Outsourced and Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for RIA’s and Financial Firms

When I was working at large global financial companies like Goldman Sachs and PIMCO, we had 100’s of people working on our behalf around marketing, investor-related content, advertising and educational events. In fact, companies like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have entire elevator banks that are just dedicated to marketing and investor relations!  Individuals working in these divisions are each assigned different verticals of the marketing process, from public relations to content creation and editing, social media, website design, search engine optimization, advertising, webinars, and more.

Beyond their employees, such firms have multi million dollar budgets to spend on advertising, high-end lead generation technology platforms and more.  All of these help them turn their brands into a household name, driving millions of traffic sources to their websites, and ultimately helping the firms acquire more clients for their advisors.

I took those resources for granted, and you probably did too, if you used to work at such firms. If you started your business, either as an RIA, accountant or lawyer, coming out of such large national or global organizations, you probably underestimated how many people went into the development of a household brand.  Or you may not have thought of those resources as important enough to stop you from having your own independence and starting your own boutique practice.

Fisher Investment’s estimated MONTHLY digital advertising cost. Can you compete?

Fast forward to today, and your team of 5, or 10, or even 200 professionals is working around the clock to handle the client service load, operations and hiring needs of your fast-growing organization. Revenue growth and client maintenance are your top priority, and you are benefiting from the beauty of referrals rolling in from your independent nature.

But…what about marketing? 

I don’t need to talk about the benefits of marketing in this article, as I’ve explained them in detail in other articles and pages on our website.  [or you can watch this video to the right!]

If you’re reading this article, you probably already know the value of marketing…but you know something is not right in your approach. Things are taking way too much time, you’re throwing spaghetti at the walls hoping something will stick, and you flat out don’t know what to do. Managing money or handling legal cases are your passion….looking at your website’s backlink counts and optimizing your sales funnels probably aren’t.

The problem is…you’re probably handling your firm’s marketing in one of three ways:

1.     You’re doing it yourself as the CEO, Partner or Shareholder, even though you have so many other responsibilities on your plate.  On top of all the other activates you have to take care of, from hiring to managing a team, rebalancing portfolios, running portfolio reviews, going to trial on behalf of your clients, keeping up to date with the latest tax rules, compliance matters and employment rules, you’re also assuming the role of Chief Marketing Officer.  Your efforts are getting diluted on multiple fronts.

2.     You’ve probably hired an in-house junior marketing person, someone fresh out of college or with limited years of marketing experience…maybe even your administrative assistant has taken on the role of the marketing head just to “execute” what you deems as the right marketing tasks for you. 

[By the way, if you are happy with this person’s work and would like to give them more ammunition to succeed, we have a variety of services to work alongside your in-house marketing team! See them here.

3.     You’ve considered hiring an in-house senior CMO, but getting ready to spend upwards of $150,000 annually to pay his or her salary, not including bonus and other costs.

All of these methods can be great…if you have the time or the budget for them. For example, some firms really enjoy marketing in-house (from reviewing design elements to creating in-house podcasts, making their own videos on a weekly basis or writing blogs that are receiving heavy traffic.) They’ve carved aside the consistent and dedicated hours per week to work on marketing efforts that work well for them. [“Consistent” being the most important word in the last sentence!] Others have a $1 to $2 million budget annually to spend on marketing.

If you do not have the bandwidth nor the budget to focus on marketing on a consistent manner, then, in our opinion, you have a higher chance of success if you were to outsource your marketing to an entire team and agency versus piece-mealing it internally.

Here are three key reasons why outsourcing your marketing is an effective way for growing your brand, visibility and ultimately revenue.

1.     Saving you time

While marketing may seem like a casual, fun and easy endeavor, one tiny task like writing and uploading a blog can take at least 3-5 hours if done correctly.  Let’s start with writing the topic: What do you write about?  Technical investment pieces that can be found already on the Wall Street Journal?  Why would someone come to your site to read such a topic if it already exists on global investment journals written by highly-established journalists who gets paid to write such eloquent topics? 

And let’s just fast forward past when the article-writing process…we then get to uploading the content and distributing it.  Because if something is written just to be written, without any intent for being read, then it was a complete waste of time and energy!

Searching for the right keywords to optimize the content, correct image selection in line with brand, optimizing the metatags and titles, hyperlinking other relevant topics and backlinking…all of these, if done correctly, take time.  And if you don’t think those matter, then again why are you even uploading a blog?  People don’t appear out of thin air to read your blog.  You need to drive them in.

And that’s just one blog!  If you’re looking to increase your website traffic, we’re looking at a minimum 1-2 blogs A WEEK!  Does your team have the capacity and bandwidth to handle that workload, on top of its other responsibilities?

2.     Expertise

There’s one rule in marketing…and that is that there are no rules!  That’s the good news.  However, just like there are no rules to create a piece of art, we have the artists who come up with outside the box ideas, and “wanna-be: artists” who color inside the line!  Following what others are doing around marketing won’t get you to your ultimate goal.  You need to have expertise around best practices, market insight, traffic intelligence, trends and other idea resources to help get you to be heard and viewed.

We once worked with a wealth management firm that was so adamant about posting a new blog on the same exact day of the month…prioritizing a process rather than the why. Why are you posting so frequently? How about refreshing content and optimizing it? How do you know the ROI on a certain blog? It become more of a chore and a robotic activity rather than a creative and goal-oriented activity.

An outsourced Chief Marketing Officer is typically working with dozens of other clients just like you, allowing them the chance to experiment, see best practices, and be entrenched in the marketing landscape to understand what’s needed to be done differently, and more importantly, WHY!

You’ve probably been told “Why should I give you to do my estate planning when I could do it myself,” or “I use Turbotax to do my taxes.”  As someone who eats, breaths and sleeps your market, you know very well that sure, anyone can do the same services you provide on their own, but because they’re not fully entrenched in it, day in day out, mistakes can be made and time can be wasted.

It’s always worth it to work with an expert!

3.     Saving you money

Marketing is not cheap!  The reason why marketing is expensive is because of the time and expertise it requires, as you read above.  It’s also getting more expensive as competition gets more and more fierce for the same target markets, driving up advertising costs.

If you’ve found a cheap solution, like an auto-drip campaign, I would say it’s probably money wasted rather than well-spent.  If you’re planning on automating your marketing, you’re assuming people are robots looking to read canned material.  That’s just not how it works!  Would you reply to a canned voicemail about auto-insurance?  If you won’t, then are you assuming others (especially high net worth investors) are less sophisticated than you to reply to a canned marketing piece from you?

What if your solution is to hire someone inhouse?  The marketplace currently is pricing someone who has specific niche marketing experience at minimum $100,000 to max $300,000.

And that’s just the beginning.

Then we’re looking at actual marketing costs, such as website design, development, hosting, brochures and more.  Beyond that, if you’re planning on creating videos and more, you will need to spend money there.

Contact us to discuss our Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer Services

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