Marketing for New Zealand Financial Advisers: 10 Tips That Actually Work

Most New Zealand advisers do not have a marketing problem. They have a time problem. The advice is good, the clients are loyal, and the referrals come in when somebody remembers to ask. What is missing is anything that keeps happening when the week gets busy, and the week is always busy.

This is written for mortgage and insurance advisers working in the New Zealand market, under a New Zealand licence, talking to New Zealand clients. Not a list of growth hacks. Ten things that hold up over a year, in roughly the order we would do them.

1Talk to the clients you already have first

Every adviser we work with underestimates their own database. You have people in there who bought one policy six years ago, have had two children since, changed jobs, bought a bigger house and have never been asked about any of it. That is not a cold list. That is a group of people who already trusted you with something important.

New business from an existing client costs you a conversation. New business from a stranger costs you a marketing budget and six months. Work the first list until it is genuinely worked, then go looking.

• Sort your database by the date of the last real conversation, not the last transaction.
• Anybody past two years gets a review offer, not a newsletter.
• Anybody whose circumstances you know have changed gets a phone call.

2Pick a rhythm you can hold when you are flat out

The single biggest predictor of whether adviser marketing works is not quality. It is whether it survives a busy March. A monthly email that goes out every month for two years will beat a beautiful quarterly campaign that stops after the second one, every time.

Be honest about your own capacity and then go one notch easier. If monthly feels like a stretch, commit to six a year and land all six. Consistency is what turns you from somebody a client used once into the person they think of as their adviser.

3Lead with the question your client is actually asking

Advisers write about products. Clients think about problems. Nobody in New Zealand wakes up wanting to buy income protection. They wake up wondering what would happen to the mortgage if they could not work for six months, and they have never quite let themselves finish the thought.

Write to the thought they are already having. "What happens to your mortgage if you cannot work" gets read. "The benefits of income protection cover" does not. Same content, and only one of them sounds like it was written for a person.

4Use video, because it is the closest thing to being in the room

Advice is a trust business, and trust is carried by tone, face and manner far more than by words on a page. Video is the only format that carries any of that at scale. A client who has watched two minutes of you explaining something clearly arrives at the first meeting already half decided.

You do not need a studio. You need decent light, a quiet room, a phone at eye height and something worth saying. And you do not need to make it all yourself: a library of explainer videos with your branding on them does the educating, and your own face on a short introduction does the trust.

5Send people to a page you control, not a social post

A post on a social platform belongs to the platform. It disappears down the feed, the reach is whatever the algorithm feels like that week, and you cannot see who watched. A page on your own domain, with your branding, your details and a way to get in touch, is an asset you keep.

It also lets you measure something real. Views tell you the subject line worked. Clicks on your phone number tell you the content worked. The gap between the two is the most useful number in your marketing.

6Make the next step embarrassingly easy

Most adviser marketing ends with "get in touch" and no way to do it. On a phone, which is where the majority of your emails are read, a client who has to find your website, then your contact page, then type an email, is a client who has decided to do it later.

• Your phone number should be a tap, not a number to copy out.
• Give a text option. Plenty of people will text who would never ring.
• One question in a form beats six fields, every time.
• Say what happens next: "I will come back to you within a day" removes the hesitation.

7Ask for referrals properly, and ask on purpose

Referrals are the best business an adviser gets and almost nobody has a system for them. The moment to ask is not a quiet month. It is the day after you have done something visibly good for somebody: a claim paid, a refix that saved them real money, a structure that finally made sense to them.

Ask specifically. "Do you know anyone who needs insurance" gets nothing, because it asks the client to do the thinking. "You mentioned your sister just bought her first place. Would it help if I had a chat with her about cover?" gets a name.

8Keep marketing inside your licence, and know who checks it

This is where adviser marketing differs from every other small business in the country, and it is not a reason to do less of it. It is a reason to build it once, properly.

You are operating under a Financial Advice Provider licence, with duties under the Financial Markets Conduct Act and the Code of Professional Conduct for Financial Advice Services. Your marketing sits inside that. Separately, if you are emailing people, the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 wants consent, a clear sender identity and a working unsubscribe, and the Privacy Act 2020 governs the client information you are holding to do any of it.

• Educational content is far easier ground than anything that reads as a recommendation to a particular person.
• Keep your disclosure wording where it belongs and do not let a template quietly drop it.
• Keep a record of how somebody came onto your list and that they agreed to be there.
• Make unsubscribing genuinely easy. Somebody who leaves cleanly may still refer you.

9Measure the two numbers that change what you do

Advisers either measure nothing or drown in a dashboard. There are two numbers worth watching, and they are useful because each one tells you what to fix.

• Did they open or arrive? That is your subject line, your timing and whether they recognise your name.
• Did they do anything? A call, a reply, a form. That is whether the content was worth their time.

Two hundred views and no replies is a content problem. Twenty views and six calls is a distribution problem, and a very nice one to have, because it means you only need more people to see the thing that is already working.

10Put your marketing somewhere it happens without you

Everything above fails the same way: it depends on you remembering. The advisers who get compounding results are the ones who moved the work off their own memory and onto something that runs whether or not this week went to plan.

That might be a monthly slot in your calendar you treat as a client meeting. It might be a template so writing a newsletter is twenty minutes rather than an evening. It might be handing the sending to somebody else entirely. The mechanism matters less than the fact that it does not rely on a good week.

Where to start if you only do one thing

Pick the clients you have not spoken to in two years, send them one genuinely useful thing about a problem they actually have, and make it easy to reply. Do that again next month. That is the whole of it, and it beats a strategy document every time.

ShareThis.Video was built for exactly this: a library of explainer videos branded to you, a newsletter you can build in about five minutes, and landing pages on your own domain that tell you who watched and who picked up the phone. If the hard part for you is the rhythm rather than the ideas, that is the part we take off you.