Barron's Advisor Summits - Blog

Your own ad campaign

2/19/2020

Department store pioneer John Wanamaker famously said, "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." A century later advertising is a massive enterprise with creatives, planners, buyers, analysts, demographers, etc, all trying to reach the right "eyeballs" at the right time. Fortunately, we've cut all of that out and delivered you a turnkey, multi-million dollar ad campaign.

We haven't sat on our hands waiting for readers to come to you, we've pushed Barron's advisors out to our readers through the equivalent of $3.1m in advertising in Barron's, WSJ and Marketwatch.*

Here are the topline ways we've promoted the Barron's advisors since last June (from $$$ to $):

8 months of digital banner ads on WSJ, Barron's, Marketwatch
28 print ads in WSJ and Barron's (including ads in the rankings)
Paid google search
Paid social media (LinkedIn + Facebook)

In short, we can't guarantee our readers will connect with you, but we've given you the absolute best chance that they will through continuous promotion of the directory and the rankings.

* advertising priced at ratecard

Advertising on the cheap

2/3/2020

Advisors often ask us how readers will find their profile pages. We answer that we're advertising across the Dow Jones network (among other things). Since ad banners are served at irregular intervals its often hard to prove their impact.

This is why we've done an audit of the ads we've run on WSJ and Barrons in the past sixth months. To our delight, we've delivered an astounding $2.1m in digital ads banners for directory participants.* Our ads were shown on 71.5m pages and drove just under 40k visitors from WSJ and Barron's – confirmed subscribers.

This of course is just ad banners. We are also generating tens of thousands of visitors to your pages in other ways:

Ads in print issues of Barron's + WSJ,
Links on the Barron's homepage
Paid and organic Google search
Paid and free social media (facebook, linkedin)

In short, the directory is one of the easiest and most cost efficient ways to tap into your rankings success.

*Ads priced at $30 cost per thousand (CPM)

Beehive marketing

1/30/2020

In our weekly newsletter, top advisor Peter Rohr discusses how he built his business by adapting a "beehive mentality." Rohr provided service for firms (the hive) which then allowed him access to its employees (the bees.) While this may not be a strategy for every advisor, it does show the value in tapping into self-contained networks. Most of us live in tidy, hive-like networks — professional, social, cultural geographic, etc. Having a client, for instance, who is a chief resident at a hospital opens the door to dozens of his or her professional associates. This is a tried and true strategy that has dozens of variations. You may specialize in divorcées, athletes, doctors, small business owners, astronauts, etc — and have effortlessly rolled up business through word of mouth for years (and found yourself on our rankings in the process).

The effectiveness of this word of mouth marketing has made many advisors justifiably skeptical of any and all external marketing. Why spend money trying to attract high net worth clients "off the street", when it's much easier to sit back and let clients do the work for you? That said, the value of any new "off the street" client isn't just his or her individual account, its the aggregate potential value of the associated social/professional network. So while its is often difficult to justify marketing spend in the short term, if you take a longer term view, the potential upside — especially when your clientele are high net- and ultra high net-worth — almost always justifies the spend, when you consider the potential upside of finding a new "hive."

The graphic above is a social network map developed by the CDC as a theoretical model for flu outbreaks. Most advisors are content to stay in the central node, cultivating contacts within their social networks. They are however missing out on a much larger potential gain by ignoring new networks — be it doctors or opera singers. Advisors who can cultivate relationships with multiple social networks can supersize their practices.

December Guide + Paid Search

12/19/2019

The As you probably know, our December issue on Kids + Money published earlier this month. Obviously we had a good amount of traffic to our sites, but as usual with the Guides, we are promoting the content outside our walls.

Each article contains a link to the directory where an interested client can connect with you.

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Tie-in #1
The editorial inset that has all of the guide content AND a link to the directory

Tie-in #2
Articles have a rotating ad unit that includes a link to the directory.

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One added bonus for participants in the directory is the inclusion of your firm name in our paid search. Google allows us to enter search terms that may be relevant to someone looking for an advisor. Adding the participants to this keyword list ups the chance that the rankings and/or directory links appear in the paid ad spot.

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Lastly, now that the indie rankings is in the books, we're starting to promote it internally on WSJ, MarketWatch, and Barron's. For added visibility, we're doing some paid promotion on Facebook.

Our belief is that our sites provide the best quality audience for your spend, but we include additional external marketing for promotional purposes and to raise awareness of the rankings overall.

The new advisor finder

12/9/2019

Starting this week, we will be building out a new, improved advisor finder tool. While the FA map was great, the next iteration will allow visitors to delve deeper and create more accurate lists of advisors. The matching tool will show a list of all advisors sorted by geography and minimum account size. Visitors can whittle down this list by selecting from a set of filters.

We will be testing this and gathering feedback in the next two months. Our goal is to launch it by March.

Visitors to the directory will enter their zip, age and AUM. They click "find an advisor" and a sorted list is presented.

The list of all advisors is sorted by geography and account size. All premium advisors are shown at the top of the list. The "cards" feature a larger headshot and contact information.

If visitors want to create a more curated list, they have the option to filter out bad matches. The filters include: ranking, FINRA/SEC registration, State(s), certifications, specialities and planning (y/n).

Our ultimate goal is to create a tool that matches investors to their perfect advisor. We think this is a step in that direction.

Kids and money

10/30/2019

The next issue of the directory will run Dec 2 in Barron's and the following week in WSJ. The theme is talking to your children about money. We'd like your input into topics for the upcoming February and May issues. If you have suggestions for what theme(s) we should focus on, email advisor.editors@barrons.com

Above the fold

10/29/2019

Barron's is making a few tweaks the homepage to make the rankings and advisor directory more visible to Barron's readers. In two weeks the "advisor" module will now be "above the fold" – the term for content that doesn't require any scrolling. It is your direct input that helped sell this change to the development team, so keep the feedback flowing.

The Barron’s Hall of Fame

10/25/2019

The Hall of Fame is online. To see the full list visit: barrons.com/hall. The good news is that we've added this honor to your page for any visitors. Please let me know if we missed toggling this listing on your page and congrats.

Barron’s Makes a Difference

10/2/2019

Everyone cares about ROI, but once in a while you get to do well by doing good. You may have seen our article in the May Directory on teacher annuities. The crusaders featured in the article, Tony and Dina Isola have credited it with helping jumpstart an investigation by the New York Department of Financial Services. Click here for the WSJ article.

Rankings upgrades

9/5/2019

Many of you are print traditionalists. But, we're pushing hard to upgrade our rankings online to expand the impact of our lists beyond the traditional readership. We've made some small improvements to rankings so it's easier for a serious investor to compile prospects across lists. We will be adding some new copy to flesh out these pages for visitors and make it easier to get to the rankings from the barrons.com homepage.