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Acquisitions, technology and competition - all these forces are coming together now to shape the financial services providers of the future. Those who want to continue to be a player in this market years from now need to understand and embrace these forces today. What does this have to do with marketing your business? Everything because you need to know how your industry is changing in order to effectively market yourself. Let's take a look first at acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions are a matter of survival for both large financial services companies and small. Large companies are recreating themselves a piece at a time in order to develop a complete business model that includes a distribution channel, a sales channel and a marketing channel, just to name a few. Smaller companies - ever sensitive to the fact that large companies are getting even larger - also are making acquisitions to boost themselves up to the next level. They have to if they are going to compete. Everyone wants to provide a 100 percent turnkey solution for their customers, so they're looking around and saying, "Who do we need to acquire to make that happen?" I think the Internet is one place financial companies will soon turn to for acquisitions. For example, it will be easier, cheaper and faster to buy a Web site that fulfills a need within the company than to build it. Web sites such as ours - Advisormarketing.com -are a perfect example. Need to roll an Internet-based marketing function into your business or offer Internet-based marketing expertise to your clients? What better way to do that than to buy an established Web site that specializes in that area? Dot -com companies also will be acquired for the same reason - they provide something your company needs and needs now. Also on the purchase block will be companies that produce software that makes it easier to do business. Traditional companies also are fair game for financial services organizations on the prowl. They're buying companies that offer everything from insurance to mutual funds to annuities. Then they buy a company with a sales force and a company with a distribution system. One interesting development in all this is the demise of the notion that someone is too big to buy. Hey, no one's off limits anymore. Companies once thought too large to be acquired are being bought. It's no longer the big getting bigger, it's the huge getting huger. Now let's turn to technology. The greatest changes that will occur within the financial services industry will be spurred by technology. Two things will happen. First, technology will make it easer for financial advisors to obtain vital information faster than ever. My father worked for Prudential many years ago, and back then you had to look at the stock ticker to find out what was going on. A client had to call you or read the next day's Wall Street Journal to keep abreast of developments. Now, anyone with Internet access can have the information they need in minutes, if not seconds. This is a plus for advisors because they can quickly and easily gather information on current trends, new stocks, changes in industries and global happenings and use that information to make their clients better investors. However, for every positive, there's sometimes a negative. Be aware that many of your clients also have the same information-gathering capabilities. But they're not the professional, you are. Only you can put the information into perspective so your clients can understand what is significant and what is not. It's not enough just to have the statistics. You have to be able to understand them. The second thing technology will do is increase the number of"touches" that create and reinforce relationships. One of the greatest benefits I see coming out of technology is the ability to touch your client or prospect simply, easily and inexpensively in a moment's notice. And I'm not talking Star Wars technology. With today's technology, I can have a system that delivers a birthday card to each of my clients on time. It would only take about an hour to set it up. You can even have a personal gift sent instead of a card. There are a number of Internet services that do this. I can go beyond tracking investment-related data and gather more personal information that my clients care about. This impresses the heck out of them! For example, I can tell my computer to send me information on Purdue University because one of my big clients is a Purdue graduate. When Purdue signs the best basketball recruit they've ever had, I can send my client an e-mail and give him the good news. If I'm that client, I've got to be thinking, "Wow, this person cares about me!" My vision is that advisors who use technology for things other than sports scores and news in their home town are going to be miles ahead of the competition. They can use technology to increase the personal connection, the touch factor. As we go forward, the more you can touch a person, the more you will develop a long- term relationship. That brings us to our final topic - competition. Competition is coming out of the woodwork. And it's happening on a global scale. Pick up a newspaper or magazine on almost any given day and you'll see news about some international company that just purchased another international company, making the acquirer the largest in the world. It's no longer good enough to say, "I'm in a small town and, sure, I've got some competition from a larger company with a local office."That larger company may become a multinational corporation. And technology just increases the impact of this competition exponentially. And mega-merger mania is pushing other companies into the financial services arena. How long will it be before I can log onto Amazon.com and find a financial advisor, a tax expert and a mortgage broker? Competition will continue to grow. The money that's available to financial services experts is so large that it breeds competition. There's too much money out there, too much at stake, for someone not to want a slice of it. To get your slice, you need to start thinking about tomorrow today and adjust your marketing accordingly. Acquisitions, technology, competition - they're all coming together now. Will you be ready for what tomorrow brings? Martin R. Baird is a nationally recognized expert on marketing for financial advisors. Baird is the author of "Guaranteed Results," an easy-to-read book filled with more than 100 marketing ideas, methods and tools. He's president of Robinson & Associates, Inc., a Phoenix, Ariz.-based marketing management company. Baird also is president of advisormarketing.com, a Web site that offers free marketing information for financial advisors. The only Web site of its kind, advisormarketing.com is the premiere source for free marketing advice, information and tools for self-driven, success-oriented financial advisors who are demanding information that helps them market their practice, meet the needs of their clients and increase sales. Advisormarketing.com also is an electronic forum where advisors can learn from each other by discussing common problems, sharing ideas and gaining new insights from their peers. Traditionally, many advisors have not focused on marketing. Now, increasing competition is bringing the value of effective marketing to the forefront, and advisormarketing.com is designed to help advisors strengthen this crucial aspect of their business. All the information at advisormarketing.com is available at no charge because the site is sponsor supported. For more information about advisormarketing.com, visit Baird's Web site at www.advisormarketing.com or e-mail him at mbaird@advisormarketing.com. Baird also may be reached at 480-990-1775 or 800-279-1775. Martin
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