Financial advisors who are thought leaders are able to garner a disproportionate share of the affluent as clients. To become a thought leader, however, requires that you develop content.
There are three criteria you always need to focus on to achieve the best results:
1. Concentrate on cutting-edge topics. Considering your audiences, your thought leadership content has to be state of the art, solution based and actionable. It has to provide answers that the affluent and centers of influence can use to their benefit. You need to provide meaningful insights and value that sets you apart from other professionals.
Your thought leadership content cannot be a retread of generally known information. Even when dealing with common knowledge, you need to provide a different perspective with new insights. The content must result in clear, workable solutions.
2. The content must be tightly constructed. The solutions you offer the affluent and centers of influence should strike at the heart of their wants and needs, and be indisputably logical and easily understandable. Your conclusions must follow systematically from previous contentions and defensible assumptions.
You cannot presume the value of your content will be implicitly recognized. You need to ensure forcefully that the target audiences are aware of the value you are bringing to them. Connect all the dots. Failing to make sure all the pieces fit tightly together will confuse your audience, and this can work against you.
3. There needs to be a “call to action.” If you want wealthy clients and quality professional contacts, something in your content has to attract their interest. The content should compel them to want to know more about you and, preferably, want to work with you. You need to think of your thought leadership content and the way you’re communicating it to select audiences as highly sophisticated advicertising.
You need to educate your audience, but it’s a mistake to think audience members will absorb everything you know. You have to bring your audience up the learning curve, to a level where they can appreciate your expertise and be more discerning consumers.
You must provide your audiences with a way that they can work with you. You must make sure that they will ask for more content.
If you choose to develop thought leadership content, it only make good sense to do it extremely well because of the time and resources required. Following these three criteria will help you excel.
