Advisors’ unique business challenge today: To replace older clients drawing down their portfolios with young clients accumulating wealth. And though they may have attracted the older ones in an old-fashioned way, they must fashion new approaches to the young.
Or as John Rourke, CEO of Gotham Tech Labs, succinctly put it: “Everyone’s living online. You can’t cold-call people anymore. This is the world we live in now.”
Rourke is one of three cutting-edge entrepreneur panelists at the MarketCounsel annual conference in a session devoted to how next-gen advisors can find clients through innovative marketing.
Rourke, together with Justin Wisz, CEO of Vestorly, and Bill Okun, president of Relationship Science, described how their firms’ approaches can take advisors further than LinkedIn or Facebook.
Wisz kicked off the session with a warning to advisors about the insufficiency of email, social media marketing or traditional marketing campaigns.
“It gets your message out there but it doesn’t boomerang,” he says.
In an effort to go beyond static websites and mere posts, Vestorly offers what Wisz calls “personalized content discovery experiences” — essentially a dynamic news feed.
That, he says, is the new expectation of people trolling the web. “I can get curated content from my advisor because I want to know what he thinks about this article in Forbes or The Economist,” Wisz says, adding that Vestorly can “capture leads, help get new clients and generate client referrals.”
Using Vestorly, an advisor can say he wants articles on the Top 5 places to retire, for example, and the site will draw from all around the Web to create a targeted news feed.
“They experience the web through your lenses,” Wisz says.
The average person views more than 80 pages of Web content a day and has an average of three shares a day, Wisz says. And it is those sharing experiences that can generate leads, he says.
“Vestorly can help you understand how is this guy [who is sharing] related to me.
“We can see what they viewed; how many times they viewed it; what else they’re viewing. We can pull in their email, their phone number … home loan data; Experian data; it’s all on the web,” he says. “You have to interpret data yourself.”
An advisor can program the tool to let him know when, say, a viewer has read five articles on the feed and meets certain pre-selected criteria, and then get in touch.
A second novel approach to digital marketing came from Relationship Science, whose business premise is that “relationship capital is the most underutilized asset,” according to Bill Okun, the firm’s president.
Relationship Science, which panel moderator Marion Asnes described as “LinkedIn on steroids,” is designed to help businesspeople leverage relationships they already have in order to get in front of hard-to-reach people.
The tool starts with Relationship Science’s “curated database,” augmented with algorithms that would help an advisor find out how close he is to ideal prospects.
“It answers ‘how do we get in touch?’ We leave it to you go figure out an artful way to get the introduction. We just show the path,” Okun said, adding: “It should lead to warm introductions.”