Shareholders Service Group, a custodian to newly-formed and small RIAs, has partnered with Advisor Products, providing  SSG’s 1,500 RIAs with a source of advisor websites and client portals for external communications.

SSG’s high proportion of “emerging RIAs” and younger advisors, are a good fit for Advisors Products. While any advisor who wants to use the most modern tools and techniques could easily use our solutions, Advisor Products tools are well-suited to a tech-savvy advisors, who often are younger than the average advisor.

AdvisorVault Client Portal's content widget is live! It enables advisors to stream financial planning content and their latest blog post alongside reports from seven portfolio performance systems, MoneyGuide Pro and Redtail CRM.

Advisors can personalize the content stream to each individual client. Retirees, pre-retirees, and business owners can see content focused on their personal financial issues.  We aim to change investor behavior by providing education content supporting fiduciaries at crucial moments. 

Advisor videos we're offering are totally different from anything else in the industry. Look at the 35-second video below, which is one of the 15 new FINRA-reviewed videos made available recently.

Making a video is hard, time-consuming and can be expensive. I've seen advisors more than once who are smart, articulate, and animated get in front of a camera and freeze.

A new batch of about 15 videos are available in the Advisor Video Library and this one addresses fears of another stock market bubble.

 

Interactive Brokers LLC, which provides trade execution and clearing services to advisors, recently named Advisor Products to its list of preferred providers for advisors. Interactive is known for its low its prices on trading.

A widget displaying account data from TD Ameritrade Institutional’s VeoOne Platform is now available in the AdvisorVault Client Portal.

Using TD Ameritrade Data Intelligently

Instead of providing a link on your website where clients log into TD Ameritrade Institutional’s advisor-client website to see account values, clients log in to your website’s client dashboard. It’s a client portal designed expressly to help advisors collaborate with clients.

If you optimize the location of client assets, you are different from the vast majority of advisors. Here's a way to explain that, literally, in your own voice.

The video illustrates complex ideas differentiating advisors who optimize portfolios for taxation. Posting this video in your own voice on YouTube and embedding it in a blog post on your website, or on a static marketing page on your website, concisely shows the value of your advice 24/7 in three minutes.

Advisor Video Library gives you a library of timely videos that you narrate. You read a FINRA-reviewed script we’ve written and record your voice reading using your telephone with our simple online app. Your voiceover is inserted in an educational video.

Using proprietary technology, your voice personalizes videos, and it’s really easy to do.

Facebook has yet again changed the way it allows applications post to your profile.

The social network has updated its interface and it changed the permissions that allows apps like ours to post content to your profile. Facebook now also requires a review of apps like ours to ensure it meets their terms of use.

Redtail CRM, one of the most popular CRM systems financial advisors, was released recently on advisor websites that use the AdvisorVault Client Portal.

Integration of Redtail into advisor client portals increases an advisor’s efficiency enormously. It opens a new channel of communication from your CRM to your clients where none existed before.

Advisor Products has released a beta version of Advisor Video Library, an online app that makes it easy for any advisor to provide FINRA-reviewed videos personalized with their voice and branding.

The 15 timely videos we've added to the Advisor Video Library feature graphics and scripts created by Advisor Products. You record a voiceover using our proprietary app. It's automatically embedded in the video, along with your logo, contact information and a map of your local area.  You can post the videos on your YouTube channel (or we can do that for you).

The vast majority of advisor websites are developed with little forethought and rarely vital to the business of a professional. But advisor websites can and should be the most important app in your practice! It is your interface with the outside world!

Shrill headlines scream fear for roboadvisors, but independent financial professionals must embrace the Web.

We, the people of Advisor Products Inc., are launching a solution automating ongoing financial planning advice supervised by financial professionals — CFPs, CPAs, CIMAs, CPWAs, CFAs, ChFCs, CLUs, and EAs.

The Financial Advisor Communication System (FACS), a client portal for advisors, now integrates with Redtail CRM.

The integration of Redtail CRM for advisors with the Advisor Products client portal platform enables advisors to scale their businesses and provide better service to clients. When you assign clients tasks from Redtail, it triggers an email to the client telling him to log into his client portal.

Here’s a one-minute clip from our new Video For Independent Advisers Who Are  Fiduciaries. It highlights key factors of your unique value proposition in four innovative ways:

1. Personal Narration. Using a Web app we’ve developed, you narrate a FINRA-reviewed script we provide. The words are displayed slide by slide and you record using your computer microphone.
2. Fritz Meyer Research.  The video reports on research independent economist Fritz Meyer, who has documented the track record of Wall Street’s top strategists from 2007 to 2014, as published in Barron’s annually in the venerable weekly’s “Outlook” cover story. According to Meyer, a former investment strategist at one of the world’s largest investment companies, any investor who followed the consensus advice of the Barron’s Wall Street strategists’ industry-sector picks annually would have performed disastrously relative to buying and holding the S&P 500.
3. Fiduciary. The video explains the benefits of working with a fiduciary.
4. Powerful Video. Economic research lends its to graphical display, and this video includes graphical cues inserted to make the information easy to understand. While you explain your fiduciary obligations, an aerial view pans New York Harbor at night for a 360s° close-up of the Statue of Liberty. While you narrate a script contrasting your practice with a Wall Street’s broker's, viewers see the skeletal remains of the head of a bull amid the scorched earth of Death Valley, California.

For a fiduciary, this video voices a clear response to people who don’t know how you are different from Wall Street’s herds. This campaign breaks new ground in independent advisor marketing by making a professional video easy to personalize and distributing it utilizing Advisor Products' email marketing integration with Constant Contact. It equalizes TV ads and media influence of Wall Street.

Advisor Products and Constant Contact are now powering video email newsletter campaigns for advisors with educational FINRA-reviewed scripts and slides derived from economist Fritz Meyer’s research. For $400 a quarter (one-year commitment), API-CTCT will:

• Provide you a three-minute FINRA-reviewed video script
• Record you over the phone reading the script
• Add your narration to graphic investment news update videos
• Post your video to your YouTube Channel
• Write a 300 world article about the economy related to the video
• Layout article, embed your video, and post it to your blog
• Write, design, and brand an email campaign featuring your video
• Upload your contact list to Constant Contact
• Send the email campaign to your contact list
• Review your analytics with you to improve results every quarter

 

The main components of a powerful new client portal for financial professionals is now live on production servers. It's integrated with:

Constant Contact (CTCT), a world leader in online marketing tools, shared a booth with Advisor Products at Schwab IMPACT 2014, and we used the occasion to launch a concierge marketing service for financial advisors.

From the left to right: Steve Gordonson, CTO of Advisor Products since 1997; Trevor Moore, a financial advisor marketing consultant at API; Tim McNamara, head of sales for North America and Europe at Constant Contact; and Mindy Cohen, a Constant Contact specialist in financial advisor marketing.

Advisor Products and Constant Contact have teamed up to provide financial professionals a concierge marketing service.

• Outsource all your marketing to pros
• High-touch, high-tech service
• Timely educational campaigns monthly
• Analytics to measure return on every marketing dollar you spend
• A marketing coach dedicated to your success
• Executed by a Constant Contact Master Certified Solutions Provider

With TV, social media, and financial news portals relentlessly undermining advisor relationships and bombarding investors with a confusing cacophony of wealth management tips, regularly reinforcing good investor behavior is the right thing to do for your clients, and it also happens to be the smart thing to do for yourself.

So we’ve literally made it effortless for advisors to reinforce good behavior once a week. We’ve added a new feature to the weekly update email that allows advisors  to send their contacts a message every Friday at 6 p.m. ET that gently reinforces best practices that are aligned with a financial professional's perspective. The new version of the weekly update includes two links to leading financial news sites, as always, but now the third link in the update is an email campaign integrated with advisor websites.

Since January, we have been developing a new client portal for advisors.

The new client portal is built into AdvisorVault, which is used by hundreds of RIAs. AdvisorVault is a highly customized version of Microsoft SharePoint explicitly designed to meet the needs of financial advice professionals.

The integration of Advisor Products content with Constant Contact is boosting advisor email campaign open rates by nearly 100% over the average advisor's open rate, according to data from users.

Advisor Products integrates Constant Contact’s email marketing tools and analytics into financial advisor websites, and the first users of the integrated app provided their email “key performance indicators,” which are tracked in Constant Contact.

In mid-February 2014, Tim McNamara, who heads sales at Constant Contact, the world leader in online marketing, called Steve Gordonson, a partner in Advisor Products. Since then, we’ve worked intensely with the leadership team at Constant Contact, including Alec Stern, the sole co-founder of Constant Contact still working at the company.  The partnership establishes a way for advisors to get email campaign open rates nearly 100% higher than the average financial advisor using Constant Contact. [caption id="attachment_1861" align="aligncenter" width="483"]Advisor Products turns professional education content from Advisors4Advisors into email newsletters, enabling optimal use of Constant Contact for list management and analytics.[/caption]

Tim had spent five years in business development and operations at  Schwab and then 10 years as an advisor at UBS, Morgan Stanley and Wachovia.  He's been an internet entrepreneur, having built the nation's first online divorce platform. A year ago, Tim became the head of business development for North America and Latin America at Constant Contact.

Email marketing is the most effective marketing tool available to financial advisors but not all email marketing platforms perform the same. Fortunately, performance measurement of the efficacy of email marketing platforms comes down to a few well-defined key performance indicators—email open-rates, click-throughs, delivery rates, and adoption of campaign-tracking technology.

Email newsletters are enjoying a renaissance and remain the most effective marketing tool available to financial advisors.

“Email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march,” says media columnist David Carr in  The New York Times. “Bloomberg, Fast Company, The New York Times, Politico and many other news organizations are finding that they can grab attention — and readers — in the inbox.”

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:

Advisor Products is about to launch a new email campaign on our financial advisor communication system (FACS).

The campaign implements a reliable Internet marketing technique to provide financial advisors with a marketing funnel. Anecdotally, we know it will increase RIA AUM.

Advisor Products recently released a new open-source continent management system for advisor websites. It’s a big improvement over AdvisorSites BackOffice and we are offering a huge discount if you upgrade by February 28.

The new system, the Financial Advisor Marketing Dashboard (FAMD), does a lot more than manage a website. FAMD integrates your social networks, email newsletter, client portal, and content marketing strategy with your website. FAMD enables you to develop website leveraging the newest open-source technology.

Wall Street’s poor track record for forecasting the best and worst industry sectors is the subject of a new content marketing campaign created by Advisor Products for independent financial professionals.

The campaign is based on a study spanning nine years by economist Fritz Meyer, who has meticulously documented the investment results of sector forecasts made annually by 10 top Wall Street strategists in a Barron’s cover story since 2005. Meyer’s research shows how Wall Street’s sector bets have been a dismal failure.

Financial advisors who use Constant Contact or MailChimp can now easily import Advisor Products content into email newsletters. Our Financial Advisor Content Marketing System is now integrated with Constant Contact And MailChimp.

Advisor Products makes educational articles and videos that wealthy investors need to know about. Now, advisors can automatically populate emails newsletters built using Constant Contact or MailChimp with FINRA-reviewed content from Advisor Products.

Financial advisors who use Constant Contact or MailChimp can now easily import Advisor Products content into email newsletters. Our Financial Advisor Content Marketing System is now integrated with Constant Contact And MailChimp.

 

Using our WordPress plugin for financial advisor websites, you can now add The Financial Advisor Content Marketing System to any WordPress website.

If you’re using an up-to-date version of WordPress (3.6 or higher), you can add The Advisor Content Marketing System to your WordPress website for free.

Advisor websites become a lead-generation tool when integrated with our Financial Advisor Social Media Content Stream.

Here's how to configure the social media dashboard for advisor websites with your Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter accounts.



Advisor Products has been making financial advisor websites since 1997, and our focus on providing  content has always differentiated us from other website vendors targeting RIAs and financial planners.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, we've improved our content by collaborating with the best minds in the financial advice profession, and we have cracked the content marketing problem faced by RIAs and financial planners. How?

In October 2008, I started an advisor education effort that has evolved into an online continuing professional education portal called Advisors4Advisors. A4A produces online educational presentations that a CFP, CIMA, and CPWA can view anytime and receive continuing education credit 24/7 for viewing. (We just were recently approved as CPE credit sponsor for CPAs attending our live webinars.)

Point is, A4A gives financial advice professionals 24/7 access to the best minds in the profession, and then Advisor Products converts their ideas into content that educates clients of advisors. Advisor Products creates articles and videos about financial planning for the ultra-wealthy that get posted to advisor websites, and you can choose which articles appear on your website using the AdvisorSites BackOffice content management system (CMS).

That's where our social media dashboard for advisor websites comes into play. With every article and video we produce for advisor websites, we create social media status updates that can be personalized by you and scheduled for posting on your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter accounts. By editing the 140-character we provide you to include your local- and target-market keywords, you improve your search engine results and -- more importantly -- target your social connections with intelligent financial planning ideas for wealthy families.

The platform costs $2,337 annually and is called AdvisorSites Platinum. If you only want our content and don't need our secure client portal, website archiving, and service from our technicians,  then you can add our content to your website for just $1,337 annually.

Now for the clincher, the new piece of this content marketing system, which completes the system: a lead-generation module that turns advisor websites into a content marketing machine. The lead generation module provides your social connections with in-depth special reports that visitors to your website must sign in to view. They must sign in by providing you their email address and, if you want, a phone number, to view your special reports.

Advisor Products has been producing websites since 1997 and we’ve had to be innovative to survive and thrive as the Web has evolved, but it’s not been easy always. Now, I am happy to report, I think we’ve got social media marketing nailed. Here below is a detailed explanation of what we’re doing along with some context for understanding our solution.



Early Adoption By Advisors. In the first wave of social media adoption by financial advisors, which began about four years ago, BDs led adoption by implementing compliance technology solutions with little regard to content. They flopped, according to executives at several large BDs. In that initial effort, a few social media marketing companies offered proxy software. An advisor would not log in to LinkedIn or Facebook to interact with their network. Instead, you would log into their applications, which were stripped down versions of the social networks. It was impractical because the apps advisors would use worked on desktops but often did not work on all the different mobile browsers, so you could not tweet from your smartphone.

The early solutions came from compliance apps or from companies whose founders were technology experts. They were not experts in financial planning. After selling the BDs on their solutions, these companies realized they were really in the content business. They've struggled to produce content. But they don’t know what a defective grantor trust is or why many wealthy individuals are asking judges to bust trusts created just five or 10 years ago. Content marketing, funny enough, depends ultimately on valuable content. Check out the two-minute video below to see a sample of client content for RIAs advising ultra-high net-worth individuals (UHNWIs).



Second Wave of Adoption Brings RIAs. A second wave is now under way in which advisor adoption of social media is driven by content, and now RIAs as well as BDs are adopting social media marketing. RIAs are hiring consultants to produce content, and the BDs are working with compliance technology companies and marketing companies. But based on my conversations with advisors and BD executives, neither of these efforts are working out very well. Why? It’s rare to find a consultant with the skills needed to do the job right.

Effective Content Marketing For Advisors. To produce effective content on the Web for advisors, a consultant must master three unrelated fields:

1. Writing


2. Search engine optimization


3. Financial planning

Finding a writer is easy. Finding a writer who knows about search engine optimization is a bit more difficult. Finding a writer who knows SEO and understands the financial advice business is very difficult.

Meanwhile, advisors are neither writers nor SEO experts. So they have no idea what they’re being sold. Consequently, advisors are often hiring consultants that know a lot about financial planning but little about SEO or SEO consultants that know very little about financial planning. I’m sure most of these consultants are good people who are trying to do their best. But they don’t know what they don’t know. Plus, they're local. You can often meet with them, and that's nice. But advisors wind up getting sold on content marketing solutions with big holes strategically or technologically.

Advisors Get Snookered. Where advisors fail in content marketing is because no one wants to read the information they're sending. Consultants are telling advisors that the only way to succeed in social media is by producing content. Yes, that’s true. You need to create content. But the content can’t be about nonsense. It must be timely and incisive. If you are not creating content people respond to, you’re wasting your time and your prospects'. Everyone is bombarded with a stream filled of unimportant ideas. Adding to the cacophony does not differentiate you. To digress, most writers don’t know financial planning or the financial advice business, and can’t be expected to write about the topics your high-net-worth target clients care about. People who write for a living generally don’t have a lot of money. That's why they're called "starving writers!" They’re writing about financial problems they've not experienced. They’re probably not reading The Economist every week and they probably don’t know that many investors are currently unhappy because their advisors diversified globally at a moment when the U.S. stock market has outperformed the rest of the world’s regions by a wide margin for several years. On the other hand, if you can fluently provide news for ultra-high-net-worth investors--uncommonly smart educational news content UNHWIs can't find elsewhere, then you are differentiating yourself. If your writing consultant could provide that kind of content, they would not be a writing blog posts for $100. An advisor I know, who is spending a $2,000 a month on content marketing--more than 10 times what Advisor Products charges for its top content package--told me he knows his content is "crappy."

Content Need Not Be Original. A big misconception is that you have to create the content or hire a writer to produce valuable content. That’s just not true. Last month’s Journal of Financial Planning contained an article written by a marketing consultant who stated as a fact that "canned" content solutions--a pejorative term for describing content for advisor clients not written by the advisor or private labeled by many advisors--do not work. But she provided no evidence, and she’s wrong. Consultants are biased. Telling advisors that all their content needs to be original supports their business purpose. The consultants get paid to write original content. Or maybe they simply don’t know any better because they've bias has prevented them from examining how syndicated content can be a more cost-effective and powerful solution. Who knows what's in their hearts? But the truth is your clients and prospects don’t care whether you write your own content or link to The Wall Street Journal to give them the valuable ideas they need to know about. Clients and prospects—your social media connections and email subscribers—simply want authoritative, informative, and easy to consume content about wealth management, and don't care if you write it or not. "Canned" content can be used to accomplish the same goals as hiring a writer who interviews you and writes for you, but at a fraction of the cost.

Tweeting Content You Did Not Write. Some advisors tweet articles written from authoritative publications and that’s an okay way to engage social network connections, but it has a couple of serious flaws. First, linking to articles and videos written by others drives traffic to those publications instead of your website, where you can market to your connections and email newsletter subscribers. Linking to newspapers, magazines, and mutual fund companies can, in fact, undermine your message, if that's the only content you provide. Newspapers and magazines are in the business of empowering investors to manage their money without an advisor. They’re not written from an advisor’s point of view. And while the finest fund companies, like DFA, might provide excellent content and research, their videos and articles trumpet their products and not your brand. Their materials are also not intended for clients and are produced for advisors.

What Advisor Products Is Doing. Advisors need authoritative, easy-to-consume content trumpeting their brands that reflects their perspective. So Advisor Products creates authoritative content that can be branded by you. We make it effortless for you to use that content to bring your social network connections to your website. Tweeting a link to an article that is authoritative, informative, and easy to read and that is posted to your website is a great way to communicate with prospects and clients--even though the article or video is not produced by you. So Advisor Products has been creating content in collaboration with thought leaders in the profession: Bob Keebler, an expert on estate and income tax planning; Prof. Craig Israelsen, an expert on applying modern portfolio theory to low-expense portfolios, and Fritz Meyer, an economist and investment strategist. Our content is based on in-depth analysis by the best minds in the profession, experts in specific areas of wealth management.

Social Networking Must Be Easy For Advisors. Content marketing using social networks must be very easy or effortless, or the vast majority of advisors won’t do it. Since content marketing is unlikely to bring immediate results, few advisors have the discipline and patience to make the long-term commitment necessary to and put the time into writing articles and posting status updates. I love this stuff and can go for days without offering a tweet when I'm busy. Advisors need to be able to get their names and ideas across to their social media connections with little effort. Most RIAs do not have the staff to devote or the time to tweet, write blog posts, and make videos and slide shows. Most advisors need a system that will be on auto-pilot, where they do almost nothing. We’ve got that.


 

How It Works. FINRA-reviewed articles and videos that we create are in a database that advisors access using the AdvisorSites BackOffice, our own content management system. You simply click on a check box when you want a story to appear on your website. Then, you use our social media dashboard to send out status updates about each articles posted to your website. We build sites on Joomla, an open-source content management system that we've integrated with our content distribution systems, and we develop sites on a proprietary .NET content management system for advisors affiliated with BDs and that allows pre-review of content by a compliance department.

Social Media Marketing Integrated And Lead Generation With Advisor Websites. The solution Advisor Products has developed integrates three crucial components in online marketing for advisors: high-value articles and videos about wealth management, status updates, and lead generation. We write and send for FINRA review, three status updates (tweets) for each article or video we produce for your website. The tweets can be posted automatically to appear in your profile and on your social network connections’ news stream on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The tweets link back to the articles on your website. This solution did not come about overnight. It was built incrementally over many years. But now I am happy to report that we have it nailed. I believe we've cracked the code for mass personalization of quality content marketing campaigns for advisors to UHNWIs.



Lead generation. “Call to action” graphics on your website invite visitors—your social media connections and email-newsletter subscribers—to download a video, slide show or article and requiring they submit an email address and phone number, which gets emailed to you automatically and becomes a lead. This enables advisors to execute content marketing campaigns. The image directly above shows how call-to-action graphics (CTAs) can be placed on a site. The graphics on every page of your site prominently feature colorful Windows-style tiles linking to special reports for your target market. The uncommon knowledge conveyed in these educational videos generates leads. When you post a tweet about retirement income planning that one of your social connections wants to view, they click on the link in the tweet on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, which takes them to your website. At your site, your visitors see a graphic off to the side or on the bottom of the page that might say, “Special Retirement Income Report,” which they can view by providing their contact information. When visitors to your site click on a call to action graphic, it displays the special report only if they provide their email address and phone. They become leads for you. The snippets from a retirement income special report is embedded at the top of tbs post. Below is another special report about diversification and 2Q13 stock performance.

Personalization. All of components are personalized. The tweets are on your social profile. The articles and videos are on your website under your brand. The special reports are branded to you as well with your logo and firm name and contact information. If you want to do a little bit of work, you can append the status updates we have written with your keywords. For example, we may write a tweet, “10 ways retirement income investing is different in 2014.”  You can append it to say, “10 ways retirement income investing is different in 2014 for doctors in North Carolina.” That will help your search engine rankings is doctors in North Carolina is your target market. You can pick your articles and tweets once a week or once a month in 10 or 15 minutes, append the tweets with your keywords and schedule them to go out on specific days and times. You have a personalized, social media marketing program with some of the best client education content available anywhere.



 

Blog writing. If you want to take things to the next level and invest in writing a blog, then you’re going to have more success with search engine optimization. That is, if you fill your blog with the keywords people are likely to use to search topics you advise on, then you’ll be helping people find you who are looking for solutions you provide. By combining keywords about wealth management niches with local keywords about your community, you increase the likelihood local people will find you. Often the topics are not about estate planning or wealth management. For example, I am working with an advisor now who is located in an area dominated by golf courses and country clubs. So we’re writing posts about the long term cost of golf club membership and listing he annual and up-front cost of the different country clubs in the small towns with the wealthiest residents. If you optimize your website and do not write a blog, your website still needs to be optimized for your keywords and you still need to optimize your title tags, metadata and perform other on-page SEO tasks, but your chances of success in using search engines to enable to find you are much lower than if you post articles with you keywords regularly.

 

RIA content marketing requires content that long-term investors and financial planning clients value.

The content Advisor Products produces in collaboration with economist Fritz Meyer helps investment advice professionals retain clients by reinforcing a long-term perspective on investing in content updated monthly. By applying a long-term perspective to news affecting the markets currently, we help you do what's best for clients and your practice. In addition, the content can be used for marketing. We have sophisticated tools for using our content on your website, social networks, and email newsletters, which enables you to generate leads.

Advisor Products now offers four ways for advisors to leverage content from economist Fritz Meyer:


-- PowerPoint Slides For DIYers. You get all of Fritz Meyer’s PPT slides every month--more than 100 slides a month plus a “highlights” version with just 15 slides. You can post some of the slides to your website or use them in client meetings, newsletters, and social media. No voiceover is included. This is for DIYers leveraging Fritz’s research to make their own content. $300 annually.

-- Content Marketing System. AdvisorSites Platinum gives you get a turnkey content marketing system for advisor websites that is updated monthly with investment news based on Fritz Meyer's analysis. Articles, videos and social status updates based Fritz Meyer's investment ideas are provided for your website along with and Bob Keebler's financial planning and tax research. Platinum also includes a Social Media Dashboard, website archiving, and much more.

-- Quarterly Market Summary. Fritz writes a comprehensive 1500- to 2000-word summary about the markets and the economy that is edited by Andrew Gluck and provided as a 10-page Word document and a PowerPoint slide presentation. 

-- Investment Perspectives Quarterly Videos. A quarterly 15-minute video presentation in which Fritz walks clients through economic events and explains investment performance.

In preparing for a presentation on financial advisor content marketing yesterday, my worst suspicions about how advisors are getting ripped off were proven true.

I began my research by opening up LinkedIn and looking at the stream of news generated by my connections. On LinkedIn, you get a stream of updates about new connections people made, changes to their profiles, and status updates. Status updates are 140-character "tweets" linking your connections to an article, video or other valuable content. The 140-character updates are a standard on social networks and you can send these updates on Twitter and Facebook as well as LinkedIn. I've used status updates for years to market my work and have about 2,000 advisor connections--95% of whom connected to me to get my news feed about practice management.

To keep my research honest, I went to the very first status update in my news LinkedIn stream that was posted by an advisor and clicked on it because it had a sexy headline. What unfolded was an absurd proof of how advisors are being ripped off by vendors spewing nonsense about social media and content marketing.

 

 

Advisors who are do-it-yourselfers have been around for years. Becoming an independent advisor -- joining a new profession -- naturally attracts entrepreneurs, DIYers who like things done their way. However, in observing independent advisors over the past 30years, I have seen the focus of DIYers shift dramatically

Five or 10 years ago, a DIYer-advisor would outsource administrative and perhaps technology tasks. Today, the range of tasks advisors outsource has grown wider, as technology improvements made outsourcing more economical. Today, advisors outsource the writing of financial plans as well as investment research and trading, relying on TAMPs, UMAs and separate account managers.

Today, DIYers focus on marketing.  A growing number of advisors have come to realize that they can more safely outsource their style of investing, financial-plan writing and even tax management, but they cannot outsource creation of their public voice. Consequently, today's DIYers among advisors are writing blogs, making videos, and creating their own Web marketing campaigns. They suddenly seem to understand the value of communicating about their niches.

They're suddenly trying to figure out how to regularly talk to a very specific audience. They're suddenly trying to figure out how to create meaningful Web content focused on their target markets. All this is great news for Advisor Products because our content creation system definitely helps advisors succeed at all this.

What's incredibly ironic, however, is that the first wealth managers to figure out that a financial advisor content stream can benefit them are DIYers.

Today's DIYers among advisors are early adopters of content marketing. And in trying to create their own content, they are the first ones outsourcing to content partners. I'll have more to say about the importance and content role of content partners another time. For now, here's a short quiz to help you figure out if you’re a DIYer advisor? If you do seven of these 10 things, you’re a DIY advisor.

1. You write a blog post optimized for search engines at least twice a month


2. You set up your own channel on YouTube


3. You own professional video lighting


4. Your firm reconciles account data daily


5. You’ve created three Slidecasts or more


6. You test your backups twice a year


7. You registered your firm on Google Places


8. You backup your computer at least weekly


9. You use Camtasia Studio 8


10. You host webinars monthly

Creating your own voice by blogging and participating on social media is time consuming and not for everyone. So DIYers have a distinct advantage. If you’re not a DIYer, or if you are a DIYer who wants to augment your voice with intelligent content cleverly packaged in a way for you to make it your own, check out our social media content stream below.