We increasingly have become digital denizens—online retail vs. Stores, Facebook vs. Letters, Google vs. Newspapers—creating this new big wave of personal statistics we charmingly name “Big Data.” Extracting insights and developing finely tuned engagement techniques from this activity is a holy grail effort for maximum marketers today. With a lot of buzz and stress around upgrading our advertising strategies, it’s far well really worth the time to explore this new modern-day blending of advertising and marketing and era and notice how it could be applied to financial offerings and economic guide community engagement strategies in particular if it happens to include more than one ensures.
Exploring this subject matter has led the Institute for Innovation Development to reach out to economic advisor and seminar advertising expert Mike Thurman, co-founder of White Glove—a virtual advertising enterprise specializing in planning, managing, and selling instructional seminars for monetary advisors, among different enterprise experts. Aside from White Glove’s 100 percent achieved-for-you, turn-key, logistical community engagement approach through academic seminars—completely utilizing virtual marketing—it’s the triple guarantee and precise pricing model the company gives that really is a boldly differentiating price proposition. It makes you surprised what they have uncovered, what they understand that we don’t, and how can they isolate the digital pulse of the monetary hobbies of a network?
Mike Thurman: The magic method changed into an ardor for training and a schooling-targeted seminar – now not selling our enterprise or selling our offerings at a dinner seminar, which become the enterprise popular. The dinner seminar may be powerful, but my cousin and fellow White Glove co-founder, Dean Thurman, and I sincerely had a passion for coaching the public about crucial subjects associated with retirement.
So, we decided to host our seminars at academic-focused places, inclusive of libraries and network centers, versus eating places. Our seminars have been a hundred percent centered on instructing and informing the public—no longer promoting ourselves or our economic practice. We determined this approach to be a lot more powerful in helping us build relationships with network participants who wanted sound monetary advice and retirement techniques…no longer folks that just confirmed up for a free meal.
Hortz: At what factor did you start experimenting with digital advertising and marketing, and what changed into the catalyst or experience you had that led you solely in this course? Thurman: The strategy I outlined above labored for decades, but it started to grow to be very bulky for me, Dean, and our economic exercise team to coordinate these kinds of seminars. We have been using the conventional “pay and pray” method of spending hundreds of dollars on print mailers and working with a mail house to send out the one’s mailers.
We began to note fewer humans have been showing up at the seminars, or they weren’t a match for us to help with retirement planning. Also, more regularly than I would love to admit, we screwed up via putting the wrong date or coping with on a mailer—so we were out of success (and out numerous cash!) whilst we made a mistake like that no person showed up. Dean and I knew there needed to be a better manner.
We believed virtual marketing turned into the catalyst to that better manner. In 2015, we decided to place virtual advertising to the test by exclusively using digital ads to market a seminar. It labored—and we have been amazed. We commenced building out a marketing strategy on how to completely flip the “vintage school” seminar marketing model on its head. We hosted our first Social Security seminar for a guide client in September 2015, and our corporation has exploded in growth when you consider that then.
