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Prestigious financial advisory firm captures high-end market with branded research and interactive tools. |
Litman/Gregory has long been known as the financial advisor’s financial advisor. As such, their research and analysis has been sought after by other firms. So, as the Internet matured, this forward-looking firm saw an opportunity to open up their store of research and analysis and make AdvisorIntelligence.com a comprehensive site, fully available to this high-end clientele.
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Overview: Highly respected financial investment and research firm seeks to bring their successful print publication online. In the process they learn to expand the service, partition their markets, and leverage their much sought after research into a powerful subscription website targeted to financial advisors.
Organization: Litman/Gregory is a financial services firm based in California. Founded in 1987, they offer a unique blend of detailed financial research, long-term investment strategies, mutual fund products, and a newsletter to high-net-worth clients, institutions, other financial advisors, and retail customers. Litman/Gregory has built a reputation for scrupulous research which they have used to grow a large, dedicated following in a highly competitive field.
Challenge: Bring a print newsletter with thousands of subscribers into the web environment, grow a high-end, sophisticated professional advisor client-base from the subscription pool. Once established on the web, extend the brand and increase subscription revenue from ranks of financial advisors.
Solution: When Steve Savage, publisher and managing director, arrived at Litman/Gregory Analytics, LLC in 1999 he immediately sought to translate Litman/Gregory’s success in print to even greater success on the web. Financial research currently available through a subscription-based newsletter would be made available online; and it would command a premium from a demographic that Litman/Gregory was already quite familiar with: financial advisors. The move would allow Litman/Gregory to target an upscale demographic by offering an added-value version of Litman/Gregory’s high-integrity research that included expanded coverage, practice management tools, and broader investment strategies.
Savage’s solution — a blend of commerce and web-enabled interactivity — was designed for the web by Publishing Resources, whose capabilities include an informed understanding of the financial community and financial instruments. As publisher and managing director, Savage engaged Publishing Resources to work with his marketing and research team to transition from print to web.
The AdvisorIntelligence.com subscriber is purchasing a business solution of their own. They use the AdvisorIntelligence research to recommend mutual funds to their clients, receive compelling content to adapt into their own practice’s newsletters along with PowerPoint presentations, forms and questionnaires, in-depth asset class research, fund due diligence, model investment portfolios, and updates on the select list of funds covered by Litman/Gregory.
Solutions, the newsletter for subscribers »View |
Result: The website has proved to be not just a technological answer, but a commercial one as well. Publishing Resources understands the financial industry clientele and tailored the AdvisorIntelligence website to address their needs for easy navigation, research, and downloading capabilities.
As a result of knowing their customer, when Publishing Resources provides customer service for any web-related questions, they are representing Litman/Gregory. Says Publishing Resources President Rich Mansfield, “We deliver what they are selling … and see that whatever communications we receive are handled by the right people … we’re not afraid to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.”
The client’s high-value market has grown with the creation of a sophisticated but easy-to-use website, resulting in a wider subscriber base of financial advisors who realize the added benefits and value of exclusive research with online tools and customized reporting features.
A Long-Term Relationship
The user-friendly design of the AdvisorIntelligence website mirrors the close working relationship between Publishing Resources and Litman/Gregory. It is simple and elegant. As to be expected, Litman/Gregory maintains the research, financial guidance, and content updates. The non-technical interfaces — a database-driven system — allows Litman/Gregory to focus on information, not the website. Publishing Resources does the HTML work that includes maintaining all back-office operations.