Kelly Waltrich, Author at Intention.ly - Page 5 of 6

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Author: Kelly Waltrich

Generative AI for Financial Advisors: Beyond the Hype

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

Earlier this year, generative artificial intelligence burst into the popular consciousness as the public gained access to new chatbots, writing tools and image generators powered by sophisticated technology like ChatGPT that most people had never encountered before.

The wealth management industry immediately began to ask about the impacts of this emerging technology. When would it come into their businesses? And how would it change the work of advisors and their support staff? Some wealth technology companies moved quickly to implement generative AI applications in their platforms.

“People are hungry for innovation and better ways of doing things, and for productivity,” says Kelly Waltrich, founder and CEO of intention.ly/, a marketing engine for financial, wealth and technology firms. “I’m someone who is fully embracing it and trying to figure out all the ways it is going to make me smarter.”

Yet as the hype around generative AI finally settles, technologists are asking deeper questions about its potential uses, its benefits and its shortcomings—and in many cases they’re finding that more caution and care is needed in choosing where and how to apply the new technology.

While Waltrich doesn’t believe the financial services industry needs to slow down in its embrace and engagement with AI applications, she does think that it needs to make sure it better understands the technology before the applications are put to use.

“We need to be transparent about how things are working behind the scenes, and we need to be aware of what advisors are implementing,” she says. “Firms have a number of people available to work behind the scenes to do due diligence on [technology] vendors. … They need to know what’s happening on the other side of their screens.”

What Is It?

Many financial advisors have been using some form of artificial intelligence for years in their technology stacks, perhaps without even knowing it. Many client relationship management and planning platforms have functions that allow advisors to choose their next best actions or give clients behavioral nudges. These functions are usually built on some form of intelligent data gathering and sorting capability. From the data, the software intuits what the best moves are for an advisor or client. Over time, the software becomes better at finding the best or optimal information that its user is seeking—just as a person learns how to do a job better with repetition.

Generative AI, on the other hand, offers something different: It can understand the natural language people write and speak with, and then it can generate responses in similar language (or with images, audio or video) that make sense in the context of the requests being made. Like previous iterations of AI, it also learns as it goes.

This technology isn’t really new. The first responsive chatbot was created over 50 years ago by MIT researchers. It’s been roughly a decade since the first chatbot passed mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing’s test of how convincingly “human” interactive technology is: That bot convinced more than 30% of its users that they were not speaking with a program, but a real live person.

“Today there are many more that feel truly human to the user, with all the pros and cons that entails,” says Philipp Hecker, CEO and co-founder of Bento Engine, an advice engagement platform for financial advisors. “The pace of change and progress is amazing in terms of the underlying technology.”

Hecker says the only things that really hold AI applications back from sweeping across the wealth management space are humans’ willingness to engage with the technology and the regulatory framework that advisors operate within.

Are We Ready?

More recently, technology companies have experimented with using generative AI on social networks like Twitter (now X). In one infamous case, Microsoft deployed a chatbot, Tay, on Twitter in 2016. Twitter users quickly trained Tay to make outrageous, nonsensical and inflammatory statements, leading Microsoft to shut it down.

After ChatGPT’s upgrade brought generative AI to a broader audience this year, stories proliferated about students and technical writers who tried to use the bot to produce deeply cited academic research, only to find that the software was convincingly fabricating the sources it was citing and that, in the end, it had produced useless copy.

Even more recently, Microsoft incorporated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine so users could ask the software to generate statements and pictures. The company found out that despite the guardrails it had put in, users were able to “teach” the AI to make outrageous, racist and defamatory statements and images. One infamous image the bot produced showed Mickey Mouse brandishing a handgun as he pilots an airplane into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center. The incidents led Microsoft to “lobotomize” Bing’s AI, putting up even newer guardrails to prevent misuse.

Today, the world is contending with AI’s ability to create “deepfakes,” believable video and audio replicas of people’s faces, bodies and voices generated entirely by computer.

Given AI’s tendency to make mistakes, wealth managers using it could end up violating compliance rules when working with clients, according to Lincoln Ross, CEO of CircleBlack, a cloud-based software platform for advisors. Eventually, he says, the technology might help advisors’ support teams by collecting data, but he says it’s not ready.

The concern isn’t just that the financial industry may misapply artificial intelligence, but that the industry itself—as well as the capital markets—could be manipulated by it.

Not Really

“I would say that, for better or for worse, wealth management has been more conservative when it comes to technology, and that we need to continue to be a bit more conservative,” says Molly Weiss, chief product officer at Envestnet. “At the end of the day, trust is an essential part of delivering financial advice, and I think that as an industry you can argue that we haven’t been as careful as we should be.”

For that reason, she says financial advisors are likely to use AI right now mainly to make their operations more efficient, rather than using it in any way that “touches” an actual investor. “Trust in the relationship and trust in financial advice is too precious to risk,” she says.

Many technologists were surprised about any level of interest in AI from wealth managers, who are often hesitant to adopt new technology, largely because of regulators. With federal and state watchdogs looking over their shoulders, advisors may take a long time to embrace newer artificial intelligence for building client-facing tools. While “weak” forms of AI, like robo-advisor algorithms, will continue to be used in client-facing environments, Hecker says the industry is only in the “second or third inning” of finding ways to use generative AI in a way that complies with regulations.

Where It Can Work Now

Still, that doesn’t mean wealth management has to sit on the sidelines while other consumer-facing industries benefit from artificial intelligence. There are already wealth technology firms finding ways to help advisors implement technology behind the scenes.

“AI is best used as a way to augment non-client facing aspects of wealth management,” says Ritik Malhotra, CEO at Savvy Wealth, an RIA firm with a digital platform. “Two quick examples would be helping the advisor brainstorm how to take further actions and helping to automate some of the functions of the back office. Still, none of these applications yet include executing something entirely autonomously.”

intention.ly/’s Advisor Brand Builder platform uses AI to help build out an advisor’s branded marketing materials, including social media, logos, business cards and web pages.

Waltrich says about 75% to 80% of the platform’s content production is handled by AI, with professional editors and writers then stepping in to refine the work and make it ready to publish.

Hecker believes AI can best be used to help advisors and clients prioritize where to spend their time, both when it comes to money moves like saving, spending and investing, and when it comes to practice management. AI may also help increase the loading ratios—the number of clients per advisor—at some firms.

“We as an industry struggle at the supply side of human advice,” Hecker says. “We all can and must serve more clients; the only way to do that is by using more, better and smarter technology. That’s the force multiplier and leverage point.”

Never Fear

Some advisors look at this technology the same way they looked at robo-advisors before—questioning whether a more intuitive and behaviorally responsive AI could displace advisors. But technologists, in general, believe that will never be the case.

“There is no world where AI can replace a human financial advisor,” says Malhotra. What he sees instead is a future where AI could help in interactions that are purely transactional, where human interaction isn’t necessary.

While generative AI, like the robo-advisors, may help an advisor refine their value proposition—perhaps helping the advisor manage human behaviors and relationships rather than managing actual money, the technology is still incapable of filling an advisor’s shoes, Hecker says.

“Net-net, I view it as a much-welcome and much-needed force-multiplier that makes us human advisors even more human, even more often,” Hecker says. “The general trend will continue of pushing humans up higher in the value chain. The next phase of evolution could entail the human advisor focusing even more on behavioral dynamics and the convergence of health, wealth and family.”

Wealthtech Roundup: Intention.ly, Docupace, Ycharts, Elements and More

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

In this edition of the Wealthtech Roundup, we speak with our newest Wealthtech Leader of the Month, intention.ly/ CEO Kelly Waltrich, on the launch of Advisor Brand Builder (ABB), a new marketing technology platform.

intention.ly/ Launches Advisor Brand Builder (ABB) Marketing Technology Platform

intention.ly/ CEO Kelly Waltrich and industry branding veteran Melissa Thomas developed the new proprietary solution called Advisor Brand Builder (ABB), for which Thomas will serve as President. The pair previously led fintech rebrands at eMoney Advisor and Orion.

ABB provides a five-step process that can take less than 48 hours to complete, starting with a 20-minute interactive discovery workflow and brand asset generation engine. It is designed to help advisory firms identify their visual style preferences; customize logos, imagery, messaging and more; and apply their brand to assets such as websites and social media.

And now for our Q&A with Wealthtech Leader of the Month, intention.ly/ CEO Kelly Waltrich.

WSR: Why did you decide to launch the Advisor Brand Builder (ABB) platform, and what gap does it fill in the marketplace?

Waltrich: Throughout my career, I’ve seen what the power of a strong brand can do. But as we considered the brand development options available today – in particular, for breakaway advisors, established firms looking to level up the quality and impact of their branding, and enterprise firms seeking a turnkey solution to rebrand newly acquired advisor businesses – Melissa Thomas, ABB’s co-engineer, and I realized there was a sizable gap to fill.

AI has made brand building for firms with limited resources faster and more affordable, yes. But the technology still isn’t sophisticated enough to turn the nuances of a firm’s unique story and value proposition into the differentiated, authentic language and complementary visual applications that truly bring a brand to life. That requires a distinctly human touch. The answer seemed clear to us: Find a way to leverage both. And ABB was born.

WSR: How has marketing technology in wealth management evolved over the last few years, and how do you see it evolving in the next few years?

Kelly Waltrich, CEO, intention.ly/

Waltrich: It’s impossible to talk about the evolution of marketing technology in any industry without acknowledging the overwhelming impact of AI on marketers’ ability to produce, design and publish content in a fraction of the time it used to take. Video, for example, was only a pipe dream for many wealth management firms even a year ago. Now, advisors can create their own videos in about 30 seconds with minimal effort and next to no training.

But even as content creation becomes easier, I think wealth management is going to struggle with two distinct challenges: Authenticity and regulatory requirements. Marketing technology is going to have to keep pace with both to remain impactful.

WSR: What advice would you give to advisors who want to improve their marketing technology resources, but don’t know how to start?

Waltrich: Don’t start with technology at all. Start with defining your marketing goals and working backward to identify the obstacles standing in the way of achieving them, then consider whether technology can help alleviate the roadblocks. The truth is, no marketing technology can fix a haphazard strategy or inconsistent execution, so if the problem is foundational, technology isn’t the answer.

For advisors who have a sound strategy in place, I recommend looking beyond advisor-specific technologies to the wider world of phenomenal marketing solutions available. These platforms will help you stay ahead of broader marketing trends and offer insights you might not get from technologies built exclusively for wealth management marketing. Hubspot, for example, will not only keep your digital marketing initiatives organized, but it will also surface performance data that enables you to continue optimizing your efforts.

Want To Swing For The Fences? Do These Things First

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

A PSA To Executives Looking For A Marketing Magic Bullet: You Won’t Find One

My co-founder and I just spent weeks putting together a 2024 marketing plan for one of our clients, an innovative advisor fintech platform with nothing but incredible opportunity ahead of them.

Using their marketing budget, a couple million dollars, we outlined six months of initiatives that included:

  • A total brand transformation, including positioning, visuals and messaging
  • Launching into the as-yet-untapped enterprise space
  • Designing an entirely new demand generation engine
  • Putting a PR plan in place for the first time
  • Implementing a robust event strategy — again, for the first time
  • Leveling up current product marketing efforts

Comprehensive, aggressive, ambitious. That’s kind of how we roll.

The CEO felt differently.

“This feels very safe to me,” he said after we finished presenting our plan.

SAFE?

Let me pause here to go on record saying I genuinely love this company. Their people are smart. Their product is innovative and differentiated — which can be difficult to come by in our hyper commoditized fintech space. They’re enthusiastic brainstormers with a lot of industry knowledge.

But hearing the CEO call a holistic, fundamentally focused, multi-channel marketing strategy built to maximize their budget safe — without yet having seen any creative concepts to accompany the campaigns — made me realize marketers are still facing an uphill battle.

It’s not so much the comment itself that alarmed me, but the bigger, still apparently pervasive misconception it represents.

Executives, even very smart, successful company leaders, still believe marketing is all about pulling one magic lever or doing something so disruptive and attention-grabbing that it immediately sends your pipeline into overdrive.

I am here to tell you this is not true. And dispelling this unfair and entirely unrealistic notion for all of the marketers that come after me is a large part of why I started intention.ly/ in the first place.

Successful, creative, exceptional, innovative marketing always starts with the fundamentals.

Last year, there was a ton of hype around Monday.com’s Super Bowl commercial — and for good reason. A B2B SaaS company taking up space alongside Coke and Nike during the single biggest advertising event of the year is gutsy and frankly unprecedented.

But when you peel back the curtain and take a look at Monday.com’s broader marketing strategy, it becomes clear that the commercial was only possible because all of Monday’s fundamentals were already in place.

They’ve built a well-oiled demand generation engine. They’re executing a thoughtful content strategy across multiple channels. I don’t have access to their data, but based on company growth, I think it’s safe to say they’re consistently hitting their goals.

You can do big, bold things in marketing like Super Bowl commercials. That’s part of the fun. But if you don’t put the fundamentals in place first, no one will see or care about your grand slam. First you need to do the hard, slow, somewhat unexciting work of:

  • Building brand
  • Growing an audience
  • Making sure your messaging resonates with your audience
  • Aligning your product to your customers’ needs
  • Understanding your metrics: cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, sales cycle length, pipeline velocity, etc.

When you master bunts and base hits, you earn the right to swing for the fences.

Part of the problem is that a CEO who has traditionally focused on product development is conditioned to put all of his proverbial eggs in one big, splashy basket. But marketing doesn’t have that luxury. The real world isn’t Mad Men, and marketers can’t sit around with bourbon and cigars, mulling over a single incredible concept to drive enough revenue for the entire year.

They need metrics and clean, organized data to continuously make informed decisions. They need to build a brand their audience loves. They need to make sure they’re getting in front of prospects who are ready to buy with product differentiators and solution-focused messaging, while using thoughtful, educational content to create demand from the rest of the market that isn’t yet in a buying cycle.

All of that requires fundamental work.

Think about marketing fundamentals like putting new tires on a car. Is there a less exciting way to spend money? No, there is not. But if you don’t, you will quite literally get nowhere.

Investing in marketing fundamentals isn’t safe. It’s absolutely critical.

The good news…? This sparked great conversations with the client, and we’re in a phenomenal place, ready to head into next year prepared to execute. Excited to watch them put this plan into action and witness the all-but-safe results it yields.

Blink and it’ll be Christmas

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

The way you approach the next six months could make or break your 2024.

The other day, I saw a headline that read something like, Scientists believe the Earth is starting to spin faster.

Clickbait? Probably – how would that even happen? But when mid-summer arrives (and how did we already get here, by the way?!), time certainly feels like it moves more quickly. Q3 will disappear faster than a new round of Taylor Swift tickets, and 2024 will be here before we know it.

You might think that means you need to double down on execution and accelerate your tactical efforts before the end of the year. But I’d argue the opposite.

If you can pull yourself out of the day-to-day weeds, you can create a definitive head start for your firm by doing what no one else is doing during this time, which is laser focusing on strategy.

It might feel counterintuitive, but pumping the brakes and taking a step back now will allow you to move faster in the long run – without stumbling over mistakes your competitors are going to make because they didn’t do the foundational strategic work first.

Prioritize these six initiatives between now and December to set your firm up for success in January:

1. Assess what worked and what didn’t. With six months of the year behind us, you should have enough data available to identify content trends, your best- and worst-performing channels, and opportunities to capture market share, as well as to analyze client feedback to determine what needs to be on your 2024 roadmap.

2. Be aware of revenue goals for next year. Once you understand your revenue targets, you can back into the budget you’ll need to reach them. Make sure this exercise includes collaborating with other departments to determine upcoming key initiatives, like rebranding, acquisitions, and product launches, that will require an allocation of marketing spend.

3. Scrub your CRM. The last thing you want to deal with on the first day of the new year is a tangled mess of email lists and contact information. Make sure your lists are clean, organized and segmented properly so you can hit the ground running with newsletters and highly targeted campaigns to an engaged audience. Review all of your nurture campaigns to make sure they’re firing correctly and that the content is fresh and optimized.

4. Get your brand house in order. This doesn’t have to be a months-long project; it can be as simple as gathering your logo, color palette, and brand fonts, as well as any distinctions to your copy style, together in one place. Standardizing your brand elements will exponentially accelerate your ability to get more creative out the door.

You should also take this time to revisit, refine, or develop your brand’s messaging guide. Identify your firm’s differentiators and ask your top customers why they love working with you to create messaging for your brand that’s both original and authentic.

5. Pressure-test your lead handoff process. Gaps in your marketing-to-sales handoff process can create significant missed revenue opportunities, so it’s worth spending the time to identify and address any trouble spots. Coordinate with your sales team to walk through exactly what happens when a qualified lead is passed from marketing to sales, and look for any opportunities to reduce friction for prospects. You can also test this yourself by filling out a high-intent form (request a demo or contact us) on your website.

6. Look for outsourcing opportunities. Not only does outsourcing alleviate pressure on your in-house team, but it’s also a budget-friendly way to introduce a broad range of subject matter expertise to your marketing efforts. Whether you need help building digital campaigns, creating content, planning events, or something else entirely, your earlier work assessing performance and budget can help you decide what to outsource and where to turn.

I’ll also add one tactical recommendation to this strategic list: Start executing on your holiday campaigns now. I can’t even count the number of firms I’ve seen scramble when Thanksgiving hits because they haven’t started thinking about what they want to do for the holidays, both from a campaign perspective and for their clients and employees. Instead of adding more stress to an already high-tension time of year, start putting the pieces in place now so the heavy lifting is done by the time the holidays roll around.

How you spend the next six months matters. Choose wisely.

Executives: Here’s How to Drive Marketing ROI

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

Nope, not clickbait. This is a real breakdown of the underlying reasons why you’re frustrated with your marketing efforts. We see it all the time – a business invests heavily into a marketing lead funnel, but then months later wonders why the results aren’t better.

This undoubtedly raises concerns that marketing efforts could be falling short. (Let the finger pointing begin.) Before executives make decisions, metrics are splashed out on the table, lead funnels are examined, and sales teams are questioned. At the end of the circus comes a conclusion: it must have been the marketing. [Que theatrical sting: ‘Dun, Dun, Dun.’]

Despite all this, your rockstar marketing team continues to report phenomenal metrics on click-throughs, new engagement requests and booming web traffic. It looks like they’re KILLING IT. But if the business is still missing its revenue goals, something is clearly amiss. Is marketing really to blame? Maybe.  But maybe not – here’s how you can tell.

The Marketing ROI Dilemma

Here’s my favorite conversation: “How do I measure the value of marketing?” Rightfully so, executives want to understand the cost-benefit analysis. Do the results surpass the outlay enough to justify the expense not only in dollars, but also in the production hours and opportunity cost? To answer this effectively, we need to return to the initial goal and the processes that were supposed to get us there.

This question must be asked relentlessly from beginning to end of any campaign. But here’s the reality: most firms are doing it backwards. They set out with high hopes, run like crazy to execute, and then a few months later they review the results. This doesn’t work for a variety of reasons.

Marketing, more so than most departments, also relies heavily on other teams to properly execute strategies. Even with a suite of allies, a marketing leader requires that A, B, C, D, and E and F, all happen in complete harmony.

Marketing’s Allies:

  • C-Suite
  • Customer Service
  • Product Development
  • Public Relations
  • Sales
  • Technology

Even assuming the processes and teams are working well together, it doesn’t mean there’s not a greater underlying issue hindering your revenue performance. It’s time to dig deep.

Maybe You’re Asking the Wrong Questions

Marketing isn’t a band-aid, it’s a central component to driving company profits. If you’re relying on marketing to fix a broader, underlying issue…keep reading.

Used effectively, marketing procures qualified leads and delivers them (piping hot) to sales leaders. In order for that to happen though, a number of factors need to occur in constant, synchronized succession. So before you throw out your existing marketing strategies, executives should consider where else challenges may exist in your product, technology, sales and customer service processes.

Hey, There’s a Hole in Your…

Shoring up these gaps now is essential to quantifying your marketing efforts later. Turning on the lead flow will only temporarily mask your larger problem. Before greenlighting your marketing strategy, you’ve got to understand the factors that could hinder its success. Kick-off your intentional marketing campaign only once you’ve reviewed the entire process, asked the hard questions, and believe that the only thing between you and increased revenue streams is a need for customers to be more aware and willing to purchase your products or services.

Just what the [#$%&] is going on?

Consider these common scenarios:

  • Leads are going stale in the funnel.

Despite driving qualified, ready-to-purchase prospects into the sales cycle, there’s a lag in capturing revenue. This could show up more obviously in longer close times, but also with minimal notes in your CRM, fewer sales calls, poorly written follow-up emails, or a variety of other sales issues that essentially stack up to improper training. No amount of leads from marketing will solve the problem of an ineffective sales process or team.

  • Product is missing a competitive advantage.

In an industry facing rapid expansion, businesses need to be evolving their product to serve the growing consumer demand. If you aren’t focused on constant improvements and investing in growth, know that your competitors are gaining the upper hand. Marketing can bolster your messaging and attract more eyeballs, but if the product itself can’t stand on its own, there’s nothing marketing can do to hide its flaws.

  • Ineffective dashboards and integrations.

Marketing has become far more scientific over the past decade. With all key technologies linked behind the scenes (from content platforms, to social media, to CRMs) there are dozens of metrics that can be created to monitor performance across activities within your firm. When these integrations and dashboards break, or never exist in the first place, it becomes more like a guessing game. Not investing here is a sure way to set your sales and marketing teams up for failure. If this is a gap in your current processes, resolving it should take immediate precedence. You can’t optimize what you can’t measure. 

  • Capacity constraints are hindering performance.

Especially today, our industry is not immune to the national talent shortage. If you’re seeing weak metrics from any department, consider if this is a talent issue. Are the right people in the right chairs, and if so, are they overcompensating for a larger issue? This could present in ways such as, a department that previously performed well is now missing their goals, your customer service team is hearing more complaints than usual, your CRM is showing the same volume of activity yet fewer leads are closing. The list goes on…but until you solve the capacity constraint, you will not see improvement in your bottom line.

  • Poor or confusing client experience.

Do you know what it’s like to be a client of yours? If it’s been awhile since you mapped your client experience, you may be surprised at what you find. As businesses grow, their services typically evolve, and with this often come temporary bridges. The problem with temporary bridges is that they become permanent and then overlooked as new challenges present themselves. Revisiting your client experience may uncover some reasons that prospects and clients are falling out of love with you. Some of these findings will have easier solutions than others. Marketing can help adjust messaging and positioning, but ultimately won’t move the needle until your processes are reconfigured to meet the demand for the size of your firm today.

 Prove it.

Before, during and after your campaigns, marketing leaders and executives can track progress by reviewing a few key metrics. The best and most reliable way to stay on top of this is through dashboards and reports. Executives should ensure these are set up in advance to build a baseline, and then continue to leverage these for insight as the campaign unfolds.

Whenever there is concern over whether marketing is performing as intended, step one should always be reviewing the agreed upon marketing metrics. When those appear to be in order, yet the firm is still missing its financial marks, it’s time to look more broadly at the products, processes and people across the organization.

From You to Them: Reframing Your Approach to Social Media

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

We see it all the time: Businesses using their social media accounts as their personal billboards (for the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on LinkedIn, but the same ideas apply to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok). And the truth is, it’s easy to default to using LinkedIn strictly as a promotional platform for sharing your press releases, your product features, your benefits, your awards. 

It’s more difficult, but way more effective for building a loyal audience that actually wants to read your posts, to focus outward and use social media as a valuable, educational resource center – most of the time.

Because a percentage of your posts should be about you and what you do. LinkedIn isn’t a sales tool, it’s an engagement platform, which means it can be used in many different ways, a big one of them being for its original intention – job hunting and recruiting. Potential candidates will certainly be interested in what your culture is like, who your recent hires are, and what you bring to the market.  

But LinkedIn has evolved well beyond its roots as a career network. Across industries, people spend time on LinkedIn connecting with their peers and learning how to do their jobs better. Importantly, that does not mean they log onto LinkedIn to request a demo of your software or read about why your latest feature is such a game changer.

Flip the script. What can you offer your target audience on LinkedIn that has nothing to do with them buying anything from you? You know them – their goals, challenges, benchmarks, struggles, uncertainties – so use that information as your foundation for LinkedIn content.

When you’re putting together your social media calendar, the key is to ensure your Them: Us ratio skews in favor of them – your audience – and doesn’t lean too heavily on self-promotion as a strategy.

So who’s doing this well? 

Sales and marketing software big guns Gong and Metadata, with recent posts that include:

  • Demand gen campaign dos and don’ts
  • Tips for balancing demand generation with ABM 
  • The impact of marketing and sales alignment on sales rep retention
  • A common sales team hiring mistake, and how to fix it
  • How to maximize your demand gen budget while your competition is cutting theirs

In the fintech space, Helios offers up their quant-driven research twice a week with market commentary and their Most Important Thing blog feature, both aimed at helping advisors communicate more effectively with their clients about what’s going on in the market.

Individuals have mastered this, too – just take a look at Dr. Daniel Crosby’s page for a compelling combination of behavioral finance insights, psychology lightbulbs and the occasional welcome dose of humor.

And perhaps no one offers more value-at-no-cost sales content than Josh Braun, who regularly gives away cold email templates, frameworks for improving sales calls, and real-life examples of applying psychology to sales.

Evolving Your LinkedIn Presence

Not sure where you or your company fit in?

Follow this simple framework for taking the ‘me’ out of your firm’s social media:

First, start with an audit. Look back through your last ten LinkedIn posts. Count how many are focused on you – what you sell, what you’ve won, why you’re great – and how many focus on what your audience wants to know.

If the ratio is seriously skewed in favor of posts about you, consider these tips for evolving your social media presence to be more audience-centric:

  • Ask your sales team the top three questions they hear on prospect calls. Create posts that answer them.
  • Go back to existing case studies. What problems were your clients facing before they found your solution? Build content around those challenges.
  • Talk to your clients. What are they dealing with right now that may or may not have anything to do with your business? Encourage thoughtful discussions about those topics on your platform.

Once a month, go back and review your posts. Over time, that ratio should shift in your audience’s favor. The benefits of this are clear for them: Free, valuable content they can take and use to improve performance, profitability, engagement, etc.

But there are distinct, powerful advantages for your business, too – three in particular:

Shareability: When’s the last time you shared the news about some other company’s funding round or industry award with your team? Probably never. But a concrete list of five tips for improving client outreach, or a thorough breakdown of a new industry rule? Those posts are shareable because they help your audience either a) learn something new or b) do their jobs better.

And what gets shared may not get measured – there’s no way to track social media posts sent through Slack, for example – but it does get amplified. Shareable information drives your message outside of your immediate followers to a wider audience, reaching potential prospects who may not be following you on social media yet.

Brand affinity: People like people who help them. It sounds simple, and it is, but it’s also a powerful tool for business growth, especially if you’re in a commoditized space with a number of competitors. 

Word of mouth: Not everyone who benefits from your content will be able to buy from you – immediately or ever. But the somewhat ironic thing about creating content without the intent to sell is that it often ends up helping you sell after all – due in large part to grateful followers telling others about you.

We mentioned above that it’s difficult to track whether your educational posts are being shared through private channels like Slack, Teams, email or DMs. But there are ways to determine if changing your social media strategy from you-centric to audience-centric is having a positive impact on growth and revenue:

  • Track number of followers on LinkedIn. Is it growing? More importantly, is the number of followers in your target audience growing?
  • Look for qualitative indicators, like engagement in the comments from followers that match your ideal client profile.
  • Pay attention to number of website visitors, especially via direct traffic or branded searches. These should increase as you ramp up your valuable, educational posts.
  • Add an open text, ‘How did you hear about us?’ field to your demo or contact us form. People will report whatever their most memorable interaction was with you and your content.

As with any change you make in marketing, don’t expect to see results overnight. Give your audience-focused social media strategy at least six months to start making a difference.

How to Link Your CTAs to the Buyer Journey

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

I’m an impulse buyer. Any and every toy for my kids? Yes, please. The air fryer that’s all over Instagram is definitely in my kitchen. And let’s talk about the checkout lane. I can always use more candles, a new phone case, and coffee mugs.

But when it comes to big-ticket items, my buying journey is very different. My path to purchase is a process and I rarely raise my hand until I’ve done some research. 

If you find yourself nodding your head, you’re not alone: 81% of consumers research online before making a purchase. And SaaS buyers complete 60%+ of the buying process before engaging a vendor. 

We know the buyer journey is full of twists and turns and it’s our job as marketers to deliver the right customer experience at each inflection point. Ultimately, our goal is to guide consumers through this journey so they make a purchase from us. 

The right CTAs encourage our audience to take action. Gartner calls this “buyer enablement” — providing information to customers in a way that enables them to complete critical buying decisions. 

The wrong CTA can turn potential customers away — something I see many of our clients struggling with. Many of us think using “Get a Demo” or “Let’s Talk” is the only way to go. But accelerating the buying journey is as if you’re serving the dessert before the appetizer. 

We need to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey, not steer them off course. The first step is to understand the buyer journey so we can reach our customers where they are in each stage. Then we need to develop a robust content marketing strategy that presents content for each stage of the buyer’s journey with CTAs that encourage the appropriate action and drive growth. 

Aligning Intent to Action 

It’s important to align our calls-to-action to the buyer journey to optimize performance of our campaigns. Sure, we might get lucky to land a handful of demos, but we’re missing out on prospects who are early in their buying journey. 

We can all relate to these frustrations when our executives ask why the numbers have dropped off. Why would the “Get Demo” CTA bring in leads last quarter but has been falling flat now? These conversations made me think of my recent buyer journey.  

Problem: My best friend from college bought an RV to prioritize creating experiences with her family. My husband and I thought this was a great idea and began our shopping journey. 

Awareness: Our research was focused on understanding the different types of RVs and price ranges, and we even started looking into family-friendly RV destinations. 

Knowledge: There’s a lot we don’t know about RVs so we dug in even more: floorplans, new or used, ways to tow an RV, etc.

Consideration: Then we started to think about our budget and discussed what other things we might need to put on hold to afford our investment.  

In this process, we’re searching for answers to: 

  • What is the challenge I have to solve?
  • What are my options for solving this problem?
  • How do I sort and filter those options to meet my very specific means?
  • How do I compare the options?
  • How do I figure out the ones that are best for my budget, lifestyle, business, etc.?
  • How do I fully understand the options?

For each type of question above, we (marketers) need to craft the correct CTA to match the intent of our audience: Whether they’re researching their problem, solution, options, or different brands. Presenting a “Buy Now” offer will fall flat because the customer hasn’t reached a decision yet. This is the time to serve up helpful content to educate and provide answers to their questions. 

The Right Content for the Right Stage

Marketing is impossible without great content. Buyers need to engage with 8-13 pieces of content before making a decision. That’s a mix of first- and third-party content in the forms of social posts, blogs, earned media, reports, etc.   

Consider the information below, which shows the different types of content you need to be thinking about for the different stages of the buyer journey and the different types of leads you have.

AWARENESS KNOWLEDGE CONSIDERATION
HOT Needs expertise Needs to know how a specific offering can solve a problem Needs to test-drive offering
WARM Needs frameworks Needs to understand problem Needs to evaluate options
COLD Needs answers to questions Needs problems resolved Needs solutions to solve problems

 

Awareness

  • Users focus primarily on learning more about their problem. They’re not interested in your product and certainly aren’t ready for a demo, but they want to find a solution to eliminate their pain points. 
  • Serve them content that educates, such as blog posts, social content, videos, and ebooks. Show them how your product can eliminate or reduce their pain points. 
  • CTAs can be “Subscribe To” “Follow Us” “Find Inspiration”

Consideration 

  • These prospects have already learned a lot about their problem, discovered some potential solutions, and are evaluating their options. 
  • Deliver content that will position your product as the best solution, such as case studies, webinars, and comparison guides. 
  • CTAs can be “Watch Now” “See How We Stack Up” “Read Case Study”

Purchase 

  • These buyers know what they want. They’re looking for the right features, support, integrations, and cost. 
  • This is where you can splash “Request a Demo” and “Free Trial”

The End Result: Great CX

The buying process is always happening, regardless of the good or service — candles, air fryers, RVs, software, etc. But, the time to move through the buying process is different. While we can’t force prospects to skip steps, great marketer’s find creative ways to accelerate the process.

Tying the CTA to the customer journey should make sense to those stages. Because great experiences delight customers, happy customers keep coming back for more, and they spread the word. 

I encourage you to study and understand the buying journey, develop your funnel around those inflection points, and create a content marketing strategy that maps content to each phase of their journey using the right CTAs. 

I should know. After researching the RVs, I finally raised my hand and reached out to an RV dealer. Our first trip is going to be to Nashville, TN, in a few weeks. 

It’s Time to Rethink Your Event Strategy for 2022 and Beyond

Posted on by Kelly Waltrich

The fintech and financial services industries have relied heavily on in-person trade shows, conferences and other events to drive business for as long as I can remember. And even as the world became more digitally focused, we stuck to what we knew: Exhibit halls, keynote speakers, networking happy hours and salespeople pitching product demos from 10’ X 10’ booths.

When COVID-19 stepped in and blew up the comfortable event circuit for us, it forced a re-evaluation that probably should have happened years ago: 

Are conferences, as they’ve traditionally been executed, still relevant? Do financial professionals and fintech firms get as much value from them as they used to?

Do in-person events still drive results – growth, new business, innovative ideas, deeper connections with clients, peers and prospects?

The answer is the classic and unsatisfying catch-all, “It depends.” 

In this case, it depends entirely on you. You control your own event destiny – meaning you get out of events and conferences what you put into them.

Setting up a tired booth with a wrinkled table skirt and a couple of sales enablement pamphlets is going to earn you exactly the results it should in 2022: None at all. In the fintech and financial services spaces, which get more competitive by the day, simply being at a conference is no longer enough. 

And as the price for attending and sponsoring industry events skyrockets, it becomes even more important to make the most out of every dollar. Follow these tips to start getting more value out of conferences and events:

1. Choose wisely

Every dollar counts, remember? Curate your calendar accordingly, with the events most relevant to your business and your goals. 

This could mean conferences that offer you speaking spots, that are especially attractive to your target audience, or that have the real potential to teach you how to transform your operations. (It’s great if the stars align and the events that can make the biggest impact for you also happen to be in, say, Florida or California, but it doesn’t always work out that way. If your customers are headed to Wisconsin in February, you should be too.)

2. Send standout pre- and post-conference communications

Firms salivate over registrant lists, but rarely spend the time to use them to their fullest potential. Every one of your competitors sponsoring the same conference is also sending communications to the same list, so be thoughtful about making yours stand out. 

What that doesn’t look like: 

A mass email blast before the event with your booth number and boilerplate language about your firm

What that could look like: 

  • A valuable asset they can use right away to address challenges you know they’re facing 
  • A quick, fun video from your team members attending the conference
  • Personalized outreach to several key prospects inviting them to one-on-one coffee at the event (the key here is personalized – for this to work, you need to make a meaningful connection, so do your research before you send anything)

3. Get the booth right

Let’s get this out of the way first: A clean, modern and uncluttered booth is table stakes. If you’re bringing banners, they should look sharp, bright and new, not like they just stumbled off a red eye from LA to Philly. (As your team is working on banner design, by the way, remember that what’s most important should be at eye level. Most people will never even see the bottom of your banner.)

Think about how to make your booth one that people want to visit. There’s a balance to strike between doing something unexpected to capture attention in a literal noisy, crowded space, and being completely gimmicky. Keep your brand and the conference environment in mind as you think about how to draw people in. 

For example, broadcasting or capturing audio in a packed conference hall can be difficult, but you can put together a photo booth Hollywood style with your logo as the backdrop, and encourage attendees to share their photos on social media.

And don’t hesitate to leverage the pandemic’s unsung hero, the QR code, to get your brand and your message into people’s hands. Put a QR code at your booth and set up a dedicated, mobile-optimized landing page for the event; even if they don’t look at it right away, it’ll be on their phone’s browser the next time they open the web.

Finally, make sure your most charismatic and informed employee is working your booth (if this is two different people at your company, send them both).

4. Or think outside the booth

All that said, there’s no law requiring you to actually have a booth presence at a conference. In fact, sometimes it’s more valuable to put that money toward something else, like inviting your top clients and prospects to a nice dinner near the event location. 

You can also think about conducting on-site client interviews in smaller breakout rooms, setting up a fireside chat, or recording a podcast episode with some of the key thought leaders speaking at the event. 

Free yourself from the way you’ve always thought about conferences, and instead take advantage of having both your audience and the thought leaders they respect all in one place.

5. Maximize the impact of speaking spots

If you or someone from your firm is lucky enough to be given airtime at a conference, don’t squander it. 

Make sure your presentation: 

  • Is hyper aligned with the goals and challenges of the conference audience  
  • Is timely and relevant (this doesn’t mean popping a pandemic slide into a deck from 2018 and calling it good)
  • Is updated with your firm’s most recent language and branding  
  • Is on a topic you feel natural and comfortable talking – and answering questions – about in front of a large group of people

Perhaps most importantly, amplify the power of your presentation after the event. Record it and upload it to your firm’s YouTube channel. Cut up snippets and parse them out on social media. Send targeted post-conference emails with clips that hold value for key prospects. Turn the topic into one or several blog posts.

6. Spend money where it makes sense

Most of these tips boil down to being thoughtful about your approach to events, and this is no exception. 

Almost every conference offers countless sponsorship opportunities. Choose the ones that a) align with your budget and b) will actually help drive interest in and awareness of your brand during and after the event. 

For example, spending $5K to feature your logo on cocktail napkins at the opening night happy hour may not be your best move. 

But $6K on elevator wraps, which you can treat like bonafide billboards for the entirety of the conference, with targeted messaging and QR codes that point to a dedicated landing page, could be worth the spend.

7. Put the ‘work’ in networking

Conferences are exhausting. It’s draining for anyone, even sales reps used to spending the entire day on the phone or in meetings, to show up and bring their A-game to every single conversation for two to five long, full days.

But aside from speaking spots, being able to build your network and make real connections is the single biggest benefit of attending in-person conferences. You can book and give demos from home. You can buy ZoomInfo and cold email your entire target audience from home. 

What you can’t do from home is buy an impromptu cup of coffee for a prospect, or set up a meeting over a beer at happy hour, or grab an Uber to the airport with the tech vendor you met at the concert last night, who just might have the answer to the exact problem your business needs to solve.

If you’re going to an event, give it your all. You never know where the next conversation could lead.

8. Share valuable information with your team

Don’t leave the best insights from the conference at the conference. 

Whether you’re learning more about your clients’ needs, checking out a demo of a new tool or absorbing motivation from a keynote, put a process in place to share that information with the rest of your team as quickly as you can. Create a dedicated event Slack channel, or hold a post-mortem immediately after the conference to walk through highlights, takeaways and action items. 

Our events team has seen and done it all, from putting major industry conferences together to driving pre- and post-conference engagement to building booths and setting up network events. If you need a hand making the most out of your 2022/2023 event calendar, let us know!