Everyone knows that social-media and digital tools can play a key role in marketing for advisors, but how else can advisors leverage technology?
Chad Hamilton, a CFP and the vice president of practice management at Mariner Wealth Advisors in Denver, says that clients and potential clients often respond better to videos and online infographics than they do to written material.
Mariner Wealth Advisors has a lot of written information to provide.
“But people are much more geared to watch a short video on a topic than they are to read a white paper,” Hamilton says. “If I can put the information into a video or a one-page infographic with pictures and illustrations, it will get a lot more attention.”
For example, Mariner Wealth Advisors has videos about retirement and how to deal with heavy concentration in a client’s own company’s stock. The firm also has an infographic that focuses on retirement-related issues that clients will face at different ages.
“There are so many financial topics that are abstract and hard for a lot of people to grasp, alpha, beta, etc.,” Hamilton says. “But if you can show it to them in a picture, they can get the idea more quickly, and in moving pictures [videos], even more so.”
Mariner Wealth Advisors also has benefited from offering five-question exercises online, about retirement for example, where the answers generate suggestions from the company.
“We have people give their name and emails for those, and it’s a good way to get leads,” Hamilton said.
Meanwhile, Scott Shrader, a CFP and the president of wealth management firm Vault in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, uses social media but bucks the conventional wisdom.
“Most people say LinkedIn is best for business and Facebook is best for personal communication, but I’ve made my best connections on Facebook,” Shrader says. “I’m getting more relationships built there.”
Many professionals associate LinkedIn with solicitations, while Facebook is more associated with pleasant, personal interaction, Shrader says.
“You may get more peer-to-peer contacts on LinkedIn, like attorneys or accountants,” he says. “But I get more clients on Facebook.”
Shrader says his website helps drive clients to him because he offers tax services in addition to portfolio management.
“I get a lot of tax business that turns into financial business,” he says. “So I can do a lot of different marketing.”
It is very important to have a message for the brand and to convey the same message across all marketing platforms, regardless of the technology, Shrader says.
Dan Weil’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Institutional Investor and Tennis magazine.
This story is part of a 30-30 series on savvy ideas on modernizing your practice.
