Marketing advisor tech isn’t easy. To break through the noise, marketers need to understand both the realities of an advisor’s work, and the end clients they serve.
It’s a plight that may sound familiar to RIA marketers, who also need to demonstrate a sharp understanding of their ideal prospects. Abby Domine, CMO at Flourish, and Emily Tran, VP of Marketing at Vanilla, speak in the newest episode of Marketing Matchup about a move away from old-school product marketing to something more practical: helping advisors do their work more effectively, with fewer distractions.
Focus on value
The modern advisor feels the pressure of being a hero to their business and to their clients, Domine said. “It’s a hard job being an advisor, right? You have to be quantitative and qualitative. You have to build relationships, but also produce number based results,” she said.
Advisor tech leaders find themselves marketing to a cohort that is not always tech savvy, but still has business challenges to solve. It is an increasingly crowded field (just look at Michael Kitces’ Advisor Technology Map!), and standing out requires a laser-sharp focus on the actual value of the solution. A successful campaign needs to show the technology saves time for the advisor or helps them serve clients better, full stop.
Begin with the end (user) in mind
One common mistake Tran sees is messaging that targets the firm’s decision-maker but ignores the actual user. Often, those are two different people.
“The advisor doesn’t always have a seat at the table when a tech decision is made,” she says. “But they’re the end user. And if it doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work.”
Education is also a massive component of a successful advisor tech marketing campaign. Best-in-class tech can’t help an RIA if it is too difficult to learn, or there is no institutional buy-in to adopt the technology at all levels. Not everyone learns the same way, so documentation, videos, live support, and walkthroughs deployed in tandem are a powerful component of the storytelling that accompanies successful advisor tech solutions providers.
Watch the full version of their conversation below, or download the latest episode of Marketing Matchup on your platform of choice!
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