Kevin Mulhern on Content Marketing as a Differentiator

Show Timeline:   

3:42 The genesis of Advisor Stream
The need and missed opportunity that Kevin saw among advisors
7:44 What is content marketing?
And how it can be leveraged by advisors to increase client engagement
9:47 The distinction between effective and ineffective content
Curating content to keep it relevant and resonant
14:34 The advisor’s role in this process
Combining machine data with the personal touch
17:35 Segmenting your communications and providing important context
Recommendations to help personalize and engage what goes out to clients
21:45 The balance between created and curated content
A suggested ratio from industry experts
26:39 Navigating different digital platforms to get your content out
Why Kevin believes email is still the most effective marketing tool
29:48 How to ensure you’re sending just the right amount of communications
A powerful way to let clients decide the right frequency for them
32:55 The connection to referrals
How the content marketing approach can drive an 80% opt-in rate from prospects
37:12 Tips for advisors getting started with content marketing
The three principles Kevin stresses regardless of the vehicle you choose

Links:

Website: www.advisorstream.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmulhern/
Advisory Board program: napfa.advisoryboard.solutions

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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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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.

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