Becoming a thought leader is successively instrumental to building a tremendous wealth management business. It is becoming a necessity for those professionals who want to work with the wealthy—especially the ultra-wealthy.
You can acquire thought leadership content in two predominant ways. You can either curate thought leadership content or you can create thought leadership content, with each approach having advantages and disadvantages. Of course, you can do both.
Neither approach is inherently better. What will probably work best for you might not be very worthwhile for another wealth manager. A panoply of factors will come into play in deciding whether curating or creating thought leadership content is the best way for you to go.
Curating is when you provide you audiences with thought leadership content that someone else created. The ability to pull together and share ideas, concepts, strategies, product information and so forth that are meaningful and of strong interest to particular audiences is an extraordinarily effective and inexpensive way for wealth managers to provide thought leadership content.
When you create thought leadership content, you are building new ideas, concepts or solutions for particular audiences. A common way for wealth managers to create material is to leverage their expertise in a particular type of investing, for instance, or to rely on their observations and experiences.
The degree to which your thought leadership content is unique and meaningful to the people you are sharing it with produces your competitive advantage. This does not mean your thought leadership content has to be truly unique; it just has to deliver value to the audience.
When you create content that really connects with your audience and is in meaningful ways unique, you have a significant competitive advantage. The complication is that many professionals expend considerable resources to produce “me-too content.” When you create thought leadership content, you can likely have the biggest successes and the biggest failures.
When curating content, the downside is minimal. If something is not working, it is quite easy to shift gears. Meanwhile, you obtain the possibility of tremendous upside. By skillfully delivering curated thought leadership content, you can gain a competitive advantage.
Creating thought leadership content can get expensive. For instance, the packaging can be costly if you end up having to bring in a designer and writers. Then there are the production costs.
Curated thought leadership content, in contrast, is relatively inexpensive. Whether you are using a service or a platform or doing it yourself, the out-of-pocket expenses can range from $10,000 to $15,000.
When you are curating thought leadership content, you can use it pretty much immediately. So if you see a wealth client who could benefit from certain insights or a center of influence who needs to come up to speed concerning a particular financial solution, you can respond at that moment.
Creating thought leadership content, on the other hand, can be laborious and time consuming. If you and your team, including the experts you have engaged to assist in creating and packaging the intellectual capital, are going full blast, at best, you are looking at months before your content is available for use. If you are considering conducting primary research as part of the project, you should not expect to have anything to use for six months, and more likely a year.
Russ Alan Prince, president of R.A. Prince & Associates, is a consultant to family offices, the ultra-wealthy and select professionals.
