What is your background?

My entire career has been focused on the intersection of technology and digital marketing in the wealth management space. I got started at Fisher Investments right out of college where I worked in sales, operations, lead generation and marketing and learned a lot about how to achieve actionable results.

I then went on to start my own consultancy where I worked with RIAs and wealth management groups to help them build their prospect pipeline using digital media and content, while always keeping an eye to measuring outcomes. It was at this consultancy that I began to come up with the idea for Vestorly.

What is Vestorly and what drove you to build it?

Vestorly is software that automates the process of engaging clients with interesting content using artificial intelligence and is currently being used by several hundred institutions and firms. At my consultancy, we were running complex and costly marketing campaigns and wanted to find a better, more cost-effective approach for our clients. We were looking for software that could automate the entire digital marketing process by finding content, curating it, and then providing data we could use to measure results.

We then conducted a survey of 40 advisory firms which found that 80 per cent of the respondents’ lead generation came from referrals, which is when I had the “aha” moment: why were we trying to find a tool that did something that was not speaking to the audience our clients needed to speak to? It was through this thought process that Vestorly was born. The software that advisors needed did not exist and so we reverse engineered the client referral through customized and sharable content to help advisors fine tune their interactions with their clients. We came up with the concept in 2012 and have been building on it ever since.

What need does Torii fill in the industry? How different are those needs from other small businesses outside of the financial sector?

When we created Vestorly, we solved the problem of providing the right content to the right individual at the right time, which helps advisors reduce friction in their daily work life. This is very applicable to other small businesses given that they all need engaging content, coupled with usable metrics, to prove ROI all while keeping overhead costs under control.

The main difference between Vestorly and Torii is that Vestorly has a variety of compliance features that help business owners get their content which is reviewed and archived. Torii is a little more free-spirited and social and generally more open-ended in how it can be used. We are incredibly excited about the universality of Torii as it is quite rare for technology developed in financial services to make itself applicable globally – it normally happens the other way around.

What are genetic algorithms and natural language processing and how have they innovated the automation of content marketing?

Those are data science terms – natural language processing is reading the actual substance of content online, understanding everything about it from topics, to publishers, to journalists, etc., and then creating different meta tags to help label that particular piece of content. Those tags are weighted through our genetic algorithms which then dynamically change the weighting based on the activity generated through NLP. It sounds complicated , but the main takeaway is that our algorithm is a living, breathing thing that is constantly getting better and smarter all the time, changing the game around the efficacy of automated content marketing by predicting what the end-user needs, not what your gut thinks it does. Everything that advisors do is pretty measured and data-oriented, they don’t do guesswork in creating a financial plan, but when it comes to marketing, all they currently use is their opinion. By using data science, instead of relying on your gut, you can rely on objective analysis.

You have a unique platform – who would you consider your competitors to be? What does Torii solve that they do not?

Our competition is the status quo in marketing which is characterized by manual work, a lack of interesting content that people want to read, and a lack of data that proves that their program is working. These are the challenges of any marketing technology or even an aggregation of different marketing technologies.

If you are putting more than one tool together, it becomes more costly without necessarily adding any more value. Torii provides data that has tremendous actionable value. It is indisputable in helping business owners engage clients and prospects to see what they are interested in, and then use that information to create a lift for the business. If you are looking for vanity content , then Torii is not for you. By removing all the mundane tasks, manual work, and the guessing games, Torii is able to cut through the fluff.

What trends are you seeing in marketing, and how do you see the discipline developing over the next five years?

The way we have always found professional service providers is by asking friends and family. The internet at large and social tools have not only made that process easier, but grew it on an incredible scale, far beyond what a typical pre-digital social network could do. Now that we have gotten to this point, more and more businesses are using content marketing and social media, we are seeing those tactics and platforms being used incorrectly, generally to facilitate one-way conversations, which is not the right way to go about it.

It is the equivalent to “advertising.” Business owners will need to move away from vanity content and vanity marketing, and actually use content to drive a two-way conversation. Is your client constantly searching for and looking at articles to climb Mount Everest? An advisor, for instance, can use that information to help their client make a financial plan, along with a life plan, to make that desire real – which is actual value-add. Ultimately, it will become the norm that digital marketing will become more personal, more natural, and more reliant on data, ultimately making the experience feel like a conversation you might have face-to-face.