According to a recent report from Broadridge and ESI Thoughtlab, more than 50 percent of investors consider the ability to provide holistic, highly personalized advice to be one of the most important reasons for choosing a wealth advisor. Keeping a client as your North Star can go a long way toward overcoming other challenges, such as declining fees, churn from wealth transfers and competition from robo-advisors, as I mentioned in a recent On Wall Street article.

Personalization comes with a hidden cost, though: additional effort that many time-strapped advisors simply don’t have. In my experience, most advisors can comfortably scale personalized communications efforts to around 10 prospects. This is far short of the 100-prospect pipeline that many ambitious advisors I know consider the minimum for a growth-minded acquisition effort.

Fortunately artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and cognitive marketing offer them the high-tech precision of a modern fish-finder for honing in on the most desirable prospects. As advisors learn more about a prospect’s preferences, cognitive marketing tools can simultaneously automate the distribution of specialized communications to prospects on the subjects they care about the most.

Here are three ways cognitive marketing can help advisors target and nurture prospects to improve their acquisition game:

• Hone in on the most desireable clients. Advisors can then focus their energies on those prospects best matched to their own individual skills and their firm’s capabilities.
• Accelerate their grasp of what makes each prospect tick. Client interactions and preferences provide the key to their interests. Supplying detailed profiles to advisors gives them the insight needed to understand what’s driving their prospects’ choices.
• Shorten the sales cycle. Once advisors knows where each prospect fits in their pipeline, they can prioritize their own time more effectively. With actionable intelligence, they can continue to deliver personalized content to help win new business while managing their client relationships.

Unleash your data and skip casting a wider net

Cognitive marketing helps advisors align their competencies with the prospects that need them most, while also laying the groundwork to rally other firm resources for the client as needed.

Putting data analytics and cognitive tools to work for your advisors can act as a kind of “silent sales assistant.” Through personal, authentic connections within a single, secure multi-channel platform, your advisors can successfully manage relationships while – instead of casting a wider net – high-tech solutions automatically communicate with prospects in the personalized way they demand.