Tags: client communications | marketing | prospecting | Social Media

“Canned content” — that’s how investment advisors often refer to articles Advisor Products posts on advisor websites. In an age of social networking, however, that’s changing. The content Advisor Products makes available on over 1,100 investment advisor websites is valuable in a social media stream.

This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only

Social Media Content Stream For Financial Advisors, a new solution from Advisor Products, uses videos and articles created by Advisor Products and posted to your website as the basis for a social media content stream about wealth management.

Tags: client communications | differentiation | marketing | prospecting | Search Engines

Jordan Kasteler, an SEO and social media consultant, wrote a thoughtful post about different types of angles you can take in creating content.

For advisors, who are not pros at creatingcontent, Kasteler identifies angles to take in creating blog posts, tweets, videos, slideshows, and other content. 

This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only

For instance, you can write or post a video "manifesto" reinforcing to your target audience that they are doing the right thing, or you can post a "controversy" treatment on the same subject with an eye toward challenging your audience. 

You could look at this list post cynically as suggesting you use cheap tricks to hook readers, viewers, friends and followers. But Kasteler is merely suggesting that you use what in other times has been called a literary device.  

Using these simple devices for your business is not disingenuous. It's just smart because it can help you make your points more clearly.

For advisors, the writing devices suggested by Kasteler can help you convince people of your point. A manifesto preaching the benefits of low-cost index investing is likely to attract searches by those interested in that topic, and so might a story deriding actively managed funds or tactical asset allocation. 

Kasteler's post on SearchEngineLand is worthwhile to advisors trying to understand how they can create content that will boost their search engine rankings and attract the clients they want.

In addition to the 21 ideas, Kasteler makes an important point that advisors must consider in creating a content strategy that will drive search engine results.

"Viral content is quality content," says Kasteler. "It’s passionate, it’s well-written, it’s eloquent, or it’s hilarious." 

Now here's the clincher: "If you want the thousands of shares, you’re going to have to put into the hours to make something with real value for your audience," Kasteler adds.

Point is, advisors looking for shortcuts and magic apps to drive search engine results are, in the end, constrained by their ability to create valuable content. 

Therein lies the rub. You will need to be willing to put time into creating valuable blog posts, tweets, videos, slideshows and other content that your target market wants to see.

If you are not willing to put in that time on a sustained basis, your results probably won't be great.

Tags: charitable giving | marketing | Offbeat | prospecting

If you join Advisors4Advisors (A4A) now, we will donate $20 of our $60 membership fee to Bubbles The Clown’s financial literacy program, and you can post a logo on your website saying you support Bubbles' charitable organization.

Felzenberg received 5-star rating from 27 reviewers, placing him near the top of the national list of charities at GreatNonProfits.org, a website where people rate charitable organizations.

Tags: marketing

The proliferation of designations has left close to 70% of the country's brokerage firms using various "senior"-oriented titles and job descriptions, but supervision and definitions are all over the map.

This Website Is For Financial Professionals Only

FINRA polled the industry as part of its ongoing efforts to monitor activity that preys on senior citizens and discovered that firms review these designations on a case-by-case basis.

Some of these designations include "certified senior advisor," "certified professional consultant on aging," "chartered senior financial planner," and so on.

Requirements range from three days of bookwork to a comprehensive academic curriculum, and some are banned in various states, including New York.

As FINRA puts it, "in certain instances, senior designations approved by firms or widely used by registered persons did not require rigorous qualification standards. As a result, the existence of qualification standards to obtain a designation did not ensure that those registered persons holding the designation possessed financial services skills that were unique or valuable to senior investors."

That's a diplomatic way of warning that some of these certs are empty marketing fluff that can lure vulnerable clients into bad relationships.

For what it's worth, only two firms FINRA talked to say they require reps to get "senior" designations before working with older clients.

Among those that ban some designations, enforcement varies widely -- some prohibit one or two, while others establish a few certs as allowed and ban everything else.