While the shift to digital tools and platforms has been underway for more than a decade, from the growth of blogging and social media to the rise of the robo-advisor, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 will likely forever mark a turning point that rapidly accelerated the digital shift for financial advisors. Yet while the forced digitization of the financial advice business has been most noticeable of the realm of digital paperwork (i.e., eSignature adoption) and meetings themselves (e.g., Zoom and the like), it is the marketing and growth of financial advisory firms where the digital shift has been most disruptive to the advisor status quo.
After all, as the latest Kitces Research on advisor marketing has previously shown, even before the pandemic it was a category of “digital” marketing in particular that showed the greatest disparity of “haves” and “have-nots”, of a select few firms that were having outsized marketing success while the remainder were struggling greatly. And even within the digital marketing strategies, some, like SEO and paid social media advertising, are showing far more success on average than others like blogging and social media. Which only raises even more questions in the current pandemic environment about what digital marketing strategies are really worth pursuing (or not).
In this context, we’re excited to announce the launch of the first Kitces Digital Marketing Summit – a virtual conference focused not on Telling financial advisors what they “should” be doing, but instead to simply Show what real advisory firms are actually doing that works in the realm of digital marketing. From SEO to paid social media advertising, to blogging and email marketing, online scheduling, and CRM systems to manage the sales process of turning prospects into clients in a digital world), this Kitces Summit will showcase what really works across the top, middle, and bottom of the digital marketing funnel. No sponsors. No vendors. Just advisors providing a behind-the-scenes look for other advisors about what they’re doing that’s driving real results. (Though we will provide some curated and crowdsourced recommendations at the end of potential vendors that advisors might use if they see something they do want to implement!)
This “Show, Don’t Tell”-styled Kitces Digital Marketing Summit will run for “just” an action-packed 4 hours on the afternoon of Thursday May 13th from noon to 4 PM EST (replays/recordings will be available for those who cannot attend live). So if you’re still curious about what it really takes to do digital marketing successfully, and want to actually see what success looks like, I hope you’ll check out our new Kitces Digital Marketing Summit, and “See What’s Possible!”
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