Targeting
Targeting – it’s a concept fraught with negative connotations. No one wants to be seen as ‘the product’, and for good reason – no one wants to be manipulated. It’s why years ago XY took a clear stance on the XY/advisers/product relationship. Advisers are free to talk about anything, and product providers can work with us to create valuable content.
But what is ‘valuable content’, and how does XY ensure a good outcome for advisers and for product providers? The team here at XY approach it from a first principles point of view:
- Advisers want to get better at adding value to both their clients and their own bottom line.
- Product providers want to speak to more relevant advisers and distribute more product.
There’s a rudimentary view here that says these are competing priorities which can never be solved. We fundamentally disagree. We believe there is an amplification model here which solves for both. It’s an exceptionally unique business model, and something we are immensely proud of. It took us many years to develop, and it precisely lines up with our mission statement to ‘drive the positive evolution of financial advice’.
Normally Marketing
So how does XY do it? It’s a question we are often asked. How does XY solve both the adviser problem and the product provider problem without turning anyone into ‘the product’?
It comes down to how XY does targeting differently from other platforms.
Imagine how Linkedin does targeting. The goal for Linkedin is to know as many data points about each user. From there, it’s quite simple for any company to jump on to the Linkedin Ads Manager, target an audience, and feed them any kind of marketing message imaginable.
Linkedin provides open access to:
- any company – to attract
- any audience – to provide
- marketing message – they want
Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest… the list goes on. All these broad based platforms gather personal data points and provide marketing channels for companies to use. Not to say it doesn’t work, and there is an argument to say it’s better than blanket tv ads. But the issue we have with this method here at XY, is that it doesn’t solve for the financial adviser. The emphasis for outcome is heavily skewed in favour of just one stakeholder. The implicit message for the financial adviser receiving these messages is simple – ‘sit down, look at this logo, and listen to what we have to say’.
How does that ‘drive the positive evolution of financial advice’? It doesn’t. And how does this fulfil the adviser’s need to ‘get better at adding value to both their clients and their own bottom line’? The answer again is clearly – it doesn’t.
How XY Does Marketing
At XY we come from the angle of ensuring there’s value to the adviser in everything we do. So when we sat down to go deep on our revenue model, we made sure to look at business models which added value to the user, rather than simply converting them into ‘the product’. In the end, we created a very different business model to everything else in the market.
XY Adviser provides selected access to:
- vetted companies – who commission XY to produce
- education in areas advisers are requesting
Rather than any company getting in front of any adviser sharing any message they want, we do not provide open access. Rather we work with a small amount of clients each year, who commission us to produce educational content for financial advisers. And how do we ensure the educational content is relevant? We do something quite novel – we actually listen to advisers.
A Positive Impact
While all other platforms spend their time trying to understand individual data points, we spend our time trying to understand adviser problems. XY produces around 30 podcasts a month around the world, and we conduct in depth interviews with advisers each week. We pay attention to the problems and discussions happening on the platform. From these conversations, we deciphe r what the most important things advisers are aiming to solve at any given time. The problems are then workshopped with our clients to create a solution. Our goal is to reduce the time for an adviser to upskill in an urgent area of need, down from years – and into days.
Launching the platform in January 2020, XY now counts nearly 1 in 5 advisers as members, and growing rapidly. If you’d like to explore ways we can work together, feel free to contact us here.
