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Advisors look alike, but do they have the same preferences?

by Steven Miyao

Most marketing messages don't resonate with advisors because they are not pertinent to their needs. Asset managers need to invest in asking questions that enable advisors to be segmented based on preferences.

Advisors have specific needs
Last week we invited four RIAs to our e-business roundtable. On the surface, the four advisors looked alike: all were from NYC, all were male, and all had about the same amount of AUM. When asked what asset manager content most resonated with them, each had completely different needs and preferences. One advisor got a lot of value out of the business building content that an asset manager sent him, another advisor preferred to get investment ideas and didn't need the business building information.

Marketing messages need to add value
The lesson learned from this advisor panel is that asset managers need to segment their advisors based on their needs and preferences, rather than using demographic information from a CRM system.

Think about your own behavior. What e-mails do you always read?

You only open e-mails that always contain at least one or two things that you are interested in (an example might be the daily Ignites emails). If someone sends you a number of e-mails that don't have value for you, you will stop opening them. Every time these messages pop up in your inbox, you immediately delete them.

In order to have advisors respond to your messaging, the content of an e-mail has to specifically address their needs. This can only be accomplished if asset managers understand what those needs are.

Use your e-mails and the Web site to gather advisor preferences
Profiling advisors is not an easy task and can't be accomplished in one quick survey. Luckily, both e-mail and the Web are perfect mediums to collect data from advisors.

A few techniques to collect data through e-mail and the Web:

• Track the specific messages that advisors open and click through
• Ask advisors to rate both e-mails and Web content with a simple thumbs up or down
• Occasionally ask a single preference question after the login
• Conduct polls and show the advisor how the community has responded to these polls

All of this data needs to be associated with a specific advisor and continuously tracked in order for you to send more targeted messages to that advisor.

It will take time, so get started
It will take time to segment your advisors, but the sooner you start, the sooner you will be able to send targeted messages that will yield more effective responses from those advisors.