Todd Sensing, a portfolio manager and 10-year veteran of the hedge fund world, recently decided to change careers. He had two sons on the autism spectrum and realized that parents like him had few resources for special needs planning. There are a lot of insurance products in this field and not a lot of fiduciaries. For instance, people might need to fund a special needs trust or look for no-load policies through third-party actuaries, it’s also a very emotional topic. Sensing says he can help people wade through that—because he did.

But marketing to that niche would be difficult, and there aren’t enough people in his city of Miramar Beach, Fla., that would come to seminars or make referrals for such a new firm, which he calls FamilyVest. “I have local clients, but my business focusing on special needs planning, especially where I live, would not be as viable without the digital marketing that I’m doing.” He started using HubSpot, a marketing automation software, which allows him to track people who are reading the literature he’s putting out on the subject.

Such software allows advisors to check the click rates for their e-mail campaigns, see how long people are reading them, etc. Sensing has a 40-page e-book on special needs planning that he uses as a “lead magnet.”

“To create landing pages was taking me longer than it should have,” he says. Now, “if I have the copy, art and deliverables ready I can create a complete landing page with drip e-mail follow-up within a day.” Perfect for someone who wasn’t a programmer or designer, he says.

He says that a start-up firm like his must get a better return on investment for its marketing dollar because he doesn’t have a lot of time. The traditional route for advisors marketing their wares is to pay for direct mail, put an ad in a newspaper or conduct a seminar.

Graig Norden, the president of San Francisco firm Freewheel Marketing, which helps RIAs with technology, says these old methods of doing marketing are old habits that will die hard. “You throw bodies at the problem … get a list, dial for dollars.” One such way to go about it is to send out an e-mail blast on MailChimp. It’s low cost and low risk, he says, but “when you get an unsubscribe or a spam filter or some sort of a blacklist, it pollutes the rest of your ability to send e-mails.”

Marketing automation software, by comparison, lets you see who is actually interested in what you do.

Norden says that this is still a new field with emerging players and the landscape will change over the next couple of years, but the four major players now, he says, are Salesforce’s Pardot, Oracle’s Eloqua, Marketo and HubSpot. (Norden has a relationship with HubSpot as an agency partner.)

The automation platforms work by scoring possible client leads and determining who is looking at advisor material—white papers, e-mails, etc. Those clients who download information are scored so that advisors can know when a person who’s window-shopping their website might be up for an actual phone call.

The software lets an advisor know, for instance: What did the client click on? Was it about care for disabled adults? Emerging market stocks? How often did the client download the information? Different campaigns the advisor has created then take these segmented clients to custom landing pages on the advisors’ websites.

Such information is becoming more vital to financial advisors because many of them are busy planning and are having a hard time developing and segmenting new business, especially in small or midsize shops with small marketing crews who might have different service offerings for high-net-worth and mass affluent individuals. They need to know if they are wasting their time talking to large groups of people who have no interest in what they’re doing.

To put it another way: In the past advisors went after clients. Today, the clients should be coming after the advisors, says advisor Jason Kirsch. This is called “inbound marketing.” You put the bait on the hook, and software can tell you who’s nibbling.

Kirsch, who recently founded Santa Monica, Calif.-based fee-only financial planning firm Grow to work with millennials, comes from the broker-dealer world. He left his old firm last year, however, because the regulatory regime made even putting up videos difficult.

“One of the main reasons I wanted to leave and start my own thing is to try to take advantage of this opportunity to market digitally and market to an audience that wasn’t really hearing from financial advisors, and that was a millennial audience.”

Since that audience isn’t being charged on assets yet, planners need an efficient process to work with them—not spending half their time on new business. What intrigued him about marketing automation is “being able to set up a process that’s repeatable, that’s scalable, where I’m communicating with my market … while I’m sleeping or working on other things.”

He uses the platform ActiveCampaign, which allows him, he says, “to spread lead magnets all over the web—for instance I’ll offer a free book, or a free copy of my book [The Millennial Advantage] in electronic format, or a free guide to something or possibly even an article or a 15 to 20 minute conversation with me … and try to get them to sign up for it. Then that’s the triggering effect. As soon as they sign up and put their e-mail and their phone number in, then they go into my automation.”

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