Compliant content for RIAs should be genuine thought leadership, but 99% of advisor websites fail the thought leadership test. Why?
The information revolution has made it hard for financial advisors to get their message across. In an Alice-In-Wonderland world in which facts don't matter and the U.S. President tweets 100 times a day, it's hard to know what's important. It's hard to know where to get information. As a result, the vast majority of advisors have given up on development of websites that are more than an online brochure. Since the founding of Advisor Products in 1996, advisor sites have remained little more than online brochures for advisors.
Athough advisor websites with FINRA-reviewed content have grown into a mature software business, advisor sites with compliance tools for FINRA-regulated reps are today developed in scale for the masses of independent registered reps. But these mass-produced sites still do not deliver the focal personal financial planning and investment analysis that affluent, educated financial advisory clients need. RIAs, tax and financial planning professionals, and fee-only investment fiduciaries trying to differentiate themselves must do better than simply settle for the mass-produced advisor websites which are currently popular with reps at IBDs.
What Advisor Products has done for over 20 years is provide the best compliant content for fee-only advisors who are fiduciaries and who advise private wealth clients on tax and investment planning. Our approach to advisor marketing has always been about communicating deeply and educating clients. It's geared to advisors who want evidence-based financial content, and whose clients--like themselves--are thought leaders in their respective fields. This requires a more sophisticated digital financial content marketing platform. Consider the article idea shown here in part. It's based on analysis from Craig Israelsen, Ph.D., an academic and expert on low-expense investing.
At his November CE webinar on A4A.TV, Dr. Israelsen showed why pre-retirees in their 50s — ideal clients for most practitioners — need not suffer from investment performance anxiety. As retirement nears, Dr. Israelsen demonstrates, a boost in the savings rate is more important to retirement success than the more heavily-emphasized portfolio performance.
It’s not uncommon for pre-retirees in their 50s and 60s to grow anxious about portfolio performance, but it is actually their rate of savings that is more influential as retirement nears. The illustration explained in a 300-word article uses irony to engage pre-retirees with an eye-catching graphic.
Explaining why pre-retirees shouldn’t be hung up on portfolio performance when it is actually the size of their savings rate which is much more critical to retirement success is a subject most advisor websites do not attempt to address creatively. Nor do these other websites dig deeply into the tax and financial planning strategies in our FINRA-reviewed weekly market commentaries for fee-only advisors, RIAs, and other fiducuaries.