What are you doing to create content to keep your clients informed and engaged in the financial planning process?

Lynda McKie CFP^®

Senior Private Wealth Adviser, Elston

Licensee: EP Financial Services

More than ever before, we’re noticing that clients are hungry for relevant and timely content to help them make astute financial decisions. That’s why, within our business, communication is a key priority. We understand the importance of sharing crucial portfolio and market information quickly, so when changes are made or market events occur, clients know what has occurred and why – on the day.

We communicate openly and often with our clients, delivering valuable, engaging content, astute analysis and commentary, through a number of different channels. These include our website, email, social media, e-newsletters, blogs, in-house presentations, videos and more.

We get a lot of positive feedback about our in-house presentations, which cover a variety of investment, economic and technical financial planning topics. They also provide a forum to talk about the latest changes to super and tax legislation. We encourage clients to ask questions and get involved.

By keeping clients well-informed and managing their expectations, we’ve created a loyal customer base. In turn, because our clients are having a positive and satisfying experience with us, they regularly introduce friends and colleagues to our business.

I believe financial advice firms that provide regular, high quality content have a competitive advantage over those that don’t. It has become an integral part of the service offering our clients have come to expect, and a valuable business-getting tool.

Robert Goudie CFP^®

Financial Adviser, Meritum Financial Group

Licensee: MLC

Providing content to clients starts from the first initial contact and continues right throughout the client/adviser relationship.

Prior to a prospective client’s first appointment, we send out an email, along with a welcome video. The primary objective of the video is to familiarise the client with myself and the office surroundings, while letting the client know what to bring and what to expect from their first appointment.

In more complex client situations, we will often follow-up the initial appointment with a personal video, which highlights the key points that they need to consider. We keep these videos brief and succinct, and of course, the video allows the clients to watch and re-watch, which is often helpful for couples with busy schedules.

Our educational material is constantly being created and evolving. As part of our ongoing content creation plan, we record and produce a short weekly YouTube video of two to five minutes. This weekly video is sent to our entire client database via email and shared via our social networks. If the content is quite topical and newsworthy, we will often have the video re-purposed into a press release for distribution to our local newspapers.

We are firm believers in being in front of our clients regularly, and providing helpful and current educational information. While we still run traditional face-to-face seminars, which many of our clients enjoy as a social opportunity, all our presentations are now recorded as webinars and circulated amongst our network.

Rebecca Fergusson CFP^®

Principal and Private Client Adviser, Main Street Financial Solutions

Licensee: Fitzpatricks Private Wealth

Creating quality content to keep in touch with our clients has been an important part of the growth of our business. It helps us establish emotional connections with our clients and to keep them informed. We do this in a number of ways.

Firstly, every new client receives an introduction email prior to their initial meeting, with adviser profiles attached and links to our website. On an ongoing basis, clients receive targeted emails in relation to specific topics, market commentary and issues, monthly newsletters and access to the Financial Knowledge Centre, which includes calculators, videos and articles.

We have created a number of videos that can be found on our website or YouTube channel. We use these videos to get our point of difference across, to explain why we do what we do and for client testimonials. We also have videos and blogs in relation to specific client issues, such as personal insurance or estate planning.

We have also produced several eBooks, including Secrets of Successful Investors and How to Choose a Financial Planner, which can be downloaded from our website.

Finally, social media, of course, plays a part in how we communicate with clients and the broader market.

We use Twitter for short messages, Facebook to provide information on what is happening within the office at a personal level to help clients feel part of our team, and LinkedIn to reach out to professionals and referral sources.

We now have so many different ways to communicate with clients and keep them engaged. We understand that this helps connect with clients and the broader market and improve our brand recognition, but we are conscious that it’s important not to publish too much content – quality versus quantity seems to be the key.

Anne Graham CFP^® LRS^®

Managing Director/Senior Financial Planner, Story Wealth Management

Licensee: Securitor

We provide content via our website and social media to prospective clients before they even make an appointment.

Most people will Google you before they make an appointment, so we attempt to have an informative website that provides an overview of our process, what to expect and importantly, our approach to and philosophy about advice. We’ve used video to introduce each team member to the client, so they can put a face to the name and realise we’re people, too.

There’s additional content on the site that is educational and that’s provided by The Knowledge Centre – both prospective and existing clients benefit from that information. Clients have logins, which provides them with exclusive access to the entire library. Using external content providers is very cost and time effective.

Our social media presence has a number of purposes, which all revolve around engagement. We have a presence across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and use each of them slightly differently.

We not only provide education but also provide comment and opinions around issues that are important to our clients. We try to put some personality in our marketing to ensure clients are comfortable dealing with us and have a sense of who we are. The social media aspect can be automated, to a degree, to manage time.

During the process of engagement, we use an online mini fact-find, which has generated positive feedback. Videos are being used more frequently for obvious reasons.

On a more personal level, we reach out to individuals with commentary, articles, fact sheets on issues that are specific to their concerns, whilst personalising the process. Print information is also used to break up the mode of delivery and that appeals to some of our older, more traditional clients.

Gil Gordon CFP^® AEPS^®

Proprietor and Senior Adviser, RI Lower Hunter

Licensee: RI Advice Groups

Engagement is a funny word. Does it mean:

1. The clients understand and value the work we do; or

2. We do work that the clients understand and value?

Ideally, the answer is both, which means our value proposition is aligned to client objectives. Experience teaches me that many (if not most) advisers think they provide a service that clients don’t really understand, like portfolio management and review.

In ASIC’s REP 499: Financial advice: Fees for no service, the point is made quite clearly that some advisers are charging fees for services offered but not provided – a major outtake was the adviser’s offer of a review, rather than the provision of that review. Why didn’t the clients take up the review offer?

Failure to map our service to the client’s human objectives is both dumb and, with Report 499, now a genuine threat to our business.

To keep our clients engaged with our offering, we capture their human goals and burdens, such as retirement, holidays, cashflow management, estate planning and aged care. In our practice, we build and maintain a living financial model that shows when they will achieve their objectives and this then shapes their objectives and our advice. Our clients understand that we can help them make better decisions as life throws them brickbats and roses.

Our process has been validated by the Beddoes Institute in a client survey, where we were the first practice to receive a score of 10/10 for ‘Initial Engagement and Advice’, as well as 10/10 for ‘Understanding Client Needs’.

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