The vast majority of advisor websites are developed with little forethought and rarely vital to the business of a professional. But advisor websites can and should be the most important app in your practice! It is your interface with the outside world!

Shrill headlines scream fear for roboadvisors, but independent financial professionals must embrace the Web.

We, the people of Advisor Products Inc., are launching a solution automating ongoing financial planning advice supervised by financial professionals — CFPs, CPAs, CIMAs, CPWAs, CFAs, ChFCs, CLUs, and EAs.

The Financial Advisor Communication System (FACS), a client portal for advisors, now integrates with Redtail CRM.

The integration of Redtail CRM for advisors with the Advisor Products client portal platform enables advisors to scale their businesses and provide better service to clients. When you assign clients tasks from Redtail, it triggers an email to the client telling him to log into his client portal.

Here’s a one-minute clip from our new Video For Independent Advisers Who Are  Fiduciaries. It highlights key factors of your unique value proposition in four innovative ways:

1. Personal Narration. Using a Web app we’ve developed, you narrate a FINRA-reviewed script we provide. The words are displayed slide by slide and you record using your computer microphone.
2. Fritz Meyer Research.  The video reports on research independent economist Fritz Meyer, who has documented the track record of Wall Street’s top strategists from 2007 to 2014, as published in Barron’s annually in the venerable weekly’s “Outlook” cover story. According to Meyer, a former investment strategist at one of the world’s largest investment companies, any investor who followed the consensus advice of the Barron’s Wall Street strategists’ industry-sector picks annually would have performed disastrously relative to buying and holding the S&P 500.
3. Fiduciary. The video explains the benefits of working with a fiduciary.
4. Powerful Video. Economic research lends its to graphical display, and this video includes graphical cues inserted to make the information easy to understand. While you explain your fiduciary obligations, an aerial view pans New York Harbor at night for a 360s° close-up of the Statue of Liberty. While you narrate a script contrasting your practice with a Wall Street’s broker's, viewers see the skeletal remains of the head of a bull amid the scorched earth of Death Valley, California.

For a fiduciary, this video voices a clear response to people who don’t know how you are different from Wall Street’s herds. This campaign breaks new ground in independent advisor marketing by making a professional video easy to personalize and distributing it utilizing Advisor Products' email marketing integration with Constant Contact. It equalizes TV ads and media influence of Wall Street.

Advisor Products and Constant Contact are now powering video email newsletter campaigns for advisors with educational FINRA-reviewed scripts and slides derived from economist Fritz Meyer’s research. For $400 a quarter (one-year commitment), API-CTCT will:

• Provide you a three-minute FINRA-reviewed video script
• Record you over the phone reading the script
• Add your narration to graphic investment news update videos
• Post your video to your YouTube Channel
• Write a 300 world article about the economy related to the video
• Layout article, embed your video, and post it to your blog
• Write, design, and brand an email campaign featuring your video
• Upload your contact list to Constant Contact
• Send the email campaign to your contact list
• Review your analytics with you to improve results every quarter

The main components of a powerful new client portal for financial professionals is now live on production servers. It's integrated with:

Constant Contact (CTCT), a world leader in online marketing tools, shared a booth with Advisor Products at Schwab IMPACT 2014, and we used the occasion to launch a concierge marketing service for financial advisors.

Advisor Products and Constant Contact have teamed up to provide financial professionals a concierge marketing service.

• Outsource all your marketing to pros
• High-touch, high-tech service
• Timely educational campaigns monthly
• Analytics to measure return on every marketing dollar you spend
• A marketing coach dedicated to your success
• Executed by a Constant Contact Master Certified Solutions Provider

Concierge Marketing For Advisors is for you if you can't ever find the time to send an email newsletter. You and your Constant Contact coach design a strategic marketing plan based on your unique strengths. Then, a Constant Contact Master Certified Solutions Provider implements your plan using our integrated content marketing platform. You and your coach refine your list and tag your contacts' based on their "financial focus areas" to craft strategical email campaigns month after month for a year. With Concierge Marketing For Financial Advisors, you get:

With TV, social media, and financial news portals relentlessly undermining advisor relationships and bombarding investors with a confusing cacophony of wealth management tips, regularly reinforcing good investor behavior is the right thing to do for your clients, and it also happens to be the smart thing to do for yourself.

So we’ve literally made it effortless for advisors to reinforce good behavior once a week. We’ve added a new feature to the weekly update email that allows advisors  to send their contacts a message every Friday at 6 p.m. ET that gently reinforces best practices that are aligned with a financial professional's perspective. The new version of the weekly update includes two links to leading financial news sites, as always, but now the third link in the update is an email campaign integrated with advisor websites.

Since January, we have been developing a new client portal for advisors.

The new client portal is built into AdvisorVault, which is used by hundreds of RIAs. AdvisorVault is a highly customized version of Microsoft SharePoint explicitly designed to meet the needs of financial advice professionals.