Ron Carson's Peak Advisor Alliance, which provides practice management consulting to 1,100 advisor members, announced this week the rollout of a virtual coaching and marketing platform called Digital Fortress, which Carson says will provide "growth made easy" for advisors, for $495 a month.
The platform provides access to Peak's practice management expertise, tied with content provided by Faulkner Publishing, which is led by Craig Faulkner, who was the founder and longtime president of Emerald Publications. Also included is website creation and hosting, electronic newsletter creation, marketing effort analytics and a mobile app for advisors.
In an interview Thursday, Carson said that his plan is to have Digital Fortress accomplish for advisors "what Pixar did for Disney," by providing a "single-point access portal that automates an advisor's marketing, website and social media operations," with "compliance-approved content" and Peak's practice management resources, including online access to Peak's in-house and external coaches. His intent is to help advisors "to grow easily and compete at a level" that they couldn't reach without the platform.
The platform itself is a flexible one, Carson said, that can respond to the needs of individual advisors and their clients, and can be customized to reflect the advisor's own personality and firm branding. Carson called Digital Fortress "the first one-stop shop for client communication, practice management ideas and marketing automation all at your fingertips through a singular central hub."
In the same interview, Faulkner said that the central feature of Digital Fortress is the "robust advisor admin" function, a "command center" dashboard that analyzes each advisor user's activity on the platform's consumer marketing campaigns.
The virtual coaching, he said, is "self-paced coaching" that uses a "wealth of video content" from Peak "that the advisor can go through at their own pace," while receiving "direct online support from coaches."
At Emerald, Faulkner says he "trained thousands of individuals on the how-to's of marketing," but that Digital Fortress "refines the process" to allow an advisor to focus on "how do I increase my client base, and how do I manage those clients," which perennially are an advisor's two major concerns.
