BACKGROUND

Even before Truly was incorporated, PWL Capital’s President, Brenda Bartlett, reached out to us (via a recommendation from long time friend Aleece Germano). PWL had been trailblazing wealth management in Canada for 20 years, promoting the idea of evidence-based passive investing. Though the approach was already popularized in the US because of high-profile studies and champions such as Warren Buffet, Canada was still incredibly slow to adopt.

PWL had been creating content for years and, though it had been a good part of their inbound success, Brenda expressed the desire to pull it together with a strategy and a more formalized plan.

The mandate was to research the market and come up with a strategy that would lead to more qualified leads and a growth in the profile of their boutique firm.

RESEARCH

Research into the market showed a few key issues:

1. Canadians in general aren’t very educated on investing. Most people go to their banks and ask about how to grow their money. Unfortunately, this leads to them being sold expensive products that make the banks more money than the investors.

2. This level of bad service has led to an overall distrust of banks and investment firms. All of this while they seem to all be paying lip service to “customer first” and “personalized investing,” which is really bogus, further damaging trust.

3. Women are still very underserved and patronized. They are more likely than any other market to switch advisors and they switch based on trust and connection.

There were also plenty of studies that showed that “millennials” were going to inherit a lot of money and they very much distrusted banks. They were also much more savvy on investing and low-fee options like robo-advisors were more attractive than the banks for this group.

None of these learnings were that shocking, really. The biggest insight for us was the advisors themselves.

What struck us was how unique each of them were! Though they were all part of PWL because they believed in the approach, they were all very unique in their approach and their audience.

STRATEGY

When we came back to Brenda with our strategy, it was clear that they didn’t require one series. What they required was help in developing a solid strategy for each of the advisors. In fact, this was going to be much better for the audience as well because choosing a financial advisor is such a personal decision.

So, over the next year, we worked on rolling out series for each of the advisors:

It was important to develop these series in a way that made the production and up-keep simple and straight forward. We put a strong editorial process in place that helped the teams get into a rhythm, coached them on editorial, content and even how to record themselves.

Two years later, many of these series are self-reliant and they’ve taken all of the production in-house. Truly continues to be a strategic partner, bringing in collaborators where necessary and advancing the strategy to the next level year after year.

THE RESULTS (2 yrs)

• Video views (YouTube only): 4 million (90% Canadian!)

• Average completion: 80% of the video length (videos are 5-10 minutes long)

• Subscribers across the channels: 63,000+ (YouTube)

• Podcast downloads: 750,000+

• 2, #2 Business Podcasts in Canada on iTunes on a regular basis (Canadian Couch Potato + Rational Reminder)

• A consistent flow of qualified leads and traffic to PWLCapital

• A large increase in media appearances for all of the advisors

PWL just rolled out a gorgeous new website that features the content much more prominently and we’re now working with them to make certain that we’re tracking the results end to end and fixing their search results in general (they were suffering with a previous website that wasn’t optimized for SEO).

EXAMPLES:

LINKS:

No Dumb Questions with Nancy Graham (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/nancygraham/

Your Money, Your Choices with Susan Daley (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/daleysusan

Common Sense Investing with Ben Felix (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/benfelixcsi

Canadian Couch Potato Podcast with Dan Bortolotti (iTunes): https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/canadian-couch-potato/id1183027240

Financial Planning with Peter Guay (YouTube): (EN) https://www.youtube.com/peterguay (FR) https://www.youtube.com/vosfinances

DIY Investing with Justin Bender (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/justinbendercpm

L’Investissement Décomplexé avec Raymond Kerzerho (iTunes): https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/linvestissement-d%C3%A9complex%C3%A9/id1164748116

Family Matters with Tony Layton (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/tonylayton

Rational Reminder with Ben Felix and Cameron Passmore (Apple Podcasts): https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-rational-reminder-podcast/id1426530582