Advisolocity a Transformational Distribution Resource Needs Your Help

On February 17, 2010, In Uncategorized, By Bruce

By:  D. Bruce Johnston, President, DBJ Associates

Over the past year, we have talked about the transformations taking place in investment distribution. 

I am certain you are viewing first-hand one of the major changes in wealth management – the shift of resources from traditional marketing to social media and networking. 

This resource shift is sure to accelerate as marketers and compliance officers now find common agreement. The release of FINRA’s 10-06 ruling has removed the last impediment to utilizing the cost-efficiencies and creativity of social media programs. A new social media marketing compliance lore will soon be coming into existence.

I’m pleased to announce that my colleagues and I are almost ready to launch our new site – Advisolocity.

Advisolocity is a transformational distribution resource designed for this present moment. Advisolocity – which stands for advisor velocity – is a collaboration of creative marketers, investment distributors, as well as social media and technology specialists.

Advisolocity is dedicated to supporting the business development efforts of advisors, money managers and other service providers who are endeavoring to attract and retain a greater share of investment assets.

Your comments to me have proven invaluable in the past and I would welcome a chance to ask your opinion of our exciting new effort. Here are two of our sample pages:

As a way of saying thank you for your time and comments I would like to provide you a copy of our latest white paper:  “One-2-One: How social media will allow you to conduct a thousand conversations at the same time”.  You can register and receive the white paper by clicking here: http://bit.ly/a4FiM9  If you prefer and would rather not go through the registration process – we are concerned about protecting your privacy – send me a request at: bruce@dbjassociates.com 

Thanks for your help and we look forward to your comments.

Tagged with: • • •
 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Edelman Study answers the question: Whom do you trust?

On February 11, 2010, In Financial social media marketing, By Bruce

For Financial Advisors, trusted communicator is job one

By: D. Bruce Johnston, President, DBJ Associates 

Brokers and advisors are the most trusted sources for providing accurate information on investments, followed by friends or family, according to the 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer. CEOs landed dead last as least trusted.

Highlights from the survey include:

  • Financial performance now scores at the bottom as a trust factor.
  • Transparency and honest practices took the number one spot
  • Most trusted financial institutions: Local banks were number one, followed by mutual funds and insurance companies

With all of this good news, trusted advisors may still not feel like cheering – especially when confronted with constrained marketing budgets.

“Even though resources are scarce, advisors with a story to tell can still create news,” Advisolocity’s John Drachman said recently. “From free interactive press releases, to white papers and webinars, there are many cost-effective ways to engage customers and prospects that do not cost that much.” The present moment may represent a historical opportunity for advisors.” He added, “Five short years ago their trustworthiness hovered near the bottom of The Barometer.”

What should you do now? Here are Five Things FAs and Advisors should be doing to benefit from this shift in sentiment:

First, they are evaluating their current communications strategy – With so many sources of communication available to your clients today it is imperative that you evaluate and leverage as many as you can.  FINRAs recent clarification around the rules governing social media provides a completely new opportunity to leverage. Don’t let your own lack of expertise in this area prevent you from leveraging these valuable resources – seek professional guidance and input.

Second, evaluate your “customer engagement strategy” – This used to be referred to as customer service but in the new world of communication it’s about “engagement”.  Today’s customers view frequent and honest communication as the most important factor by which they judge financial services firms.  How does your current engagement strategy match up?

Third, evaluate the resources and strategy you have allocated to your marketing programs and branding campaigns – Industry estimates show the number of clients receiving comprehensive financial planning will increase by 20-25% over the next year or two.  What are your strategies for establishing and promoting your brand?  How much time are you devoting to client acquisition and retention? 

Fourth, evaluate your resource allocation to the “Emerging Markets” – I’m referring to the next generation of investors, those between the ages of 25 and 34. This is an often ignored demographic for a variety of reasons but 75% of this group say FAs and Advisors are who they first turn to for financial advice.  This may be that “once-in-a-career” opportunity to make significant inroads into this group assuring future growth for your firm.

Fifth, evaluate what differentiates you from your competition – are you using all the tools at your disposal?  Successful FAs and Advisors will leverage both traditional and on-line communication applications.  To enhance “customer engagement” they will leverage market commentary and portfolio manager market overviews in building their financial planning practice. Have you clearly articulated the advantage working with you brings to your clients in terms of achieving lifestyle and financial goals?

Future success and growth of your business will come from a combination of increased interest among investors in fee-based financial planning models, and how well FAs and Advisors position themselves to take advantage of this once-in-a-career opportunity.  Those assessing their business model as outlined above will certainly stand a better chance of success than those adhering to the status quo.

Tagged with: • • •
 
0 Comments
Leave A Response

Where Social Media Meets Traditional Media – the Windshield Postcard

On June 2, 2009, In Uncategorized, By Bruce

By: D. Bruce Johnston, President  & CEO, DBJ Associates 

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of having lunch with Jason Heinhorst, Partner at FUSE Research Network.  The purpose of our lunch was to discuss asset and wealth management firms’ various approaches to incorporating social media and social networking technologies into their business models in order to enhance client acquisition and retention.

The topic at hand certainly jumped to a new level when returning to our respective cars we found on our windshields postcards that read: IS YOUR 401K HAPPY?

With that simple question and supposedly unsophisticated delivery system – the windshield postcard – RIA Patrick Jolliffe of Jolliffe Capital, Inc., Denver, CO got our attention. The question was driven by data gathered by Deloitte Consulting LLP and Pension and Investments in their 2008 Annual 401(k) Benchmarking Survey.  When asked what was the biggest concern of employees, 81% of employers surveyed responded – “where to invest and which funds to use”.

I quickly called Patrick and asked, “What was the major driver behind your decision to pursue this type of client acquisition strategy?”  His answer was simple:  “The numbers of advisors waiting on 401(k) rollovers is extremely crowded. I felt that I needed a strategy that was “cyber” in nature and allowed me to participate at all levels of this opportunity.”

The point of Patrick’s traditional media postcard was to drive people and prospects to www.happy401k.com where a wealth of social media interaction, information and qualifying tools awaited the visitor.

According to Patrick, the site was designed to attract 401(k) assets from participants at all levels of investment sophistication and investable dollars; provide a consistent communication strategy tailored to certain asset levels and provide face-to-face (f2f) contact for individuals at $250,000 of investable assets or more.

His strategy and site meets the definition of social media.  At its most basic sense, social media shifts how people discover, read and share information and content. The social media tool box of technologies is transforming monologues (one too many) into dialogues (many to many). Through their participation in dialogues, we are finding out that you can transform prospect interest in your product into prospect publishing about your product. In effect, your prospects become your advocates before they become your clients.

That’s why Patrick’s strategy seems to sync well with new research from the study Capturing the Hearts & Wallets of Peak Accumulators: Building Profitable Investment Business among Generation X and Younger Boomers, which the Wall Street Journal recently discussed, stating that:

“After feasting on the baby boomer gravy train for decades, wealth managers now face the reality that this generation will not feed their bottom line so amply in the future.”

The simple math for fee-based advisers is calculated by befriending their social media prospects first as thought leaders to knowledge seekers; then as advisors to clients second.

For the next best growth opportunity, wealth managers should start skewing younger to the next wave of big asset accumulators. And it turns out this potential market is just waiting to feel the advisers’ “love”.

Patrick’s strategy also seems to fit well with an emerging Baby Boomer theme – they are locking into the three “W’s” – www. – at record levels.  An integral part of Boomers’ lives, the Internet is an increasingly comfortable place for them to conduct business, communicate via email and Twitter and learn about products and investment products through websites, blogs and forums; as well as groups of like-minded individuals. In fact Patrick’s “cyber” Boomer strategy is spot on according to one travel industry study as 95.3% travel with computers, 91.08% have access to the Internet “all the time” or “at Wi-Fi hotspots.”

We constantly need to remind ourselves that we are human beings and after all isn’t that what this social media thing is all about? It’s connecting people to people. It’s connecting people to you, your product, your service, your solution.

And what will happen in the future? It will be about connecting clients to clients where they will discuss you, your product recommendations, your service standards, and results of the solutions you recommended.

How will you ever provide this high level of connectivity? Will it come through B2B, P2P, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, some “killer apps”, F2F meetings or maybe windshield postcards? The correct answer is all of the above – it’s all integrated!

At a time when investor skepticism in the 28-52 demographic is at an all time high — only 18% work primarily with a financial professional — Patrick may have created an elegant solution on how to blend the need for communication with the need for cost efficiency.

 

By the way, it wasn’t until I was miles away that I noticed I had another windshield postcard, this one issued by the Denver Police Department for parking in a no parking zone.   Man, those windshield postcards really get your attention!!!

Tagged with: • • • •
 
1 Comments
Leave A Response

Thinking Beyond LinkedIn

On May 24, 2009, In Uncategorized, By Bruce

By D. Bruce Johnston, President, DBJ Associates

 

While LinkedIn offers an attractive gateway to the world of social media, many financial professionals we have been speaking with downplay the importance of other social media tools like Twitter. That sentiment was forcefully expressed recently in John Ridley’s Visible Man column, which decries Twitter as a stomach-churning indulgence for navel gazers.

 

Is John right? Are Twitter and its fellow social media apps best suited for distracting easily bored, attention deficit fad followers? That thought was on the minds of many at the Russell Reynolds Distribution Roundtable focused on Social Media tools as a way to expand distribution for asset & wealth management firms in New York recently. The other side of the story was well-represented as well: That every game-changing communications improvement arrived first as a fad. Those over 20 may remember the early cellular phones in their lunch box-size vinyl bags; when it wasn’t unusual to wonder: “Isn’t that guy just showing off? Does he really need to have a phone with him all the time?”

 

Every communications improvement finally wasn’t really about the app after all, it was about the content, about what the message was trying to achieve.

 

·         It’s about the characters stupid A cross between blogging and instant messaging, Twitter currently has 5 million users and is growing at a rate of 7500 a day. Each “tweet” is short and sweet, 140 characters. What can you do in 140 characters? Use the word count/character count feature in Microsoft Word, and find out. Remember; work backward from the URL you wish to hyperlink to. That italicized text is 140 words long right there.

·         An application is not a vendor Asset and wealth management firms considering adopting social media applications to enhance customer relationships and loyalty should do so by utilizing a combination of social media applications, not just a specific application. For most this will be a difficult concept to grasp because as managers, most of us are usually being asked to choose one vendor over another.

·         The power of social media lies in their combination. There is no single application that is right for everything all of the time.

·         Face-to-face (F2F) is part of the social media tool kit too F2F is at the heart of every successful media program. Even with communications preferences changing and online engagement tools becoming commonplace, F2F selling still has a place in the solution suite. “Social” means “passed in pleasant companionship with one’s friends or associates” – that’s F2F in action.

·         You are your own thought leader Social media also represents the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Through identifying and publicizing your expertise – or thought leadership – you begin to set the standards of engagement for your network to generate exposure, opportunity and sales.

 

Some enterprising CEOs are taking to the promise of social media in a big way. Take a look at this message from Vanguard CEO Bill McNabb on the firm’s financial stability. Posted on their web site in April, to date 96 visitors have commented. Simultaneous to the posting of the message on the Vanguard website, they very well could have sent a tweet, allowing recipients to forward, or “retweet”, the message to friends thus enhancing the number of receipients.

 

Sprint Experience Makes Us Think Twice

 

Sprint and many other companies and their managers could take a page from this experience that my good friend Scott McKain had recently with Sprint. He twittered a complaint to Sprint about excessive advertising covering up a loss of customers and received this series of 140 character tweets from Stephanie Vinge of Sprint PR:

 

·         Thx 4 the feedback. You’ll find we’re doing far more than just running cool ads& our customer serv metrics continue 2 improve

·         And, as U can see, we have been watching, listening and helping our customers consistently via twitter, etc. Tweet me anytime

·         Did U know: Sprint has the most dependable 3G network and is now rolling out Sprint 4G. DM me anytime for Sprint info

·         Did U know: Sprint 3G is faster in more places than AT&T

 

Scott was impressed at her persistent follow-through and responded this way:

·         Grateful for…and impressed by…your kind responses. Challenge is (obviously), how do you re-interest former customers like me?

·         Don’t mean that sarcastically or disrespectfully! It’s that we think it’s tougher to re-engage former customers than acquire new.

 

Stephanie responded:

·         I get it. not taken that way. I agree. I have been an angry, unsatisfied customer myself (of select companies) but we know what we need to do!

·          Oh, what I’m doing is nothing compared to our company progress. Thanks and give us another chance – you’ll be glad!

 

And, he’s considering it.

 

The takeaway is this: When someone voices a concern about your organization, you strengthen your hand by responding just like Stephanie did: Immediately, openly, and sincerely. And she made an attempt to reconnect with a former customer. Who knows? You might get that dissatisfied client back.

 

Would it be worthwhile for you and your firm in terms of AUM and revenue if you could respond immediately, personally and sincerely to your customers? Would it be worthwhile for you and your firm to stay connected with current customers reconnect with former customers and stay in front of potential customers?

 

The promise of social media and Web 2.0 is to answer those questions in the affirmative.

 


Tagged with: • • • •
 
2 Comments
Leave A Response
Go To Top »