ASx rolled out the platform yesterday, and today has made the platform available for purchase directly from its website. It charges a flat $1,500 fee for the first tier of training.
Barish provides four reasons why social media marketing offers advisors a powerful tool to reach more prospects and clients in an efficient manner.
The first reason relates to referrals. “Social media marketing is really not much different from finding referrals—the format is different, the mechanism looks different but the actual activities are the same,” Barish said.
But instead of expanding on a linear basis where a client or center of influence tells one other person at a time about an advisor’s great services, social media expands referrals on an exponential basis as an advisor’s messaging is liked and shared by more people.
He said the second reason why social media marketing makes sense is that it provides a lot of data that can be aggregated and studied to make an advisor’s efforts at digital outreach more effective. That leads to Barish’s third reason in which social media analytics can be used to refine messaging towards an advisor’s greatest strengths, and the fourth reason is that marketing can be targeted to deliver specific messages to specific niches.
“We have a couple of clients who have pivoted their entire digital business development to target digital marketing because their message is so focused it’s become an unbelievably powerful channel,” Barish said. “There’s one firm that came to us talking about dismantling their website because social media had become so productive for them, but we would hesitate to recommend doing something like that. We believe social media is an essential component of a marketing mix. We still believe in other strategies.”
ASx was founded by Dynasty and Envestnet to offer many of the value-added services available to Dynasty network firms to advisors using Envestnet’s platforms. In addition to the new social media training, ASx offers advisors data services, marketing, compliance, growth capital, business management tools and outsourced CFO services.
The “Unlocking the Essentials of Social Media” program augments ASx’s marketing support for Envestnet advisors, said Swenson, ASx's president.