The entire Advisor Products team is working hard to achieve an ambitious set of goals that will transform the way financial advisors communicate.
Here’s an update on our work at Advisor Products in launching the Financial Advisor Communications System:
Clients First. We’ve launched a campaign to upgrade subscribers to the new Advisor Products platform for advisor websites. Before marketing Financial Advisor Communication System anywhere else, we are calling all of our clients to tell them about the Financial Advisor Communications System. Actually, our new and generous strategic partner, Constant Contact, is calling Advisor Products' clients. In the calls, you'll learn about a limited-time offer of $1,000 savings on an upgrade to this new platform for advisor websites. If you are a current subscriber to the Advisor Products email newsletter service, please expect a call from a Constant Contact coach. Your coach is responsible for making you use the integrated Constant Contact-Advisor Products system for working with UHNWIs. You will be trained on how to use Advisor Products articles, videos, calls to action, and status updates with your clients, prospects, and referrals sources while leveraging Constant Contact’s powerful email marketing technology and analytics and enabling you to conduct measurable marketing campaigns that are sure to raise AUM over the long haul. Embedded below is a video about the upgrade offer. Please let me know if you want to be contacted.
Eureka! I’ve come to understand clearly only lately that every 100 people you connect with represents “X% of annual growth in AUM” at an RIA. How much exactly is “X” worth? It depends on whether you ever see the contact, whether you complement Advisor Products content with your own blog posts, and how well you personally connect with people. Anecdotally, we know from users that the system works very well over the long term. With Constant Contact;s, we are working to improve the efficacy in measurable ways. I'm looking for the optimal way to track AUM of our users. Let me know if you have an idea.
What is FACS? Financial Advisor Communications System is a scalable content marketing system based on the proposition that people do care about content. Clients and prospects—your social media connections and email subscribers—need authoritative, informative, and easy-to-consume wealth management news, and they don’t care whether their advisors writes it or not. Since our content is based on ideas from Robert Keebler, Fritz Meyer, and other leading thinkers who speak at the Advisors4Advisors weekly professional education webinar series, our content is packed with important ideas for UHNWIs.
Campaign Basics. Each campaign is comprised of: (1) tweets that link your social network connections to (2) an article on your website, and (3) allow them to sign up for your email newsletter. Once signed up, you begin a long-term conversation with each contact using FACS.
Great “Canned” Content. While “canned” content has been derided by marketing consultants in the financial advisor trade press and by competitors selling advisor websites, these individuals are wrong and misstating facts. Canned content, which is a pejorative way of describing the educational content for UHWNIs that Advisor Products provides, can accomplish the same goals as paying a writer by the hour to interview you and write up your financial wisdom as a blog post, but at a fraction of the cost and with more authoritative information.
Constant Contact-Advisor Products Partnership. Advisor Products recently signed a strategic partnership agreement with Constant Contact. CTCT has not formally announced the partnership. It is publicly held and it must comply with Reg FD. That does not preclude me from telling you what's happening at Advisor Products. CTCT is going to help me train advisors on best practices in email marketing. CTCT is telling me that Advisor Products knows content marketing for financial advisors better than anyone, and they want to help more advisors utilize my content with CTCT’s email marketing technology, training, and personal coaching program. While I am a pimple on the "tookis" of CTCT, it's a dream come to true for me to have validation from the best email marketing company on the planet.
Financial Advisor CTAs. In marketing jargon, FACS adds “calls to action” (CTAs) to advisor websites. A CTA is a graphic. It invites visitors to your website — your social connections, email-newsletter subscribers, and other people who come to your website as a result of a search — to view a video, but requiring an email address to subscribe.
How FACS Generates AUM. A page is created on your website to subscribe to your e-newsletter. You add new potential clients and referral sources to your subscriber list as needed, and anyone visiting your site can also subscribe. You manage your contact list in Constant Contact and can track everything they’ve ever clicked on that you’ve sent them. Since subscribers can unsubscribe anytime, only people in tune with your message stay. It’s a self selecting process. These leads might take years to close. It’s wise to think of them as long-term relationships. Assuming you made a good first impression on someone when you met them — at a cocktail party, local event, or that someone was referred by a friend. Eventually, these fleeting contacts become clients, sometimes years after they first started receiving your email newsletter, simply because you have provided them with years of financial insights. With Constant Contact coaches guiding you toward best practices in distributing Advisor Products content for UHNWIs, this simple program will grow your RIA’s AUM and can be augmented with your own original SEO blog content make to even more powerful.
Using FACS With Constant Contact. FACS enables financial advisors to conduct content marketing campaigns, send weekly market updates automatically, and conduct social campaigns. The image directly above shows how call-to-action graphics (CTAs) can be placed on a site. Every page of your site prominently features a banner linked to a video with ideas for UHNWIs. The uncommon knowledge conveyed makes contacts value your informational touches. While Advisor Products has offered an email newsletter since September 2001, it did not enable advisors to manage their list as effectively and its analytics did not allow for reports showing you who opened which emails. By bundling Constant Contact we are able to harness its power for engaging users. You will use this system. With Constant Coaches exhorting you to implement email marketing best practices in distributing Advisor Products content for UHNWIs, you will grow AUM.
Nut and Bolts. When you use our system to post a 140-character status update, it gets displayed on your profile for all your connections to see on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. When a person in your social network wants to know more about a topic in your status update, they click on the link in the update. That takes them to an article on your website with more information (and sometimes a short video) about the topic mentioned in your 140-character update. Off to the side or on the bottom of most pages of your website page are banner ads that we insert and that are updated automatically inviting visitors to your website get even more information about the very topic that brought them to your website. It could be a “Retirement Income Report” based on research by Craig Israelsen or Manish Malhotra, or Wade Pfau, or it could be an estate planning update based on Bob Keebler educational content about taxation of UHNWIs, or the monthly assessment of corporate earnings and LEIs by economist Fritz Meyer. Point is, it is great content that smart people with money value. So they subscribe to your email newsletter and eventually, one day, a group of these individuals become clients. How many? That depends largely on you and your effort to reach out to them periodically to complement our effort on your behalf.