Thank you all so much for tuning in and joining us for this conversation. I’m Samantha Russell, the chief evangelist at FMG. And joining me today, I’m so excited, we have Michelle Feinstein.
And Michelle is our new chief product and strategy officer here at FMG. So we thought what a great way to introduce her to all of you and also to really talk about organic growth and where advisor marketing communications are headed. We know that right now there is a lot going on and everyone’s just sort of getting whiplash trying to pay attention to what are the trends that are actually gonna move the needle. Where should I be investing in both my business from time and money perspective when it comes to growth? So Michelle has so many interesting thoughts, also so much experience to draw from. So Michelle, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thank you. I’m so excited to be able to do this podcast with you and just work with you and be part of the FMG family. So really excited to jump into the conversation.
Nice. Well, we wanna also let you know if you’re joining us live, you can actually just type your questions right into LinkedIn or put them in as comments, and we should be able to see them, and answer them. So feel free to do that, but this will also be recorded so you can watch the rest of it later if you get, pulled away. So just to start, I thought, Michelle, it would be really great just to tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at FMG.
Sure. So some of you dialed in may be familiar. I’ve been in the industry a real long time, probably close to thirty years. I spent many years of career on the custodial side of the business working at BNY Mellon Pershing.
I led product strategy and tech consulting for them for many years, and that really got me out into the industry spending a lot of quality time with broker dealers and RIAs, working on strategy and growing their digital transformation experiences. The past five years, I was at Salesforce. I was the GM over there for Financial Services Cloud. It was an amazing experience, and it really showed me how firms are looking at CRM.
As we know, Salesforce has really evolved from a CRM into an agentic platform. And it all points back to, there’s a lot of consistency in terms of problems that firms are trying to solve across wealth management, RIA, asset management, insurance. It points back to some pretty big categories that Samantha and I will dig into, categories you’re familiar with, data, AI, workflow advisor experience, agent experience, etcetera.
As far as FMG, I just joined the FMG family just a few months ago in January.
Yeah.
I would say what brought me here were a few things. I mean, number one, GTCR who owns us has really been just a wonderful partner. They’re invested in the business. They’re really, helping us strategize and just accelerate our investment so that we can become a much more expansive platform and more valuable for advisors. I’d say the second is the people. So the people that FMG has attracted and retained here are wonderful people that have also grown up in the industry and they understand your business. And I think the third is, you know, FMG wants to be an AI native company.
We have a lot of AI capability already in the platform and we plan to continue and invest there and I wanted to be part of that.
I love that. And I’ve got to know you a little bit. We have a lot more getting to know each other to do, but over the last few months, and I I love the background that you bring. And, you know, to your point about compiling the right people at the top and you know, just overall, for those of you who are maybe listening in, whether you’re currently an FMG user or client or you maybe haven’t taken a look in a while, one of the things that I think surprises a lot of people is just how far the platform has come in the last few years.
You know, we now have everything from tools like Muse that will allow you to create content within the platform using AI. And I just got asked a great question the other day, you know, using AI to create content versus using content that, you know, maybe FMG provides or that you’re using FMG’s AI builder Muse for content. And why would you use one versus not just go to ChatGPT or Claude, which we can dive into. But one of the things that really you’re getting when you work with FMG is a partner who knows the industry.
And because we have access to, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of data points on what compliance will approve, what they won’t approve, what, works for moving the needle for advisors, we can use all that to power our version of these AI tools, which makes it incredibly compelling and more efficient for the advisors using them.
Hundred percent. You hit on three big categories for AI. I mean, right now we’ve always been focused on how do we leverage AI to automate the content creation process to make it easy to act as an agent. There’s a product we have called Sidekick that acts as basically an agent for the advisor, them to figure out what to write, how to write it, making sure it stays within the brand standards of their company, and of course compliance. So we have a lot of work going on today where we leverage AI, same thing to make the oversight process a much more efficient, scalable, and automated, experience for our firms and for our advisors.
So I think that’s a good segue to what is when it’s I guess some people are saying the video is looping. I’m sorry if you’re having trouble watching it live. We will share the recording, which hopefully the recording will not have a looping.
But I wanted to talk about organic growth. That was one of the biggest things we get asked about over and over again. And AI has become a huge part of that conversation. How do I use AI to create more efficiencies, to, you know, create more growth in my business?
I mean, you’ve got so much experience in this industry. What’s your read on where advisor marketing and growth stands today and what’s maybe not working and what is working?
Yeah. I think number one, I mean, advisors are not professional marketers, right? They try to do it off the side of their desk. Their firms try to help them and their biggest challenge is having enough time to be able to really think creatively and determine where do I need to show up?
When do I need to show up? How do I need to show up? AI, and firms like FMG have a huge opportunity to help advisors solve for that. So number one, it’s where do I need to show up and when and why?
Well, using So you outsource versus what do you do in house?
Right. Like, do you outsource or what do you do? But also where? Right? So should I be showing up on social channels?
Do I have a strategy because firms are looking for me, all through these like Claude and Perplexity and AI tools? Am I gonna show up there? How am I gonna be profiled there? I mean, is a huge challenge that we’re hearing in all the strategy sessions I’ve been sitting in an FMG.
Firms are trying to figure out their AEO strategies.
Okay.
So huge opportunity.
Testimonials, right? So firms are trying to get comfortable with, would we allow a testimonial to be posted? What are the benefits of doing so? What are the drawbacks?
How do we control that? And then how do we learn from those testimonials? So lots of area for opportunity. And I I think the biggest thing is advisors have to realize they they need to continue to be proactive and engage their clients, beyond just the financial planning meeting.
Right? All throughout the year, thirty, sixty, ninety, hundred and twenty days, there need to be continual touch points. They need help with what should those touch points be. Things like AI looking into data signals from various sources can give them lots of ideas of what’s happening within that account, within the portfolio.
Has the plan drifted? These are all great topics that can help advisors get engaged and then curate content that’s targeted against those topics.
And I think one of the things that’s can be really frustrating is oftentimes as an advisor, you hear about marketing that maybe people in other industries are doing or even other firms within your industry are doing. And then you’re being told, you know, you can’t do that or all financial advisers can’t do that or our firm can’t do that. So can you talk a little bit about the way from your perspective? And I think we know, because you and I have had conversations about that.
People may not realize that when they come to FMG, the solutions we have that empower them to do the marketing they wanna do that might be more innovative and cutting edge like testimonials, but doing it in a way that has those compliance checks and balances that allow their compliance team to sign off on it.
Right. So we have a lot of capabilities that support that whole marketing automation journey. And one of them that’s really valuable, not just to our customers, like our enterprise clients and advisors, but also to partners, is this compliance chassis and framework that we have, where it looks at every piece of content that’s gonna come through, looks at it from a brand standpoint, from a wording standpoint, from a regulatory standpoint, issues flags and signals and warnings to the people that are doing the oversight to make sure that instead of having to do a manual process, this is triggering it right into the flow of work So they can feel confident that when they release whatever that content is, that it’s meeting all the standards, rules and restrictions that apply before it goes out. So there’s gonna be no risk in terms of brand reputation.
And it really makes such a massive difference in what you can do when you have that compliance system and framework in place because you can do things at scale. So Right. You know, that yeah. The a hundred percent we hear from people that is the number one of the number one things in terms of the value that they’re that or I shouldn’t say value, but they feel so confident in that.
When you hear from advisors though, organic growth is their number one priority, both for individual advisors actually and enterprise firms. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about some of the best practices. Give people some really strong takeaways that they can, you know, walk away with. And we can talk about just overall, but also how we at F and G are empowering people to pull these different levers and to grow.
And so, you know, in my opinion, the things that people really, really, I would say, walk away from if they engage FMG and they work with our team, the number one is outsourcing the things that they can so that they can focus on doing those really high value action items that only they can do. Right? So what do I mean by that? They can work with our team through our do it for me program where they’re paired with a concierge from our team.
And every single month, we prepare a marketing calendar for them, and we say, based upon your your niche audience, who you’re trying to target, these are the two blogs we’re gonna add to your website every month. These are the emails we’re gonna send to your centers of influence, and your client list. These are the social posts that are gonna go out. And by the way, can you send me a picture of you and your kid because we’re gonna talk about saving for college?
So we’re personalizing it. Right? So we’re preparing all of that content. We’re pushing it out.
We’re adding new people to different lists, making sure the CRM’s staying updated.
And then they’re able to spend the one hour a week they have on marketing to get in front of the camera and record a video or to host a client event or to do those really high touch action items That’s right.
Knowing that the system is in place that’s gonna keep dripping on people. Because when I stand in front of a room and I ask, how many of you know what you’re sending out to your clients and prospects next week or in two weeks or in a month to keep dripping on the people that have raised their hand and said, hey. I downloaded your tax planning guide. Most people don’t have something in place. And so that is a massive difference in organic growth because we know it comes down to consistency and keeping that pipeline, you know, moving. But I’d love to hear your perspective, Michelle.
Yeah.
In addition to what you said, I would say that the other area, a lot of firms that are seeing success are focusing is automating prospecting, lead enrichment, lead scoring workflows, and then activating what they can do against those leads. And so they’re coming to firms like FMG and saying, do you have this capability? Can you match it up to the powerful content that you already have to accelerate where we can focus, how we can segment the business, how we can segment the prospects? This is an area that we’re actually looking to add on into our platform later this year, which is the ability, yeah, to ingest that type of data.
So we’re looking at different partners in the space, from data brokers to platforms that specialize in lead enrichment. And we’re really excited because this is gonna add an amazing pillar of functionality and data signals and information that we can act against. So I would say that’s a big one. Again, personalization.
So personalization and the idea of targeting those customers, segmenting them, and then doing very targeted outreach content, changing the website experience that they might interact with based on who they are and what their needs are, matching advisors up to clients, leveraging the data behind the scenes to be able to understand who the ideal client is for that advisor.
You see me smiling so big because I get so excited talking with you about your vision for the product and where we’re going. And I know everyone listening in is probably saying, oh my gosh, you’re planning on doing some of these things. That’s amazing.
Especially when we talk about leads. Everybody wants help with Yep. Generating the leads, qualifying the leads. So say more. What what are some things that FMG big vision has on the board for where we’re going?
Yeah. So everyone’s known FMG for the past couple of years primarily as being a leader for marketing automation, and we will continue to invest in that category. I think what’s exciting is for the first time, FMG is now gonna be opening the platform. And we really wanna evolve into what we call a relationship operating system, and we can’t do that alone.
So when I say open the platform, it means right now, we’re developing, everything that we have is gonna have an API service. We’re gonna make all those API services exposed publicly, and we’re gonna have an offering called FMG Connect. Fmg Connect is gonna launch in, probably in the summertime of this year, and it’s gonna be available to both partners as well as customers. So imagine, you know, many customers wanna be able to have, control of the experience, and so they may wanna have a headless FMG interaction.
They’re gonna be able to hook into the API services that are most interesting to them and be able to embed some of our experience into their own front ends. From a partnership standpoint, this is critical. So we need the In order to become a platform that really is more of a system of client engagement and relationship management, we need to hook into those systems that advisors rely on the most. So we’re looking at custodians and, fintechs and financial planning providers and estate planning and tax planning.
Those are all like meeting managers, all really valuable, data signals that reside in what they’re producing. We wanna be able to bring all of that data into FMG, harmonize it, and start acting on those data signals to start triggering even more personalized content that we can develop, and we’re super excited about that.
One of the things I think that’s really interesting, we’ve worked you know, we’ve talked with a lot of firms.
So many people use FMG across the spectrum from, you know, in you know, RIAs, solo advisers, really large broker dealers, credit unions, banks, you know, you you name it. They’re using us.
And they’re they already trust us. Their compliance trust us to communicate with their clients on their behalf and to automate some of those messages even where in some instances, you know, the adviser just knows FMG is communicating with my clients for me and they trust us. So I think we are so well positioned to build on that trust and to continue to be, you know, that relationship OS, as you called it, for the adviser across more than just the marketing side, but all these different layers that end up enabling growth. And I’m so excited that that’s the vision and that that’s where we’re going. So we kind of have a picture here of all the different things that you just mentioned. I don’t know if you wanna say anything more about that or I can go to the next one.
Yeah, I mean, I’ll just touch on this. The visual is really helpful to bring our vision to life. And so what you’re seeing here in the blue is these are the spaces we’ve always played, right? Digital marketing, client engagement.
You’re seeing the categories in the gray as areas that we wanna go and expand in. So lead gen, we’re gonna take a build, buy, partner, and acquire approach, which will be really fun. Right? So there’s some providers out there that are already producing an amazing experience, firms are leaning into them, we wanna partner with them.
In other cases, we might make an acquisition to accelerate our innovation.
I think another big one we didn’t talk about was video. So we’re seeing a lot of players out there. A lot of firms I talk to, video is a priority. They want their advisors showing up in different ways, producing podcasts, having video avatars where they can produce presentations or snippets, what’s happening within the financial plan. So video is a space where we’re also looking at, should we build, buy, partner, do some type of a combination of that. So as you think about what FMG is, now it goes from it’s really from the front office, the very beginning from generating leads to turning that prospect into a client, to nurturing that client, to reaching into the relationships. We wanna be there every step of the way, enabling the advisor with the tools, with the data, with the content, with the reporting that they need.
What you’re seeing on the right is kind of the the phases. And so the foundation of the relationship operating system is that FMG Connect platform. Right? So you can now think of FMG really as a data orchestrator and a workflow orchestrator. And that’s gonna become critically important because those are the two use cases that most partners are gonna come to us with. And part of that will be agents, right? So later in the year, we’ll introduce an MCP layer that will make agent to agent orchestration possible.
And what you just touched on something though that I actually wanna make sure I point out for everyone listening. I think a lot of people still think of FMG. I don’t know what your perception was, Michelle, you know, even a year or two ago before you joined as, okay. You can help me with my website and you can create content and help me communicate with my clients.
People do not realize when it comes to client engagement how much more we go beyond, you know, just Oh, yeah. Marketing. Right? So we have MyRepChat, which is our text a compliant texting solution, which you can use completely separate from FMG.
If you have like a WordPress website, something like that, you can one hundred percent still use MyRepChat. We just recently acquired Testimonial IQ and launched FMG Testimonials, which is probably one of the things I’ve been most excited about in terms of a new product launch.
And so is our clients. Our clients are really excited about that.
Yes.
And for good reason, right? We’ve been saying forever, if you want to focus on an AEO strategy for twenty twenty six, which you should be if you’re listening to this, there’s three pillars that you need.
And, actually, I’m just gonna kind of go forward to this slide. It’s testimonials and social proof is the number one pillar that, you know, makes up a good portion of that. And that’s because these AI tools, they wanna yes. They wanna see what you have to say, who do you serve, but they care more about what other people have to say about working with you than what you say that client experience is like. They wanna know for real people the social proof. So we have been talking about this for a while, but we didn’t have a solution to provide for you all, and we are so thrilled to launch this.
It is really a walk, jog, run, or walk, run, sprint, however you wanna call it, approach where you really start just by collecting client feedback in a compliant way. Then you can decide if you wanna use those testimonials in your marketing, such as on your website. And then, you know, final stage, if you are, wanting to go all the way to the sprint phase, you can then push those out to things like, Google reviews. So it really allows you to have a compliant workflow to make sure that if you get audited, you can have a systematic approach to check all the boxes, but it makes a massive difference in your visibility in these AI search tools.
Yeah. And I think the point you hit on there is control. So it’s not like you’re gonna have these testimonials and they’re automatically gonna be out there. You’re gonna decide, do you wanna post them?
When you wanna post them? It’s leveraging the compliance framework that we have here, which is critically important for most firms that wanna do this. And I think there’s also the opportunity to learn from the testimonials, right? So that you can then target your marketing just based on what your customers are loving about your brand.
Use your client’s words. That’s To future customers like them, right? Like that is a hundred percent the best strategy.
So we’ve been talking about AEO a lot. I have been. It’s been in, you know, I feel like in the industry news constantly. So if you’re listening to this, these are really the three things as a takeaway you wanna focus on in twenty twenty six if you want to be more visible in AI search. So getting testimonials and real social proof from clients. And obviously, F and G solves for this through our new launch of F and G testimonials.
Then you want to make sure you’re building your reputation and demonstrating your expertise. This involves things like doing LinkedIn lives or being on podcasts. Right. You can and you don’t have to have your own show.
You can go be on other expert shows. Right? That will actually really, really help. Having hyper niche content.
So one of the things we love in the FMG platform, we’re writing all this content you can use, but you can take a piece and then use our AI tool Muse to make it hyper specific for your niche. Right? And then share that out.
So our launch of Muse really, really helps solve for that. And then the third one is formatting your content for AI. We know that AI reads content very different than traditional Google crawlers did. And so you wanna have things like schema markup, summary boxes at the top that really explicitly explain what the content’s all about, FAQ pages, all of these things. And FMG just recently launched a schema market markup FAQ widget, and we’re constantly iterating on where we can enhance the product, especially on the website side for this pillar, if you will.
Yeah. And I think the theme is there’s a lot of change happening, right? So a lot of investment, a lot of change, and a lot of new capabilities coming out. So for sure, you should be looking at FMG as a platform that really is gonna accelerate scale, productivity, and help grow the business for your advisors.
So I think that’s such a good segue into what’s next and where is everything going. It’s really been a huge year of change for FMG as you mentioned.
We’ve got new senior leadership. We were acquired by GTCR and they’re heavily, heavily investing in FMG, which is amazing to see. So let’s talk a little bit about this next generation ecosystem and this relationship OS. I’ve got this great visual that you shared with Yeah.
So we talked about it before, and I think the biggest takeaway that you can look at here that’s different for FMG, number one is that big box around partners. So as I mentioned, FMG Connect is gonna be the foundation to relationship OS. This is gonna really unlock the ability for everything to be API enabled here at FMG. That gives a lot of flexibility for clients and for advisers on how they wanna interact with our platform. I think the second is we are prioritizing integrations with agentic players. So think of the meeting note takers. Think of, CRM.
Think of providers that do relationship mapping or bring in, you know, really important lead gen and prospecting data signals. For this rest of this year, that’s where we’re gonna double down on partnerships and integrations, and we’ll be launching those starting this summer. And hopefully, it’s gonna make it easier and reduce swivel chair for the advisers that rely on those platforms or use multiple platforms. We want it to be fluid.
Right? So if you wanna spend time in FMG, you’re gonna be able to access all of this data. If you wanna spend time in another platform, you’re still gonna be able to access FMG’s data or experiences in another platform. So I think that’s the gist behind this and the spirit behind this.
Other areas that we will continue to invest in will be, as you can see on the right, voice, video, as I mentioned earlier. More AI capabilities will be weaved into our existing offerings as well as new offerings that we’ll roll out. We’re gonna be going a bit deeper on compliance. So that’s a strategy we’re looking at right now.
How can we, you know, enhance the the rules and bring more AI into the compliance experience for you? So lots of exciting things happening, Samantha.
I am so excited. And, know, there are certain things that for me, especially when I talk with advisors every day, you know, you want to we give them advice of what they can do. So it’s going to be so wonderful when we always have the exact product to match the advice that we’re giving. Because with any company, right, as you’re building, there are certain gaps you identify as you’re moving forward.
And so for instance, video. We have certain features in our platform that I love. Like you can upload a video and send an email, and you don’t have to first currently as it stands today, you don’t have to upload it to YouTube or Vimeo first. And then embed it in your website or the FMG just creates a landing page for you and it gives you a thumbnail and it gets rid of some of those extra steps, which we know makes a huge difference.
But to expand upon that, I’m really, really excited for that.
You know, one we didn’t talk about also that we just recently released is the ability to leverage natural language to even just search our content library. Yes. And the other is we’ve started to launch a new offering called the Content Marketplace. So yes, FMG has our own content that many folks come to us for, but we’re starting to see that, for example, asset managers and big enterprise firms, they may have other types of content that they’re using from third party sources or from their own libraries that they also wanna bring into the content library. So we’re starting to work with certain firms that wanna do that, and then they can control which content is offered when in the library.
Makes so much sense to tap into the distribution system that we’ve built and the advisors are already using in that way.
I think, you know, a hundred percent that makes so much sense. I know in the past, we’ve had partnerships with certain firms too where they already have a great, let’s say, lead gen piece of content, and then they can make it really easy for the advisers to add to their website and then have a drip sequence that goes out afterwards. And I think that’s also such a big key is there’s all there’s all these different people that might say, hey. I have this great resource or this great piece of content over here and over here. But if the adviser’s already using one system to manage all this, you really wanna get that content where they’re already living and spending time.
Right. And, you know, directionally where we wanna go is to be able to even dig deeper into some of that content and lift off certain things like visuals from the content. Maybe there’s certain graphs or things and be able to take those pieces and eventually put them out on a website or someplace that that firm wants us to place it. So we’re looking at how we can go in and kinda slice up that content and just use certain pieces in context in the flow of work. So I think eventually we’ll get there.
I love that. So I know we’re coming up on the top of our time here. One of the questions I really wanted to ask you is when you think about, you know, you’ve joined FMG coming in, where we’re headed in the next year, what is the thing that you are most excited about?
I think I’m most excited about how our teams are using AI behind the scenes. All of our product managers right now are using things like Claude Cowork and other capabilities, and I think that’s gonna really scale how we operate. It’s gonna make us much faster in terms of how we’re building our capabilities. Right now, we’re replatforming a lot of things, so stay tuned.
You’re gonna see all new experiences coming out of FMG. And I’m just excited again that we have someone that owns us that is investing double downing and investing in our innovation. So it’s it’s really giving us the freedom to get creative and explore and partner and think about capabilities that we can add onto the platform that we’ve never added before. So I think you’re gonna see a pace of innovation that you’ve never seen before from FMG and that’s super exciting.
I can attest to that already. It feels that way. Having you here, it’s been amazing to hear your ideas and think about where, you know, you you envision the adviser experience when they’re interacting with FMG and how they’re using it to really power that organic growth. So thank you so much for joining me and for all of the great insights.
