Resources for external financial advisors to build stronger client engagement
Vanguard’s Financial Advisors Services division retains a marketing presence with external advisors who sell our products. For this project, we were serving those clients, and the problem we were looking to solve was creating a playbook for them on how to acquire and retain clients from a pool of people who may be an untapped market.
It started with a consultant firm who helped us establish an advisor’s journey, which showed a possible opening in their process for including new marketing strategies and new target groups.
One thing we established about our advisors is that they rely heavily on mobile technologies. At one time, there were certainly plenty of advisors who carried briefcases full of whitepapers and brochures to client meetings, but gone are those days. From our user research in the very limited windows of time in our clients’ busy, on-the-go schedules, we were able to determine that they are usually between meetings and would have a hard time knowing at the beginning of the day, before they set out for all of their client meetings, which “best practices” playbooks they would want or need throughout their day. If they were to have an on-the-fly need to figure out how best to cater to the financial interests of a female client, they were much more likely to arrive at that need while already out on the road, and thus, the solution had to be mobile.
Through our partnership with researchers and content writers, we developed “brochure-style” content for our external clients, but with mobile-friendly packaging. We were already developing a “Client Relationship Center” resource as part of our external advisors site to strengthen the partnership we maintain with external advisors, and this content seemed to align well with that goal. I designed a fully responsive, infographic-style web presence that accounts for large (laptop/desktop), medium (tablet), and small (mobile) form factors: Women as Investors; Acquiring and Retaining Heirs; and Leveraging Social Media.
