‘Engaging with new formats is not a vanity project for advisers anymore’

There is a running joke among the profession that you only need three things to be a ‘real’ financial planner, writes Justin Cash. They are a Tesla, a fancy barbeque, and a podcast…

The third of those three, a podcast, tends to draw a particular kind of scoff. How does such auditory navel-gazing possibly translate into new clients? Who cares what a couple of crusty old financiers think anyway? Shouldn’t these planners be busy doing some actual planning?

These jokes are often circulated on social media, home to many such people with podcasts to plug.

I can practically hear you scoffing again. Scoff all you want. But engaging with new formats is not a vanity project for advisers anymore – it’s fast becoming a must-have for long-term survival.

At PA360 last month, Morningstar said that across a sample of 5,000 younger clients, TikTok is one of the primary ways they are learning about investments. So to not even attempt to learn a few lessons from what appeals about such mediums seems to me a bit churlish waste.

Let’s run few a through here, and why they might actually be a good thing for the advice profession.

First, younger clients have a new vocabulary, for a whole new sharing economy. Social media stars do not ask you to ‘refer’ people to their channels. They make it easy and user-friendly to do it. They remind you time and again that you should pass on the message. They even create incentives for spreading the word.

For years, the likes of The Yardstick Agency’s Phil Bray have spoken about how planners are too shy about asking others to share their good work, and how simple tweaks to language can help. That social media continues to captivate younger investors is only more evidence of why seriously such things should be taken.

So have you thought about how you generate the financial planning equivalent of likes and follows? How your reviews are acquired and presented? How you can work your professional network to upsell or cross-sells to existing clients? How you communicate with potential prospects? How you deal with ones that might be ghosting you? Because you can guarantee the most popular online brands with the next generation of wealth have.

One of the other big learnings from viral successes is how they use data. They analyse and assess of campaigns in microscopic detail. They constantly engage with the discussion around their content. They spot geographical and demographic trends and blind-spots. Many financial planners, I would wager, have not looked at which parts of their websites are performing well, or really interrogated the data on what people do and do not like about their brand and service.

An even more important learning about what works in the new digital world is brevity. Remember early social video app Vine? It didn’t allow broadcasts over six seconds. While that specific model may have gone to the wall, it hits on a deeper truth: Generation Z have neither the time nor inclination to listen to your hour-long pitch about the benefits of your business. They do not care about your risk-managed model portfolio, and even less about your discretionary fund manager’s oh-so-clever rebalancing act.

What they care about is immediately understanding a product’s value. So do you have a catchy strapline for your planning business? What is the one message you can deliver that cuts through the noise? And how can you articulate that to the uninitiated?

There is a point to all this. Which is that if we ever want to move to a completely new-look profession, where advisers are paid for their expertise, not their assets, it will only work if we get younger clients on board. All of those predictions about paying an annual retainer to your planner, outside of anything to do with product sales, can sound like a pipedream, or the paid subscription packages some influencers offer – it’s our choice.

So what would the equivalent of the premium content that could be unlocked from you as an adviser from such a subscription be? Would you be able to create tiers of such a service, and articulate them succinctly?

Not every adviser can, or should be, a podcast hero, or a TikTok star. But if they don’t learn a thing or two from the people who are, they might miss out on a lucrative stream of future clients.

Justin Cash is a freelance journalist and online editor at the Dow Jones