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Practice Management > Marketing and Communications

Nitrogen Wants to Give Growing Advisors Their Time Back

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In May, Nitrogen rolled out a tool that complements human capabilities for client communication, content creation, research and more.

“Artificial intelligence can shorten the time to do things that you’re already doing,” Craig Clark, chief marketing officer of Nitrogen, told ThinkAdvisor in an interview.

Nitrogen AI, a virtual marketing content assistant, as the company dubbed it, initially was powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo, now upgraded to GPT-4.0.

The tool stems largely from a survey of 1,000-plus financial advisors that the company conducted last spring. 

It found that “firms that are growing at a hyper-growth rate — 21% annually — actively market their firms and services. 

“They create a lot of engagement mail,” Clark said in the interview.

Now, more than 600 advisors are using Nitrogen AI, available to the firm’s customers by subscription.

“AI gives you time back, allowing you to do marketing at scale,” Clark said. It enables advisors to “reach out to clients more often and more consistently.”

Nitrogen’s AI tool can create first-draft content of marketing letters and newsletters, for instance, which the financial advisor then edits and customizes.

An interesting feature, Clark said, is “tone customization,” which personalizes the advisor’s style or brand.

“Some firms or individuals want to present a really conservative, staid kind of perspective in their marketing communications,” he added. “Others might be communicating with, say, tech company CEOs who might appreciate a little lighter tone.”

On the drawing board is another major use of Nitrogen AI: helping advisors get ready for client and prospect meetings.

“Our research finds that a huge amount of time is spent on meeting preparation,” Clark said. “So shortening that would be helpful in terms of increasing client satisfaction and getting more referrals.”

ThinkAdvisor recently interviewed Clark, who was speaking by phone from British Columbia, Canada, where he is based. Here are excerpts from the interview:

THINKADVISOR: Can you describe Nitrogen AI?

CRAIG CLARK: It’s not an email marketing engine or a marketing program. It’s a content assistant to help advisors develop content to send through email or social media or other channels they might use in marketing.

It generates first-draft content you can personalize. It takes the job of creating marketing [content] from agonizing hours and days down to just a few seconds.

And the advisor can put their own spin on it.

Can advisors just say to it, “I want to write a marketing letter to my clients”?

They literally could do that. We’ve trained [this tool] on financial advisor content we’ve produced over the years.

So the advisor could say, for example, “I’d like to create an email on [subject], and I want to appeal to young [prospects] in Memphis.”

Our tool will set up that email in seconds.

But it creates only the first draft. So the advisor needs to edit it before sending it out?

That would be our guidance. For sure, you’d want to read it and very likely customize it and tailor it to a certain situation.

There may even be a compliance layer that needs to review it before you send it to clients.

Please explain how it allows users to select a tone of voice for their communication.

It’s very much about a personal style or brand. Some firms or individuals want to present a really conservative, staid kind of perspective in their marketing communications.

Others might be communicating with, say, tech company CEOs who might appreciate a little lighter tone.

How does your tool achieve that?

It chooses different words and different combinations of words. If the topic is retirement savings, say, it might [generate] different examples based on the degree of conservatism that you want to have in the draft.

How will using this technology affect the human element?

It’s very much up to the advisor or firm to set a guideline for AI. If I’m a solo advisor, it’s going to give me a lot of flexibility because now I’ve got time back in my day to go out for coffee with a client or meet them in my office.

In every advisor’s book there’s a long list of clients they want to have top-of-mind, constantly differentiating their services from others, to build [rapport].

Then there are new clients you want to focus on winning. You want to spend a ton of personal time with them because they represent a big opportunity for your firm.

So this tool gives you time back, allowing you to do marketing at scale.

But how will it change communication between client and advisor?

It will allow advisors thinking of doing more marketing to reach out to their clients more often and more consistently now that they don’t have to spend hours and days working on marketing. Instead, they can do what they do best: client-facing [work].

It will increase their capacity to reach out, and it will probably raise the quality of communications for some advisors and firms because they’ll have a much better starting point for the content.

But how personalized can a Nitrogen AI-generated draft be? Suppose you want to send a follow-up to a prospect you just met at a party?

That’s not a great use case for AI. If you’re dealing with one person, I would suggest you write the whole thing from top to bottom yourself and not use AI.

But if you’re trying to get a message out to all your clients or compose a newsletter, I would use AI to create a draft. AI can really help you generate messages to many, many prospective clients.

What would be a hypothetical emailing scenario?

You could use AI to create an email that you’d put into Constant Contact, say, or another email marketing system that would send it out. 

You can pull a list of existing clients, and they would all get the same email. You’d just customize the first and last names and maybe a couple of other details.

Is Nitrogen AI meant to be used by administrative assistants or only advisors?

It’s very situation-specific. We’ve designed our tool so that your assistant could compose your monthly newsletter that’s sent to all your clients.

Larger firms we work with have a full-blown marketing department that’s using our tool to create newsletters and the articles in them.

In a lot of cases, our solo practitioners might be [creating] those themselves.

Another use for Nitrogen AI is research to keep advisors and their clients informed of various developments. How is that done?

AI scans the news and any other feeds you might have. You can use this research for both existing clients and prospects.

What’s the next application of Nitrogen AI?

It’s safe to say that there are many other use cases for AI across our growth platform. I’m thinking of things like meeting preparation — what to talk about with clients — another big area that advisors spend a lot of time on.

So this is probably going to get more attention. 

Meeting preparation brings artificial intelligence to bear on helping advisors get ready for their next client or prospect meetings.

Our research finds that a huge amount of time is spent on meeting preparation. So shortening that would be helpful in terms of increasing client satisfaction and getting more referrals.

How has AI helped your own firm in creating software?

Historically, engineers would write every line of code to build features into the software. It’s a very real thing now that, for certain pieces of code, you can use AI to create the first draft.

It can speed up the job of software engineering, and Nitrogen is certainly exploring that very actively.

For a software company, it gives us time back to think strategically. We have to look farther down the [road] in terms of features we’d like to build into our platform.


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