Creating "buzz" can sometimes be a very elusive concept.
However, in this day and age, creating buzz has become more critical than ever – especially in wealth management. Standing out can be both challenging and necessary; it takes strategic planning, creativity and engaging the right people to make a lasting impact.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Snappy Kraken's CEO, Robert Sofia who shared candid thoughts about what it truly takes to get people talking. This discussion dives into the importance of genuine engagement and creativity in generating excitement around a brand or event.
Sofia reflects on his own experiences, including creating the successful Jolt conference, and emphasizes that buzz is not something that can be manufactured out of thin air – it requires something truly noteworthy to get people talking.
Whether you're a financial advisor looking to elevate your marketing game or simply curious about the mechanics of buzz creation, this discussion offers valuable insights and practical advice that you won't want to miss. Click on the video to listen to the interview.
Transcript:
Suleman Din: Robert, thank you so much for coming on to our show today, really, really appreciate it. Robert, you are, I think at this point, one of the self-styled and really recognized marketing gurus here in wealth management.
Robert Sofia: Oh, guru, what a word, oh, man.
Din: Well, with that beard.
Sofia: You know, I was too baby-faced; I got to get a little respect here.
Din: Yeah, there you go. I've been talking to folks about marketing, and I wanted to ask you a question that I feel is really important for people to understand. A lot of folks think, 'We'll put something together, throw it out there and start pulling in the receipts,' right? But marketing doesn't work like that in the sense that if there isn't some appeal to that message, it's just not going to resonate with folks. So whether it resonates, maybe you call it generating buzz, it's a challenge. So how do you create buzz?
Sofia: It's such a good question, everybody wants to create buzz. And there's so much to it, and nobody's ever asked me that question before. No, they really haven't, and I've never written about it. And I think if I'm telling the truth, I've probably never even thought about it. I don't think I have because I don't think of marketing in that way. I usually think of it as just getting the outcome I want.
But what's interesting about your question is that those great marketing outcomes are dramatically improved when you create buzz. So I'm going to probably dance around a bunch of different things because it's not super codified in my mind. But how do you where do you want me to start?
Din: Well, how do you how would you in your mind define buzz? The word gets thrown around a lot. How do you approach it?
Sofia: If I were to define buzz. I would say it just means people are talking, people are anticipating, and you see that, and if you're not part of it, you want to be. FOMO [fear of missing out], right? That, to me, that's what buzz is, and there are a lot of ways to create it, but if you just think about that definition, you have to get people engaged. You can't create buzz by yourself unless you're a celebrity, and then you can just show up drinking a Coke and it creates buzz, but that's not most of us, right? So, self-styled promotion isn't buzz, and people usually see through that.
Real buzz is when other people are talking about it. To me, the first thing is you have got to get the right people engaged, and doing that requires that you have something worth talking about. You've been in journalism a long time in, you'll get this.
I remember years ago I had some business partners who always wanted buzz, and they could never get it, and they told our PR company they weren't doing a good enough job creating buzz, and the PR company shot back. I'll never forget the conversation. They shot back, 'Well, maybe if you did something buzzworthy?' [Laughter] Well, they fired us as a client.
Anyways, the point is to be buzzworthy, if people are going to talk about something, it's got to be worth talking about. You can't just muster up buzz from nothing. This paper coffee cup is not buzzworthy, but if it was handmade ceramic, and I had made it for the conference, and it was Joel Bruckenstein's face, and on the back it said, Happy 20th, Joel, and I was kissing him on the cheek, that would go buzzy somewhere on the social media feed, and everybody would be shocked that I kissed Joel, and then he'd probably invite me up on stage, and I'd give him a kiss on the cheek, and then it'd be even more buzz. Buzz is, you got to get people talking.
Din: The reason I ask is because you created Jolt [conference]. It didn't exist. The conference itself, I thought that was an example of creating really durable buzz in the industry. I'm just kind of curious, was there any kind of strategy as you created that? How am I going to get people hooked? How am I going to get people really engaged to come to something that didn't exist before?
Sofia: The ability to pull that off was absolutely contingent upon creating buzz. So, first principles, number one, it had to be something new. If Jolt was a Snappy Kraken conference, which by the way, in this first iteration, we were going to call it SnappyCon, the immediate assumption would have been, well, I don't want to go hear about Snappy Kraken. That’s not going to be buzzworthy, right? So, no, it was going to be something new. So we're going to have a marketing and creativity conference – marketing, branding, growth, creativity – the only one in the space that's never been done before.
So that's one. Wow, this is new and worth talking about. People come up to you; they're going to ask you [Suleman] why you have a cast on your leg, right? It’s worth talking about, and it's new. Hey, he doesn't usually have that cast on it. So newness. By the way, I'm going to just say that something doesn't have to be completely new. It's just to be positioned in a new way. That's another key thing about it. So it sounds new. So that's number one.
Number two, we had to involve the right people. So I was very intentional about who I included in Jolt, who I invited on stage, who I gave free passes to, because I wanted people who had reach to be profiled. And it made sense because we're a marketing conference to have those people there. I invested in getting the right publications there where I could. Then I made sure that the right introductions were made so the right content would be there. Even incentivized people to reach out.
I didn't do it at this conference, but I thought about, before my presentation, saying, look, everybody, during my presentation, find something you like, post it on social, and whoever gets the most likes or clicks on their content, I'm gonna give you a hundred bucks. Now, I didn't do it. But that's a little small example of getting the right people engaged to create the buzz for you.
Din: So much of it, I think, is in the planning, right? And that's really hard. I mean, I've had a conversation with Daniel Crosby about his Diet Coke viral moment. It is sometimes like trying to catch lightning in a bottle, I guess, but oftentimes, it's just planning and planning and planning before execution, to your point, that creates something memorable.
Sofia: It is, but it doesn't always work still. And for all the buzz-worthy things that we've done at Snappy Kraken, there's an equal amount that we thought were gonna create buzz that didn't. And that's another interesting thing. Your perspective on what's gonna actually be buzzy is not always accurate. I probably sound ridiculous saying buzzy, but, you know, hey, I just, I don't know, it just seems right.
Din: You can blame me for putting that word in your mouth. But were there any kind of lessons? When things didn't work out, like, were you able to spot why when you did the post-mortem?
Sofia: Yeah, sometimes, and it's for different reasons. I think creativity is just essential for this because if you strip everything away, when something is not new or novel, people don't wanna talk about it anymore.
That's why things spike in the news for a while; there are trends, and then it tapers off. So you have to be creative enough to keep coming up with ideas, new creative angles, creative ways of approaching things, packaging things, and if you keep that, that's really the biggest lesson. Like, we tried that, it didn't work, we're going to be creative and we're going to try something else. And if you persist in that, you eventually will hit on things that will create buzz, especially if you get them in front of the right people.
I'll give you an example: we just released our state of digital report. We've done one several years in a row, so it's old news. It's just data. But what are we going to do that's different this time? So, we packaged it up in new ways. We made a mini version of it; we incorporated it into our presentations, and we did an early release to the media to start talking about it. We started doing a save-the-date post for it. We packaged it as the largest and most comprehensive data analysis of financial advisor marketing of all time. A quarter of a billion data points. Nobody else has ever been able to look at this much marketing insight in one place, a quarter of a billion data points. So now it's like, whoa, a quarter of a billion data points. There's never been anything that big. That's creating buzz.
Din: Let me ask you this question – and this might tick people off.
Sofia: It'll definitely tick me off.
Din: A lot of folks, they're like, hey, I'm not a marketing guru, I need to, you know, reach out to a third party service helping with that. But, there are things like compliance and so on and so forth – do you think that because of the nature of wealth management and how you have to be so measured in way you communicate that it prevents a lot of people from actually ever achieving that kind of buzzworthiness? There's an overreliance on third parties where it's like, you're not speaking your truth, right? It's been filtered through several different phases before it gets out.
Sofia: It's true in some firms where they're restrictive. Yeah. And where they absolutely don't allow advisors to do things. But that's not true of most. It's definitely not true of the independent channel. It's not true of the marketing departments. It's really a self-imposed limitation and I know that because I used to run a practice. We did a ton of marketing. We created buzz in the community. We would do quarterly charity events in our community. We did golf tournaments. We did concerts. We did movies in the park. We did it all for charity. We got local businesses involved. We got local people involved. We created buzz all the time. We did it all in a compliant way.
So, it's not truly limiting. I think people think they can't. And that is a cop out for them not to try. But if you if you are committed to it, then you find creative approaches. You get the right people involved and you can go create a buzz. Absolutely, you can.
Din: Robert, thank you so much for taking a couple of minutes to answer this question. I'm glad that I asked you a question that you haven't been asked before. That's buzzworthy.
Sofia: There you go. Let's create some buzz with this. What are we doing here? Fistbump? Handshake?