Marketing Compliance for Financial Advisors (Q&A With Dynamic Wealth Advisors)

Most financial advisors do not have the revenue or staff to manage all of the systems, compliance and technology it takes to be successful. Dynamic Wealth Advisors (DWA) knows this all too well and has decided to do something about it. DWA helps advisors handle operations, compliance, and investment administration at scale.

We sat down with DWA’s COO, Craig Morningstar, to gain insight on how his team thinks about online marketing for financial advisors — starting with the tough questions.

OutboundEngine: Is online marketing really necessary for financial advisors?

Craig Morningstar: Only for advisors who want more clients. Think about it. Someone could know 5-10 different financial professionals who they could work with, but the advisor who stays in front of them and connected through email marketing and social media marketing is the one who gets the call when life happens. Do you need to rollover your 401k? Did you inherit some money? Those are all opportunistic events, but you have to be on the mind of the client to get that opportunistic call.

Q: What would you say to a financial advisor who’s fear of breaking compliance regulations is keeping them from marketing their services online?

A: Compliance is not an option, it’s a requirement in this industry. Advisors can be removed from this industry and no longer allowed to practice if they violate compliance. They can also be fined a significant dollar amount if they don’t adhere to the firm’s compliance procedures. If you have 10 different advisors at your firm all doing their own individual marketing stuff, it just takes time to get something through. A running joke is that compliance is “The Office of Business Prevention” because they get in the way from a salesperson’s perspective, but they’re a requirement.

To avoid this, we get our content pieces a month in advance from OutboundEngine so compliance has the opportunity to review them. Content goes out, compliance is ahead of the game, and if there is something needed, compliance will work with OutboundEngine and the advisor doesn’t have to get involved. That’s as easy as we can make it.

Q: How do you encourage advisors to keep their contact email list up to date?

A: We say to our advisors, “Ok, on Friday afternoon you’re not going to be busy with clients. So, on Friday afternoons you need to sit down and put together the contacts that you’ve made for the week into your OutboundEngine database.”

The idea is that if you have it on your calendar, it’s going to happen. We literally send the calendar invite to the advisors for 8 consecutive weeks, just as a reminder to encourage usage…because when they put more contacts in, they get more value out of their email marketing efforts.

Q: What were your initial thoughts behind building a marketing strategy for your team?

A: It has to be one that will get used. We’ve worked with other companies that either provided an email marketing template, email software tool, or content that’s already compliance approved. But every one of those took the advisor’s engagement and time, and they didn’t tell the advisor who’s looking at their stuff. That’s one of the most important values that OutboundEngine brings. The content is already there, it’s delivered for you, and it’s the easiest to use. So, we’ve had advisors stop using those other solutions to move to OutboundEngine.

Q: What made you decide on a done-for-you marketing solution?

A: People oftentimes will say “yeah, I can do this once,” but my question to them is how about twice a month? How about 24 times a year? And that’s where they realize that it gets pretty hard to do and there’s somewhere else they should be spending their time.

What DWA has found is that OutboundEngine makes keeping in touch really easy and time efficient. Once customers see how it works, I would believe that there are very few advisors who drop off your system.

Q: How have marketing insights dashboard freed up time for your advisors?

A: Now they know who to call. And also by knowing what prospects are looking at, they can better shape the conversations they have. When our advisors are talking to a prospect, they focus on the points that the prospect clicked on. The advisor really has the opportunity to shape that conversation to make it a good fit for the prospect. You can’t get there with any other solution.

Tell us a little more about what DWA does for financial advisors?

We make the unattainable attainable for every advisor we work with. Most advisors do not have the size, revenue or staff talent to integrate support and manage all of the systems, compliance, and technology that we have. So, when an advisor joins us they get this entire package which they could never do on their own — that’s the unattainable. They all want the greatest technologies, they want all these different things for their clients, they want to be compliant in what they do…it’s really hard to do that when you’re a firm that’s under 200 million dollars in assets.

Before they joing us, financial advisors are literally our competitors. Because they had to do all of the things that we already do. We’re able to provide more at a lower cost than they can do on their own. They all had to take care of paperwork, compliance, trading, and technology. And it’s not a good use of their time. So when they come to DWA, we take care of that.

Wrap-up

Craig and his team of financial advisors at DWA have worked with us to take a number of time-consuming tasks off their advisor’s plates.

Today, we help them:

• Manage compliance and content creation
• Automate email and social media marketing
• And prioritize who they should follow up with next

Similarly, DWA helps financial advisors take care of paperwork, compliance, trading, and technology. How does that all work? Craig said it best.

“We tell people it’s kind of like a private jet: you don’t want to have one on your own, but you want to have the fractional usage of one. And that’s what we are. Here’s everything you’ve always wanted, for a fraction of the cost. In that way, it’s kind of like what OutboundEngine does. You could go out and buy all of the programmers and software developers for just one company, but when you spread the usage out over many companies, that’s where the benefit comes from.”