Although a good advertising service can be crucial to the success of your financial planning venture, you can't leave every marketing task to the advertising service, especially when you can just as easily get your customers to do it. Referrals and word-of-mouth advertising will always be valuable because people are more likely to trust the opinions of their friends who've used their services than they are to trust an ad they see on TV. Here are five ways you can get your customers involved in marketing.

1. Offer a referral bonus

A referral bonus is one of the best ways to motivate customers to talk about you to their friends and family (coupled with great service that's worth talking about, of course). General practice is to offer a "bonus" to both the referrer and the referee. It's wise to offer the bonus in the form of a coupon or discount rather than as cash to weed out people who are just looking for free cash rather than financial planning. 

2. Offer free resources

Offering added value, such as free financial self-help tips and more info about other financial issues, is another way to get your customers to talk about you to their friends. They might point friends who need sound financial advice towards your resources, which could lead to future sales.

3. Keep a helpful blog

Blogs are not only a great way to bring traffic to your website, they can also help establish your authority as a financial planning expert. And more importantly, they're easy to share. Your current customers can recommend you remotely by sharing your blog posts on social media websites with almost no effort at all.

4. Give customers incentives to share on social media

In addition to making it easy to mention you to friends and share your content, you can make customers even more likely to share by giving them some kind of incentive. Even a points system that allows them to save up for a 10% off coupon when they share your posts online can be a very effective means of distributing your content on social media for maximum exposure.

These four tips can help you increase your customer base organically through word-of-mouth advertising, referrals, and social media marketing that you can make happen with practically no effort. A little judicious planning and setup can turn your customer base into a great supplement to the advertising services you currently use.