Is SmartAsset Legit For A Financial Advisor?
The way SmartAsset is set up is fairly simple and the business model is legitimate.
They produce tons of content, retirement calculators and informational pieces to help drive organic and paid traffic to their website.
Generally speaking, it is a “prospect” looking for advice to see if they have enough for retirement.
The prospect enters their information, agrees to the terms then is sold off to a Financial Advisor in a close geographical proximity.
How much will I spend on a SmartAsset Lead?
Typically, a lead will cost around $200.
These price points are different based on how much of “investable assets” the prospect has.
You will most likely spend a considerable amount of marketing assets and resources on purchasing these leads.
This is not meant for new or junior advisors with limited budgets as this will not be the most efficient way to leverage your time.
Are the leads outbound or inbound?
SmartAsset classifies these as “warm leads”, but some users have different experiences with the quality and verification of these prospects.
They should be “warm” or at least have expressed interest in seeking out a financial advisor.
It is important to know that these are not exclusive and will be shared with multiple advisors, sometimes a dozen.
There are also reports of leads being recycled and resold to different Financial Advisors.
Ensure you make a complaint about the lead in the event this happens.
What is our overall impression of SmartAsset Leads?
As former Wealth Advisors, we have not used this service.
While the idea of having warm, inbound leads is very attractive, we know that the economics behind generating an interested prospect is expensive and only works if you sell that lead to multiple parties.
SmartAsset invests HEAVILY into ads on multiple platforms and in order to recooperate this cost, they will need to sell it to multiple advisors.
While fair, this does come with some negative drawback when you may be the 9th advisor to call this individual over the course of a few days.