Advisors are sick of using a bunch of disparate applications that can’t communicate with each other and require manual transfer of data. Technology vendors, TAMPs (turnkey asset management programs) and custodians, now playing the role of technology provider, are all developing solutions they hope will be advisors’ one-stop shop for fully integrated technology.
Hearsay Social is now applying this idea to advisors’ digital communications efforts. The Silicon Valley company introduced Hearsay 360 on Wednesday, a single dashboard that combines all of Hearsay’s services—managing social media accounts, launching websites, and communicating via email campaigns and text message—for advisors to efficiently and compliantly communicate with clients.
“If you ask a typical advisor to log into five different systems to do five different things when it comes to digital marketing, they’re just not going to do it,” said Clara Shih, the founder and CEO of Hearsay Social.
By putting it all in one location and including Hearsay’s built-in archiving and compliance workflows, Shih believes it will make digital marketing a lot more accessible to advisors and remove the major barriers of entry.
And by having all marketing efforts run through a common portal, Shih added that Hearsay 360 also provides for new analytics. As other dashboards tout the ability to show a holistic view of a client’s financial life, Hearsay 360 tracks engagement across various communication channels to give a 360-degree view of their clients’ digital behavior and understand what is or isn’t working.
“[Hearsay 360 can] connect what an investor is reading about on a website, to what she’s tweeting about, to what she’s opening in email or ignoring,” Shih said.
This data will also fuel Hearsay’s predictive analytics tools to automatically recommend how an advisor should interact with clients. For example: Hearsay 360 detects that a client is interested in an advisor’s Facebook. It will automatically recommend the advisor send a personalized email based on the topic. In a few clicks, the advisor can generate a pre-approved, compliant email and send it to the client.
“Instead of shots in the dark every day, we can, through data science, tell [advisors] that these are the 10 people you should call today,” Shih said.
Hearsay 360 is designed to integrate with other enterprise technology, such as compliance tools, CRM and even personal financial tools, to create automated workflows.
“Google, Amazon and Facebook have set customer expectations for every industry, as evidenced by the rise of robo advisors and direct-to-consumer online options in financial services,” Shih said in a statement. “Advisors know they must modernize or risk becoming irrelevant.”