Hortz: Tell us about how you built out elements of your offering with strategic partners. Why did you decide on strategic partners vs building everything yourself?
Rogerson: While many of our customers will leverage the articles they discover within our content platform for social media posts, email campaigns, and website content (just to name a few), UpContent does not have the capability of sending a social post, delivering an email, or hosting a website—and yes, this is intentional and is rooted in our past.
When growing an agency, there were two things that could always be relied upon:
1. There was always a new technology or solution just around the next corner that our new or current clients would need us to use in order to seamlessly deliver on their marketing and sales enablement strategy and,
2. The analytics reports from one tool to the next never matched—causing us to spend countless hours investigating why the numbers weren’t the same or even more time explaining the differences in how each tool in their technology stack counted each activity.
We couldn’t bring ourselves to being another solution that did “some of the same things” as other tools that would be common to our customer’s stack and also knew that most of the market we were looking to serve had already selected a social media management, email marketing, customer relationship management, and content management system for other reasons—why try to duplicate something that is working and instead innovate alongside these delivery tools?
While this is a starkly different approach to many other curation solutions, it is not new. The process of creating content has almost always been distribution independent. An organization would create a compelling piece and then optimize it for each delivery channel to drive their audience back to a unifying next step. Why would the approach to curation be any different?
Hortz: Any other thoughts or recommendations you would like to offer advisors on the topic of strategically using content for their sales and retention efforts
Rogerson: Absolutely. First, we suggest you begin to view your marketing as a resource for people, not just self-promotion. Yes, you can direct your content curation based on your brand’s goals and offerings, but you can also do so while remaining useful to people.
Second, begin to view your marketing as thought leadership and as a source of useful information on topics that are interesting to your clientele while remaining relevant to your service. It’s hard to do this with all your own writing, which is why UpContent is available.
Finally, don’t forget to recalibrate by viewing engagement numbers and listening to client feedback on your communications efforts. Slight tweaks here and there could result in a client referral that really moves your bottom line.
We welcome you to learn more about our technology and how to maximize your curated content strategy by visiting our Resources Library where we are happy to share access to our eBooks, webinars, podcasts, and downloadable resources.
Institute for Innovation Development is an educational and business development catalyst for growth-oriented financial advisors and financial services firms determined to lead their businesses in an operating environment of accelerating business and cultural change. We position our members with the necessary ongoing innovation resources and best practices to drive and facilitate their next-generation growth, differentiation, and unique client/community engagement strategies. The institute was launched with the support and foresight of our founding sponsors—Ultimus Fund Solutions, NASDAQ, Pershing, Fidelity, Voya Financial, and Charter Financial Publishing (publisher of Financial Advisor magazine).