Intention.ly with Kelly Waltrich | E272

Bringing modern marketing to financial services.

On today's episode of Fintech Impact, Jason is going to talk to Kelly Waltrich, CEO of intentionally, a well-known marketing firm within the advisor and fintech space that helps companies market themselves effectively and get results.

Episode Highlights

  • 00:33: Kelly spent 10 years as a CMO of two of the fastest growing fintech's in the Spacey money advisor in Orion and along her journey Kelly realized that this industry was plagued with a lot of terrible advice around how marketing should be deployed in businesses. 

  • 01:16: Most people didn't get into a business to market it, they got into a business to do the thing that they wanted to build.

  • 02:20: You need to have an understanding of how certain things play with every other marketing effort that you have. It's not just ok to create a content strategy in a vacuum. You have to have it tied to everything else you are doing, says Kelly.

  • 05:09: Kelley is extremely particular about the firms that they work with. They conduct a pretty in-depth review of the companies before they agree to market them because they have to have a couple of things right.

  • 05:46: It's sort of blows Kelly's mind how little founders and leaders are sort of inspecting the world around them and understanding what they are up against.

  • 07:21: Kelly talks about a major red flag when people don't know the competitive landscape.

  • 08:51: Kelly shares how they try for the most part, to just make sure that the brand is solid and what the messaging is going to be.

  • 10:29: As per Kelley it is important to clearly define goals and she is a stickler about the goal-defining process.

  • 10:50: If your end goal is you want to recruit 5 new advisors, we need to figure out what that means, says Kelly.

  • 11:54: Most ironically, in industry, it's always about helping people reach their goals.

  • 15:23: Just because you hung a shingle doesn't mean people are going to walk in and just hand you money. 

  • 17:50: People have the attention span of a goldfish. By the time they have approached you they have already started doing something else. If you let days go by before you get back to them, it just makes no sense.

  • 19:09: Kelly shares how they track revenue through growth of all of their clients.

  • 21:01: Content is everything, you have to distribute it through the right channels at the right times to the right audiences, but the content is the fuel that drives everything.

  • 24:54: When you tell firms they need to add value to the lives of the people that they are trying to reach, so much of the value that they add they are so scared to add for free because they say that is what we charge for and that's what they pay us for.

  • 25:47: Your brand is being distributed. More people are seeing it. It's so worth it, and Kelley tells everybody the same story.

  • 28:58: Kelley is on a crusade to help firms realize the value of modern marketing that it should have a seat at the table, that it should be driving strategy, and then it should be a driver of company revenue.

3 Key Points

  1. Kelly shares how she was really compelled to create a company in that everyone in it had a strong industry context, understood the competitive landscape, understood the inner workings of each of the firms, and understood how everything needed to be connected.

  2. Kelly explains what content map is and how they use it.

  3. Kelly explains how they spend a lot of time building content strategies and content plans that fuel the overall demand generation plans. 

Tweetable Quotes

  • "When everybody was reevaluating what they were doing with their lives, I wanted to build a firm that could turn that around for this industry and help firms deploy modern marketing to generate revenue, turn their marketing efforts into revenue generating activities." - Kelly Waltrich

  • "I am building this technology. It is so awesome. It's going to change the way advisors work." - Kelly Waltrich

  • "We make sure that we have a story that we can work with because, at the end of the day, we can't create campaigns, we can't drive opportunities." - Kelly Waltrich

  • "Once you have given us your granular, thoughtful, realistic goals, we get after it, and we put a plan together, and we say this is, this is what it's going to take, this is what it's going to take from your time." - Kelly Waltrich

  • "We have a lot of firms that come to us, and it's very me, me, me, me, me, and it's hard to get people to realize that they're adding no value to the lives of the people that they are trying to reach, and they are basically their egos are basically fueling the messaging that they are putting out." - Kelly Waltrich

Resources Mentioned

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech