Robert Sofia on Personalized Marketing

Show Timeline:

1:12 The biggest changes in advisor marketing over the last decade
How technology is shaping how advisors automate, measure, advertise and grow
3:36 Marketing practices that are no longer effective
And the practices that are replacing them
5:10 The shift in how advisors need to define their value
Why it’s important to think in terms of service and value, rather than just marketing
9:07 An example of humanized marketing
Taking the email newsletter approach and modernizing it for a personal touch
12:20 Getting specific on messaging and tone for a personalized effect
Using examples from clients’ lives to demonstrate your value as an advisor
15:59 Contextualizing the communications
The right time and place for the right type of message
18:36 The value of segmentation
Ideas for segmenting prospects and clients to tailor the communications
20:58 Robert’s platform and what it helps advisors achieve through automation
The five advisor objectives that are addressed by the system
23:00 The driving referrals objective
Robert’s philosophy on the things that ultimately drive referrals
25:03 The automation process
Their on-boarding campaign and referral generation campaign
30:07 How advisors can start putting these ideas into practice
Options and resources available to you to achieve your objectives
32:47 The right mix of personalized and pre-written messages
Understanding the demands on your time and optimizing your efforts

Links:

Website: https://snappykraken.com/, Referral generation campaign
White paper: 102 Ways to Surprise & Delight Your Clients
Twitter: https://twitter.com/robertsofia
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsofia/
Resources mentioned:
Mailchimp
Leadpages
Wistia
Marketo
HubSpot
Infusionsoft

Want more?

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

Episode Transcript:

Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. In this episode we talk with Robert Sofia, founder and CEO of Snappy Kraken. Winner of the inaugural Fintech competition at the 2016 conference of the XY-planning network, Snappy Kraken is an automated marketing platform that helps financial advisors personalize, deploy and track marketing campaigns and business processes. Since 2005 Robert has helped over 1000 financial companies with their marketing.

He’s a speaker on marketing, branding and entrepreneurship and an author of two books and articles in major financial and business publications. We talk about how marketing financial advice has changed over the past ten years, what role automation can play to help you become more effective and consistent in your marketing, even how you can automate referral generation. If you want to know how to leverage the most current concepts in technologies to better market your firm, this is a conversation you’ll want to listen to.

So, without further delay, here he is, Robert Sofia. So Robert, thanks very much for joining us on the Becoming Referable podcast.

Robert Sofia:
Thank you, I love being here.

Steve Wershing:
Now Robert, you’ve been in advisor marketing for a long time, and you’ve done a bunch of different things. What have you seen … what have been some of the biggest changes that you’ve seen in advisor marketing over the past ten years or so?

Robert Sofia:
Oh my goodness, there’s been so many. Unfortunately, not everybody is adapting to those changes, but primarily they’re driven by technology. I think there’s been more resources advisors can use to automate their business and their workflows, of course the advent of social media being more adopted within the industry and digital ways of tracking and measuring results. In the past advisors were very much left to their own devices to just try things and see what sticks and now actually there’s great ways to automate and measure and to grow in very creative ways online and offline and integrate those to work together and so that’s been a big evolution.

Julie Littlechild:
Would you say, has the evolution, I’m sure the answer is probably both of these, but has the evolution been in the way in which we can automate and use technology or have there also been changes, do you think, in the way in which we are connecting with prospects. Is that different as well?

Robert Sofia:
Oh, big time, if you think about the nature of marketing and consumer behavior too, there was a time when interruption marketing was really the thing that people did. It was the phone calls and it was the pop-ups and it was the ads that interrupt your show before you watch them. And there’s still many forms of interruption marketing out there, but advisors were using interruption marketing too. And now we see more … it’s permission-based marketing. You engage with people on the way they want to be engaged and on the channels that they’re using. And it’s not forced upon them but they opt in to it. And so it goes from less of just an outbound self-serving angle to more of an inbound and client focused angle, which is how it should be. So, advisors, instead of just advertising, they have to think more about value now and how they engage with clients and prospects in a way that those people want, with information that they want and that’s definitely a shift in how you think and how you market.

Steve Wershing:
And so, this is related to that Robert. What would you say are some of the top things that used to be true about advisor marketing that are not true anymore?

Robert Sofia:
Yeah, well you don’t have to start your firm with a name that starts with A so you can be at the top of the phone book.

Julie Littlechild:
Well that’s good.

Robert Sofia:
Hey, you know there was a time, that was it, AAA was the way to go. So, it depends on what time period you’re looking at, but there’s been a lot that’s happened in the last, just focusing on the last decade, practices that advisors used to use that really don’t work anymore. A very good example of that is spamming people, I mean when I first got in this business we got an email list of everybody in the community and we just started blasting them and holding seminars too. There was a time when we could just send out 5000 postcards and pack three rooms and bring in a bunch of clients and prospects that way. I mean that’s how it was when I got in the business back in the early 2000s.

And both of those methods are going by the wayside. Cold calling is not effective anymore and so now it’s really more about positioning your thought leadership, elevating your profile in a way that people notice you and are attracted to you. It’s about getting involved in things where your ideal client and prospects are in the community. Good old-fashioned networking and salesmanship and the marketing gimmicky stuff just doesn’t really work.

Read More