Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Kevin Mulhern
Speaker 1:
Learn everything you need to know to form and benefit from a successful client advisory board. From the man who has led more client advisory board meetings than anyone in the financial services industry. Stephen Wershing, CFP, has been helping financial advisory firms create and utilize client advisory boards as a business building strategy for over seven years, and now you can get his best advice for a small fraction of the cost by attending this one-day program held just before the NAPFA 2018 Conference on October 15th in Philadelphia.
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The program also includes guest speaker, Marie Swift, president and CEO of Impact Communications, a thought leader for thought leaders. She is known for bringing some of the industry’s best and brightest voices together for dialogue and debate. She’ll teach you how to leverage your advisory board and your marketing. You’ll walk out with a complete action plan for getting your advisory board together or to make your current board a bigger success.
Go to napfa.advisoryboard.solutions. One-day, October 15th in Philadelphia, can show you how to deepen your client relationships and engage them like never before. Having a conversation with some of your best clients may be the fastest way to referrals and more clients.
Don’t miss this opportunity. Go to napfa.advisoryboard.solutions to sign up for this event today. That’s napfa.advisoryboard.solutions.
Now, Becoming Referable.
Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I are joined by Kevin Mulhern, the CEO and founding partner of AdvisorStream.
Kevin is absolutely passionate about helping advisors to use content marketing, and he has been doing that since before we even used terms like content marketing in this industry. But it isn’t just about using any content. Kevin believes that getting the right content to the right clients from the right sources not only drives deeper engagement, but can help differentiate you.
We talk to him about how content marketing fits into an overall engagement strategy as well as best practices for sending original content, versus curated content. Just as important, Kevin shares ideas on how all of this drives more referrals. With that, let’s get straight to the interview.
So, Kevin Mulhern, welcome to Becoming Referable. So pleased to have you.
Steve Wershing:
Welcome, Kevin.
Kevin Mulhern:
Thank you, Julie, and thank you, Steve.
Julie Littlechild:
I am thrilled to be talking to you today. Now, I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Kevin for a lot of years. We live not far from one another and have been in the industry, and I’m just so excited to see the way this business has grown. So looking forward to the conversation. Maybe we can just start, Kevin, with an overview of your business, AdvisorStream, and what it does.
Kevin Mulhern:
Sure, and thank you, Julie. That’s right, Julie and I … Actually, my first job in Canada was working basically under Julie at a very great small consulting firm in Toronto, Canada. So it’s great to be here today.
Julie Littlechild:
I can take some credit if this goes really well, I think.
Kevin Mulhern:
Well, I think that there’s some truth in that, but we’ll have to separate that for another conversation. So AdvisorStream is an automated marketing system. It’s an omni-channeled digital marketing system or platform for financial advisors. It was built by financial advisors. We had an advisory board, with advisors from across the U.S. and Canada help us design it. It enables them to consistently deliver real-time engaging premium content. It allows them to position themselves as thought leaders, as a top resource for relevant news and educational material and just stay top of mind with your clients and prospects.
It’s a service which has been created in partnership with the world’s leading publishers. So we work with New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Barron’s, Forbes, Fortune, Washington Post and about 20 other publishers and financial clients soon to come on as we go into the U.K. So we curate content in real time, and it’s the most relevant, credible content we can find for advisors to use with their clients and prospects. That’s generally what we give.
Julie Littlechild:
The genesis of this … I mean, we’re in the content marketing realm here.
Kevin Mulhern:
Right.
Julie Littlechild:
What was the genesis of creating this business? How does it help advisors?
Kevin Mulhern:
Right. Well, about five years ago, I guess six years ago, five, six years ago, I have been working, like yourself, Julie, with advisors all around both in Canada and the U.S. One thing I noticed, well, at a brokerage firm that I was a partner at, was that advisors really weren’t taking advantage of the new digital marketing tools that were out there. Not taking advantage of that one-to-many nature of digital marketing.
So I dug down a little bit in that, started asking some questions to some focus groups across the country, and it turned that advisors, A, didn’t have time to sit down and do all of these great content marketing opportunities, take advantage of these opportunities. One, they didn’t have time. Two, it wasn’t really in their wheelhouse. It wasn’t really something they had spent a lot of time in the past.
I think the average age of an advisor when we started this was about 57, or just over 57, and they had already built, a lot of them, successful practices, with traditional marketing means, and maybe didn’t really see the value or just how large the return on investment could be.
So we thought basically what we would do is see if we could build a system that would automate this, but automate it in a way that gave advisors a lot of control at the time of setting up their accounts and their AdvisorStream accounts so that they would decide what content from our publishing partners, what content from their head office, what content that they themselves have created would be used to post content to their web properties, their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, their website or their blog, and also what content would be included in their outgoing email communications. So the genesis really was a need that wasn’t being filled. A lot of advisors not taking advantage of really powerful digital marketing tools, and at the center of that was really content marketing.
Steve Wershing:
Kevin, just for the benefit of our listeners who are not familiar with some of these terms, can you define what content marketing is?
Kevin Mulhern:
Sure. It’s funny, you can go online and get all kinds of different descriptions of what content marketing is, and I’ll give you a description that is similar to ones you may have seen before. Then I’ll take done on to a little bit of our personal view here at AdvisorStream on this. But content marketing is an approach focused on delivering obviously valuable content that is credible. It’s relevant to your clients and prospects. Ultimately, it’s content that will help you grow your business through retention of current clients and referrals from clients and referrals that come automatically up from web properties.
So content marketing can be leveraged to co-brand yourself with relevant third-party premium content to help you increase your credibility and build your thought leadership with different groups of prospects and clients, and we believe strongly that you will need third-party content, quality third-party content to support your own content or your firm’s content if you are going to be able to consistently provide this type of information across many channels.
One thing I’d like to say here, and I am going to reference Julie actually, but there is a huge return on investment with engaged clients. What I mean here is that when your clients feel like they’re highly engaged with you, the advisor, you’ll find that they invest or refer more.
In fact, Julie, I think you did a study, and correct me if I’m wrong, with Vanguard a while back, which determined that engaged clients or clients who feel engaged with their advisor invest and refer up to two times as much. So we really do believe there’s a strong return here.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. Go ahead, Steve.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. So I wanted to follow that up with one other question, because, Kevin, what you just said was that you talked about content as being information that engages with clients. But I think one of the things that I see a lot is people going on social media and promoting a lot of material that I don’t think probably connects very well with their clients.
In fact, I can remember one person in a client advisory board that I was running said it most explicitly. Now this is probably not true for all advisors, but for this one advisor in particular, he said, “Never send me anything I can find on CNBC.” I mean, that’s just … “I can go there for that. Send me stuff that’s–” And he went on to talk about what was meaningful to him. So can you draw a little bit of a distinction there about distinguishing content that does engage clients versus content that gets people to want to not pay attention to your stream?
Kevin Mulhern:
Sure. Yeah, I think that’s a really important point too. I mean, there’s lots of studies out there. That’s an anecdotal situation, but those are sometimes the most revealing when an actually client says, “Don’t send me anything-” I believe you said, “from CNBC.”
We hear that type of comment all the time. We saw another Salesforce study that was out last year showing that almost just under 25% of people have actually ended a professional relationship due to receiving irrelevant content, what they deemed as irrelevant content. So I think this is a very serious point.
So your question to me is what is relevant content, just to clarify here, or what content should advisors-
Steve Wershing:
Well, I mean, when you were defining content marketing, you were talking about content that engages. But I think one of the challenges is that a lot of the content that’s put out there is not engaging.
Kevin Mulhern:
Right. Right.
Steve Wershing:
I mean, there’s effective content marketing, and then there’s ineffective or even counterproductive content marketing, and I just wanted to clarify that for the listeners. But also if you could give us any insights in that, I’d appreciate it.
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah. The worst thing you can do is waste your time and then to be counterproductive with that work by posting or sending via email content that’s not going to be engaging or is irrelevant. Very dangerous practice.
So what we do, that’s what I can show you what we’ve learned over the last five years, is it’s important that you use highly curated content. What do I mean by high curated content?
Why we form partnerships with the publishers I mentioned is we have built a system that literally connects with all of these publishers and allows us to literally curate or draw down, pull articles, videos and infographics coming out of the New York Times, or Wall Street Journal, or Barron’s, or Economist, etc., that is the most successful content.
What do I mean by successful content? We only curate or add the content to our library that is about the top 5% of content coming out of our publishing partners. When I say top 5%, what I’m saying is we have machine data where we can actually see what investors and different personas that subscribe to these publishers are reading.
So we know every day what the most popular content, whether that’s a video or article, or other coming out of New York Times is, and we specifically obviously are curating, in our case, content that has something that relates to financial planning, wealth management or just your money life in general.
So we’re constantly monitoring what content resonated at Wall Street Journal, or at New York Times, or at The Economist, and we decide that that would be relevant and credible and it’s very current with an advisor’s client. So we ensure that our library is populated with content that we believe will be very palatable for the advisor to click in front of the clients or prospects.
From there, we believe that our users, our advisors need to log in, take a look at that pool of relevant, credible, valuable content and still do a final layer of curation so that they can then send the right content to their different segments. So the right content to the right person at the right time. We often hear this.
We help that process by getting rid of the chaff so to speak, boiling it down to the extremely … Or the content that was resonating extremely well with investors today. We bring that into our library and allow the advisor to do that final layer of curation before they send it out to their clients, because they know their clients better than we do.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, it’s interesting to me as well the comment about CNBC, because I don’t mind getting good relevant content from major outlets, because somebody … It suggests somebody has taken the time to really curate and find what is good there. I don’t read everything that comes out. You know what I mean, Steve?
Steve Wershing:
Yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
But I think the point, Kevin, that you made there is so important, is there isn’t a way to 100% automate, it sounds like, a final level of judgment from the advisor, and that’s really what it comes down to, right?
Kevin Mulhern:
That’s right, Julie. We work with a lot of major firms across North America, and what we do is exactly what you’re saying. We do our best. We do our best to know that the content we’re going to include, for example, in the weekly news update for MassMutual, or weekly news update for Cetera Advisors or for Raymond James or whomever it is. We do our best. Here at AdvisorStream, we have a content team. We use machine data, as I mentioned, to really narrow down the best, most resonant content. Then we have a team who really builds communications, picks six articles, sometimes we’ll add a MassMutual piece or a Cetera piece or whomever it is, the firm, to four or five other pieces of content that we think will resonate given their performance this week at the publishers that are highly related to what’s occurred this week, whether that was a change in the tax law, or a change to a 529 plan, or a 401 (k) plan. Anything that is relevant. Maybe there’s been a lot of volatility in the market.
So we’ll address those things for an advisor. We even write the introduction for that weekly communication. That then goes through the marketing team at that firm. They may make some changes. It’s reviewed by the compliance team before it’s finally presented to each and every advisor who then can make that final judgment, “You know what? I don’t want the CNBC piece. We don’t actually work with that outlet, but we don’t want that New York Times article. We don’t want that Fortune article, and I don’t like the intro. I’m going to change the intro.”
So we try to take care of most of the work, but there’s always going to be, as Julie is saying, a job for the advisor to do. There’s going to be some work every single week to do that final level of curation. We would love to fully automate it, and we’re much of the way there. But we’ll never be, to Julie’s point, fully automated. I don’t care how much IA, or artificial intelligence-
Julie Littlechild:
Or AI.
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah, AI.
Steve Wershing:
Either one. Yeah.
Kevin Mulhern:
Well, IA will be the next one. But the artificial intelligence and all the machine-based computing and all that stuff. I still think there will always absolutely be the requirement for an advisor to make sure that he or she has taken that final view of what their clients are going to see.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. So let me ask a question around how well you can tailor it. So that CNBC comment, I think that client was being a little hyperbolic, that I think what he was saying was, “Don’t tell me what the market did this week, and don’t tell me what the unemployment number has just said.” But can you split that feed and send different things to different parts of your client base based on different interests that they have, or is it one big feed that goes out to your whole list?
Kevin Mulhern:
No, absolutely. So what we do is try to prime the advisor every single week so that they ensure that they’re communicating consistently in every week. But a lot of our advisors, the vast majority of our advisors are sending out slightly different communications to the different segments of clients that they’re serving, whether that’s high net worth, pre-retiree, and they could be much more segmented into recently graduated, married, divorced. There’re all kinds of different segments that may receive slightly different content.
So what we do is work with our advisors to help them take that one communication and make it work across many different segments. We highly suggest that you send out curated communications on a consistent basis that is targeted toward your different segments. Even to take it a step further … And we do have some tools that we’ll help you do this.
But to take it a step further, when it comes down to communicating relevant content, we often suggest and try to help all the different teams we work with to send event-driven communications and persona-driven communications. Not always just your general segments, people between this age, male, female, etc., etc., but also event-driven, the things that happen in life are things that you want to be involved with. Whether that’s a new marriage, someone’s graduating from school. Obviously, somebody is retiring, someone’s buying a cottage, someone’s selling a house, someone just had their first child. Whatever that event is, there’s awesome content out there for you that would really resonate and provide value to that person at that moment. So it’s not just segmenting, but it’s event-driven communications, etc., that you want to use when you’re targeting.
Julie Littlechild:
How important … So you mentioned that you create an introduction for that that an advisor can edit. How important is that introduction in creating context and helping the client understand, “This is why I thought it was important for you.”
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah. That is critical. There’s a million things I’d like to say related to this whole topic.
Julie Littlechild:
Well, we only have a half hour.
Steve Wershing:
As long as you can fit it in 30 minutes. Yeah, right. Talk real fast.
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah, I mean that introduction is critical. Actually, the value in the content is to draw why these pieces of content that you’re presenting to your clients is valuable and important. Not just valuable, important for them to read. It’s important given you understand their financial situation. You’re out there monitoring the world’s events and things that are happening each week on their behalf and on their family’s behalf, and that intro explains that. I won’t read any of the intros here. Given that it’s radio, we’re not going to be displaying them, but I wish I could.
So 52 times a year we create these intros, and they tie together those six pieces of content. They tie them together to show why they’re all important and why they’re relevant to them and their families. Yeah, that’s a critical piece, Julie, and that’s something we work really hard on every Monday and Tuesday in conjunction with over 250 firms.
Julie Littlechild:
Right. Yeah, I can see that, because otherwise it becomes … And look, we’re all guilty of this. I thought you’d find this of interest, or pushing it out. Yeah, there’s some truth to that, but let’s face it. I’m kind of skipping out on the work there.
Kevin Mulhern:
Right, and people know that. People can see that a mile away.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah.
Steve Wershing:
So in addition to curated content, which you’re finding other places and going through and deciding that it’s a good idea for a client and then sending it to the client. There’s also created content.
Kevin Mulhern:
Right.
Steve Wershing:
What are your thoughts about the relevance of each and what the balance might look like between created and curated content?
Kevin Mulhern:
That is a great question and an important balance to strike. There’re some people, some very credible people out there, you two being a couple of them. Michael Kitces is another one who I’ve had this conversation with. They’re both critically important.
So before I jump right into answering it, I just want to mention … Again, I like to mention studies. The reason is they give us insights into things we don’t have time to figure out 100% ourselves. There’s a number of good studies out there on communication in general. So the one thing we try to tell our advisors is similar to that study you did with Vanguard, Julie, that shows the importance of engaging clients, there’s also some great studies out there that talk about the reality today of how engaged clients are with advisors.
One study was done by Cerulli a couple of years ago. I think it was called U.S. Asset Management Edge, and in that they determined that advisors on average provide 26 touch points a year with each of their clients. The fascinating part was in talking to those clients, Cerulli determined that all age groups, every age groups, from early investor, the high net worth, silent era, to the oldest client you might have, they all want more contact. In another study similar to that showed that the more you communicate with clients, the more assets you’ll convert.
Just to make the point that it is important to communicate, and it is important to communicate with both types of content, both your own content, content your firm might create and third-party content. There’s a couple of reasons for this, and we’ll get to the balance, which is your real question, momentarily. But you want to have content that you’ve written, or maybe you’ve had written for you. There are lots of services out there that will write content given the topics you want to cover as an advisor. We have one ourself, a ghost written content service.
There are also content your firm might write that might resonate with clients that you want to use. Then there’s that third-party content. The reason we strongly believe you need all three is to keep people engaged. It can’t be like the Kevin Mulhern show, or the Dan Smith show, where that advisor is … it’s just every article they get is an opinion or insights from that advisor. As valid as they all might be, you get tired of just hearing from one person.
Having content from third parties, you’re really borrowing credibility. With AdvisorStream, our partnerships allow you to co-brand yourself with that Wall Street Journal or co-brand yourself with the New York Times, or The Economist, or Bloomberg, or Fortune, or whatever it is, article or video. That’s another key point we can talk for another day. But you want to get that balance of how much content should come for me or appear to have come for me that I’ve written it. Advisors don’t have time to write content all day long. Hence, to consistently put current content on all these digital properties in an automated way, you’re going to need to pull from a third-party source. As to Julie’s point, it’s going to have to be credible content that people don’t find irrelevant, that could be dangerous.
So what’s the mix? What’s the right mix? I ask this question as often as I can to people I believe have insights, people like you and Julie, and Michael Kitces, in June, we did a session with him, and he’s come up with a ratio. He believes it’s 8 to 10 third-party pieces of content to every one piece of content that is written in your voice or that you have written that would be your own customer personal content.
Julie Littlechild:
For Michael, that would be in a day though.
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah. Yeah.
Steve Wershing:
That means if Michael is still doing three pieces himself that day.
Kevin Mulhern:
I think Michael does three pieces before he hits the road for work.
Julie Littlechild:
I know. It’s wonderful.
Kevin Mulhern:
It’s wild. He’s an animal I’ve never seen before. For the average human being out there, I think you could write one a week. Honestly, that’s hard to do, to write one quality piece of content a week. It’s hard to do. I think we should. I think advisors should be doing that. I really do. I also understand that there’s a million demands on their time today, and that’s why I always preach automation. But the balance seems to be about 10 to 1, 8, 9, 10 to 1.
Julie Littlechild:
Just to clarify. When you are curating content and just broadly in terms of the mix of created and curated, are you making it available to advisors to email as well as to post socially and have all the right formats for those different things?
Kevin Mulhern:
Absolutely. Yeah, we call it omni-channel, meaning if they’re … Which actually means … Let me specify. It means we provide formats to the content and we have the licensing with all our partners to deliver the content in a co-branded manner. So the advisor is ever present beside a New York Times article or a Wall Street Journal article. It’s the advisor’s picture or the team picture, his or her contact info right beside the actual article.
We’re not sending the client or the prospect off to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journey website, where there’ll be a paywall. Even if they do have subscription, they’ll get in, they’ll see it, but the advisor, his branding or her branding will not be there. Instead, that article will be surrounding by competing advertising, Raymond James, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo, Robo-Advisors, and different calls to action.
We believe that’s counterproductive to send that person, that client or prospect off to somewhere where they will not be present, but their competitors are going to be able to market to them. We find that very counterproductive.
Instead, our relationship is to bring the content into the advisor’s webpage. Yes, Julie, we do that formatting for all channels, all digital channels, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, websites, blogs, and email.
To your point, email. I think email is the most important marketing tool today, and I know that sounds crazy to some people, but it’s not. I mean, inbound channels. Social media is very sexy right now and it gets so much media. Rightfully, it’s growing and it is becoming a more productive, people are getting new clients from social media. But email is the most effective channel, because it’s outbound. You decide when you’re going to communicate with your clients. Vast majority of our advisors communicate every Friday at 11:00 a.m. and they know that their people are going to receive that communication, see that content, see what the value they’re providing their clients on a consistent basis.
Whereas inbound channels, you don’t decide when a client comes to your website or when a client comes to your LinkedIn page, and that’s something I ask advisors, “When you woke up this morning, did you go to your veterinarian’s webpage? Did you go to your mechanic’s LinkedIn? Did you go to your doctor’s, your accountant’s, your lawyer’s Facebook page?” I didn’t. I’m busy and I don’t. I need someone to reach out to me. Sometimes those emails will drive me back to those inbound channels, but I think the email is the critical piece of the mix.
Steve Wershing:
No. I agree with the two of you. It’s a lot more intimate, because you’re pushing something into a space that … Where the client is going to see it. Where they may or may not see something in a feed. So the question that comes from that is how do you get to the right point where you’re … You talked before about how most clients say they would like to be in touch more often. How do you find that point where you’re sending enough to be on top of mind and to satisfy that need for the contact, but not so much that they start getting annoyed by it and potentially unsubscribe or turn you off?
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah. That’s, again, a balance you want to get right. You don’t want people unsubscribing, as you say, and just generally being turned off by finding you too aggressive.
What we’ve learned after working with thousands of advisors over the last five years is that you need to put that decision in the hands of the actual client and of the prospect. Put them in the driver’s seat. Let them choose, literally choose the frequency at which they want you to communicate with them through email.
So to all advisors out there, regardless of what automated marketing system they choose, they should make sure it has that tool. The ability for their client to change the frequency of delivery at any time. At the beginning of the relationship, when we start working with a new advisor group, we always have them send out a welcome letter that says … And with a link in it that says, “Click here any time,” and this link is also provided at the bottom of every communication we send, “Please click here to adjust the frequency of communications.”
My answer, I guess, is it’s really hard for you to decide, and every client is unique. So you’re either going to decide for all your clients yourself or you’re going to do what we believe is the right way to do it, is put that power in each and every one of your client’s hands. Give them that tool, that ability to say, “I only want to receive it monthly, continue with weekly. I only want it quarterly. I want it annually.” Whatever it is.
But an interesting insight to that is after working with thousands of advisors, we monitor all the unsubscribes across our whole group. We send millions of communications to investors every month, and we monitor unsubscribes. We monitor the engagement rates, the open rates of the emails and then the actual click through rates, or the rate that once somebody opens your newsletter or your email, do they actually consume the content inside of it?
What we’ve seen over five years is almost no clients reducing from weekly. There’s been a few, but very, very, very, very small percentage of … A fraction of a percent of people over that time have actually decided that they want to receive communications less than weekly, which is shocking to some people.
We say make sure you put that power in the hands of your clients that they’re seeing it all the time, and I believe that even if they can’t read all the content you send them each week, they’re glad to get it. They know you’re there. They know you’re monitoring the world’s events for them and their family. They know they can change the frequency if they get annoyed, and that’s why the unsubscribe rate is extremely low as well.
Julie Littlechild:
So how do you see content marketing generally linking to referrals? Which is, of course, what we love to talk about on this podcast.
Kevin Mulhern:
Right. Right. Right. Well, I mean, that’s one of the main reasons we do what do. Our goal in life at AdvisorStream is to increase client retention and to drive referrals.
So when you start thinking about digital referrals or content-based referrals is what we call them here, you start to see … There’s a couple of wonderful things about them. We’d love to show you how we generate leads or referrals for our clients. We can’t do that today. But what we can do is talk a little bit about how it happens, and it happens in two ways. It happens when each Friday, our advisors … We call it a news update, not a newsletter, but a news update goes out to their client base. Sometimes, as we talked about before, that could be five different newsletters that are all slightly different going out to different segments. Those go out, and then what we see is an advisor’s client will say, “Hey, that was a great article on estate planning for young people,” which is counterintuitive for him and perhaps that might make sense for that client’s niece, or nephew, or co-worker or whatever.
We’ll see that client and say, “Hey, that was a great article. I’m going to forward it. I’m going to share it with my co-worker, or my brother, whatever.” We ensure that there’s an opt-in on every single piece of content that goes out of our system. Every piece of content an advisor sends out, regardless if they’re using AdvisorStream or something else and they created their own technology, they must have an opt-in. That’s the first way that we see leads getting generated.
What’s happening is my brother, let’s say, is the client of an advisor. My brother says, “Kevin, here’s a great Economist video. It’s right up your alley,” whatever it might be. I click that to read it, because it came from my brother who I trust. We have about an 80% opt-in rate on content.
So that’s because it’s not an advisor who I don’t … Who’s sharing it with me. It’s my brother. I open that piece of content and popup comes up. It shows me a picture of the advisor, says where he lives, what his contact information is and it has a blurb explaining exactly what he’s doing. He provides his clients with access to premium content, from New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, etc., etc., Globe and Mail here in Canada. If I would like to receive ongoing communications, I can opt in right there and then. We see 8 in 10 people opt in. That’s because it’s someone who they trust who’s sharing it with them.
So that’s one way we see, that email-based content being shared from clients to their network. We see a lot of leads generated that way. Then the second way we see … And it’s a warm lead. Let me just touch on this. It’s a warm referral, because it has come with value. In other words, the first time I see the advisor’s face, see his contact information, it’s coming alongside something of value. This Economist video that actually resonates with me makes sense to me. It says, “Reach out if you have any questions about this content.” So before I even talk to the advisor, I know that he provides valuable content. So it truly is a warm digital referral.
Steve Wershing:
So when that happens, does the advisor get notified, or is there an automation that gets triggered to that new person that sends some other kind of information?
Kevin Mulhern:
That’s exactly right. As soon as that client opts in, the referral has basically come from one of his existing clients by sharing content. This now referred person, this new lead, is opted in. He’s added to a contact list called referrals, for referral leads in our system in his account or her account, and they can now start communicating with them. Because the person has said, “Yes, please start communicating with me. What you share is valuable.” So right away that triggers. Then we actually have some software that will tell you a lot about that person, what they do, where they live, their interest based on information that’s freely available on the internet. We call that a referral or lead dossier.
Julie Littlechild:
Kevin, for someone who isn’t using an automated platform, what kind of recommendations do you have just to get started or dip your toe in the water with content marketing?
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah, that’s a good question. You’d get a lot of different answers depending on who you would ask that. I mean, of course, I would say come and try AdvisorStream for free. We give our warm free trials. That would be an easy way. But there are a few different systems out there. I would make sure there’s a few key things to think about regardless of how they do it.
I mean, frankly, you can go to the Wall Street Journal and you can license any piece of content directly from it yourself. You could then, if you have the skills in-house, you could format that and then you could send it out and you could monitor the response yourself.
There’s quite a bit of work in that, but let’s say you have a large marketing team and a large budget, you could do that. But regardless of how you do it, there’s really three key things that we would highly suggest. One is that you’re using quality content, and quality content we talked about that a little bit, but it’s content from credible respected sources. It’s current. You’re not sending something out that’s old.
What is old today is quickly becoming a shorter time period on what people will find old news and new news. Sure, first principle here is credible content. Second one is get it out to more than one channel. You want to get it out to all your channels. Even those web-based channels, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and your website, those are good places to have that great content.
As long as you have that opt-in, and that’s the other key piece here. If people don’t have the ability to opt in, then you’re doing an exercise that’s not going to return any fruit. It’s not going to bear any fruit. So quality content with an opt-in, and then be consistent.
If you receive one piece of content by email or because somebody has gone to one of your web properties and viewed an article or a video, you’ve got to consistently do that. If I come back to your website in two months and there’s no new content, or even in two weeks and there’s no new content, I’m probably not going to come back again. It’s gone stale.
Then to the first point, on quality content, if I go to your website or I receive an email from you and you’re sending me something that’s not related to me, how to get started with investing, and I’m 58-years-old and I’m preparing … It’s not really I want to read, or how to get rid of your student debt, and you have four children.
You see this all the time. You see it all the time and it’s quite amazing. You immediately are turning that person off. So regardless of how you get started, I would focus on those principles. Good content and the right content to the right people. A method to opt-in so that you actually have a return on your content marketing dollar investment here. Then thirdly, consistency.
Julie Littlechild:
That’s awesome. Well, as usual, I could listen to this all day. Really, I love the innovation in the whole area of marketing technologies, and I don’t know if we talk about these enough. It’s terrific to see.
So, Kevin, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate you being here.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah, thank you very much.
Kevin Mulhern:
That was a true pleasure. Both of you, I thank you both for having me on, and I love what you’re doing.
Steve Wershing:
Kevin, where can people find you if they wanted to find out more about AdvisorStream or how to do this stuff?
Kevin Mulhern:
Yeah. So the easiest way is to go to advisorstream.com. So it’s spelled with an o. So advisorstream.com. Please come. Please try the product. You can try it for free. If you like it, we think you will, you can continue to use it.
Julie Littlechild:
Perfect. Thank you.
Steve Wershing:
Good. Thanks so much.
Kevin Mulhern:
Thanks, Julie. Thanks, Steve.
Steve Wershing:
Hey folks, Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com.
You can also get our free report: Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. So until next time, so long.