XY was born out of a desire to ensure advisers received value when allocating their time to educational content. If we assume continuous professional development is in fact the goal, then we really should have seen the corresponding improvement in advice. As an adviser at the time, myself and the other XY founders simply did not feel this was happening. Realistically, the majority of what was handed out to us had little value in providing professional development. We felt like our time was being wasted.
As a result of feeling like our pain points were not being solved, XY Adviser was created. What we didn’t anticipate was how many advisers felt the same way. We launched with a simple premise that still continues to this day: solve adviser problems. Advisers spend their life in advice. It naturally follows they are best positioned to identify the problems that need solving.
But with the nature of advisers being busy – it isn’t always advisers who have the time to piece together the solution. That’s where XY comes in. We act as a conduit between the two sides of the profession. In a nutshell, we source problems from the advice community, and solutions from the corporate community.
Our main goal is to always serve advisers. It’s how we arrived here, and it’s how we will take this business into the future. But with a unique premise, comes a unique business model too. We don’t do advertising in a traditional sense. We don’t serve banner ads, EDMs, or accept press releases. We don’t sell data, contact information, or cold leads. So what do we do?
We build adviser-first educational content. In doing so, we help our corporate community build awareness, authority, and advocacy with advisers on an annual basis. A win for adviser members, a win for our corporate members, and a win for us. While it took a while to arrive here, we are entirely happy we took the time. Here’s how we do it.
Awareness
The first place to start in any buying cycle is for advisers to be aware your product exists, and what it does. It’s hard to build trust with a company when you have no idea it what it is or what it does. But what does ‘awareness’ really mean? Getting a message in front of someone seven times is seen to be the ideal number for a message to be successfully observed. At ten impressions however, people move from simply observing an message, to actually remembering it.
Each year, we work with our corporate community to get a short 30 second message in front of advisers. We use our product backbone – the XY Podcast to get this message in front of thousands of advisers per year. As the XY Podcast has gathered a large adviser audience over the past five years, we have achieved market saturation. Receiving between 15,000 and 20,000 downloads per month. To put into context, our monthly downloads are higher than the number of advisers in the market right now. In terms of awareness, we are entirely confident we can help our corporate community achieve this. But awareness is not a one-off thing. We make sure our corporate community stays front of mind year on year.
Authority
Delivering a message is one thing but being known for a particular message is another one entirely. Carving out a position in the market to own takes time, but with consistent effort this is achievable. This is why we work with our corporate community to publish articles. Mini pieces of thought leadership of around 1,000 words, pointing back to a particular individual within the company. This type of medium provides space to share with advisers the thinking behind the products that advisers use.
It’s hard to stand out in a crowded room. There are around ten tech providers, ten life insurance companies, and ten investment platforms financial advisers engage with. Then – there are a thousand fund managers. Each of these companies have teams of people making decisions on how best to deliver great outcomes to advisers. It’s our job to get those messages out in a crowded room. Help our corporate community share their value and provide solutions to problems. Our job is to help advisers make the best decisions for their clients, and it takes amplifying messages to make that happen.
Advocacy
Achieving and maintaining awareness on an annual basis is a great starting point. Sharing a message about what your company is doing to make life better for advisers and their clients is another invaluable step in the process. But where working with XY really stands out, is our ability to work with our corporate community to solve real adviser problems. These specific pieces of work take quite some time to build, and for good reason.
Firstly, we use cutting edge technology to deeply understand the problems advisers are facing on the platform. We do this by implementing a new form of artificial intelligence released by OpenAI in December of 2021. We may not be creating self driving cars, or reverse parking rockets, but we are using the same AI to decipher the main issues advisers want solving. At this point we take solutions and messages our corporate community want to own in the market, and complete the same process. Essentially creating two separate AI experts, who are then able to communicate with each other and recommend a path of research to complete. Our in-house team of experts confirm recommendations with our corporate member, and we complete the research. Needless to say, being known to solve these large problems advisers are facing is well received.
We then co-create this research in the form of Thematic Podcast series, Written Thought Leadership pieces, documentaries, or presentations at our twice-annual All Licensee PD Day.
Join the Corporate Community
This year we have essentially filled out our tech and investment platform places, but we still have a couple of insurance and fund manager spots available. Once these are filled up, we can of course discuss options for next year. Whether or not we can work with you immediately, it’s always great to receive introductions. Feel free to get in contact with us here.
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