With the help of Snappy Kraken, Hightower has rolled out a new platform that supplies advisors with custom content for email and digital marketing campaigns and tools for targeted lead generation.
Called Engage, Snappy Kraken provides to Hightower advisors curated digital marketing materials such as blog posts, email newsletters, guidebooks, infographics, videos and social posts. Advisors can choose content that fits their clientele or a segment of it based on generation, income, profession and stage of life.
“Marketing communications is one area that many advisors struggle with, as they often lack the time, staff and expertise to handle the heavy workload associated with deploying effective campaigns,” said Abby Salameh, the chief marketing officer at HighTower, in a statement.
“The Engage platform gives us the freedom to experiment with marketing and communications tactics that, in the past, would have taken valuable time away from our core business objective, which is, of course, working with our clients,” said Jeff Leventhal, managing director and partner at Hightower in Bethesda, Md, in a statement.
Advisors access Engage as an application in Clear, Hightower’s internal resource center. Clear includes a chat feature where advisors can share the best-practice content they’ve created among one another to collaborate and keep communications uniform. The Engage program is available to all of the RIA's advisors across 34 states.
Hightower switched to Snappy Kraken from Marketo, the marketing automation software provider it had been using for the past five years. Salameh, who joined Hightower in May 2019, led the change after observing the number of hours members of the marketing team were spending teaching advisors how to send email campaigns from Marketo’s platform.
“I use Marketo in really large organizations that have hundreds of people in their marketing department that are specialist in marketing. They know how to code, they know how to design, they can execute campaigns using Marketo’s technology. The problem is, [Marketo] wasn’t built for small businesses," Salameh said. "It wasn’t intuitive to use and it didn’t include content. So you had a disconnect. The advisors couldn’t figure out how to use it, it was hard to use at an enterprise level and there was no content that was available through the platform.”
Fifteen advisors piloted the program in March before it launched Wednesday. Salameh said some advisors who perform in-house marketing are eager to use the program and some are electing to leave the digital marketing of their firm in the hands of Hightower’s marketing team.
Snappy Kraken is licensing its program to Hightower as a white-label service. It has also partnered with Sawtooth Solutions, a turnkey asset management platform, and Redtail to help spread its services across the financial advisory industry. And last month, the digital marketing tech firm announced it had lowered its prices and waived its fees to help its customers overcome the negative financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic.