Interview with Ryan Russell, Co-Founder at Twenty Over Ten
Twenty Over Ten is a digital marketing platform for modern financial advisors. Ryan Russell’s expertise in brand and identity design, user experience and user interface make him uniquely suited to help clients achieve their vision in a digital space. His blend of design and entrepreneurial expertise helps drive the direction of Twenty Over Ten.
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| Ryan Russell |
Recently, Twenty Over Ten announced a robust line-up of new updates to its Lead Pilot tool to help advisory businesses improve their inbound marketing efforts. These new additions will enable financial advisors to better manage their content and communications in less time, generate new leads from digital marketing, and grow their businesses – completely virtually. The platform now boasts the addition of curated automated drip campaigns, gated content, Facebook Pixel for retargeting content readers, and pre-written weekly market summaries.
To get more details about this big launch and the future plans of the company, we’ve asked Ryan several questions. See his answers below.
When did you understand that your clients will benefit from the new features? Was this a response to any event?
Ryan: These latest features have been on our product roadmap since we unveiled Lead Pilot at the T3 conference in February 2020. However, over the past few months the pandemic has really forced advisory businesses across the world to shift their marketing efforts completely digital and right now more than ever, lead generation is crucial to the success of advisory firms. So we decided to fast track these improvements and additions so that advisors can better serve their clients and prospects digitally at a time when it’s much needed.
What other features do you plan to roll out within your “shift to digital” strategy?
Ryan: In today’s fast-paced technology-driven world we’re committed to helping advisors not just keep pace but outpace and for us that means intently listening to our users, keeping a pulse on industry trends and enhancing our platform as necessary to arm advisory businesses with intuitive, easy-to-use tools to further fuel their digital marketing machines.
Ryan: We recently unveiled a host of new features but our development team is already underway working hard on our next release which will include interactive content (premade collateral for advisors such as ebooks, checklists, etc.), pre-built email newsletter templates and further enhancing marketing automation.
Lead Pilot – what are its biggest advantages over the competitors in marketing automation?
Ryan: Lead Pilot is uniquely dedicated to ease-of-use and simplicity for admins, RIA’s, large enterprise groups and managers. There are a few stand-out features that make Lead Pilot truly unlike any other marketing automation platform out there:
- Customizable content – All of our existing content is completely editable by advisors at any time. Any content in the library can be used as is, OR edited/customized by the advisor completely. These “edited” pieces can be used for distribution directly from Lead Pilot, or they can be repurposed and shared elsewhere.
- AI-powered Lead Qualification – Lead Pilot provides a unique “Lead Scoring” system that not only collects leads, but assigns a lead score to each lead, allowing you to assess at-a-glance, which leads are the highest quality. The higher the score, the more engaged a lead is. These scores update in real time and you are notified when a lead is most engaged.
- Scalable – Lead Pilot’s unique seats & teams structure is for organizations of any size. Firms can group multiple advisors or firms together, making it easy to deploy cohesive, consistent on-brand messaging, while still allowing advisors to connect their individual social profiles and deploy content that speaks to their unique audiences.
- Robust profile insights – Advisors can unlock contact data on each and every contact in their database, even if you just have their email address. Lead scoring shows you when to contact a lead, and profile insights provide information on a lead’s place of employment, city of residence, social media profiles, and any other information we can find online -giving you the information you need to drive conversation and connect.
- Multichannel automated campaigns – Users can build their own custom campaigns or choose from a wide variety of campaigns curated in-house. Schedule emails and social media posts down to the minute to drip on prospects precisely at the right time.
What makes marketing in fintech different and how Twenty Over Ten helps fintechs, advisors to generate more leads?
Ryan: Since starting Twenty Over Ten, we’ve said there are two mega-trends that would shape the future of advisor sales and marketing: personalization and automation. Over the last few years we’ve built an industry-leading website platform, and now with Lead Pilot advisors have an all-in-one, intuitive platform that can dramatically increase the number of leads and simplify the entire inbound marketing process.
How many of your clients are expected to use the new capabilities? Are there any statistics or numbers to show?
Ryan: All of our new features were highly anticipated tools that we knew advisors needed in order to market their businesses in these socially distant times. We anticipate and are hopeful that all of our users will leverage these new features at some point along their marketing journey. We designed Lead Pilot for businesses of all sizes and at varying junctures in their marketing journeys – so whether they are just starting out and need just the basics and a dedicated coach to assist with growth or if they’ve built up their marketing chops – Lead Pilot can help.
What growth of Twenty Over Ten is predicted to gain after this launch?
Ryan: Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen an unprecedented shift to digital communication for everyone, including advisors. The shift to go “all-digital” has left many firms scrambling and has shown that digital communication and marketing tools are an absolute necessity now more than ever. Since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic the Lead Pilot user base has grown more than 100%, due largely in part to our specially assembled content team that is rapidly deploying content relevant to the current pandemic and market downturn weekly for advisors to deploy via blog posts, social media, email and automated comprehensive campaigns. 
Companies from which industries do you want to integrate in the future?
Ryan: Lead Pilot integrates currently with a number of leading companies in the fintech space including Redtail, Wealthbox and Riskalyze. We look forward to developing deeper connections with other companies in the fintech industry to develop even more product integrations to make the Lead Pilot user experience streamlined, seamless and more efficient.
What trends do you observe in marketing and fintech currently? How can they impact the industry?
Ryan: These are unprecedented and difficult times for many advisory businesses. In the last few months we’ve gotten so many questions – How do we shift our marketing strategy? How do we continue to connect with prospects? How can we conduct business as usual when life is anything but usual? Our answer – personalization and automation. It’s those who can adapt and embrace the shift to digital communications that will not only survive but thrive in a post-COVID world. Sure, having a website and a presence on social media pre-COVID legitimized your business but now, with the majority of the U.S. working remotely, it’s taken on a whole new meaning. COVID-19 has impacted each advisor business differently, but it’s had an impact on everyone and especially our industry.
