New Marketing System from Snappy Kraken Creates a Consistent “Wow” Experience for Financial Advisor’s Clients and Prospects

Snappy Kraken (www.SnappyKraken.com) is a SaaS marketing solution that helps financial advisors personalize, automate, and track marketing campaigns and business processes. Users can choose from a number of ready¬-made campaigns, each containing combinations of professionally designed and written email drip series, social media posts, ads and more. Clicks, opens, and shares are managed and tracked from within a single dashboard. Snappy Kraken, which took first place in the FinTech Startup Competition hosted by the XY Planning Network in September 2016, is lead by industry veteran and practice management consultant Robert Sofia (www.robertsofia.com).

I had the pleasure of speaking with Robert Sofia in May 2017.

Read the transcript below or click here to listen to the audio interview.

MARIE SWIFT: Welcome to “Best Practices in the Financial Services Industry.” This is your host, Marie Swift. I'm joined today by Robert Sofia. I'm super excited to have him here today to talk about marketing and building your business as a financial advisor. If you are listening as an enterprise that supports advisors I think there are going to be some really good ideas for you here as well.

Robert is a marketing expert. He has personally worked with 2,000 advisors on their marketing plans. He has a ton of practice management experience. He's worked in a billion-dollar RIA. He's worked with solos and ensembles, with financial offices, custodians and insurance companies. Today, through that long journey in the industry, he is the CEO of a cool little company – but I don't think it will be little for very long. It's called Snappy Kraken.

Robert, I love your logo. It's a little red octopus with sunglasses. Tell us about Snappy Kraken’s vision and how you think about pain points in the industry. What should advisors and enterprises be thinking about today to be getting over that next hurdle?

ROBERT SOFIA: Boy, that's a nice introduction Marie. Thank you! That's a big question too. I think there are a few vital questions in there. One, related to the hurdles advisors face. How we see overcoming those hurdles and then how we fit into that. If I may, I'd like to take those one at a time. Is that alright?

SWIFT: Absolutely, jump in!

CHALLENGES FOR ADVISORS

SOFIA: Really, the reason we started Snappy Kraken is because of the problems we see advisors facing. They are related to a variety of factors. So are the external forces they cannot control. Advisors have stress over the regulatory environment, the market environment and the economy, and the geo-political issues but those things for the most part are out of their control.

But when you get into the things they can control, they still have challenges. It's hard to be an advisor today because you have to differentiate from a tremendous amount of competition both from advisors next door to online brokerages which are expanding more and more into financial planning and into wealth management. So, there is that and then you have to manage the myriad technology tools. When you look at the combination of portfolio management, marketing and all the different components of that where you have your email, your compliance, your website and your social presence and everything you use for trading, client account management, and file sharing it gets really hard to serve your clients well and run your business.

That's what today's advisor has to be. They have to be an entrepreneur, a business owner, and at the same time serve other people – being that it's a service business. Those things are always at odds with each other because the time you want to devote to your clients is often times being dragged by all the infestimal little things you have to deal with. So, basically, we understand those pains and we decided we wanted to make it easier with technology. That is what we set out to do.

SWIFT: I've seen the recent product you just rolled out for advisors; I believe it's called Visional Marketing Insights. Am I correct?

SOFIA: Yes, that's one of our products.

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Read about the Visual Marketing Insights product launch here: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/martech-newcomer-snappy-kraken-announces-dynamic-automated-marketing-product-for-financial-professionals-300447000.html

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MARTECH TO THE RESCUE

SWIFT: It occurs to me that technology is just part of the solution because what Snappy Kraken has brought through is the communication aspects -- the technology is “just” the delivery mechanism. So, could you talk a little bit about communicating appropriately from the advisor’s point of view out to the general public and how to engage people visually?

SOFIA: I'm happy to do that – but I’d like to note that Visual Marketing Insights is really just a small part of what Snappy Kraken is doing. In fact, you mentioned our octopus logo. The idea behind that is of course to have a little fun but it's also because there are a myriad of tentacles that go out from our API junction, which is our system that can connect to any system. So, we can connect not only on the marketing a communication side but also on the practice management side, and also through CRM and other tools that advisors may use. So, the idea is to create a junction where everything can be managed from one place. And, that includes the communications.

Visual Marketing Insights is just an example of one form of communication that is designed to help the advisors engage their clients more effectively – which should be part of an overall omni-channel fully integrated client approach to client service. When you think about today's consumer they are used to engaging with brands and with companies that they patronize on a number of levels. They will visit their website, visit their social profile, come into their office, talk to them on the phone, use appointment scheduling software, they will login and check their accounts, they will do all types of things and they expect the experience to be constant across every channel. That's something that builds trust and that's something people expect from their relationships with companies.

So, when you engage with a company on one channel, you expect the experience to be the same as how you engage with them on another channel. Advisors struggle with that because they end up using all these different tools that are disconnected so their clients have different experiences. The problem is, it creates confusion and undermines trust.

If you go to an advisor’s website and there are all these different services and products but they all feel different because their experience logging into their accounts is different than their experience they have with social media versus on the website. That's a problem. So, what we're doing just with our Visual Marketing Insights product is that we are creating campaigns. Single campaigns so the clients experience it the same on every channel. What that does is it actually builds trust and reinforces that relationship with prospects in a way to lead them to a desired outcome. So, if they enter a campaign from a social media channel or from your website or from an email or from any method that is used to promote that campaign, they will enter and stay inside that campaign while the messages they initially expressed interest in are continually reinforced until they are ready to make a decision to meet with the advisor or to further the relationship in some way. So, the Visual Marketing Insights product is just a component of just that concept.

I know I digressed a little to explain the concept but it really explains how we think about the marketing and the client service we are helping advisors perform. So, this pre-launched product is highly visual. It's very interesting, it touches on current issues of concern in the marketplace from consumer perspectives. We look at what's trending. We look at what's happening in either the political environment, economic environment in the markets or just with people's lifestyles. We build entire campaigns around a theme and we give the advisors the ability to personalize and deploy those campaigns from one source easily. And, to track and measure those effectiveness of those campaigns so they know the marketing dollars they are spending and the technology dollars they are spending are returning on their investment.

TURNKEY MARKETING SYSTEM FOR ADVISORS

SWIFT: I'm looking at your most recent news release where you announce the Visual Marketing Insights system. It's an ongoing turnkey subscription and the introductory price is just stunning – just $39/month if advisors sign up during this initial launch period. There is also a 60-day free trial.

Let’s also talk about “snackable” content. I love that term. I'm just going to read this, a couple of sentences:

To increase the shareability, each visual is just one piece of a larger campaign meant to dazzle clients and prospects while informing them quickly. Each communication is paired with a related stand-alone webpage, also known as a landing page, and this serves as another source of traffic, readership and email list building route for financial professionals while also making it easy for people to link to and share the content via social media.

Could you talk about the value of that landing page?

SOFIA: Well, a lot of marketing content out there is just noise to people who receive it. You have the constant barrage of emails, social media posts, and mailers. People drive down the road and are hit with billboards, radio advertisements, and so forth. It's just non-stop. So, people tend to tune out. When they actually tune-in, and that's the key to the snackable content, they need to see something that is visually appealing and easy to access and hopefully interesting enough to motivate somebody to click through. When that happens, you need to make sure you're maximizing the impact of that communication, that chance. It's like a little window, a rare glimpse, that somebody is getting into your business and they've just expressed interest. And if you merely broadcast content for the sake of content then you are missing opportunities.

So, what we do is we create content that is designed to capture interest and then we always have a purpose for that content. There is an objective or goal on every place where that content is featured. In this case with this product, if it's an infographic for example, then below that infographic there will be a call-to-action and it will be designed to capture information. That landing page allows you to have a little bit of introductory text, perhaps a financial lesson. Perhaps a bit of credibility that you can build into the content so it's just not content, its content and business building with lead captures so the effort really pays off. That's a big part of our focus with the landing page. It has a purpose and it's designed to grow business.

SWIFT: I love everything about this campaign-driven approach you are taking. I've seen some of the creative work and it's stunning. It's looks like the kind of content that comes out of a big New York advertising agency but the only thing is it's better because it's specifically for advisors. It's from people who really know what advisors need – all the compliance and language issues and so forth.

I love that in your dashboard the advisor can actually go in and customize to an extent that I really never seen before – and it's still stunning and beautiful visually.

I want to take you a little higher level now. I know we've been talking a lot about this current product but I'd like to hear how it fits into everything else that you doing. This is just one thing that the Snappy Kraken is doing in the industry, right?

TIP OF THE ICEBERG

SOFIA: Yes. So, there is a lot that is still in store. We are just getting started. This product is one to collaborate with our early users and gather their feedback and work with them as we continue to build out our feature set because what we really envision, Marie, is a time when advisors will be able to access one place and conduct business from one place online and their clients will have one experience and access their advisor in one place online. So, we want everything integrated.

For example, we are working on integration with trackable phone numbers. So, phone numbers can be run through the system and be monitored and measured for retargeting pixels so that anybody that visits these sites can be retargeted online through advertising. We are working with integrations with key CRMs, key website providers, etc. so that everything that happens on their website and the marketing through our system and the activity in their CRM are linked. So even activities such as when a client is about to turn 70. Our system will recognize that and automatically begin to send them a campaign if they have qualified money in an account that talks about how they can use their RMDs – and it will also notify the advisor. Or if the client has an anniversary and been with the advisor for a year automatically our system could trigger a gift to be sent to the client based on their preferences and based on the budget that is set for that client based how they are segmented in the CRM.

So, with an automated omni-channel marketing and business management platform, which is what we've set out to build, the goal is to take everything out of the hands of the advisor except what he is really uniquely qualified to do: meeting with clients, gathering assets, speaking to them face-to-face and over the phone; we want everything else to be automated. You can with technology today because there are thousands of tools – but we are not out to build another tool. What we've actually built is in conjunction … something that leverages tools. In fact, we have over thirty integrations in our system with outside tools yet you would never know that within our system. It feels like it's only one tool.

So, as we build out integrations and extend our tentacles to other services and products we aim to become "the hub" for advisors to conduct business and marketing so that practice management and everything that they have to do has been automated as much as possible. That is our vision. Visual Marketing Insights is a way to demonstrate the potential because it covers email and social and landing pages and personalization and other things all from one place. It's just a start but there are only five or six channels integrated into it. Potentially there will be hundreds in the future and that's our vision.

Some of our enterprise clients who are going to be deploying this will have more of this functionality and we are working with them on custom content. So, a company that has a specific product set or advisors with a specific profile can actually have their own library with their own custom campaigns. Their own custom workflows, business processes and forms all can be personalized by that advisor, stored securely and help those enterprises to build relationships with the advisors and help them serve their clients better. These are just a few of the things and I could go on all day but we have a lot of exciting things in store.

XY PLANNING NETWORK – START UP WINNER

SWIFT: I love everything about what you've shared today Robert. It's no surprise that you won the Fintech startup competition last year hosted by the XY Planning Network.

Click to watch a cool video interview that Snappy Kraken’s founding team did with fpPad’s Bill Winterberg: https://medium.com/@snappy_kraken/snappy-kraken-chats-with-bill-winterberg-48e803d66010

So, congratulations on all your success. It's really exciting to peel back the curtain and hear more about what you have in store because just this one product, the Visual Marketing Insights, is exciting enough. Everything else you've shared about one place and online and the customization and retargeting is really exciting. As a marketing professional myself I get super excited about this because it does address so many pain points for advisors and the enterprises that support them. So, with that, will you tell us how people can learn more about the latest and greatest at Snappy Kraken?

COLLABORATORS UNITE

SOFIA: Sure, so we want collaborators right now. I'll be candid: we are not looking for 10,000 users to come onto our system tomorrow. We are happy to have a couple of thousand really engaged advisors who want to give their feedback and tell us what they need. Anybody that is interested in being that kind of user – a power user, a collaborator – and wants to work with us to help build something that is great for their business, those are the kind of people that should go to www.SnappyKraken.com and sign up for updates or register for our Visual Marketing Insights products just to try it out.

On every page, there is a feedback link. Start giving us your feedback. You'll find we are very responsive and we want to get to know you and your business. Again, just go to www.SnappyKraken.com. We'd love to get acquainted.

SWIFT: It's been great talking with you today, Robert. Thanks so much for being here.

SOFIA: It was a pleasure Marie. Thank you for having me.

On Becoming an Elite Advisor: Insights from Tony D’Amico of Fidato Wealth

Working with top advisors like Tony D’Amico, founder and chief executive of Fidato Wealth (www.FidatoWealth.com), is a real joy. I spoke with Tony to uncover some of his secrets to success. Tony provides some great insights for fellow financial advisors. There are lots of great ideas and much to emulate here.

Click here to listen to the audio recording.

A transcript of the interview is posted below.

MARIE SWIFT: Well hello and welcome back to Best Practices in the Financial Services Industry. This is your host, Marie Swift, and I'm joined today by Tony D'Amico from Fidato Wealth, a fee-only firm that provides comprehensive fiduciary advice. Tony has just crossed some very interesting milestones and is now in what I call the “elite advisor group.” I wanted to have Tony today on the show to talk a little bit about his career progression and how he's built his team and why he is now in this elite category. According one of the industry’s top coaching organizations, he's meeting the standards that the top 1% of all advisory firms who are in this category are meeting. So, it has to do with growth, but not just growth for new growth’s sake, but also expanding relationships with existing clients and retaining the clients you have. It also has to do with, of course, growing the team so that there is not just the same client experience, but maybe even a better client experience. So, Tony, welcome.

TONY D’AMICO: Hi, great to be with you today Marie. 

SWIFT: Thank you so much for spending a few minutes with me here this morning. Maybe you could just start by telling us about how you got started in the business, how long you've been an advisor and take us through where you are today.

D’AMICO: Sure, that's great. I first started in personal finance in 1999. I first started out in life insurance, long-term care insurance and disability insurance. I started in that avenue of personal finance and things kind of grew very gradually from there. In early 2010, I obtained my series 65 and basically, I started my own RA and began working with clients in a much more comprehensive manner. It's been a great journey. I started off in one aspect with personal finance and just grew very gradually over the years to now be providing comprehensive financial planning and wealth management.

CLIENT FOCUS, BUSINESS SUCCESS

SWIFT: So, you've recently crossed over a certain threshold of assets, you've added new team members, a new position and improving the client experience. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how you begin with that client focus and how's that helped with the business success.

D’AMICO: Sure, when I started off, I started off as a solo practitioner, which I really enjoyed. Our focus has always been to help clients achieve their financial goals in a proactive manner and, with that focus, forged some really good relationships with clients and enjoyed providing that comprehensive planning experience. As things grew as we attracted more clients and expanded relationships with existing clients, there was the need to add staff members to make the client experience consistent and also to continue to improve each step of the way. That's kind of the nice benefit of growing as a firm and adding the team members, support financial advisors and administrative support to ensure that client experience continues to be successful and improve. Part of that improvement is having multiple team members that allow for multiple perspectives and also allow for more services to be provided. I think we are able to go a little bit wider in the service offering as far as what we are doing and the standards of care we are providing. It's been a very nice and important part of this process for us to continue, not only in growing new clients but more importantly expanding existing client relationships.

ELITE ADVISOR INSIGHTS

SWIFT: In this report I was referring to it says that the elite advisors, based on their research and opinion, have lost fewer than three clients over the past year. I believe your retention is quite remarkable and maybe you can address that in your next little bit of commentary as well as talking about your marketplace. You're not in Chicago or Orange County. You're not in a big metropolitan area. If you could, please address the retention factor and growth in a smaller marketplace.

D’AMICO: I'll start with the growth piece. I read in the report that the top 1% of advisors attract about twenty-five million in new assets each year. We are proud of the fact that in 2016, we greatly exceeded that. We are humbled by that fact. I work with one of the leading industry consultants for registered investment advisors and he has knowledge of our marketplace. He says it's very common that the top advisors are in about the fifteen-million to twenty-million-dollar mark in what they are about to achieve in new client assets each year. I'm just very happy to be well above those benchmarks. That's an affirmation to me that some of the things we've implemented along the way have worked. It's a sign that things are going well and the client experience is good, which has translated into growth.

Equally important, if not more important to me, is the retention rate for our customers. We do meet those benchmarks, as well as, far as retention and how many clients are lost in a year. We are happy that we are meeting those benchmarks, because we’re not only keeping a client relationship but most importantly expanding client-based relationships by providing more services and helping with more aspects of their financial plan. Maybe we help by going deeper into their estate plan, tax planning or strategic Roth conversions or perhaps other different types of financial planning. I wish there was a metric out there that measured client expansion and not just the retention because we’re certainly surpassing it. Nonetheless we are extremely humbled and happy that we are on the right track on the growth, but more importantly retention and expansion with existing clients.

ATTRACTING TALENT TO THE TEAM

SWIFT: One of the things I heard you say earlier when we were talking offline was attracting the right team members in a smaller marketplace Its not like the sky is the limit in your smaller markets. So maybe you can talk about how do you attract such good people to join your firm? Is it incentives? Is it vision? Is it leadership? Maybe all of that?

D’AMICO: The recipe for a good company is having the right talent. We are in northeast Ohio and our headquarters are in Strongsville, OH. There isn't as much talent here as there is in, let's say, Chicago or Dallas or California. The talent pool is smaller and I think it makes it challenging. It takes more time to find the right person. You really have to know who you are looking for, which is the key, and making sure there is very good cultural alignment. So my focus has always been people's character, culture set, maturity and direction. I think those are some of the key ingredients that are a good indication that you have the right person. If you have the right person, I believe you can train people on perhaps on certain aspects of financial planning or investment management. But I don't think you can train cultural fit.

So, I think that it's been great for us that we do have a strong corporate cultural identity. We have a clear mission of exceeding client expectations, being a fiduciary, and providing comprehensive financial planning. We help clients achieve their financial life goals in a proactive manner by not being afraid to do the work that's needed to really make that happen and form some good relationships along the way. As a result, we've looked for people that have that same sort of internal drive and that same motivation for wanting to make a positive difference in peoples’ lives. We look for people who want to be in the fiduciary model, whether or not they used that model previously or were with a firm that wasn't providing as much of a comprehensive planning experience. So those are some of the key things we look at, but that's just the starting point.

From there you have to nourish that ongoing relationship. It's just like a client relationship. What you put into it is what you're going to get out of it. Really knowing your team members and in my case, being the leader, knowing where your team members are professionally and personally is key. You should be aware of what their goals are, since everyone has different goals. You need to really understanding where they are in meeting their goals and what their strengths are and the areas in which they need to grow. Just having a positive and ongoing collaboration with them in a good relationship is really key, especially when you are working within a team where there are five or so team members that are working in cooperation for the benefit of a shared client.

PROFESSIONAL CREDENTIALS

SWIFT: So, you are a registered SEC investment advisory firm. I also read in a recent announcement from your firm that you've also achieved the CFP designation, the marks of distinction. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about your own commitment to ongoing education and professional development.

D’AMICO: Thank you for bringing that up. Achieving both of those milestones has been a great accomplishment. We believe that achieving those milestones again signifies that we are doing the right thing as a firm. As far as obtaining the CFP marks, I'm definitely very proud of that and humbled by the response I’ve received. Since I started in personal finance in 1999, I have always had that lifelong learner bug, so I love to learn something new every day. I love to read articles pretty much every morning. I think it's really important. Whatever somebody does in their career – whether they are a financial planner, or a doctor or a carpenter – it is important always to be learning and growing. Things change, new information comes out, new laws happen. So it's really important to continue with that ongoing learning and development and apply that knowledge, as well, for the benefit of your client.

I'm really happy to earn those marks. That achievement was important to me to continue to that progression of learning on an ongoing basis.

SWIFT: Tony, congratulations. Thanks so much for being here today. I'm impressed by your ongoing success. Could you tell people how to learn more if they are hearing this audio and would like to check out your firm?

D’AMICO: Sure, our website is a great place to find information about Fidato Wealth and the services we provide. You can also inquire about employment opportunities. Our website is www.FidatoWealth.com. 

SWIFT: Well, Tony, thank you so much. Congratulations on your ongoing success. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

D’AMICO: Thank you, Marie. It's been great catching up with you today.