The Wealth Advisor—which is Marina Media’s Santa Monica-based unit —created a digital brand awareness and lead generation campaign that educates, qualifies and sells sponsorships in its annual guide America's Best TAMPs. Once published, The Wealth Advisor delivers its sponsors qualified sales leads in real-time by email or Zapier intergation to its sponsors CRMs.
TAMP is an acronym for turnkey asset mangement program, see Investopedia for a more complete definition.
Wealth Advisor's program America's Best TAMPs helps financial advisors by showing them how to outsource their internal investment management. This saves them time, labor costs and expense, thus enabling them to devote more time to selling and retaining valued clients.
While relatively unknown to the public, this is a trillion-dollar industry that is growing rapidly due to technology innovation.
The Wealth Advisor offers the top TAMP providers sales leads and helps America’s 260,000 financial advisors by outsourcing investment personnel and back offices to one or more TAMP solution providers.
This is accomplished by developing servicing partnerships that begin by finding the best-matched partner—based on profiling information—which is found within the 70 pages of America's Best TAMPs.
Background
For the past eight years, the Wealth Advisor has compiled and rated the best TAMPs in America. As noted, TAMPs work by channeling both asset managers and investment models to be delivered via a cloud-based technology solution to be offered to financial advisors.
This functions chiefly as an alternate solution to managing money and in-house — thus reducing internal labor costs and the cost of compliance.
The growth of this investment option for financial advisors has gone from $500 million to over $1 trillion in the last 5 years.
America’s Best TAMPs started with only seven TAMPs eight years ago and now it showcases 30 providers for its 2020 edition.
But finding America’s Best TAMPs prospective sponsors and asking them to become sponsors in its Guide took ingenuity in 2019, as it went from 19 in 2019 to 30 in 2020. This was the core challenge of the campaign.
Problems solved by this Campaign
For years, The Wealth Advisor has tried to convince TAMPs to be included in their guide—but found that the advisors with the requisite capacity didn’t understand how the industry works. Nor were they ever taught how they could match up with technology systems to offer their services.
In 2019, Wealth Advisor broke up the pattern and tackled the problem differently by educating likely financial advisors that they might create their own TAMPs (but they didn’t know how) through initally with a white paper and then a webinar presented on August 20th.
Because of excellent promotion (submitted as part of this included campaign), it was attended by over 400 advisory firms—an extremely high number for our industry—all of whom rated the program as one of the best they have ever attended.
Following the program, our creative director Tony Flores suggested that we test each of the likely candidates for the 2020 edition of America’s Best TAMPs by offering attendees a quiz that would score them on the basis of what they’re doing now.
According to our editor Scott Martin, many advisory firms may already have what it takes to be a TAMP but don't know it.
The quiz was scored from 0 to 50 and a passing score of 20, letting them know that they were likely already TAMP and already start marketing themselves as one.
Of the 400 participants from the webinar, over 100 took the quiz, and 30 passed with an average score of 40.
We then transitioned them to optimally designed to A Shopify website that featured sponsorship participation in the 2020 edition of America’s Best TAMPs.
In that process—and with the management of the deadline—we were successful in signing up 19 new TAMPs for the 2020 edition, a 33% increase over 2019.
Branding and Lead Generation Campaign Strategy
STEP 1: White Paper and Webinar to educate and find potential new sponsors - “How to Start a TAMP” “Webinar: Launching Your Own TAMP, Red Carpet or Red Tamp for RIA’s” We used a highly creative webinar at the top of the funnel to stimulate interest from our best potential prospects. This webinar generated unprecedented signups (400 enterprise decision-makers), 33% higher than any previous one. Double click image below to view webinar.
STEP 2: Webinar Attendees Invited To Take Quiz - To pre-qualify webinar attendees for the next stage of our funnel, we used an “Are you a TAMP?” quiz. It quickly generated 100 warm leads for the next step in the funnel. Double click image below to take quiz.
STEP 3: Shopify Sponsorship Sales Site - “America’s Best TAMPs 2020 Sponsorship Guide” America’s Best TAMPs is the industry’s leading guide on turnkey asset management programs.Those who took the quiz were then directed to a Shopify site that provided historical context, expanded features and benefits, and the value proposition of sponsorship in the Guide. Double click image below to enter sponsorship site.
STEP 4: Email Promo to Wealth Advisors Audience - In order to maximize downloads and leads for our sponsors, we used a unique ticket motif combined with optimized email marketing principles to generate opens and clicks. This resulted in considerable traffic to our dedicated landing page. Double click image below to view email promo.
STEP 5: Landing page - This landing page featured a preview of the 2020 edition that visitors could see the first 10 pages of and learn more. The overall layout has been optimized over many tests and proven to convert. Double click image below to view landing page.
STEP 6: Premium Offer - The 2020 guide download was the end point of this campaign on the advisors side, with a limited number of downloads available to advisors in our audience. The high engagement we receive on this guide creates a virtuous cycle whereby sponsors increasingly want to participate and be eligible for leads. Double click image below to view 2020 edition of America's Best TAMPs.
Campaign Execution
The Wealth Advisor (TWA) news site has 260,000 registered subscribers. The Wealth Advisor sends 15 million emails out its subscribers each month using the ESP (email service provider) Marketo.
Each month an email invitation is deployed to each subscriber inviting them to download and receive a digital edition of America’s Best TAMPs in exchange for confirmation of their name, firm name, email, and phone number.
Once the guest “submits” a request on a branded landing page, the guest receives a digital download packaged in an ebook viewer. This is provided by Paperturn technology, with the option to download the 70-page PDF on the guest’s phone or desktop.
The contact information is then sent in real-time to tamp sponsors along with 20 other demographic enhancements that The Wealth Advisor knows about the guest, all harvested from The Wealth Advisor’s subscriber file.
The digital lead generation program runs tirelessly twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week—which delivers 10,000 or more qualified sales leads per year.