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 will be writing a series of articles 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 first article of this series, Jigar introduces the concept of what Guerilla Marketing for financial advisors and distributors is all about, which sets the stage for future articles of The Guerilla Advisor.

What business are you into? Are you into the business of financial services? Or are you into the business of distribution of the financial products? Or are you a financial advisor? Whatever way you define yourself, but the truth is that we all are into the marketing business. Every business is either about marketing a product or marketing oneself. In the kind of business which we are into, we often need to market product as well as ourselves. Marketing is the precious connection between you and whoever buys what you sell. If you buy this argument then read the article further.

We normally misunderstood marketing as just selling. Selling is one small and integral part of marketing. For many of us, marketing gets over once the product is sold. Marketing is not about just selling the products; it's all about winning the customer. It is all about how we can create an excellent experience for our clients at all stages.

Recently I read the book called Guerrilla Marketing written by Jay Conrad Levinson. It is unique book, from which I got few very interesting ideas regarding, how to develop the guerrilla marketing strategy for any business. Guerrilla marketing is the strategy where the low cost unconventional tools are used to promote the product or attract the customer or an idea. The term guerrilla marketing is easily traced to guerrilla warfare which utilizes atypical tactics to achieve a goal in a competitive and unforgiving environment.

Unlike the traditional marketing, the techniques and strategies used by guerrilla marketing are different in terms of costing and usage. I would like to describe the guerrilla marketing as a strategy which can be used by businesses (mainly small scale businesses), and are very cost effective and easy to use for attaining any medium to long term goal of the business.

In our business, the job of the guerrilla advisor or distributor is to make every single experience of our Investor satisfying, simple, and worthwhile for the investor. Marketing begins the very moment you have product or service to offer. Which product will I sell? Which client will you target for which product? How will you approach the particular set of client? How will you call your client? How will you respond to the queries and the feedback of the client? What are the different techniques that you will use to acquire the client? How will your brochure look like? What would be the design of your card? What would be the design of your envelop? What medium will you use to communicate to your client?

Answering all above and many more questions are part of marketing. And doing it in a way so that it saves cost and using unconventional ways to communicate the product, idea or the concept, can be coined as guerrilla marketing.

What marketing is not

Marketing is not about showing off. Marketing is all about identifying a need, creating a desire, solving a problem. We are into the dynamic world where we need to find out the ways to market with efficiency. Gone are the days, when one single marketing weapon can be used to promote the idea, concept or product. We need to identify multiple weapons which can be used for any goal and to find out the optimum mix of more than one weapon, which can be used simultaneously, used to spread the message.

Marketing is about using combinations intelligently

Marketing combinations are required. If you have a very good product to offer to your client and you think by sending an SMS regarding the product or sending a email or sending a hardcopy or sending the brochure can help you convert the business, you need to rethink. With the wide variety of advertising and promotion mediums in print and digital media, it is very difficult to win the attention of the client only with one single weapon in traditional way. What you need is the combination of more than one marketing weapons to get the job done. You may send your client an SMS regarding the product followed by sending an email to the same client for same product accompanied by sending the hardcopy or brochure and finally trying to win the appointment by calling them over phone.

Many of the financial advisors are nowadays desperate to create their own website, hoping that creating the website will make them to look more professional and that in turn help them win the clients. But that's very difficult. You can develop the website for promoting something but taking few more weapons which can help your client to direct to your website is also necessary. I know many of the advisors who created their own website, and then after a year or so they decided to close down the website believing that, it doesn't work.

The key to success in financial advisory or distribution business is to have innovative products or solutions to offer to your investor and having a right marketing plan to promote this innovation.

It doesn't take more money; it takes time, energy and imagination

There are more than 100 possible weapons which can be used by guerrilla advisor to win the client and increase the business. Marketing is not any one of the 100 weapons. It's the wise use of many of them in combination with each other. Guerrilla marketing is about applying 360 degree of communication, to reach to target audiences in as many ways as are affordable, effective and possible. Your role as a guerrilla advisor is to be aware of all such marketing weapons available to you to experiment with many of them, and identify the optimum combination of few weapons which can maximise your profit with minimising your costs.

An Example of using a guerrilla marketing weapon

We all know that sending a courier packet to the client regarding some product is an activity which has a small conversion ratio. Many of the clients don't even open the envelope, and throw it away without bothering to having to look inside it. Here in case of sending the courier with some product information, you can try sending it with the Indian Postal department. As nowadays most of the envelopes reaches us by courier and the envelope you sent through postal department, having stamp on it, chances are that the recipient has not received the envelope with the postal stamp on it since few years. Odds would surely increase into the favour of client opening the envelope and have a look into it.

An envelope with many stamps is going to be noticed. Chances are high that the envelope is going to be opened, and the contents are going to be read because it's the first time in the person's life in many years he/she has received a letter with so many stamps on it. This is the true beauty of the Guerrilla marketing. It does not cost more money, but it does take time, energy and imagination.

I would like to share few ideas and techniques going further in series of the articles regarding how to be a successful guerrilla advisor and also share few of the Guerrilla marketing weapons which are cost effective and can be used by financial product distributors and agents.

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

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