Terra McBride, Chief Marketing Officer, Prime Capital Financial, and Crystal Mathis, Chief Marketing Officer and Partner at SignatureFD, have built marketing engines at their firms that track every campaign, email and ad in real time.
“Marketing used to be this squishy thing,” McBride said. “You put up a billboard or put an ad in the paper, and maybe you get a few more people that month that walk through your door and you said ‘Yay, marketing did it.’”
In this week’s episode of Marketing Matchup, McBride and Mathis talk about their experiences building marketing systems they can quantify and refine. Whether it is the careful cultivation of a prospect profile over a series of touch points, or measuring the impact of a certain amount of emoji in a subject line, everything goes under the microscope to produce consistent results that directly drive business growth for RIAs.
But the sophistication of marketing data does not mean the end of the human touch. Both McBride and Mathis agreed that RIA marketing has to acknowledge that money and emotion are inseparable.
McBride works directly with Prime Capital’s advisors to coach them on personal origin stories around their own relationships with money. She asks them things like: What was money like in your house growing up? How did it make you feel?
The answers connect advisors to the reasons they got into the profession, and help the firm acknowledge the emotional weight of a prospect entrusting their life savings to a financial professional. If the marketing doesn’t acknowledge that weight, McBride said, it can’t turn cold prospects into real relationships.
Mathis has built SignatureFD’s content strategy around life inflection points, the moments when financial decisions carry the strongest impact: having a child, major relationship changes, or hitting career milestones. At each inflection point, SignatureFD’s marketing emphasizes the firm’s guidance and the value of a financial advisor.
Their conversation with Gregory FCA brought out additional insights:
Marketing is finally a C-suite priority
Both McBride and Mathis are their firm’s first-ever CMOs. In both cases, their titles signal a shift from marketing as a support function. Now, it is a core part of their firms’ growth strategies. “It’s not just me doing this, it’s everyone,” Mathis says. “It’s an exciting time because people are taking marketing seriously.”
Look beyond finance to find excellent talent
They argue that hiring talent outside of financial services can make for better marketing. Good marketers bring with them a lot of highly transferable skills, and casting a wider net may be key to countering a persistent talent gap in financial services driven by demographics and growing demand. “You don’t need to know Sharpe ratios,” McBride said, “you need to know how to connect.”
Storytelling is your referral strategy
The industry loves client referrals because they convert fast. But relying on happy accidents is not a growth strategy. “Marketing creates relationships where there weren’t any,” Mathis says. Both firms are building storytelling systems that create that same “warm referral” feeling at scale, because no one connects with jargon and alpha charts.
Listen to the full conversation below, or download Marketing Matchup on your favorite podcasting platform!
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