How financial advisors are integrating compliance, marketing, and growth for seamless scaling
The integration of compliance, marketing, and firm growth is critical for financial advisory firms that want to grow and prosper. Ignoring any one of these areas can be detrimental to the future of your firm.
Firms looking to scale up their business must integrate compliance, marketing, and growth to ensure seamless scaling.
It's critical to ensure that all marketing materials and initiatives meet compliance standards set by the SEC and other agencies.
It's important to plan for the type of internal firm growth that will be needed to support new clients if your marketing efforts are successful.
Scaling to a financial advisory firm means strategically growing the size of the client base and the level of assets under advisement. This entails using efficient marketing strategies, technology and processes to properly manage this growth in the firm’s client and asset base.
It's critical that this all be done in line with compliance rules that govern all financial advisors.
What role do compliance, marketing, and growth play in scaling your RIA firm?
Scaling your advisory firm means increasing the number of clients you advise and increasing the level of assets under management (AUM) for those clients.
It also means taking a strategic approach to client acquisition, implementing operational efficiencies into the firm, and expanding the firm’s service offering in line with client expectations.
In order to accomplish efficient scaling, your business plan must integrate compliance, marketing, and growth.
Compliance is critical. Without adhering to rules governing compliance in general, an advisory firm can face disciplinary actions or worse. When it comes to marketing, there are a number of compliance issues that must be adhered to, including:
Are your firm’s communications in compliance with the SEC’s marketing rules?
Do your firm's communications make claims about performance? Are they fair and balanced, and do they not omit any material facts?
Marketing is very important to the growth of your firm. It’s important to develop a marketing strategy that targets the types of prospects that would make good clients for your firm. There are a number of lead generation strategies, including:
Social media marketing
Content marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Email marketing
Direct mail marketing
Advertising
In-person events and presentations
Networking and referrals
Regardless of which of these lead generation strategies your firm employs, it is critical that they be done in conjunction with your firm’s compliance department. The message(s) conveyed in these marketing efforts must adhere to all compliance requirements as set forth by the SEC and any other governing bodies (at the state level, etc.).
Marketing claims cannot include things like:
Highlighting only the benefits of a product or service without disclosing the risks
Failing to disclose any compensation paid in exchange for testimonials
Offering inaccurate or misleading performance results
Promising a certain level of return from investments
Growth capabilities need to be monitored and scaled to ensure that new clients can be properly served according to what they have been told through the marketing and onboarding processes. Internal growth must be adequate to handle any influx of new clients. Failure to provide promised services could result in client exits and great harm to your firm’s reputation.
How to integrate compliance, marketing, and growth strategies
It is critical that your firm integrates its marketing efforts with its compliance department and aligns its growth strategies.
The first step is to incorporate all three into your strategic planning for your firm's future. This should be done through unified goal setting.
Ask yourself:
What is the goal of your marketing efforts?
How many additional clients are you looking to add over what period of time? This should also include any anticipated loss of clients due to death or other reasons.
All marketing strategies should be reviewed with your compliance department to ensure that they adhere to the appropriate rules and regulations governing marketing and communications from advisory firms.
Additionally, if your marketing efforts are successful, you need to plan for any growth needs inside the firm to handle new clients. This might include additional advisors, back-office staff and compliance staff.
The strategic planning process for the firm should consider all three of these areas with a plan for each.
What are the benefits of integrating compliance, marketing, and growth?
For an advisory firm that is looking to grow and expand its base, integrating compliance, marketing, and internal growth plans is not only a good idea but also essential for success.
Integrating these three areas offers:
The opportunity for sustainable and scalable growth: Integrating compliance, marketing and internal growth allows the firm to ensure its marketing efforts that produce new business are being handled “seamlessly” on an internal basis. New clients will feel like they fit into the firm instead of feeling like they are a disruption to the normal operations of the firm.
Integration leads to streamlined processes in all three areas: Compliance is in place for marketing and growth efforts, as well as for work with new and existing clients. Compliance becomes standard procedure rather than a unique proposition. Marketing efforts can be adjusted as needed based on what is working or not working and any changes in the business. Internal growth in back office or advisory staffing can be integrated with marketing success as needed.
The integration of these three areas also reduces firm risk: This is especially true of integrating compliance into marketing and internal growth. Adherence to compliance requirements must pervade all other areas of the firm. Ensuring that marketing is compliant avoids problems with people disputing the firm's claims. Ensuring that growth is done with compliance in mind helps ensure that the firm's internal operations adhere to mandated compliance rules and procedures.
Work with Unbiased
At Unbiased, we understand the importance of growing your firm while ensuring your processes are compliant and streamlined.
Unbiased Pro can help you grow your firm by delivering leads directly to your inbox while also providing you with the tools to manage them throughout the sales process.
Content Writer
Roger is a financial and business writer who brings his extensive experience as a financial advisor to his writing. Roger's work has appeared on a number of sites, including ThinkAdvisor, Investopedia, Motley Fool, Time and a number of other sites. In addition, he ghostwrites extensively for a number of financial advisors and other financial services firms.