Abbey Minogue: stop perfecting your marketing and start doing it

The challenge of marketing for financial advisers is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of action.

Abbey Minogue, account director at Capital Outcomes, works with advice firms across the country and sees the same pattern repeat itself. Practices spend months planning, refining, and debating their marketing approach before doing anything at all. By the time they feel ready, momentum has stalled and the opportunity has moved on.

Her view is direct: stop waiting for perfect, take action.

The boardroom problem

“I see quite often people spend too much time trying to say look at the whole marketing funnel and go, we’ve got to perfect everything and have it perfect before we start going out there,” Minogue says. “But then you’ve wasted three months just kind of sitting in the boardroom going through your ideas.”

For advice practices, those three months of inaction are not neutral. They are three months of potential referrals not converting, three months of prospective clients not finding you, and three months of competitors who did make a start building visibility that you are not.

The perfectionism trap is particularly acute in professional services. Advisers are trained to be precise, thorough, and careful. Those instincts serve clients well. But on the marketing side, these do not always lead to great results.

Own one channel, own it completely

When Minogue encourages practices to move, her advice is to resist the urge to be everywhere at once.

“Even if you go, OK, this is one channel and we’re going to absolutely own it, it’s better to absolutely own that one channel and do that really well than to half-heartedly do five different ones,” she says.

That principle runs on the opposite of how many practices approach marketing. The instinct is to cast the net wide: LinkedIn, email newsletters, events, referral programs, social media, and a website refresh all running simultaneously. The result is that nothing gets the attention it needs to work.

Marketing in advice is a long game. A half-hearted presence across five channels delivers less than a committed, consistent presence on one. The practices that build meaningful marketing traction are the ones that pick a channel, master it, and stay with it long enough to see results.

80 per cent is enough to start

The corollary to Minogue’s start-now philosophy is a calibrated view of what good enough actually looks like.

“My piece of advice would be don’t waste too much time trying to have it absolutely perfect,” she says. “If it’s 80 per cent there, go out there, keep finishing it as you go because it’s more important to have a presence than to be 100 per cent looking sleek.”

This is a meaningful reframe for practices that associate professional credibility with polish. A website that is 80 per cent complete and live is doing more work than a perfect website still sitting in a staging environment. A LinkedIn post that is honest and direct is reaching people that a carefully crafted, never-published piece of content is not.

Presence is the prerequisite for everything else. There is no point in refining a message that no one has seen yet.

The adviser shortage is the opportunity

Underpinning Minogue’s marketing philosophy is a clear-eyed observation about the Australian advice landscape.

“There are so many Australians looking for advice and there is a shrinking pool of advisers to give it,” she says.

The pool of qualified advisers has contracted in recent years. The demand for quality advice has not. For practices, that imbalance is not just a sector-wide challenge. It is a strong case for investing in marketing for financial advisers. Practices that communicate clearly about who they are, what they stand for, and who they serve are not competing for a finite pool of prospective clients. They are positioning themselves to capture demand that has nowhere else to go.

The practices that benefit most from that dynamic are not necessarily the largest or the longest-established. They are the ones that have been deliberate about their positioning, consistent in their messaging, and willing to start before everything is perfect.

Marketing for financial advisers: start now

Minogue’s framework is not complicated: identify one channel, build it, commit to it, start even if the output is not yet where you want it to be, then refine as you go.

The alternative is another quarter of planning that never becomes doing.

In a market where demand for advice is outpacing supply, the practices that show up consistently and authentically are the ones that will capture it. The right moment to invest in brand and marketing is not when everything is ready. It is now.