Marketing technology mavens Snappy Kraken joined the firms trying to give advisors a leg up amidst the coronavirus outbreak.

The firm announced that it is waiving some fees and lowering the overall cost of its digital marketing programs and offering enhancements and tools to help financial advisors with crisis management and communications in an open letter circulated on Thursday.

Advisors’ success is diverging depending on their preparations and their ability to respond to the outbreak, said Snappy Kraken CEO Robert Sofia.

“On one hand, advisors have systemized business with layers of client support and are offering regular education to their clients, their clients are all very familiar with their plans and the reasons why they don’t have to panic during a downturn – these are the proactive communicators, and for them, they’re not facing a tremendous amount of tress,” said Sofia. “On the other hand, there are other advisors, solo proprietors and small teams running a practice, who are the primary givers of all advice and the handlers of all service issues, the takers of all phone calls. Because these advisors have maybe not been quite as proactive about their communications, this is a bit like World War Three.”

Sofia said that “it’s not  business as usual” for Snappy Kraken’s existing members – revenues are going down and advisors of all stripes are facing a lot of stress.

Effective immediately, all setup fees are waived for advisors joining Snappy Kraken’s program, whether they’re new subscribers or existing subscribers. Moving forward, all bew subscribers will receive the program’s deepest discount available, and existing members struggling with outbreak-related hardships will be able to qualify for reduced rates upon request.

Snappy Kraken has also pledged not to increase prices until further notice.

“Any advisor who charges based on AUM, which is the largest part of the market we serve, is going to take a hit on their income,” said Sofia. “Knowing that, we decided to offer everyone our lowest prices – a lot of the marketing stuff that advisors participate in are personal activities involving a lot of contact, like seminars, face-to-face meetings and lunches – all of that stuff is out the window. We wanted to help them figure out how to market online and give them a bigger bang for their buck. Online marketing takes more exposure and more effort to go rfom prospect to client.”

In the mean time, members of the firm’s marketing technology platform will enjoy some COVID-19-oriented changes, including new weekly crisis management communications for their clients and prospects offering perspectives on the outbreak – Snappy Kraken says the changes will help advisors “demonstrate expertise and build trust.”

The company is also rolling out its new video tool early to help advisors communicate with clients during the crisis. The tool is intended to create bi-weekly videos and includes prepared scripts, ready-made branded landing pages to host the videos, and promotional emails to drive  traffic to the videos. The tool, intended as a premium add-on to the platform, will be offered to members at no additional cost.

“We were going to launch this as a paid upgrade to our system, but it was delayed because we were creating marketing around it,” said Sofia. “We’ve decided to skip our marketing and go ahead and add it to our platform. If advisors aren’t doing video, there’s never been a better time to let your clients see your facial expressions and hear the tone in your  voice – it can help compensate for the lack of personal interaction.”

Finally, Snappy Kraken is offering education to advisors themselves in the form of monthly webinars on topics designed to help advisors cope with ongoing challenges like managing teams remotely and handling the stress of working from home amid market volatility.

“It’s not as difficult as you may think,” said Sofia. “My No. 1 piece of advice is don’t stop marketing, and I’m not saying that because I’m a marketing company. I ran a practice during the 2007 to 2009 downturn, and these downturns are the best time to pick up clients because a lot of advisors haven’t been taking care of their clients as well as they should have been. Their clients are asking questions, seeking help and seeking answers, the advisors have been lackadaisical, and it’s a good time to get out there to try to help those people. You’re not greedily prospecting, you’re helping people find the answers they need.”