Bright Draft: why we're building a social media tool just for advisors

Where things stand: Bright Draft, the tool described here, is in development. Until it launches, our team delivers the same service by hand: compliance-approved content, written and published to your channels for $300 a month. See fully managed social media →

Every advisor we talk to knows they should be posting. Almost none of them are. Not because they disagree, but because writing, designing, checking and scheduling three channels a week is a job, and it’s not the job they trained for.

The tools on the market didn’t help. Generic schedulers give you an empty calendar and expect you to fill it. Content libraries give you posts written for everyone, which means for no one, and rarely for a Canadian advisor working under compliance rules.

What Bright Draft will do differently

• It will publish, not just draft. Bright Draft will post to your LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook on schedule. There’s no queue waiting for you to approve.
• It’s written for your clients. During setup you’ll tell us who you serve, your priority topics and the topics you’d rather not discuss. Content follows.
• It’s compliance approved before it goes live. Every post goes through our compliance process. Nothing lands on your desk.
• It looks like one practice. Bold graphics, real photography and one clear idea per post, designed as a system so your feed is consistent.

How it will work

1. Subscribe. $300 a month, no setup fee, no contract, cancel anytime.
2. Answer a few questions. Who you serve, which topics you want to be known for (retirement income, insurance, intergenerational wealth transfer, getting money out of a business), which topics you’d rather stay away from, your city and your tone. About five minutes.
3. Connect your profiles. LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Bright Draft will post as you, on your accounts.
4. Bright Draft publishes. Eight posts a month, each published to all three channels, written for your audience, designed as a system and compliance approved before they go live.

Your dashboard will show what’s scheduled, what has been published, and billing. That’s deliberately all it will show. There’s nothing to manage.

What the content will look like

Educational, specific and visual. A post explaining what the lifetime capital gains exemption means for an owner five years from a sale. A graphic comparing CPP at 60, 65 and 70. A reminder about the RRSP deadline written for families in your city. A short perspective piece in the first person about a question you hear every week. Bold colour, real photography, one idea per post. Nothing that reads like an ad, and nothing that makes a performance claim.

Why $300 a month

We’re pricing Bright Draft for the single-advisor practice, because that’s who has the problem most acutely. A larger firm can hire a marketing coordinator. A solo advisor or a two-person team can’t justify a salary for social media, and the freelance alternative usually means briefing someone every week and checking their work, which is most of the effort you were trying to avoid. At $300 a month, Bright Draft will cost less than one hour of most advisors’ billable time and removes the task entirely.

For advisors who want more, our Growth plan at $800 adds a short video each month, boosted posts to reach beyond your followers and a brief monthly report. Bright Draft will be the same product as the Basic plan; Growth builds on it.

What we’re learning as we build it

The first prototype of Bright Draft asked advisors to describe their practice in a text box. Almost everyone wrote the same thing: comprehensive planning, client-focused, holistic. It was true and useless. The current version asks specific questions instead. Which of these groups do you most want? Which topics should your content lean into? Which would you rather not touch? Insurance and business succession, for example, are priorities for some advisors and off-limits for others, and the answer changes every post. Ten minutes of specific answers produces content that sounds like a particular advisor rather than the profession in general, and that specificity is what makes people stop scrolling.

The second lesson was about publishing. Early testers loved the content and still didn’t post it, because approving and scheduling was one more task. So Bright Draft will publish. The dashboard will show you what’s scheduled and what has gone live, and that will be the entire interface. Removing the last step is what makes the idea work.

Compliance, handled

This is the part most advisors ask about first. Every Bright Draft post will go through our compliance process before it publishes: educational framing, no performance claims, no guarantees, no product recommendations, no testimonials. A record of everything published will be kept in your dashboard so your dealer can review it at any time. You won’t approve posts one by one, because by the time they publish there’ll be nothing left to catch. That’s the standard we’re building the product to meet, and it’s the reason it will genuinely run without you.

What Bright Draft isn’t

It won’t be a scheduler you have to feed. It won’t be a library of generic finance memes. It isn’t a replacement for SEO or paid advertising; it won’t, on its own, fill your calendar. It’s the layer that keeps you visible and credible between meetings so that every other channel converts better, at a price that makes sense for a single-advisor practice.

Who it’s for

Advisors, planners, wealth managers and insurance advisors who want to be visible between meetings and have decided, honestly, that they’re never going to do it themselves. Bright Draft will be $300 a month, no contract, the same as the Basic plan in our social media service, which our team delivers by hand today.

Social media rarely closes a relationship on its own. What it does is make sure that when a referral looks you up, or a lead from an ad checks your LinkedIn, they find a practice that’s active, credible and clearly good at what it does. That’s worth $300 a month to most advisors. It isn’t worth ten hours of their week.

Related: See fully managed social → · Why anonymous Instagram viewing is useful for financial advisors

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