Financial Advisor Website Showcase: Freedom Advisory, LLC

Let’s start by chatting more about Freedom Advisory. Could you give us a little back of background on your firm and how you got started?

In 2008, I founded Freedom Advisory, LLC to independently provide a fiduciary environment with a comprehensive range of financial planning and investment management services to my clients with an open architecture platform through the RIA channel. In Puerto Rico, at the time, the only way to obtain investment advice was through a broker that lacked the fiduciary standard and sometimes had a conflict of interest with the products they recommended. They were transactional and lacked holistic profiling and advice.

Being active on social media is a great way to connect with a different audience and expand your reach, especially since there are 3.2 billion active users on social! We are excited to see you are on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and even Instagram! Could you dive a bit deeper into your social strategy and speak to some of the benefits you’ve seen since incorporating social into your marketing strategy? 

We are just starting to really leverage the use of social media. We see a wonderful opportunity to reach misguided investors with little investment. It is a fantastic way to keep in touch with what is going on in the market, industry and what our peers are focusing on while communicating with prospects and current clients.

Email marketing is such an important part of your inbound marketing strategy since it can reach so many people with just a single click! We noticed that you are using Constant Contact at the bottom of your Contact page for people to sign up for your newsletter, which is a great tool to use! Could you tell us a little more about your newsletter and how it’s been an integral part of your marketing strategy? 

We do a quarterly newsletter with market updates and detailed charts that we send to our clients and contacts on a mailing list. We are starting new relevant campaigns with more frequency than the quarterly newsletter. We have found that we have better engagement, connection and reach with the different themes that we share through our relevant campaigns as compared to the feedback we receive from our quarterly newsletter readers.

Blogging is such a great way to drive new traffic to your website. Since launching your new website, we noticed that you’ve already started to blog. That’s great! Could you share with us more about your content strategy and how you generate your blog topics/ideas, the writing process and cadence you hope to achieve?

The new website is very friendly when it comes to creating, post and share blogs. So, we are connecting the existing Constant Contact content into our new website. We would like to ultimate blog from within our website rather than from Constant Contact, so the SEO traffic improves from our website, rather than a Contact Contact address. The topics we like are based on financial and retirement planning, investor behavior, volatility, risk controls, and other relevant topics, without being too frequent.

Also, we started to use Snappy Kraken, but that’s separate from our website.

What has been your biggest success story so far? This can be something that you helped one of your clients do or just a personal story that you feel really proud of. We’d love to hear it! 

I believe that our biggest success story would be, that while the average investor in Puerto Rico was all-in with PR bonds, none of our clients had exposure to them. We helped them to avoid material losses and the negative experience given the downgrades and devaluation of all PR bonds.  Many local brokers nowadays claim that they do not control the local economy justifying their positioning to clients, we answer to them that we do not control the economy either but provided our clients with sound financial advice without conflict of interests.

On top of that, we had a huge success in helping new clients that came to our office feeling frustrated with what had happened with their portfolio with the PR bond effect, providing them alternatives to move on.

Twenty over Ten provides the flexibility we needed to be able to be current, blog, make changes, integrate with other platforms and have room for growth. Besides these characteristics, Twenty over Ten is ingrained in the financial advisor industry and really understand our needs. The service portion beyond the website development is what sets Twenty over Ten apart.

eduardo ramos – Freedom advisory, llc

After going through your website redesign project you probably encountered some “ah-ha” moments. Tell us more about your favorite part of the redesign process or the most eye-opening.

We now have a cleaner, better-organized website. We have been told by prospects that after navigating in our website, exactly understood what we do and how we can help them. We added new integrations that help facilitate client access with all the new technology we offer to them. Clients don’t need to remember all the different logins; they just go directly to the client tab on our website and they can find buttons that will guide them to the respective platform. Aside, we added useful tools for yet to become clients to run risk simulations and goal-based planning initiatives.

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received either about marketing or running a business in general?

Normally, it’s lonely being an entrepreneur as nobody gives you recommendations. Outside stakeholders believe that you are well-positioned while being hesitant to share their secret sauce. Yet, I can say that running a business requires a family commitment and it is not for all advisors. Not many businesses endure 5 or 10 years.

It is complicated being just a Financial Consultant, but imagine that plus adding operations, human resources, marketing, client service, finance, management, etc. so you must be flexible, resourceful and reactive to changes. Never stop learning, train staff, look around, leverage technology, and hire good consultants.

What is the most important thing that you would share with other financial advisors who are looking to redesign their website?

We have used different websites, but Twenty over Ten provides the flexibility we needed to be able to be current, blog, make changes, integrate with other platforms and have room for growth. Besides these characteristics, Twenty over Ten is ingrained in the financial advisor industry and really understand our needs. The service portion beyond the website development is what sets Twenty over Ten apart.