Financial advisors use the latest financial planning technology so they can offer more to their clients. Today’s advisors must be highly proficient with technology and have a broad knowledge of today’s financial technology marketplace. To find the right software for your business, start here. Financial technology companies take pride in offering exceptional customer support. Your advisor needs many different types of financial technology to create a personalized financial plan for you, including portfolio monitoring and analysis tools, account aggregation tools, tax management tools, retirement calculators, and financial planning software.
What tools do financial advisors use? This is a question most people ask when looking to find a financial advisor. In the current economy, it’s impossible to avoid doing your own financial research, but financial advisors can provide expertise and help you save time. So, here are the top tools financial advisors use all the time.
Website Builder
Let’s get real: people expect you to have a website by now.
When consumers are looking for a financial advisor online, if you don’t have a website, they can’t consider you because they’ll never see you.
And if you are doing outbound marketing, people will want to look at your website to form a solid impression of you and your business. If you don’t have one, you’re letting them down.
Plus, your website is the employee that works for you 24/7 and never gets tired or calls in sick. It is always there, ready to talk to prospects and provide them with valuable information.
If you don’t have a website, you need one. But as we saw with the CRM, the financial advisors who stray away from technology because they think it’s too expensive or it’s too complicated.
Enter: Weebly.
Weebly is a drag-and-drop website builder. Can you click on something and drag it across your computer screen? If so, congratulations! You are officially qualified to use Weebly.
Are there other options out there to build a website? There sure are, such as WordPress, but Weebly has proven itself easy to use, the designs are beautiful, and the customer service is great.
Note: if you ever want help with your website, make sure you hire a marketer (like me), not a designer. Designers want things to look pretty. Marketers want things to make money. There’s a big difference. I’ve seen financial advisors invest many thousands of dollars into a beautiful website that doesn’t convert.
Black Diamond
Advent Software’s Black Diamond is a cloud-based portfolio management platform. The features it offers independent financial advisors include information aggregation, customizable reporting, rebalancing, and daily account reconciliation.
Financial Planning Software
You’re probably already using a financial planning platform, but that doesn’t negate its well-deserved spot on our list. Financial planning software provides you with a dynamic, visual way to show clients a bird’s-eye view of their financial goals and the steps being taken to achieve them. With its ability to project and compare potential scenarios on everything from retirement planning to taxation and the capability to stress test and customize to individual clients, a good financial planning tool helps you guide clients to success. Farm Bureau Wealth Management Advisors have access to Envestnet MoneyGuidePro, one of the best financial planning tools for advisors on the market, and voted the No. 1 financial planning software for 14 years in a row.
Black Diamond Mobile App
The Black Diamond mobile app, an add-on to the Black Diamond management platform, is one for the clients. It keeps them updated on their account and portfolio information. The app also offers a secure messaging system, ideal for advisor and client collaboration.
Email Marketing Automation Software
This whole thing is a process. If you have a website, awesome email capture forms, but no way to follow up, you will fail here.
But if you’re running a business, you probably don’t have time to sit around all day and write emails. That’s why you need email marketing automation software, also called an email autoresponder.
An autoresponder is a sequence of emails that are sent automatically to people who have opted into it. The same emails go out, in the same sequence, for every subscriber on your list.
Of course, with this software, you can still manually type and send an email (called a “broadcast”) but the idea here is that you want your business to be as automated as possible.
To give you an idea of what might happen in an email autoresponder sequence, here is a sample:
- Day 1: Someone opts-in to your mailing list You send an introductory email introducing yourself and giving them the content they wanted.
- Day 3: You send another piece of content related to what they’re interested in.
- Day 5: You send a more in-depth introduction letter or an “about us” type email.
- Day 8: You send more interesting content.
- Day 11: If the prospect hasn’t set an appointment yet, you can ask for an appointment.
This can go however you set it up and continue for as long as you have it set up.
With Drip, you can set up a rule where if someone does X, you do Y. So if someone sets an appointment before day 11, you can set it up so they will never get that appointment email. Or you could always take them out manually. Either way works just fine, but I prefer automation.
I really like the ability to split-test my emails (I test everything). Wouldn’t it be nice to know which subject lines perform the best for you? Suppose subject line A got 20% of your list to open while subject line B got 40% of your list to open. If you never test your emails, you are making it harder on yourself.
With Drip, you can also see if someone opened your emails.
That’s cool because if the person doesn’t open your email asking for an appointment, you can just send another one, perhaps with a different subject line.
The idea is that this machine is working for you nonstop, keeping your name in front of your prospects and asking for appointments.
Hootsuite
Although many older advisors eschew the newer marketing and communication models, the planner without a strong online presence across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is at a disadvantage. To reign in these unwieldy platforms and systematize their delivery, Hootsuite, a social media marketing aggregator, is ideal.
This “freemium” product allows the advisor to post and respond to many social media accounts from one central location. A favorite Hootsuite feature is the opportunity to schedule social media posts in advance.
Risk Assessment Software
Risk, as it pertains to a client’s hard-earned money, is a confusing and often scary concept for them to understand. As their financial advisor, you’re responsible for explaining risk, and you’re entrusted to manage a client’s investments in a way that respects their risk tolerance. Risk assessment software helps you navigate the complex nature of risk so that you can develop portfolios based on realistic expectations of risk exposures. Farm Bureau’s use of Riskalyze means that our Wealth Management Advisors have tools that analyze risk and help them build investment portfolios.
Paladin Research and Registry
This free-to-consumers site serves people seeking a professional financial planner. To appear in their directory gives an advisor credibility and exposure. For a fee, this investor watchdog organization will rate an advisor according to experience, education, certifications, and other proprietary criteria. If the advisor passes the Paladin screening, he is eligible for a spot on its “five-star registry,” thereby broadening his professional profile.
Social Media Automation Tool
Social media is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in the sense that it allows to instant communication to masses of people, but a curse in the sense of the time commitment it takes from businesses.
But then again, you can make a LOT of money from social media. Which is why it’s great to have tools like Buffer.
Buffer allows you to upload social media content in advance and have it sent out at a predetermined time. It could be 3:00 a.m. and you could upload content to Buffer to share at a time when your audience is more engaged… unless your audience is vampires.
Having the tools in place to automate your social media content is another way to get a valuable task done in a very efficient way.
Plus, it allows you to consistently be posting content. Imagine having a prospect reach your Facebook page, only to see that you haven’t posted anything in eleven months. How does that make you look?
With social media automation software, you can develop consistent content distribution.
One thing I really like about Buffer is that it has built-in analytics right in your dashboard, which lets you see what types of content are resonating with your audience, so you can become more effective over time.
Fugent
Fugent offers a variety of software geared to financial service professionals. Its app for tablets is a unique remote presentation tool for out-of-office client meetings. The beauty of the app is that the advisor can elaborate on any uploaded document or report’s content, trends and information by writing on the document with their finger.
Online Scheduler
There are so many ways to communicate these days, all of which can make scheduling a meeting more complicated than it needs to be. Eliminate the time-consuming back and forth with an online scheduler. Customized scheduling tools set meetings, collate names and contact information, schedule follow-up appointments and adjust to your calendar so you won’t be accidentally double-booked. CircleBack provides Farm Bureau advisors with a tool they can use to streamline the scheduling process with clients, helping them — and their clients — focus on the important stuff.
Dropbox
Cloud-based backup services: These storage and transfer systems are constantly improving inaccessibility as well as security. There are many to choose from, but today’s advisor and her clients need a system to access and share important information from anywhere. Dropbox is one of the more popular and reliable.
Client Relationship Management Software
Think of client relationship management (CRM) software as the mothership of your business operations. It’s a hub that keeps track of existing client information, leads, and prospects. From phone numbers, addresses and personal details about clients to detailed conversation logs, a CRM manages all of the little things — freeing you up to handle the big-picture aspects of growing your business. And at Farm Bureau, Wealth Management Advisors tap into the power of the cloud with Redtail, a cloud-based CRM.
Precise FP
Data-gathering is one of the most tedious parts of the financial advisor’s job. Precise FP outsources this task. Clients input their information and attach appropriate forms and documents, and Precise FP aggregates the data into consistent, user-friendly forms. The attractive sheets can present the client data in diverse formats.
File Sharing Software
While some clients appreciate hard copies of documentation, it’s important to offer the option of receiving digital files, especially with younger clients. Consider a cloud-based file-sharing software to act as storage space and a transfer system no matter where your client is.
Bookeo
Scheduling meetings can be time-consuming for both the advisor and staff, frequently leading to lost minutes or hours. Bookeo.com acts like a super-secretary/concierge. From a ‘get acquainted meeting to a follow-up with an existing client, Bookeo takes care of making appointments, gathering the name, email, address, and phone information of the other party or parties. The system is highly customizable too.
NestEgg Estimator
The NestEgg Estimator, a Google app, is a comprehensive retirement tool that projects the client’s finances into the future and breaks them down into income, taxes, assets, and debt. The advisor can input varying amounts of data: The more data, the more detailed and accurate results. The app also gives the advisor the opportunity to play out various scenarios, such as changes in jobs, expenses, spending, and many more.
Google Alerts
The advisor must keep up with his or her online reputation. Google Alerts is an ideal tool to find out the ‘who, what, and where’ of your personal and company mentions. Set up an alert for the company name as well as your individual name. That way, you know whenever you receive a media mention online. It’s a great way for the professional to monitor social media marketing efforts and online presence.
Conclusion
Technology is redefining the way financial advisors do their jobs today. Finding and utilizing the latest tools is essential for creating and maintaining relationships and maximizing productivity. The technology that financial advisors use can be very confusing.
With so many apps and websites on the market, it may be hard to know what is offered. There are also some new startups that allow them to offer more services than just wealth management. Whatever the situation, there will always be different tools that you need for your financial planning business.