I received a brilliant message via LinkedIn today from a CFP practitioner and investment advisor considering Advisor Products to develop his RIA’s website. Mike’s message was brilliant for more than its brevity:
My biggest concern about outsourcing our marketing is that:
1. Everyone seems to use the same material
2. You have to disclose that it is third-party ghost-writing
3. Most of the stuff is really basic and unsophisticated. How are you different?
I love this guy! His questions were so good! I removed his last name, cleaned up his punctuation, and below share my reply to Mike’s three questions.
Thanks, Mike!
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My biggest concern about outsourcing our marketing is that:
1. Everyone seems to use the same material?
Yes, your website does have the same articles as other RIAs that hire us. In fact, the status updates we provide are the same and so are the video white papers. It does not matter. Here’s why.
Using our content on your website is not a search engine play. It’s a content play. In fact, we actually embed code on our sites specifying that our content should not be indexed by search engines. (Duplicate content could hurt your search rankings.)
As a content play, the articles, videos, status updates, and white papers we make available for you to post on your website inform people about wealth management.
The content is largely derived from a weekly continuing professional education program I have produced since October 2008 on Advisors4Advisors. The content is authoritative and supports advisors who use broad diversification, Modern Portfolio Theory, and provide financial planning or concierge services to UHNWIs.
Please take a look at an article that is part of our latest content campaign. You’ll see why clients and prospects often find this content valuable.
For professional practitioners, our content is the best in the financial services industry.
Moreover, the tweets can be customized by you with your keywords and the links they contain to your website are each unique. And email newsletters, of course, only go to specific users.
Point is, the fact that hundreds of advisors across the country use our system does not degrade the value of the content. I virtually never hear that two prospects were sent the same content ad it was an embarrassment. Once, I remember, I did have a problem: Five NAPFA advisors used my print newsletter in Seattle and two of them sent a newsletter that contained the same article. That incident occurred 18 years ago. No others since. Funny.
2. You have to disclose that it is 3rd party ghost writing?
People do not care if a third party wrote the content you sent them. They only want good information!
Since our content is derived from a professional education program based on best practices for professionals, it’s different from other content from third-party providers.
Finally, sending highly-valuable content for UHNWIs reflects well on your brand, and you can customize all of it by adding your own blog posts, status updates and other original content. Let us handle the “heavy lifting” by reporting on the latest tax and investment news, while you add in an occasional post about wealth management and also — perhaps more importantly — you post social updates about your daughter’s graduation, a photo from your surprise birthday party for your wife, and other personal content.
Oh, and we append a disclosure on all advisor websites saying, “This article was written by a professional financial journalist for <<Company Name> and is not intended as legal or investment advice.” RIAs must never hide the cheese. A former head of SEC’s Division of Investment Management once told me many years ago that RIAs should always disclose when they do not author the articles in their newsletters, websites, and marketing materials. We’ve done that always ever since.
Advisors who use Fritz Meyer’s or Bob Keebler’s monthly slides and customize them to include their own ideas, might want to reference Fritz or Keebler Tax And Wealth Education as the source of the materials, depending on how much they alter them, and we provide some boilerplate language to disclose that. Plus, the original sources, like the U.S. Labor Department, are always cited.
3. Most of the stuff is really basic and unsophisticated. How are you different?
Hopefully, I answered the content quality question above.
As for how we are different, I just spent an hour writing this email to you and will publish it in a few minutes to one of my blogs.
Best
Andy
This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2014 at 1:19 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.