Beacon Flash: Five Marketing Non-Negotiables of Winning Firms – A Conversation with Kelly Waltrich, Intention.ly

Welcome to the Beacon Flash, the go-to podcast for enterprise wealth management professionals looking to stay ahead of the curve. Hosted by Chip Kispert, Managing Director of Beacon Strategies, this podcast explores the future of the industry and the most pressing issues facing today’s top leaders. Join us each week as we sit down with industry experts to discuss opportunities and strategies for success.

Chip:

I am so excited to have Kelly Waltrich, the founder of Intention.ly with me today. Kelly, welcome.

Kelly:

Thank you so much for having me, Chip. I’m thrilled to be here.

Chip:

You know on the Beacon Flash podcast here we get a motley crew of people that come through and the beautiful thing is they’re there but you know, predominantly friends of ours and are really active in our community. And you are one of those people as well. And so we’re really excited to hear a lot of your perspective on enterprise, wealth, history and market in general going forward.

Kelly:

Yeah, thanks so much. I’m thrilled to be here and excited to talk about those topics. And, you know, I love being part of the speaking community.

Chip:

So one of the things we do we like to do we’d like to really kind of go fast right with these because, you know, normal people have an attention span of about 10 minutes. So when we stretch it, maybe to 20. Right, but right off the bat, Kelly, I’d love to get your perspective on you know, and this is kind of a softball question, but how is retail wealth advisor marketing evolving.

Kelly:

Yeah, that’s such a good question. And you know, I was just talking to an industry friend about some benchmark study that was put out by one of the large trade publications and I think one of the biggest trends that we’re seeing is the realization that how important content is to their marketing strategy, and not just any content but personalized content. So we’re excited to see that, you know, this study didn’t show a whole bunch of things that jumped off the page, but that was the one thing that we saw that we’re like, yes, we’re making progress. Advisors are realizing that they need to invest in this they need to invest in personalized experiences with their clients. And along with that comes personalized marketing and the content associated with it.

Chip:

So we had a roundtable on marketing back in October. And you know, if you were to take three years ago, where firms were their marketing, pretty raw, right, pretty basic, in listen to the different tools that how they’re working with automation. It was really, really cool to hear what folks are doing not all are doing it, but it seems like the ones that are growing their relevance within the industry are certainly really focusing on marcom and communicating with the client saying, Hey, what did you do for me last week, right. So you talked about that research a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about any research that you may have about investor customer’s expectations of communication with their advisors?

Kelly:

Yeah, absolutely. The the key word and what I’ve said in my last last answer was personalized and so I think what we’re seeing a lot of his advisors being more intentional or intentional about how they’re communicating with their clients, knowing that everyone consumes information differently is certain and so being aware of your audience and whether they want to see information through video or through written or through audio, or what does that look like and how often did they want to be communicated to and about what topics you know it’s interesting to you do a really good job of this with your roundtables in terms of getting to know your audience, you send out a phenomenal questionnaire that gets into the nitty gritty details of what people how people want to be treated, and what’s important to them. And I think advisors are starting to do a little bit more of that with their own client bases so that they can tailor communication programs accordingly.

Chip:

So you know, it’s interesting and thank you for that. I’m grateful for those nice words but it was interesting because of that roundtable, one of our attendees, a very large, very successful enterprise wealth firm dealer RIA technologies at the forefront. They were running a very, very cool pilot program and the pilot program was focusing on new customers and prospects. And what they were doing was really, really cool. It’s something we’ve been talking about for a couple of years. But, it was really cool because they were sending a quick little five or six question survey to a prospect or a customer, literally asking those questions that you would just alluded to. How do you like to interact? Do you want to talk to somebody? Do you like email? Do you like texts, right? It has three or four of these really? Key behavioral questions. And the interesting thing was, when they look at that pilot group, the ROI that came out of the trials was exceptional.

Kelly:

I’m not surprised by that. I mean, think about our own communication, just the communication between you and I we’re both very busy. We both have a certain number of priorities and the way that we communicate with each other and with our clients and with our teams. It is intentional so that we can move through a fast amount of things in the hours that we have in the day and I think advisors and large firms seem to think about investors and clients that way. They’ve got a lot of priorities of which finances may fall somewhere in the middle maybe towards who knows where they fall. So it’s a matter of making sure that they have the information they need at their fingertips and the way that they want to consume it so that they’re not looking for it and it’s not lost among a million other other things that they’re trying to get through in their day.

Chip:

Kelly, so one of the things that you and I have talked a lot about recently, and when we look at the high-functioning financial professional advisors, what are they doing with their marketing that’s now differentiating themselves?

Kelly:

Yeah, I think two things really come to mind. One in the first and most important thing is that they’re starting to think about marketing as a revenue generating exercise, and I’m there, you know, we talked a little bit before this podcast about how financial services takes a little bit more time than the rest of the world to get to the modern marketing and I think the firm’s that are winning are thinking about their goals as a business, what customer acquisition costs, they can bear and are building their programs and their and their budgets accordingly, putting the appropriate amount of resources towards marketing and then I think the second thing is really taking a minute to differentiate. We’re living in a time of sea of sameness and financial services. And those firms who are winning are saying yes, we drive growth. Yes, we drive scale. Yes, we drive efficiency for your business, but here’s why. Or to end investors. Yes, we do financial planning. Yes, we do state planning, whatever the services are, but here’s how and how it benefits you and so we’re really pushing all of our clients to dig deeper and take an extra step in explaining who they are and what they do.

Chip:

Well, you know, it’s interesting because I think that there’s a challenge that goes with that, right? If we think about the teeter totter, right, and hey, we’ve always done business this way. That’s not good enough anymore. Right? And what we’re seeing right because, you know, I’ll give you an example. My mom has an advisor, and she expects on a weekly basis to get some sort of a drip on something that’s relevant to her life just once that interaction, right. But it’s also interesting because when you look at being able to implement the marketing aspect, up front, there’s a good lift to that. But once you get through that lift, boy, now you can get into thought leadership, and really curating and personalizing as you mentioned earlier, that content to the customer.

Kelly:

So spot on and you know what the miseducation around marketing in our space is wild to me and I think that’s the number one thing I’ve learned moving from my role of CMO and into this role as consultant is, is that so many advisors have been told that these things can be cookie cutter or they can be set it and forget it or you know, do it for me marketing and all these things, but at the end of the day, you need to think about getting like you think about your investment management. You need to think about it like you think about your client experience. It is as important and the skills that go into it are as specialized. So I think there’s just a reeducation, across the board in our space that needs to happen around what it takes to do good marketing, how personal it needs to be to you and the foundation that needs to be laid out.

Chip:

You know, that’s, that’s super interesting. So, a few questions I’ll put you on, but who do you see a couple firms out there? Either from the wealth management perspective, or from the solution providers perspective, that are really innovative with their approach to mark con, and have really dialed in on the needs of the enterprise? Well, firm financial professionals and investors really enabled that marketing customer journey.

Kelly:

Yeah, I would love to talk about some innovative firms. I think there is and I hope they don’t mind me saying this. There’s a broker dealer called Silver Oak that we work with. It’s gonna grow 200% Next year, because they doubled down on the way that they think about recruitment marketing, it is phenomenal. They’re thinking about the marketing funnel, the same way you should about bringing on investors for the recruitment efforts, and it’s paying off tenfold. There’s a consultant that we work with called the limitless advisor and they are super creative and super disciplined in the way that they go about their marketing. They are very personalized in the way that they do their outreach, but they’ve figured out a way to make it very personalized, but very scalable. I would be remiss to point out that Riskalyze is out there turning armies of clients into brand advocates. I think that owning your community and having them speak and act on your behalf is such a winning formula. And there’s lots of firms like the two of them out there that do that phenomenally well.

Chip:

Yeah, no and I absolutely. So if we kind of transition from that question, right. So if we look at the entire kind of enterprise wealth, space, and meaning more the IBD the insurance meeting the bank programs, roll up RIA is where our enterprise wealth firms relative to the needs of their advisors, financial professionals, when it comes to marketing communications.

Kelly:

I think there’s two things that stand out to me if I’m sitting in the CMO seat at any of those firms. It’s one: how am I driving investors to my advisors with the brand presence that I have as one of these large firms. How am I working on behalf of my advisors to drive opportunities to them, because it’s kind of a double whammy in terms of brand power. If they do a good job, the firm’s doing a good job. You get the power of both firms. So I think that more and more broker-dealers need to figure out how do I very efficiently drive opportunities to the advisors that fall under my firm? I second think that the second thing is, you know, a lot of these enterprise firms build lists of no-fly zone or fly zone in terms of vendors that you can work with and I think that phase two of that for a lot of these firms, it’s gotta be to revisit what’s cookie cutter, what’s canned and can I get a list of vendors for my advisors who are going to help them create more personalized experiences? So it’s I’m not saying that you don’t need all of those technologies that you have had access to but I think you have to take it to the next level and spend the time and resources to personalize everything that you’re putting out and that takes an investment in different types of vendors and consultants and experts.

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Chip:

You know, one of the things that we’ve been talking quite a bit about is reaching out to that investor, right. But one of the big things with marketing also is recruiting. Right? So when we look at firms that are really very creative and thoughtful and innovative, with their recruiting, this is kind of open season right now. There is a lot of rows and seeds that can be put into that right now. But how do you see marketing playing more into how a lot of these firms are doing the recruiting?

Kelly:

Like I said before, you need to think about a recruitment funnel, just like you think about your marketing funnel going after an investor. So what are the phases of that experience? How are you very intentionally moving people through that? And I think the best way to do that from what I’m seeing across the board is having a really strong point of view. People want to work with people who they relate to. And so I think some of these big firms who are trying to recruit it’s so hard to relate to their message because it feels a little bit impersonal. So I think having a point of view is a strong one so that you’re attracting the type of people that you want to be working with and then finalizing your recruitment strategy the same way you would to drive AUM to your firm.

Chip:

Yeah, it’s interesting because I’m really dialing in on your messaging, comment, comments, because every firm has their own personality, their own culture, and I love that comment. I think the other thing to look at, I think, again, it’s automation. It’s using technology from a recruitment standpoint for recruiting advisors and we’ve seen discovery we’ve seen sky science and Salesforce getting very active in that enabling the ability really to track you know, once a new advisor comes on board to be able to track the AUM moving over to say, hey, how successful were we? It’s kind of balancing art and science.

Kelly:

100%. And let me just add on to your automation comment, because I think this is really important. For people to understand automation in itself is not personalization. So you think about it, I have a new client, I want to make them feel welcome. I’m going to put them through this drip campaign. I’m going to automate to make it super scalable. That’s great. But what makes a great client experience and what makes that automation worthwhile is when you have 10 different profiles of a new client and you’re customizing that automation to make it feel personal. So I think people need to remember that you have to combine the technology and the new automation and all these really cool things that we have access to these days with this absolutely 100% need to add personalization to it. So if you’re thinking about how I get more seamless and more efficient in my marketing and in the new year, make sure that you realize those two things need to be married together to be successful.

That was very eloquently put, very eloquently put. So one of the questions I always like to wrap up with is, you know, when you’re working with wealth firms, what causes you to wake up at 4am and not be able to go back to sleep?

And that’s such a good question. You know what it is? It’s an awareness of what’s around them. So what keeps me up at night is when firms come to me and they say, you’re not going to believe what I’m launching. It’s so amazing. I need you to help me get 1000 leads and I asked Okay, well, this happens every day. And I say to them, okay, well have you seen X who does the exact same thing and how they’re messaging or this company who’s launching something similar or this company who actually has what you have, but they also have this and the unawareness of sort of what’s around them, and how they fit into the landscape is sort of shocking to me so that truly, my kids and misunderstanding of the industry are probably the two things that can.

Chip:

Completely understand. So as I like to do, I like to leave you with a bit of the last what we call flash word. So I’d love to hear you know, kind of parting thoughts that you may have.

Kelly:

I think this is very simple. If I can give you any advice it’s go into the new year with a fresh look at everything that’s out in the market that represents you, whether that is your your website or your marketing materials or your LinkedIn or your Google you know what comes up when people noodle you just do a quick brand audit and really ask yourself is all of this material does all this messaging truly represent who I am? And I think that that very simple exercise and that very simple question to yourself can lead you to some sort of opportunity for transformation.

Chip:

Excellent. Kelly, thank you for being a part of the beacon flash buying cast. What a great conversation we just had over the last 20 minutes.

Kelly:

Yes, thank you so much for having me. Always thrilled to chat with you.

We hope you enjoyed the latest episode of the Beacon Flash Podcast. We’re always working to bring you the latest insights and trends in the industry. To stay up-to-date, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And don’t forget to visit our website at www.beaconstrategiesllc.com to learn more about our consulting services and the Beacon Roundtable offerings.