Be more persistent with marketing, advisers told

Speaking at the MDRT’s Tour Down Under 2016 roadshow, the association’s US chair and vice-president of sales and marketing for Pinney Insurance, Ryan Pinney, said advisers aren’t being persistent enough when marketing to prospective clients.

“How many clients are you missing because you are not marketing to them long enough?” Mr Pinney asked.

“We use a two-year, rotating marketing calendar. We create two years of content called 'evergreen content', and we make it generic enough that it’s always good [to be used] over and over and over.”

He added: “Most consumers can’t remember what you sent them yesterday let alone two years ago, and so we find that we can put them into this marketing funnel and we can keep marketing to them for years and years.

“The longest time we marketed to somebody and found we could make a sale was just short of the 10-year mark. For 10 years the person said 'no thanks'. How many sales are you missing out on because you are not marketing to them long enough?”

However, Mr Pinney explained that the marketing material has to present some form of meaningful information that a client can relate to.

“This can’t be 'buy my stuff' communication, it has to be seen as valuable communication; it has to be educational in nature.”

He added: “It has to be [along the lines of], ‘there has been this recent change to this law and you may be impacted by it’."

“[It] creates a lot of trust this way because you are not seen as a typical sales person, you are seen much more as an adviser, but you are seen much more as an educator,” Mr Pinney said.