Last month, my family and I spent a week in the Thousand Islands in a house we rented on Round Island just down the Saint Lawrence River from Alexandria Bay. Across the shipping channel in Alexandria Bay sits Heart Island, the home of Boldt Castle. The grandiose structure was to be a display of George Boldt’s love for his wife, Louise.

They began construction in 1900 and stopped it just 4 years later in 1904 because Louise had died suddenly. George never returned to the island and the castle remained unfinished and became rundown until 1977 when the Thousand Island Bridge Authority acquired it and decided to preserve its legacy. (Source)

Boldt Castle’s legacy endures to this day because of a powerful and captivating story of love that transcends time

As I took the hour long audio walking tour I couldn’t help but to reflect on the power that a love story has to build something amazing. The power and impact of marketing is rooted in the story of why your firm exists and who you serve. The story behind your firm’s founding is the guiding light that shapes everything you do and say to both internal and external audiences. If your brand story is clear and genuine, you have already overcome your biggest marketing challenge.

Marketing demands clarity of purpose

Have you ever wondered how some firms just have a gift for marketing? From the outside it seems to come easy to them. For these firms, they have taken the time to crystallize their story and they have a passion to tell it to whoever will listen. The communications channels whether it be email, social media or their website are just mediums to share their thoughts and ideas with the world. The clarity of their story frees them from the paralysis by analysis that so many of us face when it comes to growing and expanding our marketing.

Relive the moment you started

Whether you are a founder, owner or an advisor working within a firm, why did you get into this business? Seriously, why does your firm exist and why are you in this business? The answer to this question holds the key to your marketing for 2018 and beyond.

Take the time to not only think about this but also write it down and share it with others. Then ask yourself how this can be applied to transform how you tell your firm’s story in a way that will become a guiding light for future generations.

Simon Sinek’s TedTalk “Start With Why” is a must watch for anybody looking to make investments in marketing. If you have not watched it before, click here to watch it. Even if you have watched it before, click here to watch it again because it is that important to the future of your firm’s marketing.

And if you’d like to brainstorm ideas on how to share your firm’s story to grow AUM, give me a call.

The post Do You Have a Love Affair with Your Firm? appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

The average firm saw 9.2% annual growth between 2011 and 2015, with 75% coming from client referrals [RIA Benchmark Report, Schwab (2016)]. Firm owners, founders, partners and managers face extreme pressure to continue year-over-year growth but lack clarity on how to achieve it beyond practice acquisitions or the client referral channel. Most executives will tell you they see the need to grow their firm’s marketing but lack the confidence to make the necessary investments in marketing activities.

By identifying the numbers before the numbers, we can build accountable marketing programs that drive growth

Many firms I meet with don’t invest in marketing because they lack clarity on how to achieve their AUM growth targets. The key to increasing AUM is one number at a time– but it is likely not the number you expect. By working backward from your goal to increase revenue, your firm can develop a series of critical success factors, key performance indicators, metrics and measurements that will guide your marketing activities and put your growth targets within reach.

We all know that it’s important to add new clients, and that’s easy to measure month over month. Ultimately your goal will be achieved by generating a certain amount of leads and performing the required number of prospect meetings each month. While this may seem like the basics of new client acquisition, many firms fail to effectively track the creation of new relationships within this process. When we peel back the layers of this onion further, we need to identify the numbers before these numbers before we can begin to establish an accountable marketing program.

It is necessary to identify the numbers before the numbers that produce leads and new prospect meetings each month

Before a firm can qualify an individual as a lead, it will need to establish a variety of channels that generate new unqualified relationships each month. By relationships we are referring to basic contact information such as name, email address, phone number, and social profile. With just an individual’s email address, firms can begin the qualification process by communicating directly with that person about a number of different financial planning topics.

The most popular relationship-generating channel is the client referral channel, but it isn’t the only one. As wealth continues to move to next-generation investors, the need to develop additional channels that will generate new relationships will increase. Several of the top relationship generation channels, outside of the client referral channel, include:

• Events, seminars, and webinars
• Websites
• Firm branded portals
• Social media
• Client referrals
• Centers of Influence (COIs)

Let’s take a look at how our number before the numbers approach plays out with your firm’s website

Websites are one of the biggest missed opportunities for many firms in financial marketing today. Every firm has a number of anonymous site visitors each month. The goal is to convert a small portion of anonymous site visitors into new unqualified relationships so that we can nurture them each month.

At this phase we are not focused on whether or not they are qualified leads since lead generation is dependent upon generating enough new relationships to produce a group of qualified leads. While the client referral channel will always remain king, we can enhance AUM acquisition by investing in marketing activities that develop new referral channels such as your firm’s website.

Establish KPIs that help you measure and track the impact of new relationships generated on your website

You have to start someplace, and as Peter Drucker is commonly credited with saying, “What gets measured gets managed.” We know the ultimate goal is to add new clients which comes from establishing a number of new relationships every month. When we shift our focus from leads to new relationships, we can define KPIs around increasing the number of new relationships each month. Later in the process we will need to define KPIs around converting new relationships to leads, leads to prospects, and prospects to AUM, but for now let’s dive deeper into the number before these numbers.

The goal is to drive new relationships, and the critical success factor is to increase the number of new relationships being generated online by 5% next quarter. You must have analytics tracking software on your website to get started with this process since we are going to convert a number of basic measurements into metrics that we can track as KPIs to measure progress quarter over quarter. If you do not have analytics tracking software, Google Analytics is free and it will take your webmaster five minutes to install it for you.

Many firms have Google Analytics data and you can quickly pull out some specific data points to get started. As you move forward and learn, these will change, but let’s start with some basic measurements such as unique website visitors, visits to contact page, visits to blog, and visits to team pages.

Assume you generated 10 new relationships last month via newsletter signup forms, curated financial news via a portal like Vestorly, or contact request forms. If your firm had 1000 unique visitors to its web page last month, 70 visits to the contact page, 200 visits to the blog and 60 visits to the team page, you can establish some initial KPIs to measure the impact of your marketing activities on new relationship generation.

The KPIs would look like:

• 100 unique website visits for every new relationship
• 7 visits to the contact page for every new relationship
• 20 visits to your blog for every new relationship
• 6 visits to your team page for every new relationship

Initially this isn’t going to solve your firm’s digital marketing problems, but over time you will establish a trend line that will help you focus your marketing activities to drive traffic to key sections of your website via emails, social media or paid advertising. In the spirit of “what gets measured gets managed,” get started with some basic KPIs.

Most firms can take the first step today by simply taking the data they have from last month and setting it up in an Excel spreadsheet.

The simple act of getting started with some basic measurements can help to transform your firm’s approach to marketing. Marketing, like every other aspect of your firm’s operation, will evolve, mature, and grow as you move forward with a system of accountability and measurement that looks at the numbers before the AUM number.

The post Is Your Focus on AUM Ruining Your Marketing? appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

Last fall a group of deer ate all the buds off the rose bush I planted for my wife on Mother’s Day. They bloomed beautifully the summer prior, but by the springtime the stalks were jet-black and looked dead. My wife wanted to dig it up and throw it away, but a childhood recollection of my grandmother’s hardy hedge row gave me this feeling that ours would surely come back. Despite that reassurance, I’ve been constantly second guessing whether I should relent and just plant a new on, until about two weeks ago.

Now look at it. It’s in full bloom, and I have the sense of satisfaction knowing I didn’t give up on that original Mother’s Day gift I had planted.

The creation of beauty requires a combination of patience and experience.

In business as in nature, to create something beautiful we’ve got to employ a lot more patience than often feels natural. How many blockbuster ideas, products or marketing campaigns have been abandoned too soon? Unfortunately, we’ll never truly know, but in a business environment driven by the philosophy of share value and short-term results, it’s more than we would like to admit. In the world of marketing, it is not uncommon to see executives abandon a campaign after 60 or 90 days just because they couldn’t attribute a direct and immediate ROI to it.

Too little data too soon can lead us to act rashly

You may want to reconsider that marketing investment you’re about to make if you’re telling yourself, “We’ll look at the results in 30 days and decide whether to continue from there.” It takes a lot longer than a month or two before you’ll realistically start observing the benefits from most marketing initiatives. If we’re going to rely on data to make decisions, we need to ensure we’ve got enough of it first.

Just like with our roses, ideas need time to take root and grow. If we pause a campaign shortly after launch because the data hasn’t begun to demonstrate an ROI, it would be like transplanting our tired rosebush to a bucket in a dark corner of the garage. “I’ll replant it later, if it makes sense,” would all but condemn it from ever reaching its full potential.

Let your ideas blossom

Do you have a business idea you want to share with the world? Worse yet, do you have a business idea you started to share with the world but retracted because it didn’t get the response you had hoped for?

Regardless where you’re at in your planning and execution, give yourself and your team permission to put your ideas out there and let them develop long term. You’ll be amazed at what can happen when you shift away from the start-and-stop mentality to an adapt-and-grow mindset.

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The post Don’t Trash Your Ideas Too Quickly appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

I drove a Tesla (TSLA) Model X the other day and it exceeded my expectations in ways that I had never anticipated. They changed the driving experience. Let me say that again: They changed the driving experience.

Sitting in the driver’s seat made me feel like a kid again, and I’ve been driving for more than 25 years. The car is 100% electric, and it’s always on. There are no keys to turn for ignition or unlocking. Like magic, you simply step in, select a gear and go. And that’s where it begins. The entire driving experience is different and the car is just unbelievably fast.

Tesla is living proof of the power of total integrated marketing

Every aspect of the Tesla brand has been shaped by a vision to radically alter the driving experience, and that vision has been realized to a remarkable degree. They aren’t just talking about doing it; they’ve meticulously aligned their product, marketing, communications and customer service to not only take on the automotive industry, but to affect a paradigm shift of what is possible in a category that has never before achieved widespread adoption. That’s radical and something that all of us in business can learn from.

Marketing can’t help you stand out if you don’t stand apart

A recent HBR article titled, “The Financial Industry Needs to Start Planning for the Next 50 Years, Not the Next 5” talks about the winners and losers in the race to shift the organizational culture from Industrial Age thinking to Information Age thinking. This is not about creating some sizzle ad campaign that gets people in the door to take their money; it’s about delivering a wealth management experience that is entirely different from what investors experience today. In the financial services industry, there’s a lot of discussion around attracting next-generation investors. But there lies a problem in trying to attract next-generation investors with past-generation client management and communications strategies.

Choose to innovate now and transform your firm

Over the next 50 years, there will be massive winners and massive losers in the financial space. Those that will be on the leading edge will be positioned as such from the investments in long-term growth that they are making today. The danger of overanalyzing every dollar for short-term ROI is in the failure to gain from the experience and learning process that comes with piloting systems and ideas. Playing catch-up to faster-pace competitors is not a strategy for success either.

Consider this exercise: Pick one innovation priority that you want to focus on over the next 12 months, and draft a one-sentence vision of how that will enhance the client experience.

Then I encourage you to answer the question: “What could I do in the next 90 days to achieve this vision?” Use your notes as a guide to help shape your thinking towards an innovation mindset.

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The post What We Can Learn from Tesla’s Innovation Mindset appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

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The below content is a transcription of the above video and really meant more for Google than for you. If you prefer to read vs watch the above video, enjoy but please remember this is really meant to help the robots index my content so that you can find it when you need it.

Craig Hall here and welcome to our second episode of the FinMar Today video blog. Now this is a video blog or vlog dedicated to topics on financial marketing. Yes, I am definitely still struggling using the word vlog. It’s kind of like tweeting back when Twitter first came out.

Today, I am talking about something that I’ve been talking a lot about with firms lately. The topic is related to how we attribute marketing dollars and how we measure success in our marketing. It’s what I call First Click versus Last Click Attribution. When we start to overcomplicate things by trying to associate every marketing dollar to the assets brought in based on every single activity, we run the risk of stopping prematurely. If we are running a banner ad campaign, can we measure the assets that we’re bringing in based on that one activity? If we are sending newsletters, can we measure every single revenue dollar that’s being brought into the firm based on that activity?

This applies to a host of other financial marketing communications such as print collateral and website visits. All these activities make up a prospect and client experience.

We know that 75 percent of the assets are being brought in via referral channels and it’s easy to say, “We don’t need to be doing a lot of these other things since we can’t measure them and we’re going to continue to grow organically through our referral channel.” It’s true that your firm will see most of its growth from referrals. However, it’s becoming increasingly more competitive to gain new clients in all firms and that number is going to shift.

How important is it that when a referral comes in, he or she get’s a good impression of your firm when visiting your firm’s website or reviewing a nice piece of branded print collateral that is sent in the mail after a phone call?  We know they will be talking to advisors and experience all the typical things that referrals experience such as phone calls, meetings, dinners, golf, portfolio reviews, financial planning discussions and more.

In addition to the traditional advisor marketing techniques, it may help to enhance the relationship by sending a newsletter whether it’s printed or digital. Then your could start to invite your prospects to events or webinars. The blend of the traditional and non-traditional activities start to make up the experience and shape the prospect’s perception of the firm. It becomes very difficult to grow your firm’s marketing, if we fail to look at the big picture and view all the activities as on big comprehensive firm marketing strategy. We run the risk of having a lot of fragmented marketing activities with starts and stops, if after 30 days, we say “Well, we tried that and we can’t measure the ROI on that so we are going to discontinue that and try something different.”

When we do this we never really give a whole program a chance to get off the ground. I want us to think about how we can start to mature our thinking on marketing to become more holistic and inclusive of all activities that go into marketing your firm, especially as it becomes more and more competitive to grow assets.

I want to know your thoughts. Email me at chall@marketingwiz.co. Please send me a message on topics you want me to cover because I want this to be about topics that are important to you.

The post The Dangers of the First Click vs Last Click Attribution Mindset appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

The below content is a transcription of the above video and really meant more for Google than for you. If you prefer to read vs watch the above video, enjoy but please remember this is really meant to help the robots index my content so that you can find it when you need it.

Hello, my name is Craig Hall and I’m taking this chance to explore this medium of vlogging. I’ve been in marketing and digital marketing for 15 years and I read an article on TechCrunch, that Chris Brogan shared. It blew my mind that there are a billion hours of video consumed every day on YouTube. The number blew me away. I believe in the power of video because we’ve been doing it for years. We’ve got some great partners that help with corporate video. The current trend seems to be in this kind of vlogging category. It’s the new medium of blogging, but via short snippets of educational or entertainment oriented video. I focus on financial marketing education and I’ve been doing a lot of work in that space for several years now. I find myself working more and more working with RIAs and I’ve starting to talk with independent broker dealers (IBDs) about how they can build marketing campaigns in a digital world.

It’s not all about digital strategies. To me that’s not what a digital world is. A digital world is simply a recognition that we live in this hyper-digital and interconnected world using a lot of technology that we didn’t have 10, 15 or 20 years ago. How do we build connections and maintain those connections? I want to hear your questions. I want to explore opportunities to share some of what I’ve been doing with other firms around the country and what I’ve done in other industries throughout my career. How does display advertising fit into your media mix or does it? The same with email marketing and marketing automation. I talk a lot about how to build brand led initiatives to support advisors. What’s the role of events and how can we use digital technologies to follow-up after events? I recognize that 75 percent of the assets are coming in through a referral channel. So how do we justify the expenses we’re spending in our marketing? What’s the role that a more institutionalized marketing approach should play within our firms?

I want to cover financial marketing topics that are interesting to you. I want to know if this format is something that you think is valuable. Send me some topics that you’d like me to cover. I’ve got a list of different topics from people I’ve been talking to lately that I’m going to address over the next several videos. Send me anything that’s on your mind, whether it’s related to strategy, execution or management. We do a lot with virtual teams and we spend a lot of time working with clients to put all the pieces together to build a cohesive strategy that fits together throughout the calendar year. Send me an email at chall@marketingwiz.co or join my newsletter.

The post Listen to the Launch of the FinMar Today Video Blog appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

The other day I was looking at strategies to expand my activities to save and invest for retirement and I began to think about the similarities that should exist between wealth managers and professional marketers. My financial advisors have all set the appropriate expectations on what I can expect from my investments over the next 5, 10, 15 and 20 years. I have been told to expect a 5% to 8% +/- return on my investments and to run away from anybody who promises to double my money. So then why have many owners and managers set an unrealistic expectation on how their marketing dollars will impact AUM?

Set realistic expectations for your marketing efforts

There is no one single solution to expand and grow your firm and marketing is just one component of it. For marketing to be successful at your firm, it must be viewed as a set of ongoing activities to connect and engage clients and prospects through the sharing of information that helps individuals and families pursue their financial goals. All too often, marketing is associated only with lead generation and its value is then determined based on new leads and associated new assets generated from those leads. What about the importance of communicating the firm’s outlook on the markets with existing clients? How important is it to follow up quickly with relevant financial planning information for new prospects who attended a financial education seminar hosted by one of the firm’s advisors last week?

Establishing a set of marketing resources to follow up with referrals

According to Schwab’s 2016 RIA Benchmark Study, referrals provide 75% of new assets for RIAs. Since referrals are clearly the single largest component of a firm’s organic growth strategy, doesn’t it make sense to create a set of prebuilt campaigns ready to support advisors as they work to connect and engage with new referrals when they come in? Referrals still need to be sold on the value of your firm. In an increasingly competitive environment, RIAs should leverage a portion of their marketing efforts to set up referral marketing campaigns that are designed to share a variety of firm branded information via online and offline channels.

Outline the role of marketing for your RIA

Successful firms are taking the time to define the role of marketing and to establish marketing calendars with a set of scheduled activities that align with their firm’s strategic plan for growth. At this phase, don’t focus on whether or not you have the talent internally to manage the process of creating and distributing online and offline communications to clients and prospects. Take the time to sketch out two to three areas where you see room for improvement with how your firm and its advisors communicate with clients and prospects.

To learn more about building your RIA’s marketing department, click here to download my white paper: Smart Communications for RIAs.

The post Is Your Firm’s Marketing Doomed to Fail? appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

Almost 20 years later, my grade in Psychology 101 is still a sore subject for me because it was my lowest grade in college and not because I didn’t love the subject of Psychology. Ironically it was because I knew too much for my professor to handle. The summer before my sophomore year I read as much as I could on the theory of self-actualization.

Are you spending too much mental energy on understanding how your communication technologies work?

With all the day-to-day operational issues and client management responsibilities, you have precious little time to spend on creating content. If you have an hour in your schedule to devote to marketing, you need to spend it on building messages and shaping your firm’s voice. It’s not a good use of resources to spend 30 minutes trying to understand how your email service provider will deliver your client newsletters or how Google Adwords works to serve targeted display ads to website visitors once they leave your RIA’s website.

Gaining Trust in your firm’s marketing platform will help to grow your content

And here’s where the psychology comes into play. According to Maslow, before an individual can ever attain true happiness, he must have his basic needs of food, water, shelter, safety, and community met. If he worries about his basic needs, he will continually struggle to find and achieve his purpose in life. Likewise, if you are to grow your firm’s marketing department, your ideas and unique insights into what your clients need in wealth management solutions are essential to your growth. If you are spending the limited time your have on technology configurations, communication planning, message formatting, and execution, then you are not spending it on shaping the unique voice that positions your firm with clients and prospects.

Pick a platform you can trust

Your platform is a combination of your technologies, your process, and your support resources to create and launch your marketing campaigns. Whether you are using an internal resource or relying on an external marketing partner, you need to trust them to set up your technologies, build your marketing calendar, format your messages, interface with your compliance officer and execute on your behalf. Ask them to prepare and submit a detailed outline for your review, so that you can feel comfortable to focus your time on shaping your firm’s voice.

To learn more about building your RIA’s marketing department, click here to download my white paper: Smart Communications for RIAs.

The post Psychology and Its Influence On Your Firm’s Content Marketing appeared first on Craig K. Hall.

Recently my 8-year-old daughter began competitive swimming. It is a joy to watch her win a heat in the events she is competing in but that is not what my wife and I have focused on as the measure of success. If she comes in last in a heat but beats her last best previous time by 3 seconds that is a huge win for her. As a beginner, the measure of success is to continue to beat her last best time.

How are you measuring your firm’s marketing effort?

For a lot of RIAs between $250M and $2.5B in AUM, their marketing activities lack consistency making it hard for them to track and measure the progress of their marketing efforts. In a sea of day-to-day operational issues, marketing initiatives can easily get deprioritized and neglected. If your firm suffers from Marketing ADD (Attention Deficient Disorder), you’re not alone and there is a solution.

Pick a place to start and build on it

Don’t let the wirehouse firms with their massive media and marketing budgets keep you from getting focused. So you won’t be able to run commercials in the Super Bowl or dominate Youtube with digital video ads on retirement planning and wealth management services. So what? Don’t compare yourself with them because it’s not going to help you get your program off the ground and keep it off the ground. Pick one or two things you can do, put a 12-month marketing calendar together, execute and track your results each quarter.

Movement Creates Momentum

A cliché I know, but it’s true. If you want to see your firm thrive and prosper in the digital age, you’ve got to take action and begin your financial marketing efforts. Develop micro- campaigns that you can pilot within your RIA for 6 or 12 months. This will help you to organize your internal resources, identify talent gaps that may exist, source qualified partners and execute, test, measure and refine. The Morgan Stanley’s of the world did not build their marketing functions overnight. They are continually moving forward and learning from their efforts, building on what works and eliminating what doesn’t.

Get on the Blocks and Compete

A focus on consistent activity and continual improvement is the first step in growing your firm’s marketing capacity. Whether it’s starting a monthly blog on your firm’s website or developing a quarterly digital newsletter to clients and prospects, get your executive team together, set some target dates, assign responsible parties and go for it. Get your compliance officer involved early so that he or she is the loop from the beginning.

What do you need to be successful?

Please take a minute and send me an email if there is a topic you would like to see me cover. I am here to help you grow your firm’s marketing capacity so let me know what you would like to see more of in this blog.

The post How to Measure Your RIA’s Marketing Activity? appeared first on Craig K. Hall.