A recent addition to the Harbourfront Wealth Management family has come up with a unique and out-of-the-box strategy to put their advisory practice on the map.

Todd McLay, Portfolio Manager at Harbourfront Wealth Management and Precedence Capital, and co-founder of Precedence Private Wealth, together with his wife Deanna, have committed to a long-term social media strategy, including a vast amount of financial content on their YouTube channel.

As the pandemic demanded the wealth management industry get up to speed online and embrace its power of adding more flexibility and efficiency into daily business operations, it most importantly gave advisors the ability to scale up.

On the prospecting side, webinars were a huge hit … before webinar fatigue set in. It was a popular method of choice, arguably because it was a relatively straightforward method.

Gaining traction through video content on the other hand has been a tricky and less explored route as it’s one of the most difficult strategies to successfully deploy. Not for Todd and Deanna, however.

“Social Media without strategy fails”

The couple has successfully leveraged the online platform YouTube. Through a commitment to producing valuable content for 60 months starting in 2017, the platform now works for the dynamic duo.

“Our advisory practice has been using social media, and specifically YouTube since late 2016, and in January of 2017 we made a strong commitment to a long-term strategy regardless of any possible short-term benefits,” says Todd McLay. “Thankfully, that was the approach we took, as we didn’t start receiving a single client from our social media efforts for 10 long months.”

Today over 90% of their new business has come directly from YouTube, with the majority of new clients residing outside of Saskatchewan. In fact, most of their clients are coming from British Columbia, the Greater Toronto Area, Ottawa, Montreal, Alberta.

“Our content has even attracted some very key people to our team as well,” says Todd. “The difficult part is that we fully acknowledge we are still only doing about 20% of what we know we are capable of content-wise.”

Todd says this is part of the reason he moved the Precedence Capital team to Harbourfront. “We simply needed to switch to a firm that fully supports our content strategy and could provide enhanced efficiencies from a technological standpoint.”

Since so many Canadians have been stuck at home and have been looking for ways to educate themselves online, the pandemic has most definitely improved Precedence Private Wealth’s cause to share valuable information to Canadians on personal wealth management.

He added: “As a result of the market volatility, everyone seems to be taking a much closer look at their finances and are looking for new ways to better educate themselves on an ongoing basis. This is why we are so passionate about putting out valuable educational content. To showcase to all Canadians what truly is possible from a wealth management standpoint. So far it has worked wonders for us and our mission thus far.”

Precedence Private Wealth’s YouTube channel currently has just under 6000 subscribers. Some videos have gained viewership among hundreds of thousands of Canadians.