advisors offer a better way to engage with prospective and current clients.

This app ties the referral engine together because the link to the app can be easily shared, and the secure access code can be delivered to referees.

It lets advisors deliver video market updates, secure chat access, file sharing, short-form blog content, and other features.

Conclusion:

This final step of the funnel ties it all together by offering new prospects a way to "stay in touch" and receive value until they're ready to start working with the advisor.

Wealth I/O's referral products can be used in any way the advisor wants. While there is a funneled approach to data collection from new prospects, advisors use our products in different ways—as a widget on their website, as a sales proposal tool on the appointment, or as a way to network better. The referral products are dynamic, and we've designed them to help advisors stand out in a crowded marketplace where everyone looks the same.

Thank you for giving this a read.

You can watch my video below, which shows you a more detailed explanation of how the referral engine works:

Jonathan Michael is the Founder & CEO of Wealth I/O - a referral marketing engine for financial advisors to find new clients with a tech-enabled solution that captures prospect data and makes client conversions work faster with advice-driven presentation software. AdvisorX AI is Wealth I/O's AI productivity engine, helping advisors save more than 50% of time with routine workflows.