In this episode of Craft On Tap, Faustin and I tackle this crucial concern head-on and share how we've structured our approach to respect advisors' time while still delivering meaningful marketing results.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss marketing time for RIAs.
Transcript:
Stephen Beach: All right. Welcome back to Craft On Tap Growth Marketing for RIAs. Myself, Stephen Beach, the CEO of Craft Impact, and Faustin Weber, one of our marketing strategists. We're both wearing blue today, so hopefully that's good luck. We did not plan that. We're just dorky like that.
All right. So, I was reflecting on that. It took us five episodes to figure out the name, but I actually am really proud of us for going about it this way. I struggle with this too, paralysis by analysis. I wouldn't have started this podcast and these recordings till we had the name, in a prior life. This time around, we just jumped right in and started talking about things that we're familiar with and things that we think would be helpful and educational for advisors.
Today, we are going to talk about a common question we get from financial advisors when they're considering working with us. It applies to working with any marketing agency or any freelancer that is gonna support your business from a growth marketing perspective. And that is: how much time is required of me?
We understand that as a partner, managing director, wealth advisor, whatever the title is, and whatever your position is at the firm, you are probably wearing a lot of hats. Especially in the RIA space, there's more to manage – office space, compliance, people management, investment management, etc. So we understand that you're trying to evaluate outsourcing one of these core components of the business, in the marketing and business development realm. And you wanna know, is it gonna be a lot of babysitting, a lot of handholding? Do I have to come up with all the ideas or do you guys help with that? Do I have to write, do I have to execute the plan, or do you guys do that? And so on.
Faustin Weber: Yeah, thanks, Stephen. So I would say that question comes a lot of times from a little bit of post-traumatic stress disorder from working with past agencies who don't understand the complexities of the financial services industry. Like working with people who are trying to talk about some of these complex topics, everything from equity compensation to market volatility, and they don't fully understand even what they're writing.
So you're outsourcing your marketing to them, and you're paying, you're investing this money on a month-to-month basis, and then you're having to go back and essentially rewrite content that they put in front of you. First of all, I just wanna say I can empathize with anyone watching this who has had that experience. Our approach is completely different than that.
We start off with our client, a new partnership, where we will require the champions or the decision makers for your firm, usually a number of managing partners who have any sort of influence over what the messaging of your marketing collateral should be or what the focus of the overall business should be. And we require a few one-hour workshops to work on the messaging and our entire audit that we do at the beginning of our relationship.
We have a few workshops at the beginning, and then what we normally do is we send updates frequently after each of the workshops to kind of share with the partners our progress. And then we would normally go into a weekly cadence of one hour each, like one hour recurring meeting, that then would space out once we got a nice drumbeat, a nice partnership where everyone felt like, "Hey, we're producing a lot, we're making progress in our overall goals." We'd shift to twice a month.
Stephen Beach: I think there are some things that go into play – like defining what success looks like, quantitatively and qualitatively, that's been really helpful for us. Doing that in the sales process and then doing it on a kickoff call saying, "What does it look like to you guys and what does it look like to us?" And let's just talk about that for 10 minutes. It makes a world of difference, I think, to get us to the point where we know what kind of the North Star is.
We just had a client tell us that to him, part of what success looks like is if he's mowing his grass on a Saturday and he comes up with a good marketing idea or something he wants to include in the next newsletter, having an easy quick place where he can throw that down, toss it towards us, and then we will be responsible for bringing it up on the next call and talking about it. He is like, "That would be amazing."
I think it's also key to define roles. Even getting started with who's our champion for marketing, who's gonna be the main liaison with Craft? Again, same thing applies if you're gonna hire a freelancer or another agency.
Communication channels are important too. Email and Slack are by far the most common, and then a weekly call, if not weekly. For smaller clients, it's every other week. "What did we work on? What do we need to review right now? And then what's coming next?" Pretty simple.
When I first started in marketing, I was not the agenda type. I would just open up the Zoom link and I would just start...
Faustin Weber: Just rock and roll ad lib the entire time. That is like so frightening to me to even think about. I'm so completely the opposite.
Stephen Beach: People need to have agendas. If you're gonna rally a group, consolidate thoughts and plans, and execute things on a consistent basis. There's gonna be 50 balls in the air, and if we were to address all 50, it would take all of your time. So we've gotta pair that down in the offline space and then come to the meeting with, "Here are the three to five things we're gonna talk about."
Faustin Weber: And I would say too, just in terms of thinking about your time and your team's time, one thing that we really advocate for in our partnerships is helping you as a managing partner, whoever's gonna be the champion of marketing, delegate down some of the conversations to other advisors.
Let's say we're writing a blog article on some sort of retirement planning topic. One thing that we really advocate for is like, "Who on the team can we potentially elevate to be the author of this blog post or this series of LinkedIn posts, and then who can we meet with?"
A lot of times the advisor that we're working with on these recurring marketing meetings will say, "Oh, well, I want to pick my new wealth advisor. We really want to get his content out there to our current clients, or we want to elevate him and showcase his specific expertise as it comes to this retirement planning topic. Why don't you interview him or her?"
What we'll do internally is because we have experience in the space, we have a pretty good idea about what the advisor might be sharing in terms of the subtopics for that retirement planning topic. So we'll come prepared with an outline or a framework or the right questions to ask with that delegated advisor, get his or her unique spin on it, and then we'll reframe it up, get their approval, and then we'll go back to the managing partner for final approval.
In that way, we've taken away the burden, that mental load off of the managing partner's plate. And we've also been able to elevate somebody else on the team and helped that managing partner delegate.
Stephen Beach: Well said. And also just wanna congratulate you on working the term mental load into your answer there.
Faustin Weber: Our wives would be proud.
Stephen Beach: All right, excellent. Thanks for listening. That's all we have for today. We'll be back with more really soon.
Key Takeaways:
Working with a marketing partner like Craft Impact requires less of your time than you might think:
- Initial time investment: A few one-hour workshops upfront to establish messaging, goals, and to audit your current marketing
- Ongoing commitment: Weekly or bi-weekly meetings (1 hour each) with prepared agendas that respect your time
- Communication channels: Slack/email for quick updates between meetings, structured to minimize interruptions
- Delegation support: We help you identify which team members can contribute to marketing efforts without overburdening you
- Gradual reduction: As the partnership matures, your time commitment typically decreases from weekly to bi-weekly meetings
Shameless plug for Craft on Tap
The best marketing partnerships take work off your plate rather than adding to it. By setting clear expectations, establishing efficient communication channels, and leveraging your team strategically, we aim to make marketing a streamlined part of your business rather than another full-time job.
This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies for RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch
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