Marketing Wiz is a joint initiative between Kotak MF and Wealth Forum, where we bring to the distribution and advisory fraternity marketing insights that can help you connect better with prospects and clients, win new business, serve clients better and thus enhance business growth. The Guerilla Advisor is an exclusive column within Marketing Wiz, penned by Jigar Parekh of Prudent CAS.

As one of the core team members at Prudent CAS, Jigar spends a lot of his time helping Prudent's IFA channel partners enhance their productivity and serve their clients better. He has trained numerous distributors and advisors, and carries rich practical insights on practice management at the grass root level. In this exclusive column called The Guerilla Advisor, Jigar shares ideas that combine the essence of marketing with smart guerrilla tactics that are low on cost but high on imagination and innovation, which we believe can be of wide appeal across the distribution fraternity.

In the previous article of this series, Jigar shared 7 low cost marketing tools to get noticed by investors (Click Here). Here, he discusses 5 zero cost strategies that every IFA can employ to significantly widen his reach and attract prospective clients. Marketing, as Jigar showcases in these Guerrilla Advisor articles, need not be expensive, and can yet be very effective.

Strategy 1: Free Consultation

You can offer the free 60 minutes consultation to the prospective clients, where you genuinely try and help them with the problems they are facing in the world of finance and investment. You should genuinely try to help them with the problems they are facing into their current investments and the service related issues. Provide the genuine solution without trying to sell them anything.

After 60 minutes get up and offer to leave. Chances are that they want you to spend more time with them and request you to stay. At this moment, you can offer your services to them as their IFA. Free financial consultations, if done regularly in a right way, can help you add many new clients to your business. Free consultation gives you an opportunity to prove yourself and your ability to help them in their benefit.

Strategy 2: Write Blog

This one tool can create the wonders in winning the trust of the clients and prospects in a great way. Specifically HNI and Highly educated professionals belies more in writers than talker.

You should have your own blog either on your own website or on some other portal offering the blogging services. Having an active blog can fetch you many new clients. It also helps in increasing the loyalty of your existing clients.

The main benefit of the blog is that you can express your view freely without any interruption and objection. While writing blog you should focus more on adding value and knowledge to the client rather than promoting any product. As far as possible, strictly avoid promoting any specific product. You can write small 500 word blogs on various topics on regular basis.

I know few IFAs who are getting 4 to 5 hot leads every week from their blogs only. To get the benefit of the blog, I strongly suggest that you should write it regularly. Once or twice a week is what minimum I suggest. If you can write it on daily basis, it's great.

If you are not a good writer, you can take the help of professional people who write on your idea and based on your dictation, for fees. You can write on various topics, for example, Retirement Planning, understanding risk, child education planning, tax planning, 5 biggest mistakes done by common investors in stock market etc.

Once you have a blog, you can promote it through emails, your website, twitter and other social media pages. Remember if you have the best material on your blog, it's useless for people unless they know about it. So promoting your blog is also very important.

Strategy 3: Online Surveys

Creating small online surveys on various topics of investors interest is again a good tool to get and insight regarding current trends and also in gathering the data of the clients. Periodically you should have some small 7 to 15 multiple choice surveys and invite the prospective clients to fill that survey. To attract more number of people to attend your survey you can announce some small prizes like some bestselling book on personal finance to the person selected randomly out of all the respondents.

Through these surveys you can also gather the personal details of the prospective client. There are online portals, which provide you the FREE platform to create your own customised survey. You can visit www.surveymonkey.com or www.godaddy.com. After creating the survey you can send the link through email, social media or any other medium to invite people for filling your survey form online.

For example,

"Spend as little as 5 minutes to answer few simple questions on our recent survey on Investor's behaviour, and get a chance to win the best seller book from Mr (Author Name) titled (book title).

Strategy 4: PSR (personal social responsibility)

Normally every corporate spends certain portion of their profits for the betterment of the society, which we know as a CSR (corporate social responsibility.) All IFAs should also spend a specific time in doing PSR activity, which helps the society also and indirectly gives the IFA to create the new clients also.

For example, you can run financial awareness programmes in colleges for students of final year. You can tie up with any AMC to provide you the platform or support for the same. Like, IDFC MF is already running such programme as a part of their CSR activity, where they go the colleges and gives a proposal to have a small workshop comprising half an hour of movie and 45 minutes of quiz show for final year students. For this activity they have also created beautiful movie. You can either be a volunteer to this activity and go and meet the management people for organising these events at their campus.

You can also design your own workshop on creating awareness among the students and propose the colleges to allow you to organise the workshop at their campus. Most of the colleges will allow you to do so.

You have 3 major benefits of this activity. First, you are doing a service to the community from which you are earning your bread and butter. Second, you get a chance to meet the management people and professors at collage who can be your potential clients. Three, students who are in last year of their collages will soon start earning their salary and they can be your future client.

Strategy 5 : One Day Service Camp

This is the activity which every IFA can do. This is very good activity for generating new clients and leads.

You can put one day Service camp at societies in your area or in any area where you want to campaign for client acquisition. During this camp, you put up the canopy for a day. Invite society members on that day for any advice or service related issue they have in their investment portfolio, even if they have not invested through you.

Some might have lost their policy documents, some of the clients might be a clueless regarding what to do with the investment suggested by some other advisor or banker who is now no longer into the business of advisory, some of them might want to surrender policy or redeem the money or may be wanting to change the bank detail etc. Help them genuinely regarding their problems; this will give you very hot leads for your prospective clients.

You should list down the names of 15 big societies or residential projects in your locality and find out the contact detail of president or the secretary. Write one proposal for doing such activity and meet all these people and try to get the approval for your service camp, preferably to be set up on Sunday. If you try in 15 societies, I am sure you will get the approval to do so in some societies.

Just remember that your proposal should include that how the society members can benefit from such a service camp and also ensure that you will not showcase or advertise any specific product on that day. From your proposal it should be cleared in their mind that you will not try to sell anything to anyone during this service camp and whole objective of this service camp is to help them fully.

When you help the people on such matters without any consideration, I am sure many of them would get converted as your clients.

All content in Marketing Wiz is created by Wealth Forum and should not be construed as views of Kotak MF.

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