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.”

Wayne Titus, the founder of AMDG Financial in Plymouth, Mich., likes HubSpot because he can look at who his competitors are and judge their online presence against his. “Those large firms that I have in my mind as who I want to be when I grow up, we have a better online presence than they do and they have significantly more opportunity and ability to do what we’re doing and they’re just not doing it from what I can tell.” He refers specifically to the scoring mechanism that tells him what his online score is, traffic rank, the number of Facebook fans next to those of larger competitors, the number of linking domains, etc. The platform allows him to look at his marketing grade and what he should be trying to do to attract more online leads.

He says the program is also important for communicating with existing clients, who may not regularly come to the website. Tracking their interests at any one time is important.

John Dougherty, the VP of marketing at Seattle’s Brighton Jones, joined the firm last year from Microsoft. The firm is currently moving to Marketo from HubSpot. He says the latter is easier to use and can be used by a social media manager, while Marketo is more technical and requires dedicated digital staff.

He proposes what a hypothetical campaign would look like:

“A great audience for us is successful execs who have kids in college who are super-delegators,” Dougherty says. “And so we create content on the best way to fund college education if you have stock options. Do you give some of those options to your kid? If you do that, is there no way to leverage financial aid? So we can get some great content.”

So somebody searches for “best ways to fund college with stock options.” A Brighton Jones blog comes up in the first 10 responses on Google, Dougherty says. “So people click on it, they read the blog; if it’s interesting, they see the call to action is ‘download a white paper.’

“So they click on the ‘call to action’ on a button. They come to a landing page. They have to put in their first, last [name] and their e-mail. They enter that information, they hit ‘download my white paper now.’ A new browser opens, it’s a thank-you page, and that’s how you fulfill the white paper.”

Once the firm has the e-mail and interests, the firm develops a work flow, and it selectively sends information to that person based on what the firm knows about him or her. “Then we begin to qualify that person, really score them, so every time they download a white paper they get a certain amount of points. If they come to a live event, they get a certain amount of points. If they come to the website they get a certain amount of points. If they go to a specific web page they get a certain amount of points.”

So all of a sudden they’ve turned from somebody who’s anonymous into a market-generated lead, then into a “marketing-engaged” lead. “Once they hit a certain score, let’s say it’s 100 points, then they become a marketing qualified lead. And then business development picks up the phone and calls them, or sends them an e-mail saying, ‘Hey you’re really interested in college education; we’d really like to give you a free, 15 minute consultation on your current college plan.’ And as soon as there is mail exchanged, they move to a sales-qualified lead.” After that, the next step is “client advocate”: They become somebody who actively refers Brighton Jones to others.

“So there is this very well defined, item-specific process from ‘anonymous’ to ‘advocate.’ That has potentially 100 pieces of communication—and manually that does not scale. You couldn’t do that for every prospect. With Marketo it all happens automatically.”

You can also set up nurture streams, says Joe Paone, a senior vice president of marketing at Marketo. “This is much different than a standard e-mail service,” he says. RIAs who know their prospects are more interested in fixed income than stocks, for instance, can get progressively more information on that until their score has increased and they are “sales ready.”

Playing Nice
The eternal problem with software is integration: Do these marketing platforms play well with advisors’ favorite programs? Salesforce purchased Pardot in 2013, and some online commenters have complained that the parent company now wants its new product to merge mainly with its own CRM program. (Pardot did not return calls for comment.)

But some users complain about HubSpot’s powers of integration as well.  

LaVonne Brown, the chief communications officer at Savant Capital in Rockford, Ill., says that her firm stopped using HubSpot about four years ago when Savant was transitioning its website. The new CRM system was custom-made and the firm had to enter HubSpot leads manually, duplicating efforts.

HubSpot has rolled out its own CRM, but even Sensing, generally a fan of the platform, says it doesn’t have the functions of his favored program, Wealthbox, so he has ended up using both CRM programs at the same time, using one and copying it into the other, “which is not the most ideal situation,” he says. Everything done on a Facebook ad or the website or newsletter goes through HubSpot, but existing clients get their meetings and work flows and deliveries put into Wealthbox.

Some people might also complain about pricing. Sensing says that he didn’t see the point in hindsight of his $2,000 or $3,000 charge for help on-boarding HubSpot, and he now thinks he could have on-boarded himself. “Most of the information is there on their site and it’s easy to learn their system.”

Different companies charge different things based on who is using the software. Eloqua offers three service plans: basic, standard and enterprise. Basic allows three users and 10,000 contacts for $2,000 a month, said a sales rep contacted by Financial Advisor. The highest level, enterprise, offers unlimited users and a domain name and the firm must have 500,000 contacts. The price is $29,000 a month.

Pardot, according to its website, offers a standard plan for $1,000 a month for up to 10,000 contacts with e-mail marketing, lead scoring and ROI reporting; a $2,000 per month Pro plan with a landing page, A/B testing and 25,000 contacts; and a $3,000 “Ultimate” plan with a dedicated IP address and up to 100,000 calls daily.

Paone says Marketo does not list prices, since every agreement is customized for what its clients ask for. Freewheel’s Norden says that it’s actually fairly rare for advisors to pay listed rates in any case. “They are all, very, very, very negotiable.”

Norden likes automation because it also understands the sense of urgency in which people make decisions to buy products. (Think of the old joke about selling a glass of lemonade to a thirsty man in the desert for $1,000.) That’s important because client leads have a habit of going cold. Automation programs tell you when they are hot again.

“With investment management, sometimes people ebb and flow in their willingness to make a decision, and taking advantage of urgency is a really powerful concept,” Norden says. “All of a sudden, you see that they are on your website after about six months. I’d love to know that.”