In the competitive world of financial planning and wealth management, your advisory firm’s brand isn’t just a marketing tool—it’s your DNA. So, it must connect you with your target audience in a way that draws them to you and ultimately converts them into long-term relationships.

Leveling up your financial advisor branding involves understanding your ideal clients, clearly articulating how you solve their problems, building trust, and creating a narrative that resonates so deeply that clients can’t wait to connect with you.

Are you ready to grab your audience’s attention? Here are four steps to “wow” with your brand and capture the kind of business you’re looking for.

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1. Identify Your Niche or Ideal Audience

It’s critical to keep in mind that your brand is not meant to connect with you—the advisor—but rather with your target audience. But who is that audience? (Hint: It’s not “everyone.”) Although unlimited options might sound ideal, the reality is that narrowing your marketing scope will help you identify the most relevant target audience for your brand.

The first step in leveling up your brand is to define your target market. Go beyond demographics and dig into what’s driving your clients’ financial decisions. Do they:

Every powerful brand has an instantly recognizable audience. Once you define yours, you’re ready to solve its problems your way.

2. Define How to Uniquely Solve Your Audience’s Problems

Your ability to meet your audience where they are and solve their problems is the hook to your brand story. Do you know what keeps your clients up at night? What concerns do they struggle with? More importantly, how do your perspective and knowledge provide solutions to their problems unlike anyone else?

Consider two household names that have mastered branding: Apple and Starbucks. Both have highly identifiable logos and storefronts, as well as a cadre of dedicated customers who have bought into the “lifestyle” they are selling.

But even big names can get in trouble when they stray from their brand. A former Apple employee, Alessandra Ghini, shared that the catchy iPod tagline “A thousand songs in your pocket” was surprisingly unsuccessful. Apple sees the most traction when it focuses its messaging on emotions as opposed to the functionality of the hardware it is trying to sell.

Ghini also worked for Starbucks at a time when its leadership felt they needed to get the brand back on track. Their exploration focused on “the moment of connection,” whether it was having a casual coffee and conversation with a friend or coming in every day as a regular to a group of smiling baristas.

Regardless of the industry or audience, the best brands understand the correlation between emotions and purchasing power. They are authentic, with human-centric messaging, ethos, and stories that deeply resonate with their target audiences. Impactful financial advisor branding follows the same principles.

Crafting an impactful brand story relies on connecting your value proposition to your clients’ emotions, goals, and vision for their futures. Once you understand how you can help uniquely solve your audience’s needs, the focus shifts to creating trust.

3. Prioritize Trust-Building

Brand and emotion go hand-in-hand. And while logos, taglines, and even office space should reflect your brand, it’s important to understand the overarching relationship between emotion and building trust in a strong brand.

Some of the most powerful motivators of peoples’ decisions are emotions, and money and financial decisions can be even more emotionally charged. Research suggests that "we make financial decisions based 90 percent on emotion and only 10 percent on logic."

Successful financial advisor branding, then, means keeping your promises to clients and being consistent. Take time to understand how your intentions translate to your clients’ experiences. You can do this by communicating proactively, asking for client feedback, monitoring your firm performance, and training staff to follow best practices to ensure consistency.

Understanding how your brand promise is resonating will help you tweak your delivery and solidify trust.

4. Create an Ecosystem of Touchpoints

Your brand story should be one that clients are ecstatic to be part of. To reinforce your message and pull your audience in, you’ll want to create an ecosystem of touchpoints that reflects your larger vision. These often involve creative elements and range in scale and complexity.

Touchpoints to help establish your brand include:

• Logo

• Website

• Mission statement

• Professional social media posts

• Stationery (including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, etc.)

• Client gifts

• Office space

• Even the way you answer the phone at your firm!

It’s all about injecting your brand—the heart and soul of your business—into even the smallest details of your firm.

You’ll also want to routinely audit your brand touchpoints and ask whether they are still relevant. This kind of flexibility is paramount in the ever-changing financial services industry and as the needs of your clients—and your business—evolve.

Element Financial Group is a case study of how you can transform a long-standing advisor brand. Cofounders Alex Levi, AIF,® and JoanAnn Natola, AIF,® wanted to stay true to their roots, but they also wanted to push the boundaries and modernize their brand in an authentic way that represented their evolution. “We’ve built a very strong business,” Levi said. “We grew up, and our firm grew up and matured . . . and we wanted our website to reflect that,” Natola continued.

Level Up Your Brand’s Potential

Donald Miller may have said it best in Building a StoryBrand: “Words sell things. And if we haven’t clarified our message, our customers won’t listen.” You need to be able to articulate who you help and, more importantly, how you help them. And you don’t have to do it on your own.

Commonwealth provides full marketing support with our Brand Studio offering, where we work alongside our affiliated advisors to develop a brand that truly reflects their value proposition and resonates with their target audience.

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Editor’s note: This post was originally written by Patricia Marcel and published in August 2019, but we’ve updated it to bring you more relevant and timely information.