In case your not familiar with Mary Meeker, she is a legendary venture capitalist and former Wall Street analyst. Not only that, every year she releases a highly anticipated internet trends report that is an absolute must-read. Because we don’t expect you to read her 294 slides word for word we’re dissecting the top six most important points for you and how they relate specifically to us in the financial services industry. Not only that but we’re also going to dive into how Twenty Over Ten users can implement many of Meeker’s recommendations on their websites in a matter of minutes.
1. Subscription Services Are Hot, Hot, Hot!
Think Netflix, Spotify and Stitch Fix — these subscription services are massively popular and are seeing anywhere from a 25 to 48 percent adoption rate yearly. Okay great, so how does that apply to you as an advisor? This may mean it’s time to rethink your fees. Are you charging your clients a monthly fee instead of just AUM?
Retainer or subscription-based fees have been around in the financial industry for almost two decades. And although not many advisors use this structure today it is certainly gaining popularity according to XY Planning Network. Not only does moving to a subscription-base model encourage greater transparency between an advisor and the client but to the client it may also feel like just another monthly bill.
2. We’re Glued to Our Phones
Mobile usage continues to climb and U.S. adults are not only spending more time online but they’re spending more time online via their mobile devices. No surprise there! Stats show that the average adult is clocking about six hours per day with on a digital device vs. only about 5.6 hours in 2016. Additionally, we’re spending around 30 minutes each day watching videos on mobile devices.
For advisors this leads to one thing: is your firm mobile-friendly? Optimizing your website for mobile devices or having a “responsive design” is essentially what we mean by this. Not only are search engines beginning to demote sites that are not mobile-friendly but a non-responsive site is just clunky and ends in a poor user experience for your visitors.
At Twenty Over Ten this is huge for us, which is why all of our frameworks are created with a mobile-first approach. When developing our frameworks, our designers held priority on a seamless experience regardless of the device a user was viewing the website on. Through our platform, advisors can choose the framework that best fits their business and all respond to desktop, mobile phone, tablet – any device users may be on.
3. Crypto is “Cool”
It goes without saying that the interest in cryptocurrency is absolutely exploding. In fact, Mary Meeker shared that Coinbase’s user count has nearly quadrupled since January 2017 😳 While some may see Cryptocurrency as a “fad,” there’s no doubt it’s a trending topic and it isn’t going away.
Due to its popularity are you leveraging this crypto as best you can? If nothing else, as an advisor you should seriously consider educating your clients on the topic if you haven’t already. Share your stance, the pros and cons through your blog, newsletter, podcasts, vlogs and other communication vehicles.
All Twenty Over Ten users have the ability to create unlimited blogs. That’s right — completely unlimited! In addition, our newest content offering solution, Content Assist, includes pre-loaded articles around the topic of cryptocurrency. And it’s completely free in all of our website packages! Coincidence? We think not. That’s because all of our Content Assist topics are hand picked by our team of marketing experts who stay abreast of all things that are trending. Not only that but we also gladly accept topic requests from you — our users. Not convinced? Click play below to see for yourself👇
4. Daily Usage on the Rise
Revenue gains for services like Facebook are tightly coupled with daily user growth, showing how profitable it is to become a regular habit. It’s true — we are all glued to our screens. As an advisor, you should think really hard about how you can make your client interactions more regular. What we mean by that is how can you make your communications more of a daily habit? They key here is to not monetize it, but instead show value to your clients.
5. Freelancing is Freeing!
Meeker’s report shared that employees crave scheduling and work-from-home flexibility, and internet discovery of freelance work led it to grow 3X faster than total workforce growth. The on-demand workforce grew 23% in 2017 driven by Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, Upwork, and Doordash.
As an advisor you can most certainly capitalize on this. Take advantage of this by seeking help from freelancers who specialize in marketing, writing, designers, etc. This is an incredibly cost effective way to get branding and other digital marketing projects completed without having to hire someone full-time and in-house. Not only will this help with your firm’s cash flow but it will also take a lot of projects off your plate freeing you up to do what’s most important — taking care of your clients.
At Twenty Over Ten we understand that you may not have the bandwidth or knowledge to build your own website or write your own website copy or even create a social media strategy. That’s why our team is here to help from beginning to end. Rather than hiring someone in-house to build your website or write your website copy you can work with our team of seasoned experts to deliver a professional beautiful website.
6. The Voice Search Revolution
At Twenty Over Ten, we reported on this very topic months ago. So Meeker’s report even more solidified that voice technology is most definitely at an inflection point and it’s not budging. This boom is due to speech recognition hitting 95% accuracy and the sales explosion for Amazon Echo, which went from over 10 million to over 30 million sold in total by the end of 2017.
As advisors, we should think about how voice search impacts our web presence. More specifically, how voice search impacts SEO. As more and more people — young and old — use voice search to seek information online the way we look at our websites will need to shift.
With our unlimited landing pages users can easily cater to voice searchers by creating Q&A-style format pages or even dedicated FAQ pages on their websites. In addition, our inline editor makes it easy as pie to include questions throughout your site content.
Twenty Over Ten client, Life After Grief, uses an accordion-style FAQ page.
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