Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Tina Powell
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. Everything is brand. That’s the message of Tina Powell, CEO of C-Suite Social Media, and our guest on this episode of the podcast.
Everyone has a brand and whether you decide to or not, one will follow you around. It used to be that brand included your logo and what typeface you put on your letterhead, but now it encompasses everything about your business and how people talk about it, including what you say about it in public and what other people say.
In this episode we discuss the implications of having a current website and social media presence. We talk about the opportunities available in content marketing, and the four different kinds of media and how they can be combined and re purposed to get the most value out of every piece of content you produce, and of course we talk about your brand’s effect on referrals.
For example, if someone refers you and that person goes to look for your website and finds no website or finds an outdated one, they’ll simply move on to the next person and you will never have known that you missed the opportunity. Besides being a very successful marketing consultant, Tina is an active speaker, including on the TEDx stage. She serves on the TD Ameritrade presidential panel. She’s the faculty of the Advisor Thought Leader Summit and is a judge for both the T3 Technology Tools for Today Conference Student Competition and the wealthmanagement.com Industry Awards. A lot of really good ideas to help you understand whether or not you have your brand, web and social media presence current.
And so without any further delay, let’s get to our conversation with Tina Powell.
Julie Littlechild:
So, Tina, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast.
Steve Wershing:
Yes. Welcome, Tina.
Tina Powell:
Thank you. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Steve. It’s truly an honor to be here. I’m really excited about today’s conversation, so thank you for having me.
Julie Littlechild:
No, as are we. I can’t even believe we haven’t had you on yet because we’ve known you for years and seeing the great work that you do. So I’m excited to get you to share some thoughts. And Tina, really wanted to start at kind of a high level because one of the things that I’ve heard you say is that everything is brand, right? There is a good sweeping statement for you. So maybe we can just start there. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
Tina Powell:
Sure. So the concept of brand is something that everyone is familiar with. Actually, it goes back to when the first consumer products were developed when people had to distinguish from one piece of soap to another. So brand is a concept that’s really fundamental to us being just people and humans.
Now, what’s different, how it has originated over the times and especially in a digital world, 2019 is that now brand is the totality of everything that we have online as well as offline. And I like to use the definition that David Ogilvy, the father of advertising, describes it as the intangible sum of product attributes, right? And the key word, Julie, there is intangible. So brand, then, right, it becomes these visible treatments of our typeface, our symbols. I know that absolute engagement has a very powerful brand, the colors that represent our brand, but it’s really at a fundamental, specially for financial advisors, how someone is picking up the phone, how you’re greeted when you’re in the office as well as the onboarding experience of when you become a client. All of that is brand.
Julie Littlechild:
Everything connects ultimately, I guess. So when it is such a big concept and given how important this is, then what do you think advisors can do to start thinking about their own? Because I would imagine, first of all, some would say, “Well I don’t really have a brand. Maybe I should start there,” because it sounds like you’re arguing like you have one, whether you know it or not, it’s just whether it’s intentional. Is that a fair point?
Tina Powell:
Oh, I really love that. A lot of advisors will say… First of all, everyone has a personal brand. Almost every single advisor that I know today in 2019 and that you, Julie and Steve, know have a LinkedIn profile. That is the basis of their personal brand.
Others that have maybe a link to their website or maybe even a LinkedIn company page might have a broader brand where that business is actually their brand. And you asked a really important question. Where do advisors start? There are things… First of all, we’re not really taught the concept of branding. It’s something that most advisors are really thinking in terms of portfolio allocations, risk management, financial planning, everything that relates to those types of concepts. They may or may not have marketing expertise with in house or maybe they’ve commissioned someone to help on their behalf of the outsourcing.
But what advisors can do at a very fundamental level is to do what we call a brand audit. And that is to take inventory of everything. That means your website, your LinkedIn profiles, as well as your form ADV. Even though technically it’s… Well the SEC definitely does classify it as a piece of advertising. It’s going to more than one person. So whether or not advisors realize it or not, they have elements of their brand, their business card, their signage, their signage, even if they’re on a second floor and the signage that’s in the lobby.
So they need to take inventory of that brand audit. Their first place to start is to do a Google search. There’s two aspects of that Google search. The first is to do a regular web search, right? Like what comes up in the default profiles, but then also to search for the images.
And I’ll tell you why, and this just happened with a client. Unbeknownst of a client of mine, there was somebody within their office that posted pictures of the outside of their office without their authorization. Unfortunately, the day that they decided to take pictures was a very gloomy and rainy day. Not only that, they might’ve had an iPhone 5 when they did it.
So what we did is we contacted Google and we said… You can actually remove pictures because of poor image quality. And we said, “This does not represent the authenticity of who we are.” And Google took those pictures off. So you need to conduct a brand audit. That’s first and foremost.
Steve Wershing:
Well, and Tina, if I could ask. I mean, you bring up Google and you talk about brand being everything. To what extent is brand actually under the advisor’s control or are there parts of it that are not under their control and what can they do about it?
Tina Powell:
Yeah, so I think this really… See, that’s a great question and I think it really connects to the work that you and Julie have done with Absolute Engagement. As I talked about, remember that word intangible. What is under the advisor’s control all of the time is the client experience. That is 100%. It’s not only under the advisor’s control, it’s every single person that touches that prospect, that touches a client, that touches a center. It’d be a state attorney, an accountant, it could be the post office. It could be anybody.
So that is what is under the advisor’s control and also what’s under the advisor’s control is the culture, the people who work within the office. Again, everyone who touches. The other elements, whether or not that… We’re seeing a lot of things on Glassdoor. That’s why I offer that, that what is under the advisor’s control is the culture and the experience what it is to be working in that firm. That is under the advisor’s control.
So there are parts of it that are, and parts of it that aren’t. I think that every day how we show up to our firms and the type of client experience that we deliver, that’s always under our control, and we always have to work to make that better, improve that.
Julie and I were just talking about the experiences of all of these online platforms and how they now are creating the next benchmark of what it means for client service. And that’s where I think that the advisor really needs to always think about what is that client experience. And I know that you’ve done research in this area that points to exactly that.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. And so let me, before I even move you into a different direction, I wanted to come back to that brand audit because you were talking about website and environment and cards and like every piece of it. You’ve also mentioned all of the intangibles. So I imagine here we’re talking about client experience and process. If an advisor is doing this kind of audit, what’s the question they should be asking themselves as they look at each of those pieces?
Tina Powell:
They should do the entire exercise first. An advisor might get stuck in the weeds, right, if they have like, let’s say that they’ve created the totality of their… inventoried, if you will, the totality of their digital presence, right?
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.
Tina Powell:
They need to think about it in terms of root. And that is that number one, does this truly… Is this authentic to us? Does this adequately represent our brand? Does this tell the story of who we are? So I think it really is, it goes back to that authenticity component. Is what they see representative of who they are. And that’s the fundamental question, whether or not that they are inventory, the digital part of their business or their systems, their procedures, their workflows, all of that. The more of the, I guess, the back office type functioning of their practice.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. So I love those three questions, because I think that really makes it clear this is what I need to be asking. And I think you’re right. Even if we had an experience recently where we were looking at some processes and you know at some point it’s all very… it’s workflow and it’s a bit dull frankly, but where we landed was there’s certain automated communications that have to go out. And when we looked at them we thought, “You know, we don’t talk like that. Like that is so corporate. What’s that all about?”
And so I know why we created it because it was all very accurate. But then it was like, “Okay, we’ve got to go back and infuse this with a bit of personality, and our personality.” So yeah, I can see how that can really draw that out.
Tina Powell:
Yeah. You hit upon a really important thing, and that is to understand the tonality of the brand and what is the brand. Do you have more of an entrepreneurial culture? Do you have more of a corporate culture? What are the three adjectives that people would describe your firm if they were referring you and your firm to another person, to another potential or prospective client. And for every firm, it is going to be different, but it usually relates back to the DNA of the founder and where… Yeah, exactly. We can kind of trace that back because culture is not necessarily… It’s something, and Steve talked about this too before, Julie, asking the question, what the advisor has control of and what not.
A culture is going to be formed, whether or not that you’re leading it by intention or not. But I think that that’s… it’s really, really important that the elements that we’re creating, the content on this podcast right now, again, you are very deliberate in our setting up this podcast and our communications going back and forth. And now I think you’ve had a long history of this podcast already. So it follows a certain ebb and flow. And advisers need to work on that as well.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, that’s a great point. Hey, one of the things I really wanted to get into was websites, because I know this is a big issue. And certainly we’ve done research and we wouldn’t be alone in that, that says even if a client’s referred, they’re going to either do a social search or they’re going to go to your website. What are you seeing? Like how do you think we, as an industry, we’re performing when it comes to websites that really do support referability? And what are some of the more specific issues that you see out there?
Tina Powell:
Yeah. So I love our industry. However, I will say that I…
Julie Littlechild:
I think that’s a…
Steve Wershing:
I think there’s a but coming.
Tina Powell:
Yeah. You know what? We’re getting ready. There is a but. Okay? We are not doing ourselves a great service. We are not doing our clients a great service, or our prospective clients a great service. We could be doing better. And I’ll tell you what, before I do work with any client, there’s this thing called the Wayback machine, right? It sounds like, ooh, Wayback machine.
Steve Wershing:
Mr. Peabody.
Tina Powell:
Yes, exactly. And what Wayback machine does is it takes a URL, it takes a URL, it takes a website address, right, URL, uniform resource locator, so it takes an address that’s on a browser and it actually shows you the history, it takes different screenshots. And they have this graph that you can tell whether or not that there’s been a huge activity, usually a redesign or a rebrand.
But you can also see when the website originated. I always go back to see, “Am I looking at the current version? How long has this existed?” And a lot of the websites are three years old, two and a half years old. And basically, you know how much has changed in the last two and a half years old. Their team is different. Their tech stack might be different. Even their messaging to clients might be different. They might have opened a new location. And so what we’re doing right now is we’re putting like these little Band-Aids and these little fix-its.
And so I would also say to advisors that not only the website because of the age, but what’s fundamentally changed is human behavior. And you know, we all have a mobile phone, we all have a mobile device. And if you look at reports in Google analytics, at least for me and my clients, you can see that we are tilted to a mobile society. It used to be that maybe mobile represented 20 or 30% of the mobile traffic. Well, mobile has overtaken desktop. And I’ve seen this with asset manager clients. I’ve seen this with ED clients. I’ve seen this with RIAs.
And so we have to engineer for our audience. And you can see, you can even… I know that, Julie and Steve, you’ve done work with surveying clients. How do you want your information? Do you look at your information on a mobile phone? I think in 2019 going into 2020, you’d be hard pressed to find a client that says that they’re not using mobile first. So the short answer, the net message here is that number one, we have to design for a mobile first world. Secondly, and this is something that I see that it’s really, really, it’s actually a little scary, and that is the lack of a security certificate.
I’m surprised. Because look, I mean… And if you don’t have marketing in house, you’re not going to have somebody necessarily leading the charge. But a security certificate is what basically you can buy a security certificate for less than a hundred dollars. If you’re curious about it, you can just Google it. You can work with your IT provider. Your web host will help you to purchase a security certificate. It does nothing to your domain name, so you don’t have to worry. It’s not an expensive thing to get. It doesn’t change your domain. What it does is it goes from being an HTTP protocol to an HTTPS protocol. Just think of those as lines on the highway and we use HTTPS all the time. If you go to Google, you’ll notice it’s HTTP and you’ll see a little lock box. If you go to Amazon, if you go to the Financial Planning Association.
So a lot of the websites that we already use are operating under HTTPS protocol. So that is something that advisors, absolutely, if they take away anything from today’s podcast, I really hope that that’s the first order of business is to say, “Hey, do we have a security certificate?”
Steve Wershing:
I think that’s really important because I’ve got the… I think it’s because I put a new piece of security software on my computer, and when I go back to all of these sites that I’ve been to a hundred times, it gives me that danger notice, and says “I’m not going to let you through” and you have to click on advanced and then you have to click on say “Send me there anyway,” and in parentheses it says “Unsafe.”
I know that it’s safe because I’ve been there a zillion times, but I suppose you don’t really want that popping up when somebody tries to go to your website, right? That’s not the experience you want to promote out there.
Tina Powell:
Absolutely. Anything that creates friction in the client journey or the prospective client journey is something that we want to get rid of. Any iota, any atom of doubt is something that we have to solve for. I saw this happen with a client that had… It was like they had a little bit of HTTPS and HTTP on their website. So if you went to the lockbox where the reports were, that was being posted by a secure server. So each browser will create like the Chrome browser for example, each browser will handle an unsecured site differently. And Steve, what you just talked about, that warning sign prompt came out years ago and said, “Look, we want to make sure you are who you say you are and that there’s somebody not…” You’re not misdirecting the site to, I don’t know, to another foreign country or even domestically that somebody is not mirroring your site for confidential client information.
And the other thing that I insist upon is that if you are asking for the email addresses of your audience, or your prospective audience on your website, and I see advisors do this all the time, “Hey, subscribe to our blog,” you had better make sure, especially with GDPR compliance, that we are using secure methods. I mean we know we all have to be not only stewards of our wealth, but stewards of our privacy as well.
Steve Wershing:
What’s GDPR?
Tina Powell:
So GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation that was instituted by the European Union, but it also affects Canada. It also affects the US. If you’re doing business with anyone that has an affiliation with a European Union country, you must make sure that they have the right to be forgotten, and that you have a privacy policy, that you’re doing everything to ensure their privacy of their data and their protection.
And see if our listeners now can just, again, Google GDPR, the rule… I’m not a compliance attorney. However, this is where your privacy policy also, too, comes in. With regards to the question that Julie asked, what can advisors do? Short answer, policy, privacy policy, GDPR compliance, security certificate, mobile friendly. All of those things really count in a 2020 world.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. We’ve noticed a significant change. Now, we gather feedback. So firms are obviously very careful and want to ensure that we’ve met a lot of different criteria. But, boy, has it changed.
Tina Powell:
Oh yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
It’s not even necessarily private information in that sense. But I’d love to talk a bit about as well, these are great points because I think we don’t talk about this stuff enough, but I wanted to also look at content, so in effect, what we’re putting on the site or what we’re pushing out or what we’re putting out socially as a way to drive referrals and to bring people to our site. And I know you look at content strategy a lot. So when you think about that, what exactly does it mean for an advisor to have a content strategy? Maybe we should just start there.
Tina Powell:
Yeah. So let’s talk about the pillars of what a content strategy is. And so the first components or the types or the forms of content. So today, especially in a 2019 world, we have pictures, which everybody’s familiar with. We have videos, which we see more and more. We see more and more video. We see more and more video in the feed. We see a lot more people actually using video and creating videos of their own.
Text is what we’re all really familiar with. The basis of website and the basis of our communications started with just text, but now and Absolute Engagement right here, right now, a podcast, audio.
So we have four distinct forms of content, pictures, video, texts and audio. And for a content strategy, we need to have all four. Now, most advisors have the text and the pictures portion. The video, yes, we’re segueing into video by way of webinars. Some advisors are using things like Zoom and even Loom to create their own videos. And you also see live stream.
Audio content, the reason why audio is becoming fundamentally important are because of devices, because of home devices like we have Alexa, Amazon Alexa, we have a Google Home, and even Amazon, even just making sure that we optimize for Amazon, which is a completely new term. We’re not going to go into that today because that’s its own podcast. But a content strategy has to think about what are A, the forms of my content, and number two, what are those distribution methods? Am I actually sharing that content and broadcasting it to the world because the clients, the prospective client, our users, our audience, they determine what content they want.
We can say that, yes, we believe in texting and blogging and there’s nothing wrong with that. But pretty soon, our clients are going to say, “You know what? Hey, did you ever think of recording a podcast, like Becoming Referable Podcast that I can listen to in the car?” Because this is great. I mean, I love listening to your podcasts on the car while I’m getting ready, while I’m exercising. So these are things that advisors need to think about. What are the forms of their content? What is the distribution? And the most important thing, their audience, who they’re serving. And again, I think that this becomes important with surveying their clients. How do your clients want to have this information? And more and more people are relying on audio devices, myself included.
Julie Littlechild:
So you think about the different methods you can use and having more diversity in that. How do advisors also think about what it is they’re sharing? You know, if I’m not pushing out a lot of content, where do I start in that process of saying, “Everybody’s telling me I need more content.” What do I do? How do I think about it?
Tina Powell:
Yeah. So the first thing to do is to understand that you have to create a margin of safety. To create content just for the sake of creating content is just noise. You have to provide value to your audience. And some advisors are going to be better at creating content than other advisors. I would say that each advisor, a great place to start is to understand that advisor’s strengths. Where are they a better writer? Are they a better speaker? Are they a better presenter? Are they fearful doing live stream?
I have an advisor that does recorded videos because he needs to be so, so scripted and it takes us hours to put out a five-minute video and that’s how he likes to reverse engineer. So we have to respect an advisor’s confidence level first. We have to work with that and understand what is their strength and what’s in their wheelhouse.
Might have an advisor that has a specialty in working with a certain clientele. Let’s use physicians and surgeons, for example. And that’s the first place to start. Now, secondly, I will say this, it is a struggle, myself included, to be able to produce content, because we are so busy. So here’s an important part of an advisor’s content strategy. And that is to replicate the same piece of content in different forms. So for example, we’re right now on a podcast. It’s very easy to turn this into a text, and to have this recording transcribed and voila. We have Michael Kitces is doing this on his podcast and you are too, that you have the transcription of this and that’s the text format.
Some advisors might need help outsourcing that content. They could plug into different writers. They could use a writer to write a couple of different articles and then they could add value to that. They could add onto that and put it in their voice. So it’s important to understand what are the strengths of that advisor. And not only that, what is their resource allocation to creating that content?
I’ve seen advisors, some advisors not write at all and just do live Twitter streams and just report a little snippet on Twitter. The important thing is that you have to be find-able and searchable. You have to be out on these platforms, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook. Prospective clients and centers and existing clients need to be able to find you. So I would say understand where your audience is, where the majority of that audience is. Pick one platform. Don’t try to do it all. Don’t try to be this omni-channel superhero marketer and have content all over the place. Decide on one strategy and do that strategy really well.
Steve Wershing:
Tina, what are your thoughts about created versus produced versus curated content?
Tina Powell:
I like for firms that struggle with content creation, I like a little marriage of both. I still think that some of, I’ll call them canned content. I don’t mean that in a derogatory sense of the word, but I think there are really some good resources that are put out by the custodians. They’re even put out by some of the fund managers that are valuable to clients and that I think that we could be sharing that content as well as adding a little bit more of your own flair.
So, for example, let’s say that we’re using a piece of canned content on asset protection strategies. Look, it might take an adviser 20 hours to write that piece. If it’s already ready, why not just the advisor write an intro of that piece? Maybe a 400-word intro and describe like why that article is useful to their readers. So it’s a little bit of both.
There’s nothing wrong with canned content. I don’t think that we need to throw it under the bus. What I think is we need to augment it around and we need to give context to the people who are reading that content and why we’re using it in the first place.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah, I’ll disagree with you a little bit that I’m really not a fan of canned content, but one thing that I would throw into the conversation is if you’re going to use it, at least pick it carefully for your audience. I say that only because I had an experience with one of my clients a while ago where they were subscribing to a library and they were sending out messages from the library and they sent out… One of the things they sent out was the story of the richest man in Babylon, which everybody in our business knows about.
And of course that’s a story about systematic saving and it’s a good story. And their clients were typically 55 and up, getting ready for, or in retirement. These are people that had already accumulated everything, right? So there was just a mismatch between the content they were sending and the audience they were sending it to. It wasn’t stuff that the people would find terribly valuable.
Tina Powell:
So I’m hearing your point and that’s a really good one to bring up, Steve, and hence your work in absolute engagement and becoming referrable here. We talk about segmentation all of the time. So that marketing tech stack that the adviser has, that CRM that they are using, they should absolutely be segmenting their audience. And so if you are going to use a canned content, a partial canned strategy, you better make sure that you have your audience, that you have your client list and your prospective client list delineated in a certain way. Because it is, it’s insulting to get pieces of content that have absolutely no value to you, that contextually is not relevant to you, that doesn’t relate to who you are or the issues, and that then says to that person on the other end, “Hey, my advisor has no idea who I am.” And that’s actually the opposite.
So I think the key takeaway for anyone listening to this podcast right now is let’s make sure that we’re segmenting our clients within our CRM. And before you send out a piece of canned content, it might not apply to your entire audience. And that’s quite aright.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. We always seem to come back to focusing, targeting your communications plan, understanding your client. I know you do some work as well with client journey mapping. And I think all of that comes into this is who’s my client? What are they thinking and feeling and doing? What’s the journey they’re on? And then how can I support that? And as long as you’re going through that, it seems to me through that thought process you tailor, you personalize. Even canned content, like you say, it’s a great tool, but if it’s not used wisely, it has almost the opposite effect.
Tina Powell:
Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with also too being old school, taking a cutout from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, putting a nice personal note, and putting into the mail, in snail mail and say, “Hey, you know what? It made me think of this.” So a content strategy can still take on old school methods, whether or not that they’re getting their client anniversary card, a client birthday card, a personal note, all of that. So let’s just make sure, to your point, Julie, to make sure that the content is being tailored to the recipient of that. It makes that client feel so important. It really establishes it’s that glue that bonds that relationship between that advisor and their client. It’s a special, it’s an intimate relationship and nothing makes a client more wanting to refer… Right? We are talking about referable podcasts here that the advisor knows who I am, they care about me, they know what’s important to me and they know what’s going on in my life.
And that’s the hallmark of our profession, and what advisors do the best. They give great advice that is specific to that person because they understand the family unit and what’s important in their values.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. That’s great. That’s great.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, I think, yeah, and it personalizes and does all of those things. So thank you so much. Those are great ideas. But just before we let you go, if advisors or anyone listening is interested in learning more about the work that you do, where can they find you?
Tina Powell:
So they can find me at csuitesocialmedia.com, and I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn and Twitter at Tina C. Powell.
Steve Wershing:
That’s great.
Julie Littlechild:
That is wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today.
Tina Powell:
Thank you, Julie. Thank you, Steve. What an honor to be here. Keep up the great work that you’re doing in the industry, and thanks again. I look forward to all of the advisors listening to this podcast to take some of these strategies because I know that they’ll run with them and they’ll do great with them. So thanks very much for having me. I appreciate it.
Steve Wershing:
Thank you, Tina.
Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.