Breaking News, Like Last Week's Market Meltdown, Challenges Advisors

Breaking news, like last Monday’s 1000-point Dow drop, challenges financial professionals to meet client expectations. Many advisors did nothing to communicate with clients and contacts. Some might argue that reacting to every dip sends the wrong message to clients. They are deluding themselves.

Your biggest clients, people in their 60s and 70s, are all watching TV. Most get news from a mobile device. The headlines last week could easily have made a nervous retirement investor fearful.

In a world where everyone expects service like Starbucks, not sending clients a message amid major market turmoil opens an opportunity for your competitor to fill the void.

This became crystal clear this past Friday, as I wrote an email newsletter for advisor clients after the market closed. It's for a weekly update we send out on behalf of about 225 RIAs every week. Putting the wild week in proper perspective, I wrote about the chart below provided by economist Fritz Meyer.

The chart highlights eight emotional collapses in stock prices since the near-meltdown of the global financial system commenced in September 2007. Over the eight years, four drops were milder than Monday’s 11.3% plunge from May’s all-time high, which was followed on Tuesday by another 2.3% loss, and then came Wonderful Wednesday, when stocks had their third-biggest one-day gain ever.  

It’s a simple way of illustrating your case for to clients for staying focused on the long-term picture and economic fundamentals in bad times. It’s a reminder of lessons learned in the last financial crisis, and its predecessors.

It does not matter whether you personally write the message. What matters is that you agree with it and that it is sent in the midst of the mayhem to quell emotions as the media focus on headline grabbing financial news with today’s bad news.

What Advisor Products is doing is not like any other marketing system because we have a content philosophy. We are not just producing generic articles and videos and slapping your name on them. Advisors using our content suite rely on broad diversification, Modern Portfolio Theory and are a fiduciary. We have a lot in common. The content we give aligns with your investment style practice. Content Advisor Products produces is not for everyone. It’s for prudent professionals, relying on Modern Portfolio Theory.

Advisor Products won’t ever be the biggest client communications service for financial advisors. But we’re the one for financial professionals. Our best clients are CFPs, CPAs, CIMAs, CPWAs, ChFCs, CLUs, and CFAs. That’s who we want to work with because we are too passionate to not do the right.

If you fit that description, please join with us. We have an easy way for you to build a totally customized marketing website integrating our content and your own content for $1000. You get all of our weekly email newsletters for your clients — including panic protection coverage — for $2000 a year. That’s with up to 2500 contacts on your email newsletter list, social network integration, and a quarterly lead generation campaign, support from our team, and a tech tool for generating your own lead-gen campaigns with your own content. This inbound marketing platform is second to none.

I don’t want to make it seem like I am doing this alone. Far from it! I have an amazingly dedicated group of smart people around me. We work closely with two programming teams located in different parts of Asia, a local developer team in Jericho, NY, and programmers who are employees plus designers and advisor content marketing specialists scattered around the country. After making websites for close to 20 years, we have completed retooling the platform we develop advisor websites on. I am starting to distribute a link enabling advisors to build their websites online with us using this tool. The process takes about two weeks and client are happy with the end result. If you want to try it, email me at