This article originally appeared in Wealth Professional

Q Wealth's unconventional marketing team brings big-brand experience from music, fashion and retail – and it's a difference-maker for Canada's elite advisors

When an advisor makes the decision to leave their bank or dealer, they want to ensure their vision for offering a great client experience, and how they will use their unique skill set to add value, is in alignment with their new firm’s values and platform. It’s why Q Wealth’s in-house boutique marketing team has no financial legacy employees. Instead, it boasts a mix of dynamism and experience unique to the wealth space.

From overseeing the Canadian marketing of global music stars like Justin Timberlake and Calvin Harris to developing social strategy for fashion brands and designing experiential campaigns for Budweiser, Q Wealth’s marketing team and its network of branding experts bring a vibrant, contemporary feel to the stale world of advisor marketing.

In a previous life, Stephen Gasparek, Chief Marketing Officer & Executive Partner at Q Wealth, worked in artist marketing for Sony Music Entertainment, managing a roster of international acts in the Canadian market. The roster of global artists included Pharrell Williams, Depeche Mode and Pink. He tells WP that advisors love working with his team of marketing professionals, which also includes former professional musicians, social media strategists and a corporate partnerships executive from Live Nation, who are in touch with globally competitive brands.

“The goal of the firm was to compete with brands outside of financial, which is a key differentiator,” he says. “Our big objective was to bring contemporary brands’ philosophies to this drab world.”

For those money managers who have previously felt shackled by a large dealer or bank, and who have a strong sense of what sets them apart, the Q Wealth Partners marketing team is a breath of fresh air in the Canadian private wealth space. While Q Wealth Partners are owners in the portfolio management firm, their team and brands are positioned as multi-family offices so their unique value proposition can really shine.

With that in mind, the team provides each new partner with a brand book after a two- to three-week discovery and research period. It’s symbolic of Q Wealth’s fast-paced, agency-style marketing mentality.

Jared Rabinowitz, executive and founding partner, says that, like in music artist marketing, Q Wealth looks at the potential of each partner it brings to the firm.

“We need to see something that makes them special – a facet or two we can polish and use to help differentiate them and carry their message,” he says. “At the end of the day, ‘I invest your money in the stock market,’ even if you think you do it better than the person in the identical office to your left and right, is not a value proposition.

“Q Wealth elevates the portfolio management, and our partners, with the requisite education and experience, can certainly be a part of that within the registrant, but the partners we’re attracting add so much value beyond the investments, they want to shout about it. They want clients to realize they should expect so much more than just a portfolio of investments.”

Q Wealth’s marketing capabilities are designed to tell a partner’s story around the client journey. It’s an area Gasparek has always identified as an opportunity. Despite extremely modest marketing budgets, the music business is quite adept at engaging people’s attention, while the wealth space has the big marketing dollars but comparatively dull campaigns. At its heart, Q Wealth Partners, as the ring of partner ownership around Quintessence Wealth (the registered PM firm), does not position itself as a financial company, but as a technology and support platform for advisors, bringing holistic planning and wealth management together with portfolio management using modern technologies.

In addition to his team, Gasparek leans on an extensive network of freelancers who have worked on brands like American Express, GoDaddy, BMW and Samsung. While many financial organizations have marketing teams akin to glorified compliance departments, Q Wealth feels like a true marketing agency: responsive and fast-acting.

“It’s inspiring,” Gasparek says. “There's a real opportunity for advisors leaving their dealer or bank [to partner with Q Wealth] and to significantly outperform these legacy institutions in the private wealth space.”

Ambitious advisors don’t have the time to be marketing experts, so Q Wealth Partners boosts their capabilities so they can focus on their core competency – serving their clients. Rather than getting served stock templates, everything is personalized at Q Wealth. From customized websites to unique video content and social media marketing, the Q Wealth marketing team employs leading tech platforms to remain ahead of the pack.

For example, Q Wealth’s cutting-edge marketing automation works seamlessly in the background of a partner’s website, tracking prospect behaviour and areas of interest, ultimately enabling advisors to see which prospects are most likely to convert to real clients based on lead-scoring analytics.

For prospects, Q Wealth partners are again able to go beyond clicks to generate leads. They can see what people are interested in, enabling them to refine content and use AI tools to analyze prospects’ personalities and communication styles.

“Eventually, we know our prospects as if they were our longtime clients,” Rabinowitz says. “We can then cultivate that by providing a call to action, like attending an event or even just an invitation for coffee and a chat about what has meaning for them. That could be a specific financial need or a shared hobby or passion.”

In addition to social media marketing, Google Analytics reporting, webinar and podcast production, and monthly tutorials for partners and staff, the marketing team can utilize LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which helps them filter leads even more precisely to the region and profession they are targeting as clients.

Leaving your dealer or bank means having an independent voice, brand identity and value proposition. Q Wealth’s eclectic but carefully curated team of marketing experts has the skills, urgency and imagination to bring that to life.

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