Name
Title: Managing director, chief marketing officer
Company: Dynasty Financial Partners
Web address: https://www.dynastyfinancialpartners.com/
Gordy Abel is managing director and chief marketing officer at Dynasty Financial Partners, where he is responsible for all strategic brand architecture and marketing development, leveraging new marketing platforms, technology and data to build awareness and increasing customer value across various channels.
What is your role within your firm and what do you do there on any given day?
As Chief Marketing Officer at Dynasty, my team and I are laser focused on working closely with the advisors in our Network to help them effectively scale and grow their businesses. Each day is very active and we leverage our marketing tech-stack in three key areas: strategy development, team communication and marketing optimization.
Strategy Development
Marketing can be viewed as either a cost to the bottom line or an investment in business growth. We focus on making everything we do a strategic investment in the business. This requires the use of technology and data platforms to align marketing initiatives to business objectives in a way that is hyper targeted, contextually relevant and measured against key performance indicators on a routine basis.
Team Communication
Executing a marketing plan takes a village of experts and creative partnerships. The success or failure of our work often boils down to our ability to communicate new ideas, the progress of our work and to be agile in how we respond to updates and requests. Tech platforms that have sharable projects boards and management dashboards are a great way for teams to prioritize, communicate and distribute work across groups in a real-time environment.
Marketing Optimization
Eliminating waste and refining your marketing initiatives requires a tech stack that incorporates the right data sets for review. The vast amounts of data at our disposal can often be confusing and many times paralyzing to teams that are not familiar with what they are looking at. Establishing the metrics that mater and the key data points to review are critical. Having a robust metrics dashboard allows you to review campaign and traffic activity side by side to best understand where to optimize your plan.
What area/s of fintech do you believe will grow the most in the coming 5 years?
The marketing tech stack and toolset is rapidly growing and evolving for the wealth management industry. I believe we will see a “democratization of data” as it relates to how we further refine prospecting segments, build stronger points of firm differentiation and create a more contextual, values-based client journey.
We will be able to integrate the behavioral data from how we engage with current clients to further inform the marketing plans we create to drive awareness, interest and consideration for new clients. Data will be the fuel that sparks creativity and allows us to build a stronger client experiences, loyalty and advocacy. This will take a shift in how we think about the current organizational structure of our marketing teams.
My vision is that in the next 2-5 years we will no longer have digital marketing teams, we will all become “marketing rechnologists” across all channels of marketing.
How do you feel businesses are adapting to the facet of fintech that your company operates within?
This really is an exciting time for marketing technology adoption in the wealth management space. As we become more tech savvy in our personal lives, our teams are translating that usage to how we adapt new tech platforms to run and grow our businesses.
Over the past few years there were a select few people on our team and across our Dynasty Network that would explore, identify and implement new marketing tech tools. Today, we are having robust discussions with a wide range of internal colleagues, clients and external partners on new areas of technology and innovation. Believe it or not, this can often come from a tech platform advertisement they see on Instagram or Facebook.
We are seeing much higher levels of interest and education around the role technology can play in enhancing our marketing work and a much faster increase in speed to adoption. They key to all of this is to avoid what I call shiny object syndrome. It’s important to explore new tech, but you need to have a filter in place to quickly assess and decide what tech tools will provide value and those that will just burn calories.