Case Study: California Retirement Advisors (CRA) - Social Media and Video Content Strategy Success

Client Background:

California Retirement Advisors (CRA), also known as CRA Advisors, is a leading financial advisory firm based in California, committed to providing personalized retirement planning services to its clients.

Client's Challenge:

When CRA engaged with Beetle Moment Marketing approximately two years ago, they faced several challenges in their marketing efforts:

needing a Marketing leader and a plan:

Without a clear marketing strategy or priorities, CRA struggled to stand out in the competitive financial advisory space. Webinars and campaigns were happening in a one-off nature and they wanted to plan ahead on a quarterly basis targeting both evergreen and seasonal topics, e.g. year-end tax tips in Q1 or tax preparation in Q1.

Inefficient Resource Allocation:

CRA was overspending on redundant tools, software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, and underutilized resources, impacting their marketing budget and ROI. The list of tools and subscriptions needed to be trimmed in order to be efficient and cost-effective. Various vendors were running SEM and SEO campaigns but not reporting on results; there was too much unmonitored activity across contractors without a dedicated resource to hold all accountable and track progress.

Lacking social media Presence and optimized blog content:

CRA had a blog but it was not optimized for search and keywords. Its publishing schedule lacked a strategic approach and schedule. In fact, the blog had too much wide-ranging content without writing for their target avatar (ideal client). This bulk posting approach hurt their SERP rankings for subject matter expertise from a Google search perspective. They wanted to rank for terms related to California taxes and estate planning for successful people nearing or in retirement.

Their minimal social media presence was missing the opportunity to grow their audience and brand awareness, and to showcase the friendly, intelligent advisors on their team. The blog, email, and social content read as somewhat canned and not personalized or reflective of the high-touch thoughtful nature of their team and the financial planning experience that delights their clients.

Our Approach:

Beetle Moment Marketing initiated a comprehensive marketing engagement and we created a strategy to address CRA's challenges and elevate their marketing efforts. The process began with our signature Brand Strategy and Messaging - Discovery Phase, which included stakeholder interviews to gain insights into CRA's business goals, existing marketing strategies, and areas for improvement.

We charted out all marketing expenditures and results in a single dashboard (a source of truth) and found areas to save CRA money without impacting results. Through this phase, we identified cost-saving opportunities, resulting in a 20% reduction in CRA's marketing spend by eliminating redundant tools and optimizing resources. Within three months engagement had increased 64% and spend was down.

Most importantly, we applied the branding and messaging creative to an operationalized approach to streamline and organize sharing content on social media, email, blog, and YouTube.

Our team operationalized content marketing with a strategic milestone-based timeline resulting in efficient batch delivery of content to the compliance team.

Key Actions:

1. Strategic Resource Allocation:

Beetle Moment Marketing sourced and managed two freelance marketing hires—one specializing in social media content creation and the other in SEO and website updates. This strategic allocation of resources ensured that CRA's marketing needs were efficiently met while optimizing their budget. The new social media resource was more expensive but created more engaging and effective content, driving over a 300% increase in engagement the first year.

We planned, produced, and recorded YouTube and social media videos about topics the target audience of pre-retirees would search for, e.g. HSA (Health Savings Account) and healthcare costs

2. Content Strategy Enhancement:

We devised seasonal financial content themes for CRA's social media platforms, focusing on engaging and informative content. This included guiding the content writer on optimizing YouTube and social media short-form videos to maximize audience engagement.

Off-site SEO strategy for CRA included Google Maps / Google My Business listing hygiene

3. Personalized Video Content Production:

We produced Riverside video recordings featuring CRA team members, highlighting their financial advice expertise. These recordings were edited into engaging social media videos, enriching CRA's brand presence and fostering audience connection.

4. Introducing Content Themes:

Beetle Moment Marketing introduced distinct content themes, such as "Core Definitions," to simplify complex financial concepts like Stretch IRA and See-Through Trust, making them more accessible to CRA's audience. We also grouped their YouTube videos into SEO-friendly YouTube Playlists.

5. Thematic and Topical Posts:

Beetle Moment Marketing created thematic and topical posts addressing important financial topics such as HSAs and healthcare costs in retirement, further establishing CRA as a trusted source of information.

Instagram grid for California Retirement Advisors mixes IG Reels and engaging graphics. We showcase their advisors and tax tips.

Results:

Significant Increase in Engagement:

In October 2023, CRA experienced a remarkable 204% increase in social media engagements compared to October 2022, showcasing the effectiveness of Beetle Moment Marketing's strategies.

optimized Video Format:

A/B testing of various video formats, including long-form widescreen for YouTube, square videos for social media, and one-minute vertical Reels and YouTube shorts, helped optimize content delivery and enhance audience interaction.

Boosted Overall Social Media Engagement Rate:

In November 2023, CRA achieved a 6.3% overall social media engagement rate, marking a significant 146% increase over the previous year.

Consistent Growth:

Throughout 2023, CRA witnessed consistent growth in engagements on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and X, reaping the benefits of the organic work and efforts invested in both 2022 and 2023 content.

Their email marketing open rate and click rates each increased by over 14% YoY thanks to our updated email template design and content guidance.

See our work (multimedia showcase):

Samples of the content we created for California Retirement Advisors:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by California Retirement Advisors (@cradvisorsgroup)

See Maili's YouTube Playlist on Financial Education

Conclusion:

Beetle Moment Marketing's collaboration with California Retirement Advisors exemplifies the transformative power of a strategic social media and video content approach. By implementing tailored strategies, optimizing resources, and fostering engaging content creation, CRA witnessed substantial growth in brand presence and audience engagement, positioning them as a prominent player in the competitive financial advisory landscape.

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For more information on how Beetle Moment can elevate your marketing efforts, see our services or send us a message.

Case Study: Brand Messaging Strategy for BPO Company

Spoke is a premier Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company who partnered with Beetle Moment Marketing to enhance its brand presence and communicate its unique selling proposition (USP) more effectively through website, messaging, sales materials, and social media.

The Challenge 

Despite boasting an industry-leading 83% retention rate, Spoke struggled to express its superior value proposition, especially their remarkable integrity. As a BPO company (business process outsourcing), Spoke needed a way to reach their target audience of startup founders and introduce their time-saving talent placement solution. Employee surveys pointed towards an urgent need for more robust brand representation and an engaging social media presence.

Essentially, Spoke had a high value offering with the stats to back it, but the world couldn’t tell from their website and marketing materials.

Brand positioning & messaging strategy

Spoke needed to bottom line the essence of their brand so the target audience would understand their solution.

The Approach 

To fully grasp Spoke's unique challenges and potential, Beetle Moment initiated a discovery phase involving Spoke's CMO, CEO, founder, and representatives from various departments. This intensive engagement period, lasting two months, revealed a roadmap to accentuate Spoke's brand and offerings. 

As a messaging foundation, we summarized our discovery meetings into what the brand is and is not.

We surveyed stakeholders and employees about the Spoke brand. This is the resulting word cloud, inspiring the messaging to focus on keywords such as: trustworthy, innovative, and employees having a voice.

Key activities included an internal stakeholder survey, brand spectrum exercise, competitor analysis, developing engaging messaging, curating enticing taglines, enhancing website design, and optimizing SEO, all aimed at educating prospects and website visitors about Spoke's BPO offerings.

We updated Spoke’s sales deck to optimize language and graphics.

We also evaluated their sales materials such as pitch decks and email marketing to identify opportunities for stronger messaging to convince leads to become clients.

The Solution 

We took their strongest stats about retention and promotions to create compelling visuals for Spoke’s marketing and sales materials.

The project resulted in a comprehensive messaging package, complete with updated website content, design recommendations, and an improved case study showcasing Spoke's success stories. The team crafted a series of ready-to-use social media content, including tweets and LinkedIn posts, alongside suggestions for PR, media, and podcast appearances.

Further, an in-depth competitor analysis was performed, assessing the websites, SEO, advertising presence, CPM, and social media content of the top three BPO competitors.

Highlights from our recommendations:

1. Target avatar summary (the ideal client’s behavior, goals, interests, challenges, values, and Spoke’s value proposition)

2. Website content and messaging (copydeck, navigation, UX flow)

   1. Structural upgrades such as: website domain. The current domain was a .co and missed keyword opportunities (including BPO, a high volume search term for their target audience), strong readability, and equity for the brand name.
      Original: gospoke.co
      Recommended: spoke-bpo.com

3. Competitor website analysis and comparison including search volumes and keywords

4. Marketing content strategy including:

   1. SEO blog posts, whitepapers, case studies (assets written and delivered to Spoke)

   2. Organic and PR opportunities such as podcast appearances and media coverage

   3. Social media engagement strategy and content (multimedia text, video, and YouTube)

   4. Strategic partnerships to pursue

   5. Awards and recognitions to pursue

We delivered five tagline options like these, for Spoke to use on their website and marketing materials, social media profiles, and sales decks. Tagline creation was one of our favorite parts of this project because the challenge of distilling a brand into one sentence is easily the most difficult but impactful part of brand messaging. #foundation

The value of great messaging

We delivered multiple tagline options to A/B test, slogans, social media posts, email marketing content, and a messaging hierarchy to use across marketing and sales channels. This gave Spoke’s brand a consistent voice, emphasizing the trustworthy brand attribute that 90% of employees identified.

The Impact

This strategic initiative not only provided Spoke with the tools to revamp their website and initiate a competitive social presence, but it also reinvigorated the leadership team. Equipped with a new playbook, they felt inspired to lead the charge in enhancing Spoke's brand identity and digital footprint.

For your transformative brand messaging solutions, contact us.

Case Study: From Radio to Podcast Audiograms - Voice Marketing (Financial Advisor)

David Hollander is an attorney and financial advisor, and the Founder of Liberty Group LLC headquartered in Oakland, CA. Liberty Group is an RIA (registered investment advisor). Unlike most financial advisors, they provide estate law, wealth management, and tax planning all under one roof.

Award-winning financial advisor and attorney David Hollander, Founder of Liberty Group, shows you how to protect your assets at 8:00 a.m. Saturday mornings on KNBR 680, and on his popular podcast, Protect Your Assets.

For about ten years, David has hosted Protect Your Assets on the Bay Area’s number one sports radio station, KNBR. PYA airs Saturdays at 8am. David’s show is also a podcast by the same name. He successfully acquires leads from the radio show who convert into clients for Liberty Group. Many of these leads call into a phone number given during the live radio show.

The problem:

David recognized that while his main marketing channel of his popular radio show was effective and his business was booming, he needed to ensure his marketing methods would be future proof.

We rebranded Protect Your Assets and upgraded its brand strategy and social media presence, also launching an interactive voice app on Alexa and Google Assistant so listeners could simply ask to hear the latest episode or learn more about Liberty Group.

Liberty Group’s target demographic of pre-retirees and retirees are aging. People listen to terrestrial radio less and less each year. (Edison Research has shown for years in their Smart Audio Report that radio is declining in favor of spoken word streaming audio such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more podcast apps, sometimes called podcatchers).

The number of radios in the average household is declining in the U.S., going from a 3.0 mean in 2008 to a 1.5 mean in 2020 via Edison Research, Infinite Dial 2020

David also had a minimal social media presence and wanted to share more engaging bite size audio content to engage new people online and drive more subscribers to his podcast which is adapted from the radio show and airs three segments weekly.

He wanted to take all his audio content to the next level and grow his podcast audience.

We showed the team how to generate audiograms from their podcast episodes then share to social - like this tweet from @pyaradio. Engagement increased 36% in the first week of this effort.

We rebranded the podcast logo to be more visible than the previous one which was dominated by more empty white space and the Statue of Liberty; in this logo we feature David’s alter ego/nickname, The Sandman as a heroic cartoon character who helps you sleep at night (because your assets are protected).

The solution:

• We created a content calendar to promote his podcast content and implemented dozens of tactics as part of a level-up strategy

• We rebranded the PYA podcast graphics and boosted the quality and frequency of his social media sharing featuring Instagram audiograms like this.

• We created brand consistency across all social channels for Liberty Group and Protect Your Assets including homepage updates and the podcast page getting a Plink universal sharing link

• Podcast SEO and discoverability: We renamed all past podcast episodes with keyword rich titles and set a format for new titles going forward to take advantage of podcast search engine indexing around terms like “investing” and “retirement”. Examples:

  • Before:
    https://libertygroupllc.com/radio-show/week-37-market-segment (no keywords)

  • After:
    https://libertygroupllc.com/radio-show/last-minute-tax-tips/ (more search friendly now)

• We created audiograms and a process for generating at least two audiograms each week like this

• We leveled up his YouTube presence, giving specific video filming training to his advisors on creating videos relevant to investing and retirement

• We gave the team a process and format to optimize each episode’s show notes/blog post embedding their podbean audio player widget and creating at least a paragraph of unique intro text with keywords and a strong URL

• We created a YouTube SEO strategy utilizing titles, descriptions, and all-important thumbnails to help people find his videos

• We taught the team how to repurpose YouTube videos into blog posts like this

• We created a blog on libertygroupllc.com, which previously didn’t have one. This would allow us to create content around important investing and retirement topics and be found organically, a goal for the team (to decrease ad spend and boost inbound content marketing for lead gen)

• We created a New Client Welcome Message available on his custom Alexa Skill and Google Action called Protect Your Assets (more info on the voice apps coming soon in a separate case study):

• New client greeting on Alexa:

  “You may have a mix of assets ranging from a business you own, to real estate, to investments, a 401k, IRAs, art, or cryptocurrency. And sometimes you also want tax and legal advice. We're here to help with all of it to get you on track and keep you strategically invested for the retirement you've always dreamed of. I'm David Hollander, Founder of Liberty Group. Welcome to our family and thank you for trusting us to protect your assets. You can say "learn more", "play the latest podcast," or "goodbye".

”Alexa, ask Protect Your Assets to play the latest podcast.” Quick Link here to launch

Results:

• 36% increase in podcast downloads

• 5 star reviews on Alexa on Google

• 23% increase in Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn engagement

• Highest number ever of leads registering for weekly webinars and booking introductory calls

Case Study: Podcast + Alexa Flash Briefing for Women-Led Wealth Management Firm

Aspen Wealth Management is an RIA based in Fort Worth, Texas. Their daily audio briefing embodies their transparent approach to financial planning with an emphasis on relationships. (Photo by Enrique Macias on Unsplash.)

Financial advice "by women, for women, and the men who love them."

Relationships are the keyword for Aspen Wealth Management. They’re a fee-only, comprehensive financial planning firm located in Fort Worth, Texas. 

Aspen Wealth Management offers an honest and transparent approach to financial, retirement, tax and investment planning for individuals, families, and small businesses, with an emphasis on building relationships.

A Strong Foundation, Not Just Investing Results

Helen Stephens founded Aspen Wealth Management in late 2011. Helen has been a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional since 1993, an Enrolled Agent (EA) since 2009, and has more than 20 years of experience in the field of financial services.

Candace Scholz is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professional and joined Aspen Wealth Management in 2015.

During our second planning call, Candace shared this insight about what makes Aspen unique:

Most clients will say that investment returns are key. In fact, Dimensional Fund Advisors polled the clients of other advisors who are the same size as our firm. Across the board, most clients responded that the most important factor in their satisfaction with their advisor was their investment returns.

Except for our clients. They said that their overall financial plan is key. 

It is NOT just about investing, it’s the value of understanding all the facets of your life and how this impacts your finances and your future. Having a strong foundation to move confidently forward in your life - this is what our clients value in Aspen as their financial guide.

DFA cornered us and said: “You’re the only firm with these results (where clients highly valued the holistic plan).”

The Solution

We helped Aspen Wealth Management launch Purposeful Planning, a daily briefing featuring investing and retirement advice. It’s a mini podcast and is available on Alexa Flash Briefing (Alexa’s native news feature).

Candace explained, “Every member of our team focuses on making our clients and their families feel comfortable when discussing financial decisions that can potentially be stressful and could have a great impact on their lives.”

How could we translate those values into content marketing?

We help people.

What really stood out after getting to know the team at Aspen Wealth Management is how passionate they are about helping clients. This is a reason we love working with financial advisors. People in this profession really do care. You can hear it all in Helen’s emotional and touching client stories that she shared on the pilot episode “Good Cop, Bad Cop” on TD Ameritrade’s podcast, Beyond the Portfolio:

“Helen has a strong personality and no-nonsense attitude. But, more importantly, Helen knows when to play good cop and when to play bad cop.” Listen on Overcast.

Alexa Flash Briefing allows anyone with an Amazon Echo or the Alexa smartphone app to get short daily news by saying, “Alexa, news.” This is an easy way to push out helpful content in bite size chunks.

We created a content plan and specific step-by-step guidance to help Aspen launch a mini podcast.

How We Named the Show:

We went through a branding exercise together, having them team free associate with adjectives and nouns or phrases that embodied their brand. After coming up with a dozen options for show names, we settled on one of our earliest ideas.

Because the purpose behind their planning is their foundation, the title Purposeful Planning with Aspen Wealth Management was an obvious choice for meaning as well as keywords for search.

Podcast and flash briefing features:

• Length: 2-3 minutes average, new episodes every weekday

• Audio only: available as an Alexa Flash Briefing and as a standard podcast

• Multiple voices/hosts - showcasing the Aspen team

• Original sonic branding that we created with a partner musician (intro / outro music, play a sample below)

• Weekly and monthly themes incorporating seasonality or current events (such as a presidential election, tax season, or handling the COVID-19 stock market and volatility)

We trained the team in best practices and tools for producing a daily 3-minute briefcast (AKA mini podcast). Play a sample briefing:

Results

• 328% increase in plays over past 30 days (as of August 2020)

• Over 1,100 listens in the first three months with zero advertising (only organic social media promotion)

• Ranking #1 on Alexa Skills search for terms like “financial advice”

• Social posts with audiograms from the briefing garner 66% increased engagement on Twitter and Facebook

Aspen Wealth’s Flash Briefing skill is ranking #1 on Amazon under Alexa Skills for search terms such as “financial advice”

Hear Purposeful Planning Everywhere:

1. On Amazon Alexa: Enable the Alexa skill here then say, “Alexa, news.”

2. 1-click enable the podcast in your favorite app

3. On Google Assistant (Google Home smart speaker, Google Assistant iOS app, or Android device):

   1. Say, “Hey Google, play the latest episode of Purposeful Planning with Aspen Wealth Management”

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How do you grow an Alexa Flash Briefing?

1. To organically grow your Alexa skill, optimize your skill icon, title, description, and keywords on your settings in the Alexa Developer Console following SEO best practices.

2. Share clips as audiograms on social media.

3. In social posts or emails, include clear instructions and links for people to enable the skill, play the Flash Briefing, and subscribe to the podcast. More tips here: how to grow your flash briefing.

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Audiograms are still images with audio and captions that get high engagement on social media. Podcast hosts can share short clips effectively with audiograms. See this audiogram tweet featuring Candace hosting the flash briefing.

See those social posts from Tip #3 above in action: Aspen is now sharing audiograms like this and this.

By the way, you should really have a Plink if you have a podcast. It’s that 1-click podcast link we shared above.

Here’s why (video) or read more about podcast marketing tips on our blog.

Get your Plink here.

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Have a specific marketing need? get 30-minute coaching.

Book a marketing session with Emily Binder.

Case Study: Content Marketing + Alexa Voice Strategy for UX Design Agency - Nine Labs

Nine Labs is an Atlanta-based user experience and product design firm with clients including major airlines, hotels, and startups.

The problem:

With years of blog posts, podcasts, videos, white papers, and ebooks there was plenty of content but no strategic method to effectively share it on social media. Potential traffic and leads were left on the table. Nine Labs wanted to organize and share all their content to increase engagement, brand recognition, and ultimately leads.

Nine Labs: Made with ❤️in Atlanta, GA

The solution:

We created a robust social media marketing strategy and guide to help Nine Labs with content marketing. We also launched an Alexa Flash Briefing to establish a voice presence in the UX design category. Then we provided ongoing guidance in implementing, empowering their in-house team to manage it.

Custom Content Marketing Strategy

Goals:

1. Increase blog traffic

2. Increase leads

3. Increase social engagement

4. Establish voice presence on Alexa

Strategy characteristics:

• Content buckets and monthly themes based on Nine Labs’ driving principles from 4 Steps to a Human Centered Business Model

• Specific guidelines to create social posts (text, graphics, video, and audiograms) for different social channels including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn - each with different goals and slightly different audiences

• Introduction of audiograms

  • Guidelines on creating effective, short audiograms for Instagram and Twitter by repurposing past podcast and YouTube video content

Audiogram for Instagram (static image with 1-minute audio and captions)

Alexa Skills search ranking in app for “UX design” keywords - Nine Labs Flash Briefing

• Brand separation from executive profile: Clarity and direction on content strategy for CEO (and helluva smart guy) J Cornelius’s personal brand and the Nine Labs brand

• Strategy and launch of Design Driven, an Alexa Flash Briefing about UX and product

  Fact: Design-driven companies outperform the S&P by 228%.
  
  Interested in the intersection of business, design, UX, and product development? Enable this daily briefing about using design to build great products and lasting companies.

• Repurposing and repackaging high quality content instead of starting from scratch, saving the client time

• Optimize lead magnet forms on blog and website

• Strategically drive traffic to lead magnets, downloadable PDFs, and blog

• Optimized Alexa Flash Briefing keywords, description, and daily content. Hear past briefings below:

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Results of 8-week marketing engagement:

Obsess over your customers. #uxdesign

• Increase in social engagements:

  • Facebook up 21%

  • Instagram up 893% (from 312 to 3,100)

  • Twitter up 178%

  • LinkedIn from 0 to 48 average weekly engagements

• Increased blog traffic and leads from social

• VOICE SEARCH OPTIMIZATION: Within two weeks, ranked on page 1 , top three results of Alexa Skills search results for terms including “ux”, “product design,” and “ux design”

• Empowered marketing team to efficiently run with this strategy on their own

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“Emily has an incisive mind about marketing and how voice is rapidly changing the landscape. She worked hard to find the right use of the technology without compromising quality or our brand message.”

— J Cornelius, Founder and President, Nine Labs

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Why We Love Nine Labs

If you need guidance on designing a digital product, we recommend J Cornelius and his ace team at Nine Labs. Hands down, they’re the best. Nine Labs understands design and how it fits into business as a whole. They also run killer workshops and training.

Get the best thinking from startups and enterprise to give your projects the support to succeed. https://ninelabs.com/

Case Study: Josh Brown's Mini-Podcast "The Compound Show" - Alexa Skill

What if you could listen in on regular conversations between professionals working in money management?

We created the strategy and built a custom Alexa Skill for Ritholtz Wealth Management called The Compound Show. After launching their Market Moment Flash Briefing in 2018, in 2019 the RWM team wanted to expand on the voice marketing strategy to increase their early adopter voice marketing footprint.

As trailblazers in blogging and social media in the personal finance and investing space, the Ritholtz Mafia wanted to be early to voice, too.

Josh and Emily discuss Ritholtz's Alexa Skills. Hear why RWM is "kind of a big deal" when it comes to voice in the finance space.

Read more about Josh Brown (@reformedbroker) and Barry Ritholtz (@ritholtz), the forces behind some of the most popular investing blogs, videos, television, and social media accounts: Josh Brown and Barry Ritholtz: From breakout bloggers to RIA rock stars

Josh Brown and Barry Ritholtz. Image courtesy of Citywire USA, 2018.

THE COMPOUND SHOW (Original version) - MINI-PODCAST AND ALEXA SKILL

Ritholtz Wealth Management is an RIA with roughly $2.57 billion in assets under management (AUM) as of May 2023.

In March 2019, we launched a first-of-its-kind custom voice Alexa Skill and mini-podcast about investing based on the popular The Compound YouTube channel.

Josh Brown explained our project “The Compound Show” in its first iteration and how his goal was to disrupt the traditional lengthy podcast format:

I invented the mini-podcast. All the financial industry and investment-oriented podcasts are an hour long or more. I think that’s because the person whose podcast it is feels bad about asking a guest to come on and then cutting them short. Some podcasts should be an hour – Patrick O’Shaugnhnessy interviewing Michael Mauboussin, for example, or Barry Ritholtz interviewing Ray Dalio, or Michael Kitces interviewing Ric Edelman.

But most podcasts are too long and not every guest has an hour-plus worth of stuff you want to hear. However, the format persists.

I think it’s just something that’s become a tradition – to interview each guest for an hour and change – even though that’s not what the listener actually needs or wants from every conversation.

-Josh Brown

…read more about The Compound Show on The Reformed Broker

Original logo for The Compound Show mini-podcast and Alexa Skill

For this podcast, Josh recorded 10-12 minute phone calls with investing experts to give the audience a behind-the-scenes glimpse. We synced the RSS feed to his custom Alexa Skill available by voice command.

2021 update:

With a growing audience, Ritholtz and team rebranded and expanded the show, making it a weekly full length YouTube podcast. It’s fantastic and has topped the Apple Podcasts top 10 financial podcast rankings as of 2023.

You can hear it on your favorite podcast app or hands-free by saying: “Alexa, play The Compound and Friends” or “Hey Siri, play The Compound and Friends.”

Case Study: Fintech - Social Media Strategy for Global Payments Provider (Remittance)

The problem:

A successful fintech company with a monopoly on maritime payments had little to no brand presence on social media. As part of a brand overhaul and website update, we began a strategic effort to build the professional brand and thought leadership presence. As an award-winning fintech, this client wanted their LinkedIn and Twitter presence to reflect their commitment to democratizing global payments with innovative technology. Also important to convey: healthy culture and a great place to work with people who care.

The solution:

We focused on three audiences: local business and fintech, job seekers and candidates, and current employees. Through content marketing, hands-on daily management, and community building, after six months we had great results:

Objectives:

• Post consistently on LinkedIn and Twitter (@BrightwellApp)

• Increase overall social engagement rate

• Grow followers

• Establish a presence as subject matter experts and a source of industry updates

Organic growth - fintech brand Twitter account

July-December 2018 Organic Follower Growth:

• 4x increase - Twitter

• 57% increase - LinkedIn

Tactics - content we shared and promoted:

• Variety of topical articles from quality industry publications and users

  • Add commentary and insights for original viewpoint

• Tag engaged users and authors

• Behind the scenes photos (conferences, events, office culture)

• Relief campaigns for disaster relief in users’ home countries such as Indonesia

  • One relief campaign went viral (over 43,000 retweets, no spend)

• Job posts

• Twitter: Built original Lists to curate quality content faster

LinkedIn Followers (Organic)

Brightwell began with 1,085 followers. After our work, they had about 5,000 followers and a 201% increase in monthly page views.

Relief campaign for natural disaster: went viral organically on Twitter

LinkedIn and Twitter:

• We established consistent brand presence beginning in July 2018

• We created steady organic follower growth

• What happened?

  • LinkedIn post engagement:

    • Before our work: 2%

    • After two months: 19%

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Case Study: Fintech App Adoption: Facebook Advertising for Brightwell Payments

We launched an organic and paid social media strategy from ground zero, resulting in over a 110% increase in app MAU (monthly active users) in 2018.

About Brightwell:

Brightwell is an Atlanta-based fintech company offering end-to-end payment solutions through cutting edge technology and unparalleled support, serving cruise lines such as Carnival Cruise Lines, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Costa, Princess, and AIDA.

End Users (Audience for Ads):

Cruise crew members and seafarers who live all over the world, concentrated in Indonesia, Philippines, and India. Many of these seafarers are unbanked or underbanked. They work on ship for months at a time and travel to their home countries in between.

Carnival Cruise employees are paid through Brightwell.

Our Goal:

Educate and increase app adoption among a user base largely unfamiliar with digital payments, credit cards, and banking. Change habits from mainly cash and ATM use to online transfers within the Brightwell Navigator app.

Challenges:

• Language barriers

• Technology barriers (many crew lack experience with online banking)

• Spotty and slow Wi-Fi onboard ship

• High turnover of active crew

• Crew’s mistrust of payments providers due to past negative experiences

• Cash-centric cultures such as Philippines

Strategy:

Facebook and Instagram advertising targeting crew members, encouraging app install and adoption through features and benefits as well as persona-based messaging.

We created customer personas (AKA avatars) for each nationality on ship because culture plays a key role in relationships with money, both emotionally and logistically when it comes to banking.

Year 1 of Facebook Advertising:

launch, test, iterate, optimize, repeat

Results:

• Over 110% increase in MAU (monthly active users)

• Decreased CPI (cost per app install) to one-tenth that of the benchmark / goal

• Optimized CPC and CTR with over 60% and 35% improvement, respectively

Brightwell remains a client as they continue to establish themselves as a major player in the payments space and one of the fastest growing companies in Transaction Alley (Atlanta’s fintech ecosystem).

Details available upon request.