Andrew Gluck: This is Andrew Gluck. I’m
the founder of Advisor Products and welcome. It’s great to have this kind of
turnout here. We had over 200 people register for this and this is the first
of what will become, I hope, a monthly webinar to really demonstrate our
commitment to working with the advisors that hire us.
The reason that we’re doing this is, quite honestly, I had
a conversation last week with an advisor and I realized that in spite of all
the things that we do to try to keep advisors informed of all of the new
marketing products and services that we’re providing, we still can’t do enough
and right now, you need us and we want to be here for you and we’re really
trying to do that. So I hope this webinar and the other things that we’re doing
demonstrates to you our commitment to work in the way that you want us to.
The line of communication is open so please tell us what
you need. We want to help you here.
So let’s get started. If you don’t know it, we’re in a
new world for advisors and in many ways this is for the advisors that work with
us, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime and it’s not surprising that in recent
months our business has done very well. We had some of the best months ever
earlier this year, which is just astounding.
Advisors are stepping up and marketing more. I’ve got to
admit that the Point Newsletter has not done as well as I would have liked. I
think it’s a mistake to cut off any marketing in communication effort right
now, but the website products and services has been booming and it’s probably
because we’re doing a lot more sophisticated things and quite frankly, we’ve
retooled the company over the past couple of years.
We really did change the service model. We’re leaner and
we’re smarter and we’re doing things in a way so that we really give great
client service and I’m really proud of what the staff has done and how
productive we’ve been. We put a lot of money into development and I hope to
get to show you some of these things.
And of course, on our webinars that we’ve been doing on
Fridays, the Financial Crisis Webinar Series, I don’t really talk about any of
these things, so I’m glad we’re able to share these ideas with you.
The environment that we’re in, of course, is a tough one.
Revenues have been slashed by something like thirty percent (30%) for many
advisory firms, and yet you still have to serve the same number of clients and
that’s pretty scary.
At the same time, we’ve entered a new era of mistrust and
transparency is more important than ever. To help advisors through this
period, we’ve initiated the Financial Crisis Webinar Series and you could see
all of the webinars, in case you don’t know about it, you could go to our home
page, click on this gray button over here – Financial Crisis Webinar Series
– and you can see at the top here all of the upcoming webinars that we’ve
scheduled and you can click and get details about all of them and register for
any one of them just by clicking on the Register button.
And then the other thing that we have here is the ability
for you to get the slides for previous webinars and replay them right here on
demand. We keep adding to the list, of course, every week, and I urge you to
avail yourselves of this and hope that it can help you manage this crisis
better.
We have been getting CE credit for these webinars and we
are now in the midst of making it so that you could get CE credit on the
replays, so we should have that working sometime in the next week or two, I
would say. It’s something that we’re working on and we should be able to make
it so that you can replay the videos and get CE credit within the next few
weeks.
The other thing that I’ve been doing is blogging – and
blogging a lot, please see the blog. I blog a lot about our products, but I
also, quite frankly, blog about other issues and hopefully you’ll get some
value out of this. I’m trying to share what I’m learning about social
networking. Once in a while there’s a joke on here. Not everybody got that
one on April Fool’s Day when I told everybody about a new PMS system – Advisor
PMS (“Portfolio Management Software System”) and that was on April Fool’s, of
course. I had some fun with that one. So please do check out the
blog and I’m trying to create content for it. I have to stop myself from doing
it every day. Quite frankly, it’s addictive.
One of the things that we did this today was create a
survey so that you can see what it is that people are asking us for. I’m very
happy to say that we had 91 respondents take a look at the survey. About half
of the people who registered did the survey and happily, you can see the
results. What I think is interesting here is this demonstrates, quite frankly,
what you can do with the web – how you can be transparent, provide almost
instant information, instant feedback to people, and really make them feel
involved with your company, and we’re trying to do that with you.
Hey, look at that. Email newsletters pulled out at the
very last minute here and became the leading thing that you guys want to hear
about. Until today, I’ve got to say that Search Engine Marketing was the
number one thing, and that’s what this presentation was based on. We’re going
to stick with that, but that kind of Web 2.0 experience of sharing information
with you is what we’re after and hopefully you’re enjoying that experience. It
has helped us transform our company, and we aim to make it help you transform
your firm as well.
So specifically, what I mean when I say Web 2.0, I’m
talking about things like, it used to be that advisors would track items that
__________ CRM. Now your CRM allows you to assign clients to-dos and where
we’re pushing it, and this is something that Advisor Products has really been,
and we’re going to show you how we do this, is clients can assign you to-dos and
you can assign clients to-dos.
It used to be that you’d hold conference calls with other
professionals. Now you can share a client vault with them and collaborate with
them and assign them to-dos.
It used to be that advisors would perhaps document their
processes. Now where we’re going is processes and workflows are being imbedded
in CRM systems.
It used to be that you would offer an account look-up page
on your websites. Now where we’re going – XML feeds from Portfolio Management
Software – from CRM systems.
It used to be that you’d email your clients a newsletter.
Now you can create personalized content.
So Web 2.0 has really taken hold and helped us create
Advisor Technology 2.0. Like I said, as recently as this morning when I
checked that survey, the number one item that advisors asked us about was
search engine marketing. We’re going to use this list and try to go through
today as many of these items as we can and answer your questions without the
products that we do.
So what I’d like to do right now is introduce a partner of
ours, and that’s Mark Spranger, who is the CEO of eSource Marketing. We are
partnering with eSource Marketing to provide advisors with Search Engine
Services, Search Engine Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization.
I’m going to turn over the reins to you, Mark, and make
you the presenter. Okay Mark, we can see your screen and we can hear you, so
please go right ahead.
Mark Spranger: Perfect. Hey Andy, thank
you very much for having me. Again, I’m Mark Spranger. Thank you for having
me. I’m CEO of eSource Marketing. We started in this business in 1999 and
back then, we ran around, literally, and educated a lot of business about what
Search Marketing was. People didn’t come to us and ask us about Search Marketing.
Well, that’s kind of come full circle and it’s been really amazing to see and
even evidenced by the questionnaire that you guys took. Fifty-six percent
(56%) of you folks wanted to hear more about Search Marketing and Search Engine
Advertising and Optimization.
So really, you guys are a step above and what I’m going to
do today is I’ve got about ten (10) minutes. We’re going to take a real quick
look at Search Engine Marketing and kind of from the start to the finish, what
channels are available out there for Search Engine Marketing and how can you
take advantage of those in your business.
So we’re going to figure out what is Search Marketing, and
why is it important, why do I call it Search Engine Marketing, and the types of
search that you can leverage—Optimization, Sponsored Search, Local Business
Listings—and there will be a time right at the end, and sometimes at some
point, if I get a little too techy, chat in a question. Andy will forward that
over to me. We’ll have a little time at the end of my presentation here to
answer some of those questions so that we make sure there’s a good
understanding, and hopefully I can come back and really go in-depth on some of
the various that you’re more interested in hearing about.
This is where it all starts. This is the very fundamental
basis of all that I do and this is what I live by, and it’s the search phrase.
I think if anybody’s every gone on Google or Yahoo! or MSN and they typed a
search phrase in, you kind of understand how that works. You type that in and
you get the search results.
Generally the first thing you see when you get search
results is right at the top of the page, there’s a box and the box says you’re
looking at results 1-10 of about a million or two million or 10 million or
hundreds of thousands of search results. Now, if you’re like me, you might go
through a few pages of those, but the reality is that most people that are
searching, especially if they’re searching for a product or service, are not
going to scroll through three hundred eight thousand (380,000) results. The
fact of the matter is, Google really only shows a thousand results, so if you
ever try to go to the end of the three eighty (380), you’ll never get there.
Anyway, the fact is when someone does a search, especially
if they’re looking for a product or service, only half the people ever even
scroll down and if you scroll down to the bottom of that Google page, you’ll
notice that there’s a little next button and then there’s a bunch of pages
there. Only about six percent (6%) of the people, when they’re searching for
products or services, will ever click the next page.
So location on the first or second page of Google is very
important. It’s very important. That is where most of the traffic comes – the
first or second page of Google. The point here is that there’s a lot of search
results, so there’s competition out there. You’re in a business that has a lot
of competition and this is kind of how it played out.
Now the search results on a Google page, it’s the same for
all of them – MSN, Yahoo!, Google – they’re all kind of structured similarly in
that there’s three areas of results. There’s Sponsored Search Results, and
sponsored search, I’m going to get back to in a second. Those are paid ads.
Those are ads that are placed by our clients and by advertisers to attract
business for a very particular search phrase.
The second area is probably one that you hear a lot
about. You’ve probably gotten some spam email about this; I know that I do. I
get hundreds of them every day – Website Optimization, SEO, Google rankings, so
on and so forth. That is what we call natural results, or organic listings,
and those listings are the listing that Google feels is most relevant for that
particular search phrase and that search phrase, when you type that into Google
and you hit search, you’re going to get a list of results. Google has
determined those are most relevant for that particular phrase.
The last area is the Local Business Results and you’ve all
kind of seen these. This Local Business Results, I’ll get back to that in a
second as well. That’s a very unique and very interesting area, especially in
your industry.
So those Sponsored Results that I was talking about –
Sponsored Search – what’s the great thing about those? The great thing about
those is for any search phrase, I can put up an ad and attract visibility and
traffic for that particular search phrase. Now, here’s the important part
about that particular search phrase – do I want to show my ad for any search phrase
that will attract customers that might be interested in my product or
services? Not really. I want to attract customers that are interested in my
products and services and ready to buy. That’s important and we understand how
people search.
So somebody that’s ready to buy your services might be
searching a little more specifically. They may have gone out and done some
generic broad-base type searches. They’ve educated themselves. They
understand the industry. They’ll go on and type something a little different
the next time that they’re looking for information. It might be a little more
targeted.
At that point, now you have an educated consumer. You
show your ad, you attract that educated consumer to your site, and you entice
them to respond through your website. That’s huge. That makes Sponsored
Search a very valuable tool if you know how to use it.
Local Search – Local Search actually really has started to
take foothold in January of this year. Local Search is the fastest growing
channel, bar none, on the internet right now. It is the least defended in
terms of business competition. Most businesses end up in the Local Business
Results because they have a Yellow Page ad somewhere. Google, Yahoo!, MSN –
they purchase these lists to populate their databases and most of that is
sitting out there and it’s not well optimized. That is what we do. We go in
and optimize these listings so for those search phrases that come up, they can
end up here.
Now, this technology is filtering everywhere. It’s in
your cars. It’s in your cell phones now. It’s in garments and so on and so
forth. This technology has grown very, very quickly this year.
The other one that you hear a lot about, again, is the
Natural (Organic Search Results).
The other one are the Natural Search Results that Google
feels are most relevant to your particular search, and the way to target
Natural Search Results in today’s new world, as you said Andy, is to use a more
integrated approach. Not only do we integrate good, optimized content into
your website, but you also take advantage of all the other areas of the
internet that are growing fast – Facebook, LinkedIn, all the directories, the
different types of business listings out there – they all end up here in our
SEO world in our Google rankings.
If you take an integrated approach to this and you build
websites that have content that are related to your search phrases that you
want to capture, and then all of your other activities on the internet, whether
it’s LinkedIn or Facebook or blogging or whatever it is, your Web 2.0
activities all reference back to your main website to give Google really the
credibility and the argument that your content is relevant. That’s kind of the
bottom line there.
This is something that we could talk about for hours and
hours, and really what I mean to do here is give you a good overview of the
three channels. We’ve got three channels – Local Search, Natural Results, and
Sponsored Results.
So why are Sponsored Results important? Well, you’ve got
to step out of your industry, I think, first real quick, and think about this
for a second. Imagine you have decided that it’s a good time to buy a home in
this economy and you want to research where you want to buy a home. Where do
you turn to? What do you do?
Well, if you’re like eighty-nine percent (89%) of the
people in this country, you’re going to walk over to your computer, you’re
going to get on the computer and you’re going to type something like Homes and
Sacramento, California. Well, it’s the same thing in your industry.
Financial services and products – if I’m thinking about retirement or I’m
thinking about needing some financial services, seventy-six percent (76%) of
the people do the same thing. They walk over to the computer, they type in a
search, and they start to research your industry.
The coolest thing about that is every month there’s about
a billion local searches, and when someone’s doing a local search – when
someone’s locally searching for a product or service – thirty-seven percent
(37%) of those people make contact through that online effort. So it’s huge.
It’s a market that’s been growing over the last few years and it’s really ripe
to take advantage of.
About six months ago or so, Andy and I got together and he
wanted to make sure that we created some packages that would target these
different channels that were very specific to his clients, and so that’s what
we did. We went back and we created these packages that are very specific to
you and we created two packages – AdvisorFind and AdvisorFindPro.
AdvisorFind really targets those local business listings,
where AdvisorFindPro targets all three of those channels. So you get an
integrated approach, all three of those channels are targeted – Local Business
Listings, Sponsored Search, and SEO. That’s really what we’ve done and we’re
really excited about putting this together for you folks and really working
with you to make this a success.
And with that, that’s kind of the overview and I’ll go
ahead and take questions, if we have any.
Andrew Gluck: Okay, Mark, thank you.
That was a very helpful overview. It would be great – would you say that the
local package that we’re offering, which I think we priced around $60 a month,
is that the equivalent of a Yellow Page ad because a lot of people, I think, in
the financial advice business, have for years, relied on Yellow Page ads and I
don’t know if that’s a good investment anymore when they could do something
like this.
Mark Spranger: Yeah, and we get that
across the board. We look at businesses that are advertising and investing in
Yellow Pages and we look at what the returns are and we put together a package
for them using this Local Search technology, and we absolutely blow it away.
There is absolutely no comparison between the results you’re going to get with
Local Business ads and the Yellow Pages. It happens over and over again. We
blow them away. It’s amazing.
Andrew Gluck: We’re getting some
questions about the cost of these two programs. Like I said, the lower-end package,
AdvisorFind, is $60 per month and the higher-end package is $300 a month. You
know, I took away reins of control from you, but maybe I’ll give it back to you
and could you go through the components of the package with that slide that you
had up?
Mark Spranger: Sure.
Yeah, here’s the package. I’m actually not showing
everything that you get with your packages. These are the highlights here.
With an AdvisorFind package, what we do first is we
develop and optimize a Google business listing for you. We take your
information and we create a Google business listing and then we go – it takes
us a about a month to do that – and optimize it. We optimize it based on the
keywords we’re after for your particular location and integrate that into those
business listings.
When that Google business ad is listed and we go to Google
– we start there because that’s where everybody starts – then we move over to
Yahoo!, and then we move to MSN using similar content that’s been optimized on
Google for those. Then what we do is we also submit that to a service that
will place that ad on forty (40) or fifty (50) other services, so really what
you’re getting is you’re going to get an optimized Google business listing ad
that’s manually submitted to Yahoo!, manually submitted to MSN, and then
submitted a host of others like SuperPages and AT&T and Dags and so on and
so forth.
A Sponsored Search is very powerful because it’s
instantaneous. Now with the Local Business Listings and the Optimization,
obviously you’re not going to get results in an hour, but with Sponsored
Search, you’re going to get results today. So we really recommend doing that
because you’re going to see the benefits of this package right out of the
gate. That really is a Google sponsored ad and it’s all covered in the price.
Then we optimize the pages. The optimization is a
one-year process. Last night I was up til midnight finishing taxes and I had
been doing some research on the financial industry related to keywords and
things like that. I found that between the months of January and April 15,
there’s a huge spike in people looking for investment advice and it hit home
hard last night when I was doing my taxes, and you have to start thinking about
what you’re going to do there. So there’s a huge spike.
So this is a perfect time, right now, to get into the
optimization process. Because it’s a year-long process, we’re going to hit it
right at the end of the spike there – so optimization of up to seven pages of
your website, which we do throughout the year. We’re going to develop a
Facebook and LinkedIn profile for you. We’re going to be looking at the
keyword insertion on your pages, in the headings and the meta tags and all
kinds of technical stuff, but those are the packages.
Andrew Gluck: Mark, one of the things
that’s been frustrating to me over the years is that the advisors often don’t
understand that just because they have a website doesn’t get them on the Search
Engines. There’s a growing recognition of the work that needs to be done to get
favorable Search Engine rankings and to do pay per click, but it’s been slow
and painful.
One of the questions I chatted over to you is kind of
related to that. People want to know whether this is a one-time task that
you’re doing for the Pro services. Why do we have to do these things over
again frequently? Could you explain what we’re doing over there?
Mark Spranger: Yeah, really what we’re
doing, it’s not a set up and go kind of a thing. There’s a lot of services out
there that kind of provide a “here you go, we’re done; call us next year,” kind
of a thing, but we found that those really aren’t effective. You really need
to go back and optimize this over the year and you need the constant touch.
Content is king. Changing information is king. Google doesn’t want to show
ads that aren’t relevant or content that’s not relevant. Content that’s not
relevant is content that’s stagnant, so you can’t remain stagnant in your
site. You have to have a continuous path or update path.
Andrew Gluck: Yeah, so we’re going to be
optimizing some pages for you continually.
Mark Spranger: Right, and that’s labor
intensive, that kind of work, and it takes expertise, quite frankly, from
Search Engine professionals. It’s not like any web developer can do that.
It’s really a specialized field.
Andrew Gluck: Yeah, absolutely.
Do you want to explain what being an AdWords qualified
company means?
Mark Spranger: An AdWords Qualified
Company is a company that has done a few things. First, we’ve demonstrated
expertise by going through the Google certification process which is we have to
have a certain number of specialists here that have taken the test and passed
the certification test.
We also have to spend a certain amount of money each
quarter with Google to maintain that certification.
Andrew Gluck: I chatted over a couple of
other questions for you. Do you see them there?
Mark Spranger: Yes, I do. One of the
questions is, “Do you need to have a budget for the Sponsored Search hits?” and
the answer is no. What we’ve done is we’ve packaged sort of a preset package
with the AdvisorFindPro so that that is a set fee.
Andrew Gluck: Yeah, so part of the $300,
just so everybody knows, is paying for the pay per click services.
Mark Spranger: Exactly.
Andrew Gluck: And the contract period is
one year. There’s one other question about that.
So with that, hopefully everybody found that helpful. I
know I did, so thank you for that, Mark.
Returning to our list of questions, Email Newsletters is
next on our list and to speak about that, we’re going to have Barry Weinstein,
the Vice President of Sales at Advisor Products, speak about how you can create
automated email newsletters and he’ll also talk about marketing videos for your
site. So I’m going to hand Barry my headset here and then try to wrestle it
back from him when he’s done.
Barry Weinstein: Thank you, Andy.
Okay, I, for one, am not surprised that e-Newsletters and
this service ended up being number one or in the top two for a year. I work
with advisors every day and I can’t tell you how many times I get a call and an
advisor will come to me and thank me for turning them onto the service and the
response they got.
I’ll say it’s not as sexy as Search Engine Optimization or
a lot of our other tools, but it certainly is an important grass roots
marketing tool that really works. It provides, in a way, immediate
gratification. When an advisor uses this tool, they feel response in reaching
out to their clients and it really does work fabulously.
We’ve been building websites for over 12 years. We
advisors have learned that our content and the articles that we provide are
wonderful. They’re timely, they’re interesting, and they love sharing these
articles with their clients.
What happened was, we would get calls from advisors
saying, “I post these articles on my site. They’re there, but my clients don’t
know they’re there. They’re not coming to them. I’m looking at the hit rates
and they’re not being visited.” So what we did was, we created this option
program and it’s controlled in the BackOffice and what it does is it sends an
email to your client. It’s branded in your site of branding and it announces –
you get to customize the content of the email. You get to announce and
introduce the articles on your website, and then we escort your client back to
your website. The process is very easy and it’s a turnkey solution here.
Whatever CRM system you are using, we can work with you
and you can upload the first name, last name, email address of your clients or
prospects that you have in your database, and they come into our BackOffice.
We can even set them up in groups so that you can market differently to clients
versus prospects. You can market differently to pre-retirees, retirees that
you have as clients, or business owners. There’s a lot of flexibility.
And then creating an e-Newsletter, it’s very simple. We
have a 1, 2, 3-step process. The first step enables you to title the email.
You can now customize an introduction. I have some advisors that write their own
_______ here, and sometimes even their own article. You have the space to do
that. And then here you put a little trailer, at the end ending comments.
The next step, you select the articles that you want to
highlight in that issue. It’s a very simple process. These are the articles
available from your website. You can go through this list and then simply
check off the ones that you want to feature in that newsletter issue. Because
of the cost of this and the ease, this is the kind of communication that you
can do a monthly basis. It’s very simple and it keeps you in touch, and the
content that we provide is continuously updated and there’s no loss of content
to choose from.
And then the final step is we give you a preview. In that
preview, you can see here, is your banner from your site. That’s what will
appear there. This is the title of that email. You have your opening
comments, and then comes our articles that you selected. What we’re doing here
is we’re giving the title of the article, a little taste of it, and when they
want to read the rest of it, they’ll click and it escorts them back to your
site to read the entire article. It’s a tremendous tool.
Now, because of the way these articles are written,
because they’re not the type of information that you can just Google or get
anywhere else, when one of your clients reads these articles and they find
something interesting, what they have here now is this email that they can
forward to their friends, and they all have that list of five, six, seven, ten
people, and they’ll forward that email with your brand and that introduction to
you to those friends. And then those friends will have it, and they forward it
on. It’s this progression that occurs.
The calls that I get advisors saying that “I get calls
from people coming to my site that I would have never been able to touch
before, thank you, this is a tremendous program.”
In addition to this, we also have what we call in this
program, a weekly market update. This is something that we prepare at Advisor
Products. It is available at the close of business on Fridays. It has a
little snapshot of what happened in the market and then our content then,
because we go out and we find three interesting articles from other sites that
touch on events that may have occurred that week. This piece is available at
the close of business Fridays, and then you can set it up to automatically be
sent to all your clients in the database, or any group of clients. This is
something that doesn’t even have to be touched by you. Once you set it up,
it’s ready to go.
All of these materials have in it places for your
disclosures. It also has an unsubscribe mark at the bottom so anybody that
wants to be able to unsubscribe to certain features, they’ll be able to do it.
You set it on autopilot and that piece goes. It’s very flexible.
And then thirdly, we have a mass email, we call it, which
is basically a blank page and this is great because you’ll be able to easily
create any kind of communication that you would like to share with clients, and
it has that same format. Your database is already created. You have your
groups, if you’re going to market to those groups differently, and when you,
one, we give you a preview. You would put your content in here. It’s as easy
as using a Word doc. We’ll give you a preview and that preview, again, will
have your banner, your branding in it, and again, protection for compliance,
any disclosures, and unsubscribing. Everything here is branded in your firm
brand. It has nothing about us.
E-Newsletter is a very powerful tool. Other functions,
you can save emails in here and keep track of ones that you’ve sent out. It
really works and the spreading of these emails among clients to referrals
really helps build that immediate gratification that we spoke about.
Another area that we just started was our marketing videos
that we made available. I’d like to touch on this. It should be no surprise
to anyone that video and the viewing of videos on the internet has really been
an explosion load. There are research reports from comScore that say that last
year 150 million U.S. internet users watched an average of 96 videos each – a
tremendous increase in years before. In fact, those 96 videos that were
watched by individuals in December was a thirteen percent (13%) increase over
the previous month. So this increase is really building.
In January of ’09, this mode really continued. Fifteen
billion videos were viewed, an increase of fifty percent (50%) over a year
ago. Videos are used in training, marketing; features like Go To Meeting that
we’re using, Go To Webinar, enable you to be able to record webinars such as
this, and be able to share it for replays or with clients at a later date. We
do that with all of the Financial Crisis Webinar Series and it’s available, as
Andy had shown earlier, from our website.
So we’re taking advantage of marketing videos and what
we’ve done is something really unique. Our advisors have some wonderful tools
that are associated with their sites and they provide services that we think we
can spread this word through the use of marketing videos.
So what we’ve done is set up a series where every month
we’re producing a new video that would be available for an advisor to subscribe
to and they cover a wide variety of topics. What you’re looking at right now
is our web page where we have this product offering. We show you the calendar
of which videos we’re producing. Right now, available from March was the
benefits of our advisory firm client using the client portal. One of our other
platforms, many of our advisors are using it.
What this video will help that advisor do is gain
participation from their client, explain what the portal does, how it will help
them as a client, and what it does for them, and it’s done in this real nice
video that’s branded for the advisor. We even enable in some of these videos
that branding feature which is really great as well.
In April, we just released – I think today or yesterday –
Why You Want an Advisor Who’s a Fiduciary, a key topic to share with your
clients and cleanly and clearly explain.
So these two are now on our website. Feel free to come
here and view them. If you’d like, there’s pricing information, as well,
that’s posted on this site and any other information you’d like, we’d be happy
to speak to you. You can reach out to us and we can share with you some of the
future events that are happening there.
So thank you, Andy, for allowing me to share this with
everyone. I’m going to turn the reins back over before you wrestle me.
Andrew Gluck: Okay, thank you for that,
Barry. That was great.
What we want to do now is just keep it moving for you and
show you some additional services that you’ve asked about. To do that, we’re
going to have to go back into slideshow mode and Jim Voss, our Operations
Director is here to speak about adding your own content.
Jim has been a great addition to our team and if you ever
have questions or need to call us about a service issue, please feel free to
reach out to Jim and we’ll give you contact information for Jim at the end.
Jim, here you go.
Jim Voss: Thank you, Andy.
Good afternoon, everyone. As Andy said, I’m the Operations Director for Advisor
Products. My background is in the software industry, so please forgive me if I
get technical during my portion of the presentation.
My topic is how you add content with our BackOffice
application – content to your website. What I’m going to go over applies to
template websites. Some of it applies to custom websites, but each custom
website is different so if you’re not sure, you can certainly ask us whether
these things apply to you or not.
I wanted to segue into adding content by continuing the presentation
that Mark started earlier and talk about how adding content to your website
will help you with Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.
The way that Search Engines use your site is not the way
that people see it in a browser. If you want to see how your site would be
viewed by a Search Engine, the simplest way is to go to a page and in Windows,
you can right-click and select View Source and this is actually what the
Search Engine sees – the code of the page and the text of the content in your
page. If you’ve got a very large image taking up a big portion of your page
and the Search Engine won’t notice it. It starts by reading through the code.
The way that you improve your natural rankings and also
improve the efficiency of your Search Engine Marketing is by having content
relevant to the keywords for your firm and the target audience you’re trying to
reach, and change that content to include those keywords and those phrases
often.
When you think about a website, it’s really a marketing
tool both to attract new customers and to foster a better relationship with
your existing customers which may lead to referrals. So as you think about
that, remember your habits as web user and think about the sites that you visit
frequently and why you visit them frequently. Is the information you’re
interested in and that information is updated frequently.
So when you apply that principle to your own site, there
are several things you can do. We have a few different types of pages that allow
you to update content frequently. The first one I want to review is the blog
page. This is pulled in from the blog in our personal portal system and it has
some nice features here for comments. We also have a blog-type page for
clients who do not have our personal portal system. If you go into your
website BackOffice, on your home page you will see a visual representation of
your site map, and if you don’t already have a blog-type page, you can add one
by selecting Edit Site Map and Add Page. The name can be a
little misleading, but – actually it’s called an Update Page – Client
Update Page and there’s a blog layout in here. You can give it a title,
etc.
Mark unfortunately didn’t have time to get into some of
the technical details, but it’s important for you, any type of page you create
to put in a title relevant to the content on the page and put in keywords in
the description. That will help your Search Engine rankings and improve the
efficiency of your ______ words.
Another type of page you can add is again relevant to
Search Engine Marketing. It’s often said that’s the best practice to have a
landing page for each individual ad so that you can track the performance of
the ads. If you have a Sponsored Ad in Google search results – let’s say your
firm specializes in wealth management for professional athletes and you have a
Google ad targeted towards that key phrase, you want to bring people to a page
that lets them know they’re in the right place and gives them what’s called “a
call to action” which is asking them to do something specific when they get to
the page.
Frequently, this type of call to action will be a form
that the prospect or visitor will fill out to request more information. If you
want to add this sort of page to your website, again select Edit Site Map
– Add Page and you pick Contact which is a “Contact Us” form.
You’ll see the second option here is text on top and bottom. I’m going to go
ahead and add a page based on the example I just used. (Professional athletes
wealth management.)
You don’t necessarily have to have this landing page
visible in your navigation. You can uncheck this box here and it won’t show up
in your navigation. I’m going to skip the keywords and description for now,
but you should fill that out when you create the page.
It’s important also to select Save Site Map if you
reposition the page and then when you exit the Site Map Mode, you change the
content on it. This section will appear above the form and this will appear
below, so I’m just going to add a little bit of text here saying “________
financial specializes in wealth management for professional athletes.”
When you want to see what this page is going to look like
or get the URL you place in your Google ad, you can simply click on the View
Page button here. Now you have a landing page for your ad with some
information that tells the visitor they’re in the right place, and the call to
action that lets them to enter their information to contact you.
There are training videos if you select Help from the
menu in the upper-right that tell you how to do the things that I’ve described
today, as well as many other things. If you’re not comfortable doing these
things yourself, you can always submit a service request to have our team do
these things for you. You can do that in three ways. You can select the Service
Request link from the BackOffice and fill out the form, you can send an
email to service@advisorproducts.com,
or you can call our office. The contact information is on our website.
Thanks for listening. I’m going to turn it back over to
Andy now.
Andrew Gluck: Okay, that’s great. I
hope that everybody’s getting something valuable out of this. One of the
valuable things that I want to stress is that I’m hoping that advisors that use
our platinum service are going to do some of these things and use some of the
service time because you get 8 hours of service time with your website. So
don’t forget about that. We’re here for you. We want to do that service for
you. Just give us a call.
We’re coming close to five o’clock now, but I just want to
quickly touch on a couple of the other issues that were on our list of things
that advisors want to know about, and then we’re going to open it up for questions.
Interfaces with CRM systems to manage client relationships
through the personal portal, to-dos, interfaces to a client’s account – let’s
take a look at some of that just by quickly going into a client portal.
I am now logging into a client portal. The firm name is
Cornerstone up in the upper-left-hand corner. The advisor’s name is John J.
Advisor. He is CFP as are most of the advisors that we are working with these
days. This is a single client’s portal, so the client’s name is John Smith and
this is his personal website. What you see at the top here, just relating to
the interface with different CRM systems, this is our to-do manager. By the
way, all of these items can be moved just like you can with iGoogle. The to-do
manager allows you to have a conversation with the client about a particular
issue. You can assign the client a to-do to call you about his term insurance
– “let’s set up a meeting” – and then the client can respond and this can all
be tracked so that you can see the to-dos that are past due, the ones that are
achieved, and the client can see that. The client can see what you’ve done for
him in the past year. That’s important, I think.
The other thing is that the client can assign you to-dos
if you choose to turn that feature on. The client can also add a professional
over here so that you can collaborate all together with a professional.
What’s really cool is that we’ve integrated this with a
couple of CRM systems already, and are planning to do more of that. We’ve got an
integration with a sales force add-on called Accelerate and that is used by
about 100–125 firms and then we also have an interface that we are about to
roll out with Redtail. The interface is complete. We are just about to put it
on our production server and move it off of the staging server. We’re looking
forward to that. That’s going to allow you to take things from your CRM system
and get them inserted automatically into the to-do manager. So, when you have
a client to-do, it will be inserted automatically from Redtail and from
Accelerate and when a client gives you a to-do, it will automatically flow into
Redtail and Accelerate from the to-do manager here.
We’re also planning an integration with what is probably
the largest system for financial services professionals, largest CRM system,
E-Z Data SmartOffice. They’re trying to make a move into the RAA space and
have partnered with us as part of that plan.
That covers the issue with the to-do manager and assigning
to-dos and the CRM system.
The other issue that I wanted to cover is displaying all
of the client’s accounts and that can be accomplished in a couple of ways. The
interfaces that we have, some of them are with account aggregation companies so
this interfaces with BuyAll Accounts, for instance. You can see all of the
holdings – the client can – and consolidate it to you right from here.
So we’re pulling all this information in with an interface
with ByAll Accounts. We’re doing the same thing with an aggregation service
called Advisor Exchange, which is a CashEdge partner. Over here you can see we
have the assets, the liabilities. We can have insurance holdings here and top
holdings and there’s a lot of information that comes through over here and you
get a net worth statement out of this.
By the way, we have other interfaces with Albridge
Solutions and MoneyGuidePro. I’m hoping that we can improve that interface
with MoneyGuidePro. We are launching other interfaces as well with other
financial planning systems. In the next few weeks, we’ll have more to tell you
about that.
We have major technology resources – Orion Advisor
Services – so we have a bunch of interfaces with PMS systems so that you can
display your client assets.
In terms of posting a client’s personal documents to AdvisorVault,
one other interface that I should show you, and that is this is what we can do
with Portfolio Center and Advent. These are html reports that are created by
uploading an extract file, so Portfolio Center comes with an extract file with
Advent. We’ve created the extract file and you just upload that and you’ll get
these reports, essentially, whether you’re using Advent or Portfolio Center,
and they go into our vault and they’re posted up on our vault by an application
that resides on our servers. We spent a lot of money on development over the
past year to get this stuff for advisors. You can see all the transactions, so
those reports, hopefully, a lot of advisors are finding useful.
You can get that portfolio reporting, by the way, and
Vault whether you have the personal client portal or a marketing website.
In terms of AdvisorVualt, just very quickly, I don’t have
any unread files, but these would default to your unread files. You can go
into here. You can see the folder structure. Clients can upload documents.
We also have a drag and drop feature that basically gives you an Internet
Explorer view so that you can take documents and drag them from your desktop to
the Vault folder, and so can clients. In this way, it makes it very easy to organize
your system for your clients on the vault.
The Vault really, quite frankly is, I think, the most
full-featured vault available anywhere to advisors. We’ve really put a lot of
development time and money into that, quite frankly, and we continue to improve
it. We hope to be adding over the next few months, the ability for clients to
fax documents up to their vault.
Let’s see if we can take some questions because there is
no shortage of questions here. If you do have a question, feel free to raise your
hand, chat them into us.
Question: We have a question
about “I’m a startup, but I’m experienced in the industry. Can I develop a
marketing plan with you?”
Answer: We can work with you
on developing plan if we feel that you need more help than we can give you,
then we will refer out to say, Actify. They’re doing a lot of work in that
area and we’re working closely with Actify, and so I’d welcome discussing that
with you to see what you need.
Question: There is a question
about eSource Marketing and if we’re interested in the Optimization Service, do
we deal with Advisor Products, or go directly to eSource Marketing?
Answer: Good question. I’m
glad you asked that. The truth is that we want you to come to us because we
arrange for better pricing for our clients, so please call us and the packages
that we’ve built will give you better pricing from eSource Marketing.
Question: Can you write your
own articles for the e-Newsletter?
Answer: Yes, absolutely.
You can. That’s what the mass email is about.
Question: Can a client forward
the article?
Answer: Good question from
Lauren Kline; and yes, clients can visit your website and forward an article to
a friend.
Question: What is the cost of
the BackOffice?
Answer: The BackOffice is
included in all of our websites, just depending on the implementation that you
have determines your cost. We basically, at this point, so essentially two
packages – one for $1,200 a year with some of our content, and then one for
$2,100 a year, a Platinum Package, with all of our content. We’re seeing most
advisors these days really for all of the content because we’ve thrown
everything in there – the Vault gets in there with the content, eight (8) hours
of service, and we’ve tried to make that package compelling enough to do that.
Question: Is there a way that
people can subscribe to email newsletters that are sent out if it’s forwarded
to them?
Answer: Yeah, well, if they
go to your website, then they will be able to subscribe to the email
newsletter. What we do is, you can have a button right on your homepage where
people can subscribe to your email newsletter. So people can subscribe to the
email newsletter just by clicking here and that link can be placed on different
pages of your website as well.
Question: Is there a merge
feature to customize the introduction and trailers with client names?
Answer: No, good question.
We are in the process, quite frankly, of retooling the email newsletter to give
it some of that functionality that you’re talking about and I expect to be able
to do that for you in the coming months. It may take us through the end of the
year even, but it’s something that we’re working on. The new email newsletter
service will be a lot more robust.
Question: The videos, how long
are they? Are they all 4 to 5 minutes in length?
Answer: Yes, we’re trying to
keep them shorter, even, if possible. The personal portal video, I think, ran
as much as six (6) minutes because there’s just so much to say. The fiduciary
video runs about four and a half (4 ½) minutes or so.
Question: What about posting
your own video?
Answer: We are working on
adding a video page to allow you to post your own videos and hopefully we’ll
get that for you in the next couple of months. The other thing is, though, we
can actually post it for you, so you should just call our staff. Call our
service staff and we can post the videos for you.
Question: When I add content to
the BackOffice, does it look different in IE, Firefox, or Safari?
Answer: We try to make all
of our applications compatible with as many browsers as possible. As you can
imagine, that’s no easy, but the contents should look the same. The
BackOffice, if you’re talking about how you use the BackOffice, we really
recommend that you use Internet Explorer for the BackOffice. It’s optimized
for Internet Explorer.
Question: Why doesn’t the
market snapshot include the Dow Jones average anymore?
Answer: Because Dow Jones
started charging us an incredibly huge fee for it, so we’d love to bring the
Dow back in more ways than one, but it’s just too expensive at this point. We
were trying to pull together a group, if we could, of a hundred (100) advisors
that are willing to pay for the extra fee. If you would like to be counted
among that group, so please email me and let me know and we are trying to keep
a running list of people that want to add the Dow back.
Question: Question about the
client portal integrate with Juncture.
Answer: No, I would love it
too, I’ve asked Juncture about it and we’ve not been able to figure out a way
to make that happen yet, but I would welcome the opportunity to integrate. I
am happy to integrate with anybody. It’s in your interest that we integrate
with everybody and we’re absolutely willing to do that, so please let your
voices be heard. If you would like to see an integration with Juncture, my
suggestion is that you let Greg Friedman know that.
Question: The pricing for
AdvisorVault?
Answer: AdvisorVault comes
with the platinum service. I’m not the expert on pricing, though. My
suggestion is that you get more information from Barry, but it definitely comes
with the platinum service for $2,100 a year, which gets you a whole lot of
other things as well.
Question: We offer consulting
with your __________ site. I’d love to ramp up my web marketing, but have
budget constraints. Can you help me optimize my dollars?
Answer: Yeah, I mean, quite
frankly our customers are priced a fraction – for instance, our portfolio
reporting services, the other firms that we compete against, charge multiple
times what we charge. Our services are really priced as low as they come so I
think that if you try to optimize your dollars, one thing I would do is look at
if you want the vault, look at adding the Platinum Package and that will get
you more space to your vault as well, in terms of the number of documents.
Question: Interfaces with
Portfolio Center?
Answer: Yes, we do have
that. Like I showed, we have a great interface with Portfolio Center.
Question: What is included in
the Platinum Package?
Answer: Let me think of the
list. There’s AdvisorVault, there’s all of our content which is the Featured
News – Featured News is our best content. You can see it over here. And then
you get unlimited Featured News. You also get financial briefs, shorter
stories. You get Market Data Back, Quarterly Market Summary, Economy Watch,
Articles of Interest, so yeah, the Platinum Service is our best service. You
also get a bunch of other things like eight (8) hours of service from our team
which really comes in handy throughout the year, plus the Vault and there are
probably a couple of other features and email accounts as well. There are
probably some other features. My suggestion is if you want more information
about that, call Barry because I don’t have all those details off the top of my
head.
The pricing for the e-Newsletter is $500 a year and there
is a $300 setup charge for the e-Newsletter. Why don’t we reduce the setup fee
for people who are attending this call or that hear it on the replay, we’ll
reduce that to $100 – I’m sorry, we’ll take $100 off, I’m told by Barry – on
the set up of an email newsletter. So yes, we’re trying to work with you to
make that happen. But it’s $500 a year.
Question: Are the monthly
videos included in the Platinum Package?
Answer: No, they are not,
but we’re trying – I’m looking at the pricing on that. We want to get that on
as many websites as we can.
Andrew Gluck: So with that, I think
we’ve answered just about all of the questions. We’re going to be holding
another one of these sessions in another month or so. We’re going to be doing
them every second Wednesday of every month, but thank you for attending. We
had great attendance here. We really appreciate it. Thank you for all your
feedback, for the support that you’ve given us. We’re here to help you and
from everybody at Advisor Products again, thank you for putting your trust in
us. Please make sure to attend our next session so that you can see we’ll try
to discuss some of the other products – brochures, newsletters, folders – and
please make sure to come to the next session.
Also, Friday Google in AdWords for Advisors with Howie
Jacobson who literally wrote the book on the topic. Howie Jacobson, Ph.D. is
the author of AdWords for Dummies, a very popular best-selling book on
Google AdWords, so please attend that if you want to learn from really one of
the nation’s preeminent experts on Google AdWords and how you can succeed with
that. You can register for that by going to our website, looking at the
Financial Crisis Webinar series button.
Again, thank you to all of you for attending. We hope you
found this useful. When you leave, please give us your feedback. Thanks
again.
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