Marketing your own estate planning business – hints and tips

Growing your business is the goal of every aspiring entrepreneur. What’s the point in going to all the effort of setting up your dream business if it falls at the first hurdle?   

Getting yourself seen in a crowded marketplace ensures your growth and is what marketers like our partners at Formation specialise in. Find out directly from Formation in this guest article, how they’d advise marketing your own estate planning business.

Although what we do often seems like magic (if we say so ourselves) there’s actually an enormous amount of research, thought, and work that goes into making sure your own estate planning business appears in front of your target audience. 

Utilising the services of a marketing agency takes a lot of the work off your hands when it comes to the ongoing task of growing your business. But there are several things you can do yourself to effectively market your own estate planning business. These tips give you a solid set of actions to follow that’ll help you create the best possible foundation for your fledgling estate planning business. 

Choosing the name of your business 

A name is used to evoke the specific perception and attitude of your services. Yes, an estate planning business is only ever going to operate a certain way. It will undoubtedly be similar to every other estate planning service, but calling your estate planning company something completely inappropriate is best avoided.

So, what should you look out for when naming your company?    

Remain professional

Ensure you come across professionally, even with your name. Avoid choosing a silly sounding or punny title unless that is the attitude you wish to project. As an estate planner, you will regularly be dealing with your client’s finances and valued personal possessions, so it’s best not to come across as flippant. 

Project confidence

Building trust with your clients is of the utmost importance; as an estate planner, building this trust is going to be an uphill battle, simply because of the type of service you’re offering and the amount of choice available. Use your name to make an impression, be as bold as you want, as long as you’re confident in the way it will be perceived by your clients. 

Avoid obfuscation

An obscure title may be fun as an in-joke to yourself, but in the wide-world such things aren’t advisable. Being clear and concise about what your business does will engender a sense of understated confidence in your business. It also helps potential clients know in an instant whether they consider you as a viable business to give their patronage. 

 With an effective name at your disposal, the first barrier for a client has been overcome. What’s next? 

  

How do you want your business to look?    

The aesthetic of your company, when coupled with sparkling content, gives it a personality of its own. But designing your unique look is easier said than done.

 There are a number of very user-friendly tools available online to help even the most unambitious artist create a good-looking, professional website. Many opt for a WordPress site or use a service like Square Space to make a functional, yet hardly inspired, site.    

This is where the services of a professional marketing agency such as Formation come in handy. Our Design team are experts at turning your ideas into reality, creating memorable, professional, and user-friendly sites.    

Remember: everything starts with you. It’s your idea we’re bringing to life so it’s best to have spent some time considering your brand concept.    

The best way to determine how you want to present your company visually is:    

Carry out competitor research

The best way to get a sense of how most others in the industry present themselves is to take a look for yourself. Search for estate planning services in your area through Google to find out who your direct competition is. See how they’ve decided to present themselves and think of ways to differentiate yourself without alienating potential customers with an obtuse design. 

Don’t be afraid to take inspiration

If you see colour combinations, design elements, and imagery used by others that you like, don’t hesitate to incorporate them into your own design. There’s no harm in being inspired by others, in fact it’s how most design works; by looking at what has come before and finding ways of blending existing designs together, something new often emerges. Take care not to plagiarise existing logos and designs though as this can have a damaging effect on your brand and lead to copyright issues.

Create a memorable logo

How many brands can you think of that you know from the logo alone? We’re betting it’s a fair few. A good logo helps to differentiate you from others in your field. This is especially important in the highly competitive estate planning sector. Simplicity is the key to designing a good logo, iconography is extremely important to help make you memorable. Think the Nike tick, or the Apple apple; obviously these are extreme examples but there is nothing stopping you from coming up with an original logo that speaks to your intended audience. 

Utilise pre-existing image libraries or create images of your own

Images are another aspect of your site that helps it stand out. Ensure you use high-quality images either from an online library or by hiring the services of a professional photographer. An online library will give you access to thousands of images, but they do usually charge a subscription fee. Using a photographer may cost more up-front however the images will be unique to you, and you will have full control over the end result with the option to use them across all your media. 

You’ve decided how you want to present and market your estate planning business to the world, now you need to get your business in front of your customers by creating a platform to bring your message to the masses. 

  

Why every business needs a website    

Where would the world be without the internet? Wait, don’t answer that. No matter how you view it, the internet has transformed the way we communicate with each other, how we do business, and how we interact with the world.     

Having a presence online is essential in today’s digital climate and if you’re wanting to market your estate planning business, then you need an online platform where you can direct people. The push towards digitisation that took a huge leap during COVID has only continued to gain strength since the pandemic; almost every industry has been touched.     

Without a website you’re cutting off an entire segment of your potential customer base and ignoring a fantastic way to gain new customers.    

As mentioned above, there are several platforms that offer easy access to designing your own website. These tools break down the creation of a website into easily digestible chunks, always giving clear directions and at the end of the process you will have a simple but professional-looking website.    

Being able to platform your services gives you so many opportunities to speak to your customers and acts as further proof of your commitment to your company. A website is a great place to showcase your work, your successes, and your expertise.     

When you join the BEST Foundation, you’ll be given a micro-site, a place to tell your clients a little bit about yourself and the services you offer. But why stop there?    

Once you’ve established yourself in the estate planning space and as you expand your business, it is natural to need a more substantial platform to ensure the continued growth of your company. A professionally created website can do that for you.    

UX (User Experience) design is as much an art as any other part of marketing. Developing a website that is optimised to be fast, user-friendly, and secure makes certain that your platform remains viable – and visible – for years.  

Once you have the platform built, what do you do with it?     

SEO, written content and social media strategy 

 Print is dying (if not already dead), let’s face it. But writing lives on in new and interesting forms, one of these being in the digital realm as content for your website. 

 The internet is first and foremost an information gathering tool. And with informative, educational, interesting, and authoritative content on your site, Google will look favourably on it, which makes the almighty algorithm push your site further up the search results, leading to more people seeing your site (and therefore your services), when they search for an answer to a query surrounding estate planning.    

Gaining new clients is the lifeblood of any business, and to do that you need to get your name out there. Having a website full of useful information and reviews of your services acts as a giant billboard for your business, showing how amazing you are to the world at large.    

Having in-depth articles optimised for search engines and a focused social media strategy is one the best ways to get your business seen online.    

Going hand-in-hand with written content and social media content is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO also extends to the structure of your site as well, even the way you name the categories on your site and the connections between pages influences the way your site is ranked in Google.     

SEO is one of the most misunderstood aspects of marketing, but it is also one of the most cost-effective. Many struggle to see the benefits of it and the work that goes into it; the results, however, are undeniable. Unfortunately, it can take months for the results to be realised, making it hard for people to fully appreciate it.    

Let’s have a quick look at some of the things SEO entails:    

Keyword research

Wouldn’t it be great to know the phrases people use when looking for your service? With keyword research, you can see exactly this. And armed with this knowledge you can write content that speaks to the questions your potential clients are asking, in their own words. 

Site audit

You would be amazed by how many sites have poorly constructed internal structures, sites full of irrelevant pages, outdated content in need of a refresh, and categories that have little to no relevance to your customers. Effective SEO marketers will trawl through your site and ensure that every page has relevance, and every piece of content is speaking to the right audience. This is an exercise you can carry out yourself, but it will require access to specific SEO tools. 

Internal linking

No page should be the end of the internet, as a wise SEO wizard once said. What they meant by this is that as Google crawls your site (the act of combing through your pages to look for fresh and relevant content for its users), it takes note of any page that is a dead end, meaning any page that does not link to anywhere else or lead to another page via navigation, and this can affect how your website performs. This is under the assumption that it is a better user experience if pages organically lead into one another, keeping the user engaged at all times. 

With a winning strategy in place, and an understanding of how and why you need content, it’s time to actually write it. 

  

What your tone of voice says about your business    

It’s not enough to simply convey information to your visitors; you need to inject some personality into your brand.  

  As with the design choices you make, the way you choose to communicate also helps to speak to your customers on a personal and even an emotional level.    

This is important because whether we want to believe it or not, almost every decision we make is an emotional one – and even more so when it comes to estate planning. If you can speak to a person's emotions, you’ll have clients flocking toward you in droves.    

So, how do you decide on your tone of voice?    

Context is king

If you’re planning on an article about preparing documentation around death, using a flippant, jovial tone may turn people off. By using an understanding, empathetic, and compassionate tone, reaching your audience is much easier. Think about the situation in which your blog or social post is going to be read and the wider context of the subject the piece is discussing. 

Keep it consistent

One of the cardinal sins for any website is not managing to keep their tone consistent across all channels over time. This is somewhat inevitable as different copywriters and marketers come and go, and no matter how hard you try, one person’s idea of compassion is going to be different than another’s. So, how do you get around this?  

Creating a document that outlines the tone of voice for your company is a great place to start. Spend some time deciding on how you want to be perceived by your customers, what you want to sound like in the marketplace, and where you stand as a company. At Formation, this is one of the first steps when working with a new client.    

Don’t be afraid to experiment – You don’t need to get it right first time, and there is always time to amend and optimise as you gain a better understanding of the industry and who you want to target. Choosing your voice is as much about experience as it is research. Gaining a good idea of where you want to position yourself in the marketplace is a fantastic start, but you won’t see how successful your strategy is until it’s implemented. 

An online presence is vital, but what about ways to market your estate planning business out in the real world? 

  

The importance of networking    

Industry events are a great place to meet like-minded individuals and get a general sense of the way the industry is going. It’s also an opportunity to scope out the competition and learn about developments others may be working on.  

 Once again, even though these are professional, industry events, we are going to form an emotional connection to the people rather than the companies that they represent. Getting yourself seen and showing your interest and enthusiasm will keep you in the minds of other people within the industry and who knows where it could lead?    

Events such as the BWAP Awards and the BEST Foundation conference are ideal places to network and celebrate the ideas coming out of the estate planning sector, as well as getting to know other estate planners. Use them as a way to get your name out there, rub elbows with luminaries of the field, and start making a name for yourself among your peers.    

It's often through networking that business collaborations begin, and these types of events are great for maintaining relationships with colleagues. 

 Going to events gets your name out there with your peers, but what about your clients? 

  

Using reviews as social proof     

You may have heard of ‘social proof’. This concept centres around the idea that when a person is looking for a service or product, they will add more credence to the quality of that service or product if other people have had good experiences with it before.    

This usually takes the form of customer reviews. For services such as those offered by estate planners, something more akin to a testimonial would be appropriate. General customer reviews are great no matter how simple they are but with a service like estate planning, you have the chance to really show off your abilities by having clients give full testimonials of their experiences of working with you.    

Because estate planning is a role where you’ll be dealing with very personal aspects of your client’s lives, they’re going to have a lot of positive things to say it if the service they receive is exemplary. Don’t hesitate to ask clients that you have formed a strong bond with or have given good service to give you a testimonial or review. Most of the time they’ll be happy to help.   

Another very simple way for your clients to show support for your business is to ask them to score it on Trustpilot. This universally recognised platform allows users to leave reviews and find companies with good reviews. It’s an easy way for you to build trust with potential clients because it provides a simple visual signifier that you give a good service.  You can also use these reviews to market your estate planning business; by sharing them on your social media platforms or using your overall star rating score to help enhance your SEO and the way you are displayed within the search engine results page (SERPs).

CTT’s Legacy Software gives you access to an automated referral process. This innovative feature of the platform allows you to send educational videos explaining, in-depth, the details of the executor’s role to the executor of a will, for example. Within the video it will then ask these people if they too would like their assets protected and offers them the chance to get in touch – subtle way to generate interest in your services while educating them on their role as a part of an estate.    

Use marketing to bring your estate planning services to a wider audience 

By now, hopefully you’ll have a better idea about the importance of marketing for your own estate planning business. There’s a lot of work that goes into successfully marketing a company, and even when you have everything figured out, there’s no guarantee your efforts will pay off!  

Why not leave it to the experts? At Formation we excel at putting your ideas into action: running social campaigns, creating stunning websites, providing entertaining and informative content, and developing entire platforms from scratch. Get in touch today to learn what we can do for you and your new business.