After an accomplished career in financial services marketing, Kristin founded VitaVie Financial Planning, a fee-only financial planning firm focused on the needs of expectant parents and growing families in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Prior to founding VitaVie Financial Planning, Kristin excelled in strategic marketing positions with The Chase Manhattan Bank and Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. In addition, she was an advertising agency executive with Grey Direct and Carlson Marketing Group, where she managed multi-million dollar marketing initiatives for Chase and Visa.
Kristin has leveraged her marketing experience and expertise to grow her practice rapidly without making a single cold call or holding even one brown bag lunch. As a practice that is just three years old with very limited (but highly targeted) marketing expenditures, VitaVie receives inbound inquiries from prospective new clients on a daily basis. The firm recently added its third financial planner to handle its rapidly increasing client load.
So I figured I could learn a few things from Kristin given that she has never embraced the tedious and traditional marketing methods most independent financial professionals rely on to build their client base.
USING AUTOMATION TO KEEP IN TOUCH
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Kristin’s presentation, Relationship Marketing in the New World: Where Conversation & Automation Meet, was well attended. The advisors in the audience were pretty excited to learn that they could create a conversation and build relationships with prospects through frequent interaction using automation services (sometimes called auto-responders) such as http://www.mailchimp.com/ and http://www.aweber.com/.
Auto-responders allow you to build relationships with prospects by sending them a sequence of automatically delivered follow up emails. No manual sending is needed; the auto-responder software delivers your emails automatically. You can even personalize emails with subscribers’ names and other information.
Yep, that’s right. Subscribers.
Think of the people who visit your website, which should be the hub for all your online activity, as potential subscribers to something – your newsletter, a series of educational videos, weekly financial tips, etc. The goal is not to get them to call for a get acquainted meeting or to buy something from you but rather to engage them and build trust through a series of professional touches.
CAPTURE FORMS AND AUTO-RESPONDERS
You will need an online subscription / request form like this one: (after filling out the form, the visitor is allowed to download a free special report – theoretically, the advisory firm will follow up personally with the person who downloaded the special report and try to strike up a conversation) or this one (after filling out the form, the visitor is sent a series of video emails via an auto-response system such as MailChimp – this ensures that a series of touches takes place and gives the prospect a chance to see the advisor as if he or she is talking directly to them but there is no pressure to engage for services).
I am in the process of testing a video email auto-response system called TalkFusion, which looks cool so far and seems very promising.
In her presentation at the NAPFA conference, Kristin took us through the "Six Steps to Ensure (Easy) Follow-up Every Time."
Kristin Harad and Marie Swift at NAPFA 2012
“The goal is to create an effective program that engages your lead, builds rapport, and converts prospects to lifelong clients,” she explained. “You only have so much time in the day so it’s important to leverage technology to systematize this critical follow-up and still keep your personal touch.”
