ASx today announced an online program to train financial advisors to do their own basic social media marketing.
St. Petersburg, Fla.-based ASx, also known as the Advisor Services Exchange, is a partnership between Dynasty Financial Partners and Envestnet that offers advanced tools for advisors. Its new online program, “Unlocking the Essentials of Social Media,” is a virtual coaching platform involving digital classes, interactive workbooks and technology to help advisors market their firm and their services via social media.
“This is completely tech-enabled training that fits along the lines of what we’re already doing for services to RIAs,” said Ed Swenson, ASx's president. “We’ve put together a completely integrated offering. If you want to start at the most basic level, you don’t need any live interaction with our team at all.”
Video-based classes are offered by ASx digital marketing experts Justin Barish and Marisa Norris.
“The issue with social media marketing was that, until now, you had only a few options for getting involved,” said Barish. “You could hire a CMO and/or build it yourself; that’s a decent approach but you risk having a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing. If you hire someone, they could be someone well-versed in one area of marketing, but they wouldn’t have the knowledge or skill of a comprehensive team.”
The other path for advisors was to hire a third-party vendor like a marketing agency, which could be prohibitively expensive for many firms and still didn’t guarantee results. Agencies are usually not targeted or specific, said Barish, which means they try to revamp a business’s entire marketing offering. That raises the costs of using them to improve an advisor’s outreach.
The ASx program intends to offer a balance of the two different paths for advisor marketing. Advisors can either take a self-direct approach or can hire ASx’s team as marketing consultants. The training is being offered at three tiers. Tier one includes the classes and workbooks to help practitioners of all sizes get off the ground and create their own social media marketing experiences.
“We train advisors on the basics, like a college course, 101, 201, 301,” said Barish. “If we train you how to do the 101 and 201 marketing activities, you’ve just saved a bunch of money not having to pay someone else to do that, and then you might be able to hire someone to do the 301 and 401 activities.”
Tier two includes deep, advanced social media analytics to allow advisors with more robust marketing campaigns to track their progress.
The third tier includes consulting from the ASx team to create more bespoke social media marketing offerings for advisors.