[Customer engagement is a moving target and a hard one to execute on as consumers continue to lose trust in brands and are increasingly resistant to the flood of marketing messages they are being besieged with. Added to that are the challenges of customer data management with weaknesses in data collection, integration, protection and new tracking barriers employed by tech companies.

Doing a deeper dive on these issues reveals apparent shifts beginning to develop from random content sharing into a highly strategic exercise that drives business impact. This enhanced approach opens up a plethora of issues to grapple with including the concept of relevance versus personalization and the need of building your own first-party data source to power this type of program. In the wake of data privacy changes by mobile platforms last year, the enterprise tech world is suddenly very interested in customer-data platforms (CDPs). The writing on the wall to these new trends comes from sources like a recent Gartner study that expects 80% of marketers who have invested in personalization will abandon these efforts by 2025.

To learn further about these issues, we reached out to Institute members Scott Rogerson, CEO of UpContent — a powerful content curation platform built for advisors — and Brendan Kenalty, partner and CMO of Reachstack — an innovative enterprise-level, data-driven email and marketing automation platform for advisors and wealth management firms. We asked them to explain their shared view of “why relevance beats personalization every time in forming relationships that result in action” and the best use of technology married with strategy to make it easier for advisors to truly engage their clients and prospects to generate demand for their services.]

Bill Hortz: From your perspectives, what do you see as the greatest challenges and issues that need to be addressed in current financial services marketing and engagement efforts?
Brendan Kenalty:
Advisors need to be much more visible and proactive in client communication. Time constraints make it hard, but, with studies reporting 85% of clients indicate that advisor communication is the #1 reason to leave or refer an advisor, it is vital for both retention and growth. Today people receive financial information and advice 24/7 right to their phone. Advisors should be active in this process by being visible and constantly reinforcing value as the trusted place for financial advice. I see that advisors who embrace this are winning, and those who do not are at real risk.

Scott Rogerson: The gap in financial literacy is widening. Pew Research Center found that over 80% of U.S. adults rely “a lot” on their own research before making major life decisions. However, FINRA and GFLEC found that only 25% of U.S. adults have participated in some form of formal financial literacy education and 60% indicate they are “financially anxious”. Advisors can find a unique position to provide value by addressing this fact that, while many individuals want to rely on their own research, they are not confident, nor have had the training to appropriately conduct this research.

A 2020 study by NFCC reinforces this in its finding that 78% of U.S. adults indicated that they “could still benefit from financial advice and answers” from a professional. The real question today is how the advisor community can provide this advice in a way that aids the client in their research process rather than dictating what decisions they should make. Sound familiar? This is the exact realization that was made when the concept of “inbound marketing” was first coined.

Hortz: Why the need to differentiate between Personalization versus Relevance?
Rogerson: There is a lot of froth around the desire to personalize content to the needs of the individual, but personalization can quickly lead to recipients only receiving what they are looking for rather than what they should be learning or thinking about. Instead of being like Facebook where the goal is to show things like what you have already engaged with, be more like Netflix, and rather than choosing titles specifically for the individual, leverage the preferences of the individual, and individuals similar to them, to predict what the individual should learn about next.

Kenalty: As Scott points out, our focus is delivering relevant, data-based communications in a broader context to personalization. Relevance adds a layer of strategy around understanding and satisfying both known and unknown interests and needs. Content sharing should be a strategic exercise for advisors versus a random walk of distributing articles and information based on what people indicate they like.

The goal is building awareness and demand for your services. This is accomplished by understanding, educating and satisfying your audience’s need for information and education before they know they want it. For instance, making sure new parents understand when, what and how saving for college education works, or what inflation will mean to their family in the coming months and changes they should start to make. Lifestyle and other interest-based content should be part of the mix as a great way to connect and build rapport, but always have a point. Are you adding value as their financial advisor by sharing it?

Sharing random information and content is not how you build a sales funnel. Advisors and all sales professionals need to deliver an organized, high value experience that generates demand by understanding audience needs, then demonstrating value by informing, educating and sharing results.

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