Caroline Garnham, founder of Family Bhive, the online marketing platform for wealth advisors and their clients, explains how to make the most of the summer lull.

Editor’s note: This is one of a series of articles written for this publication by Caroline Garnham, founder of Family Bhive, the online marketing platform for wealth advisors and their clients, and a former head of private client with Simmons & Simmons. Her views are her own, but this publication is pleased to share these insights and welcomes reader responses.

This is the quietest part of the summer, with people taking time off to get ahead of the games. What better time to plan ahead for new business in the autumn.

The last six months, since leaving the law, I have taken the time to ask private bankers and other wealth advisors how they market their services. I want Family Bhive to complement their marketing, so I needed to find out what the wealth advisory industry was doing. Some discoveries surprised me, some shocked me, but overall it’s clear there are opportunities for all. Over the next few weeks I would like to share some of my findings and the opportunities which they present.

Crunch the numbers

“Know your client” is a hugely important phrase when it comes to marketing, whether on a macro scale at executive level or on a micro scale at the relationship manager level. Departments have clients as do relationship managers and the same principles apply to both; the 80:20 rule. Can you clearly identify the 20 per cent of clients who produce for you the 80 per cent of your profit?

When I took over the private client group at Simmons & Simmons this was the first thing I did. Within a few years, I was one of the highest profits per partner lawyers in the firm.

One of the banks I have been speaking to has done this analysis on a macro level this year, and discovered that a significant proportion of this 80 per cent were loss-making. This means that the 20 per cent are contributing to the banking costs of some of the other bank’s customers.

A relationship manager with whom I have been working was on the “City Executive” desk. He also did this analysis of his clients.  As a result he discovered that his top clients were US citizens. He focused on this subset, learnt where they lived, which schools they sent their children to and what restaurants they liked to go to. It was not long before he was the most profitable private banker in the group - with a nice bonus to match.

Having identified the target market and the services they require and which make you the most profit, marketing becomes easier. It’s time to go back to basics: identify the target market, match them with the right messages and research the best way of getting the message in front of them.

Multiple marketing methodologies

There are only four ways to market: client recommendation, networking with intermediaries who have your target market as clients, cross-referral of business within the organisation and direct. What I have found surprising is that most private banks, like other wealth advisors, tend to use only one or two of these methods. There is nothing wrong with this, provided that others have been considered and rejected for good reasons.

Over the next few weeks I will be giving some insights into what I have discovered about each of these methods and what opportunities they present. Several private bankers are now using Twitter and LinkedIn and I will go through my discoveries here as well, what is working and why.

In the last in this brief series I will also be sharing with you what I have discovered about feedback and improving your marketing material to win new business.