Marketing Wiz is a joint initiative between Kotak Mutual Fund and Wealth Forum, where we share insights on how distributors and advisors can accelerate their business growth by understanding and applying essential marketing concepts and practices. Marketing is often seen as a relatively weak link in an IFA's practice, and therefore offers high potential to deliver growth, if leveraged intelligently. It will be the endeavour of Marketing Wiz to help you strengthen your marketing capabilities, connect better with clients and prospects, serve clients better and thus enhance your own business growth.

For many advisors, a website is a hygiene factor, and for some, an added level of convenience for existing clients, who can track their portfolios online. But Pawan Agarwal of Accord Financial Services, Delhi, has used a smart web strategy that allows him to attract clients from across the country and indeed the world, without ever going across to these cities to meet them. He has found a way to leverage his advisory skills far beyond his physical reach to build a truly scalable business model. Pawan started out 11 years ago, initially as a corporate insurance agent and quickly went on to become one of Birla Sun Life's largest corporate agents by 2010. That's when he reoriented his firm entirely towards a financial planning proposition, focused a lot more on mutual funds as solutions for the plans he wrote for his clients, and developed a clear investment philosophy which he now follows to serve over 26,000 investors. Read on as Pawan takes us through the philosophy behind his web strategy and its intelligent execution that's winning him new clients from across the country and the world.

We follow a strictly needs based advisory process. We strongly believe in financial planning as the best way to advise retail investors and enable them to meet their financial goals. Over the years, we have also understood a few realities about retail clients, which influence our investment philosophy. Our belief is that in the retail world, an aggressive risk taker is very rare - irrespective of what investors say at different points of time. Retail investors simply don't have the kind of spare money that can help them comfortably withstand large bouts of market volatility. Some may be very enthusiastic about taking large equity exposure during bullish times - but the reality is that they do not have the risk capacity that is needed for large equity exposures. In reality, most retail investors are either moderate or conservative risk takers. The way we approach our investment recommendations mirrors this key insight. For example, for a first time investor who is eager to get into equity market now, we advocate balanced funds rather than an equity fund. Balanced funds provide some downside protection due to their debt component, at the same time allow meaningful upside participation, which is what the investor is keen on right now. We have learnt that in the retail world, providing investors more predictable returns is far better in the long run that trying to maximize returns.

Over time, we have created sound processes for financial planning, for making investment recommendations and for reviewing client portfolios. We realized that we have something good going for ourselves, because its working well with clients we meet. We also realized that we are limiting our scope to the physical boundaries of markets we serve - Delhi and Mumbai.

How can we offer our investment advisory services to clients beyond our geographical territories? How can we maximize the potential of the advisory process that we have created? When we grappled with these questions, we realized that technology is clearly the solution. So, we decided to create a web platform to reach out to prospects and offer our investment advisory services to anybody who thinks we can be of help. The first thing we were clear about is that this is not a corporate website meant to showcase our firm and our services. This is an advisory platform, meant to offer solutions for those looking for them. We looked at several platforms - domestically and internationally, and found that a majority of them were very product focused. Since we were clear that we wanted to offer a simple advisory platform to retail investors, we chose a completely different orientation, and went about creating InvestGuru.

InvestGuru speaks the language of the retail investor and focuses only on the problems for which he is looking for solutions. With our experience in dealing with many retail investors, we have a fair idea of the kind of questions that most have in their mind. We went about creating pages that address each of these questions. The other thing we did is that we made it in such a way that we don't ask the reader questions initially - our approach is that if this is the kind of situation you are in, here is a good solution for you to consider. It does not intimidate a new reader with first seeking his information. So, for example, we know in our financial planning process that when we create a financial plan for a child's education, the choice of asset allocation and products is largely influenced by number of years available before target date. Rather than asking how old is your child, we simply created 3 buckets where we said that if your child is 0-7 years, consider this range of solutions, if your child is 8-15, consider a different range and if your child is 15+, here is a third range. Readers can go straight into the range they find themselves in and look at solutions for them to consider. Keeping it simple and getting to solutions quickly, we find, enthuses readers to engage more.

Once they have decided products within a solution, they can either call us or mail us - in which case we will then correspond with them and get the paper work completed, or we also give them details of how they can access the AMC's office or CAMS / Karvy, if they want to invest directly. We are not here to try and influence them not to go direct - if that's what they want, so be it. What we have found is giving them a choice is a good way to win their trust and get them to engage with us.

We have a client from Muscat who came to us through InvestGuru. He had investments in direct plans, but he called us as he liked what he saw in InvestGuru. After a round of conversations that I had with him, we now are in a position where he has started his retirement plan with us and has committed all fresh investments only through us, and no more in direct. He understood what we were trying to tell him - that retirement planning is a process where the earlier you hire an advisor, the better prepared you are, because you have developed confidence in your advisor in the years leading to your retirement.

InvestGuru is a site which went live only a few months ago - in April 2014. Initial response has overwhelmed us by the sheer geographic spread of clients who we are now serving. We have signed up clients from places I would never have dreamt of doing business in - Tumkur, Khammam, Valsad, Wardha, Jamshedpur, Raipur, Dibrugarh - in addition to larger cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai - which we had expected. That's not all - we have clients signed up from Muscat, Zambia and Saudi Arabia and our site is being browsed in Spain, Singapore and UK. We are signing up 20-25 new clients each month. In one stroke, we have gone national and international! Our desire to reach out beyond Delhi and Mumbai with our retail advisory services is now becoming a reality, with InvestGuru.

InvestGuru.in is already in the 1st page of google searches for best childrens plans and such key words that are closely associated with our business. We get over 6,000 unique google searches every month - this spiked to over 10,000 in October. We have now set up our profiles in Google+, Twitter and FaceBook and are commencing a blog to create a complete 360 degree experience of InvestGuru. There are many plans we now have on making InvestGuru more visible across multiple media.

We want every saver in the country to benefit from access to quality financial planning so that they can fulfill their dreams, aspirations and responsibilities in a smooth and structured manner. Financial planning tends to be associated more with affluent investors in larger cities rather than the smallest of retail savers. Now, with InvestGuru, we are able to reach every part of the country which has internet and a post office. Once an individual gets his plan online, we ask him to use speed post to send us all the material for transaction execution. InvestGuru is making quality financial advice available to every investor anywhere in the country.

In the entire InvestGuru experience, one thing that really touched me is that many of the new investors who signed up as our clients from all parts of the country, especially small towns, are in their mid 20s. They are in their first jobs, have begun saving, and unlike earlier generations who blindly went by what their parents told them to do with their savings, these youngsters want to learn and make their own decisions. Many of these youngsters are women, who are keen to take their own financial decisions. They are looking for advice they can trust, they are looking online, and solutions like InvestGuru appeal to them. Helping the new generation of savers become intelligent investors through proper guidance is what InvestGuru is doing for them - and that, more than anything else makes the whole initiative worth the while for us.

All content in Marketing Wiz is created by Wealth Forum and should not be construed as views of Kotak MF.

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