Your Best Referrals Aren’t Working Hard Enough

I’m Samantha Russell, the chief evangelist here at FMG. And today, we’re talking about how testimonials turn client trust into AI visibility and growth. So I would actually love to know in the chat if you have joined us for a webinar before, or if this is your first one. That would be really helpful for us to see. And as we’re looking at that, Susan, please introduce yourself. So glad to have you with me here today.

I am glad to be here. I’m Susan Theater.

I’m the chief marketing officer at FMG, and we are glad to have all of you with us, and let’s get into it.

Yeah. So when you’re thinking about AI visibility and, you know, how people find any kind of business or service today, what a lot of you, I’m sure, are feeling is that it has drastically changed in the last, you know, six to nine months. So one of the things that we just wanna start by setting the stage, if you’re not familiar with FMG, FMG really is your partner for what’s next in adviser marketing. So not just what’s happening today, but we’re constantly Susan and I are looking at where’s the puck headed, what do we need to be paying attention to, things like this with AI visibility, how people are finding advisers. And so we have one platform for every single part of your marketing.

And today, we’re really honing in on this testimonial section. So we are gonna talk a little bit about the background behind it. A lot of firms, you know, don’t even realize that that with the SEC marketing rule going into effect in twenty twenty one, this paved the way for allowing firms to do this. People were kinda dragging their feet because it wasn’t as important.

But then when AI search came on the scene, ChatGPT, you know, Gemini, Claude, what happened was all of a sudden, they have been weighing, do you have social proof from real clients who use your, you know, your service? And that becomes a huge part of whether or not you can be found. So when we saw that at FMG, we thought we need to create a product and service to help advisors with this, and that is how we ended up launching FMG testimonials at the beginning of the year. So we are gonna specifically hone in on that, but I just wanted to show we can help you with a lot of different parts of your marketing.

Right, Susan?

Yes. And all of these work together or independently. So we always get that question. Do you need to have a FMG website to use testimonials?

No. Do you need an FMG website to use Do It For Me? No. Like, all of these can be used independently, and then it’s one of those magical things that they just all work together.

So you just save more and more time the more things that are plugged into the same dashboard. But they are all independent as well. I was just thinking, what a crazy thing that I don’t think maybe a year ago, AEO was I think at Future Proof, you talked about AEO, and it was groundbreaking. So it’s only been a year since that term even existed pretty much.

Yeah. Very true. And I think the more you know, what do they say? It takes seven times to hear something before you start paying attention to it.

Does everyone here know what AEO is? Let’s see. And also in the chat, we’ve got Arlette who said she’s come to many webinars, so welcome back. Thank you.

And we have Frank who said it’s not his first, and he works with Patty at Key Financial. So hi, Frank.

You new PB.

Yes. Yes. Love it. So if you are new here, don’t be quiet. Don’t be shy.

Let us know. Susan and I try to make these very fun and interactive and not take ourselves too seriously. We really want this to not be a snooze fest, but something you get great information and also, you know, learn something, but have fun. Oh, we have a a first timer.

HBC. Welcome.

You win the award for the first one to speak up in Oh, it’s one of our Baird customers.

Yay. Oh, and we got a what is AEO. What a good segue.

Yes. Wonderful segue. First. Sorry.

Always a housekeeping.

Nope. That’s okay. Just as a quick FYI because I saw the question. Yes. The session is being recorded, and we will share the slides.

But look at that. We had another person in the chat answer the question. AEO is answer engine optimization. And so, yes, that’s exactly what it is. So when you think about how people search, right, you know, it used to be you would go to Google and you would type in best financial adviser near me, which by the way, as you can see from this slide here, from twenty twenty two to twenty twenty five, people looking online for an adviser near them, that just term adviser near me has gone up seventy percent. I mean, Susan, I was really floored when I actually saw that.

Yeah. That is crazy. And then I I don’t know if we have the slide, but the percentage of searches that are done on Google versus the AI engines as look at that.

That was not rehearsed.

No. We do not rehearse these.

We just talk to each other live.

So you’re getting the you’re getting the live.

Slide to follow that. Yes.

Because but I will say this is from April, and I actually think these numbers are even higher. I I let’s everybody tell us in the chat. If you need to just quickly, you know, think figure something out, do you go to Google? Do you go to Clog?

Do you go to ChatGPT? And if you are in Google, do you click on links, or do you just get the answer at the top? Because in my opinion, where it says Google search, that still counts if you go to Google, but most people are getting the answer at the top of the page. Right?

Like so that to me is still an AI answer.

What is everybody saying?

I just I just put it in Gemini to see. So we’ll get the update.

Chat, Claude, chat, trusty old chat, Google. So a lot of people are still using And gbt? Wow.

ChatGPT, it says, is fifty three to fifty eight percent. Gemini, twenty five to twenty seven. Oh, that’s of the AI search. It’s mainly chat and then Gemini’s second. Claude is only seven to nine percent.

I think all of us who work in, like, you know, very in financial services and stuff, we’re all obsessed with Claude or in tech. It’s like, do what’s everybody here’s favorite? Will you Wade, which platform do you love to use for work the most? Susan and I are big Claude fans.

Claude for life. Hoo. Hoo. Autopilot. You’re the same.

Yeah. So I guess the point is this is not going anywhere, and it’s really interesting to hear what people like to use for different things and the answer is different. But I just wanna show this slide because I think this really helps everybody unlock. If you haven’t thought about how your prospects or customers are using this, it is being used for everything from finding an adviser to evaluating whether that adviser is a good fit to I’m sure Susan just wrote a great byline about this, you know, coming in and giving to your adviser a printout that you got from AI, asking them a bunch of questions about their strategy, your portfolio, your plan.

So what has changed and why AEO, answer engine, is so important is so with any of these questions, right, the person is going in and asking the answer engine, chatty, b t, Claude, Gemini, what have you, a question. Question. They are not getting a list of links. In all of these instances here, they are getting an answer.

Just one like, they just get an answer. That’s it. And so your business either is the the list on the list. Right?

In this example here, like, who should we hire in Saint Louis? You either are visibly there or not. So that’s why we call AI visibility. You’re either invisible to AI or you’re visible.

But even in these other instances, what I think people haven’t wrapped their minds around enough is maybe you have really started doing a ton with estate planning or, you know, tax planning. But you have it not barely anywhere on your website. You haven’t wrote blogs about it. You haven’t posted about it on social So someone goes to AI AI, and they’re saying, you know, hey.

I was referred to these two firms. Here’s what I need help with. And the AI tool can’t find that you mentioned that anywhere. It will tell the person, well, this firm doesn’t talk about estate planning, so I’d go with the other And that is a huge gap that a lot of firms need to overcome.

And we’re happy to work with you on that, so don’t don’t feel overwhelmed on it.

But you know what I just got in the chat, Alyssa saying, I recently have been getting more and more leads from ChatGPT.

So I asked if it was too much to type, but would love to hear more of the details. I’m curious if it was somebody who was looking specifically for a financial advisor near me or if it was somebody that was asking about some financial planning topic and your name was mentioned. And if you don’t ask those questions, it would be interesting for you to know because it’s going to change what strategy you need to pull the lever on more.

Yes. And so one thing while we’re waiting to hear back from Melissa, I wanna hear it too. And maybe actually tell us in the chat for anybody. Have you gotten anyone who said, oh, I went to chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, and they recommended, your firm to me? I would love to hear if anyone else got one. Oh, more.

Not a yes. Anybody with yes. I’d love to hear just, like, the high level whether they were looking for somebody near them or whether they were, you know, researching a topic or what it might be.

Yeah. And I’ve heard stories, you know, where this is not piddly little accounts. Like, we’re getting people who are bringing over real substantial AUM. And I think it also makes sense, Susan.

You know, we talk to these tools. I don’t know about you, but for me, my friends, everyone I know, we, you know, we tell it our life story. So we feel like they’re gonna understand. ChatGPT or Claude or whatever it is is gonna understand the nuance of my life because I’ve told it everything.

So now when I go to ask it for an adviser, it’s taking into account all those other things I’ve already told it.

Yeah. No. I think we completely think of it as as objective because it’s there are no sponsored ads. There are no sponsored results.

It’s not ranked by anything. Not yet. It’s what it finds. Not yet. But with Google results and everything, obviously, you got the sponsored first.

But you just got links to firm names. It didn’t really feel like somebody knew you and was recommending. It felt like, Okay, now I have to do research.

Answer Engine, I think we just trust it as a recommendation.

It’s really, as you say, it’s like a client referral. We think of it just like another visit. It’s just another audience that you need to work for referrals.

So I what I would do if I were you, everyone sitting here today, it’s hard to do it on your own device that you already have logged in to chat because you probably talked about your business. But on a another person’s phone or or laptop, go in to a new chat or, you know, a new clogged conversation and ask. You know?

I pretend impersonate your ideal client. I am fifty five years old. I live here. I’m looking to work with an adviser who will help me with x, y, or z, and then see who it recommends.

And if your firm doesn’t come up, then you want to ask as a follow-up question, why didn’t you recommend fill in the name the the name of your firm and see what it says. But one of the things you’re probably going to find, look at both of these. Right? No client reviews online.

Over here. One firm had forty seven reviews, one had none found. And this is because when AI decides which firms to recommend, one of the top things it’s looking for is that reviews and social proof. And this makes sense. Right?

AI has to decide of the, you know, hundreds of thousands of advisory businesses out there, which one is gonna be the best fit for Susan when she goes looking. And how does it do that? It looks for credibility signals, and it looks for the reputation, and it wants to know that other real people have used this firm. It doesn’t wanna recommend a scam or someone that isn’t a legit adviser. And one of the best ways to do that is to see reviews from people who’ve used the business.

So it is a huge part of the score. So what we’re putting on the screen here, Susan, right, is this score chart that you and I work together to create, which, basically, we did a ton of research to figure out exactly what are all of these AI tools, and they each kinda have their own score. But in general, if we’re saying across the board, what are they looking at? And this is what it is.

And we figured this out last, fall. What again, what a huge percentage the reviews and social proof were. FMG didn’t have a way at the time to help you all with this, and we knew we needed to have a solution. So the end of last year in twenty twenty five, we acquired, Testimonial IQ.

It is now part of the FMG family as FMG Testimonials, and we’re gonna explain to you how it actually works to help you collect these reviews compliantly from your clients. And if you cannot push them to Google yet, which we know that a lot of times is the problem, you don’t have to. And you can still get that great AEO juice, if you will.

Yes. Okay. Is it worth going through these, or do we come back to that?

I was just gonna say, you know, do you want to? It’s up to you.

Not I mean, where we cut I forget if we’re covering all of them later or if you wanna breathe today talking about the reviews in social proof.

Okay. I think it’s worth mentioning because some you know, firms are getting found without reviews. So the other things that go into it, one person mentioned that they wrote a blog about a new legislation. So content and frequency, recency, and specificity are very good for the Answer Engine.

So people tend to be asking very specific questions. And so if you keep your content geared towards your target audience and what’s on their mind and what might interest them, you have a high likelihood of being found as long as you’re continually posting content on your website, social, things like that. The other big thing is third party mentions, awards, earned media. Not easy to I mean, the earned media PR stuff is hard.

But awards, there are more and more awards out there. I know one of them just took a little tumble.

Yeah, that was not a great story.

Other than that one, there’s still a lot wealthmanagement dot com’s Wealthy Awards or Advisor Hubs. All the publications have lots of awards for advisors.

And it doesn’t matter whether it’s from Forbes. It can be from a publication that is not mainstream commercial. That’s something to put on your website and that definitely helps. And that’s something really I think everybody can do.

You probably have to add some disclosures to your email and ADV and things like that, but that’s a good one. And then the FAQs, we’ll talk about a little bit, I think, but add FAQs to your website so you’re answering not just how do we onboard you and what are our fees, but answer questions within your services sections, within the who we serve, within the what we do, answer questions about what you do that talk about the outcomes that you’re solving for, thinking about and that’s another thing to ask new prospects is, how did you find me? But also, what questions were you asking? And then you should write an FAQ on that and or a blog.

Yes. And you think about just, again, with the with all of these, when we go to these tools and we’re searching, if we go back to this, right, all of these are, for the most part, questions. Right? So people are gonna ask questions like, oh, I was gonna claim Social Security.

If I delay it a year, what’s gonna happen? Or I, you know, just started working at Amazon, and I have these RSUs, blah blah blah. Like, think about the types of questions that your particular audience would be asking, and you could add them as FAQs anywhere on your site. So it can be at the end of a service page.

It can be at the end of a blog, but you definitely wanna have just one overarching FAQ page in general that AI can source from. So if you looked at that scorecard, it might feel a little overwhelming, all these different things. What we like to say is there’s really three buckets that you need to be worried about now going forward. Testimonials and social proof, building reputation and demonstrating your expertise, and then formatting your content in a way that AI likes to find it.

So at the bottom of each of these, we’re not gonna go through all these in rapid detail, but we at FMG have been building our product around this new world of AEO and designing the product and the services we offer to help solve for each of these. So to help you with testimonials and social proof, we have FMG testimonials for the reputation and demonstrating expertise. You’re gonna see some examples here, but a big part of this is each adviser having their own place on the website where they can link to their articles, their brand mentions, their reviews.

And then for formatting content, we have an FAQ widget widget that has on the back end something called schema markup. You don’t really need to know much about it other than AI likes it when we add schema markup to pages. It makes it easier for it to site, and so we have added that to our FAQ pages. And we’re gonna show you some other ways that we help you with the formatting.

Okay.

Is there any questions, Susan, before we move on?

I think we’re done. Okay. So we’re today, we’re talking specifically again about testimonials. If you want to watch some of our previous webinars where we talk more about formatting content, things like that, if you go to our YouTube channel, we have all of our previous workshops where we dive into these topics listed there.

And they’re usually about thirty to forty five minutes, and it will teach you what you need to know. I see some people saying they are rebuilding their website with FMG. So woo hoo. Love love that.

And those would be great to watch as you’re going through it. So if you’ve been if you haven’t started testimonials and we ask you why, almost everybody says it’s because of compliance. And I’d love to know for those of you listening, had is is that still a barrier for you, or have you just felt nervous about it? Do you have the ability right now to start doing this with your home office or even in internally?

Yes. Big barriers. Okay.

Barrier. Barrier. Barrier. Barrier. Yeah.

I don’t know if we have anybody who is affiliated with Satera but I hear that they just announced today and I might be wrong by a day or two but they definitely announced at their last conference. So, Caterra is on board and we are close on a lot of the other big firms. So I think the time is coming where it just takes firms a little bit of time to get comfortable, but we are super close.

I just wrote an article in invest or not wrote it, but I was interviewed by a journalist in Investment News, and we talked all about this. And he ended up titling it, like, compliance is no longer an excuse for defending reviews, which I never said that verbatim, but that was sort of his takeaway.

And I and that was the headline. But I do think that the more you know, it just it people have to build put the program in place and feel comfortable. And the good news is FMG has been a partner of what basically every single almost I shouldn’t say every single. I don’t wanna I don’t know if I’m missing one, but almost every broker dealer, in the United States. And so they trust us to build programs that will be compliant. And so we are, as Susan said, in the process of getting this going with a lot. But You know what?

I just got a really good question that I think we should address.

So Okay.

We have a Laurie is on the on the call, and she said she works with advisers and consults with them. And she hears most often that one of the big barriers is just being afraid of bad reviews. And we do hear that too.

Do you want to talk about how FMG testimonials is really the perfect solution for that?

Yes.

So, actually, I guess we’ll just go back and I thought There was also somebody that said, you know, it’s just a lot of you gotta get signatures from the from the client and blah blah blah so we can we can talk about how we make all of that way easier.

Yes. So this maybe we’ll walk through an example here, and it’ll illustrate the point.

So this is Mission Wealth. They worked with us to create a compliant testimonial, process for their advisers, and they I wanna say they started this, what, like, nine months ago at this point. And they are not I wouldn’t say, like, super proactive. Like, they didn’t launch a campaign and go and ask everybody. They put the request in the email signature. So the advisers have it in their email signature.

And over the last nine months, they’ve had two hundred and fifty five testimonials collected.

Two hundred and five were approved. So, you know, about fifty were you know, the compliance said, okay. You know, thank you for the feedback client, but maybe they talked about their performance reviews or something that we cannot publicly put up on the website, and so those were not included. And the average rating was a four point nine eight.

And what we have found is that that is very, very common. The average rating is a four point nine. So you worry about it, and it’s normal to worry about it. But most clients love their adviser, and they love the work they’re doing for them.

And the fear of getting a bad review, I’ll I’ll just say it plainly, should not prevent you from all the good that’s gonna come from having the reviews in in totality. You may get one or two bad reviews. What I always like to tell people is that I think the exception proves the rule. If I’m on Amazon or I’m looking up a hotel or looking to work with a professional and they have fifty five star reviews and nobody has said one negative thing, I think it’s bots at some point. Like, there’s not one person that even said something like they took an ex they took twenty four hours to get back to me, or when they came to my house, they forgot to put the booties on, you know, the plumber, like, something.

The the exception proves the rule. Right? So when we see that there’s not even one person who could think of a single thing they could do better, it sounds fake. So I would not let this prevent you from collecting reviews.

I will also say so for those that, you know, say, yeah, Sam, but I’m still nervous. The way we designed the platform so first off, you can choose, you set it up with your own brand, your firm, if they have disclosures, compliance is going to preload all of that. So there is no getting a signature. There’s no work on your part. So time being a challenge for some of you in the chat, this takes no time after the setup and the setup’s super fast, mainly with compliance. Then what happens is it sends out and in this case of mission, they didn’t even send out an email asking. They just let people see it in the email signature and opt in, which is super easy.

So let’s say you did it that way and you just put it in your email signature and a client clicked on it. It says, you know, would you want to leave a review? They click on it. They see a little box that looks like a Google review.

It is not. It’s a client. It’s just a survey tool. So it has five stars.

They could click on the five stars and then a little box.

And when the customer says enter, you have a choice when you’re setting it up whether you want to give them the option of copying that onto Google.

Many advisors start this program not enabling that. At that point, it is nothing more than a client survey tool where you have a dashboard and you see all of the clients who respond to it coming in on this dashboard. So you get an alert when somebody gives you a review, but nobody in the world can see it except you. You can do this, which really everybody should do. You should be doing client surveys. So this is a great way to do client surveys.

And then you can decide at what point you feel comfortable that the reviews are such that you want to promote them. You can’t choose which ones. Like if you got ten great ones and one bad one, you can’t be like, well, I’ll promote those ten. You do still have to promote all that you have received that have been compliance approved, but you don’t have to have anything on Google that anybody’s seen.

And you can run this FMG testimonial program just like a survey tool until you feel comfortable that you want to have it automatically added to your website. At that point, you say, yes, add it to my website. And then every review that comes in is getting promoted or getting put into a little box on your website automatically so you don’t have to do anything compliantly, running through compliance. And then at some point, step three could be that you add that little button that says to the client, yes, I’d love to post this on Google as well.

And then they just click it, and it automatically copies it, and they just hit post. So it makes it easy because Google reviews will help your AEO more than just testimonials on your website. But testimonials on your website will help more than nothing.

That was long, but I think it’s interesting to people.

Exactly. And I think what you know? So what what we were showing in that last slide, I thought I had a close-up of it, and I’m sorry I don’t. But this is what would go to the client.

It’s gonna be a quick email. You can have it say what you want. We have, like, sample language you can use, and they, you know, can give their rating and then give a little little note about the service. And then at that point, as Susan said, after they’ve collected it, you can decide whether you go have it post to Google or not.

And you also, like, just remember, that can be just a survey.

Until you turn on the automatically share on my website, it’s survey. It’s not considered a testimonial. It’s considered a testimonial when you want to start promoting it. And that’s the point where you have to have all of them go in. Otherwise, you can just manage it like a survey tool.

So I just wanted to show some examples. So here is a website that we have or one of our clients, Sorenson Wealth. So you can see this is what it looks like being fed in. In the widget tool with FMG testimonials, you can decide how you want it displayed. So maybe you want all of them on one page or maybe you want only three to display at a time and people can click through here.

So that’s up to you. The other thing is as you collect more reviews and you maybe you have a few advisers, you can design pages where the there’s tags. So as these reviews are coming in, you can tag it to say, okay. This review was about Kyle.

And so we’re gonna put this review on his profile. Because if you think about how people search with ChatGPT, they may say, I was referred to Kyle Buffo. Tell me whether he’s a good fit for my business, or they may say, I was referred to Mission Wealth. It doesn’t we don’t know.

And the tools really take into account the exact language you use. So if someone searches for an individual adviser, it’s really important to have those reviews associated with that individual adviser. So our tool allows you on the back end to add tags. Maybe you remember we talked about, like, different services and how you can have, you know, different types of service that you have.

Maybe you wanna show all of the reviews that are from peep you know, people who’ve worked with you through your business own the service that you provide to business owners. So you can add all of those reviews to that particular page. So, again, the tagging that we provide also really helps with your marketing and that if somebody is asking ChatGPT, who’s a good adviser to work with me, who’s also gonna help me with estate planning, and it can find on this page all these reviews about how Mission Wealth helps with estate planning, it’s going to be much more likely to say you are one of the best options.

Right? So we at FMG help you collect it, and then we help you utilize them in the best way possible so that you can improve how likely you are to be recommended.

Okay. We’re gonna show more of how it works, but just another tip I thought I would share. If you do have a you know, each individual adviser on your your website, build them out a page, talk about who that particular adviser typically tends to work with, what geographic locations they can work in, and, you know, the more information you can have per adviser, the better in this new AI world.

Because, again, some people are going to look up the adviser by name, and then others are gonna look up the business by name.

So we wanna make sure we have built out both types of pages. So Sam should you know, that’s typically where people have their about us page. Right? And then they have all their teammates in their little photos and it can either flip and expand or whatever the different visual technique is.

Are you suggesting that they do both or that they should have an about us that’s general, but then the picture maybe takes you to their own page?

Yeah. So here’s the team page, and then you click on any one individual person, and then it takes you to their page. So that’s the best setup possible.

Yeah. That’s great advice.

Okay. So if you’re wondering, okay. Well, how long is this all gonna take? You know, here’s our seven day system.

We have had people who have been set up in one meeting. So it doesn’t need to be long, but, you know, obviously, when you’re dealing with trying to get everything approved, let’s be realistic. It can take longer. So the first thing you wanna do is make sure that form a d v is updated and that the home office is allowing you to collect testimonials.

So that’s day one. And then day two, partner with compliance and make sure all your disclosures are up to date. And our team helps with this as well. Right?

So we’re instituting this for multiple firms so we can tell you what disclosure information we typically see and that, you know, we suggest you add to the different pages.

We worked with the SEC in developing this. So it is SEC vetted. It has been through perfectly.

Good good point. And then you day three, you want to create that email asking for feedback. And, again, we have already precreated templates that you can use out of the box, or you can work with your team to decide you wanna edit them a little bit. But once you design it once, you don’t have to keep changing it.

Right? So this is all you set it up once, and then it’s just running in the background. I really wanna make sure everyone is aware of this. It’s a very automated system, which is the point and why it’s compliant because you’re not in there cherry picking everything.

It’s just running in the background. And then once you’re ready, you can start collecting them. So day four, when we say share, again, you don’t need to start a huge campaign emailing everyone. You can have it just be in your email signature, but you can create a campaign.

Some people, you know, ask it ask for these after their annual meeting or their biannual meeting.

Other people will do some sort of email campaign. It’s up to you how you decide to collect them.

But then just have to do the same thing for everybody.

That’s the point. Yes.

You it has to be we’re doing an email campaign. It goes to every client. We’re adding it to our email signature. We’re adding there’s no separate email that doesn’t have it.

We’re doing it for everybody’s annual review. That’s the policy that will be in your ADV or in whatever documents you need as a Series seven. And that’s how you don’t cherry pick. We got a question about, so let’s say they launch this campaign and they do an email campaign to everyone.

And then they’d get a whole host of, like, a flurry of reviews right away. And then it sort of drip over time. Is that fine? Or is it better just to have the drip?

And I see Arlette asking this and asking about the recency bias. So, yes, AI does have a recency bias. So if you haven’t gotten any re if you got fifty reviews last summer and then you haven’t gotten a single one in a year, that’s not as good as just getting one or two every month. So I would try to set it up so that certain if you are gonna do email campaigns, you can, you know, have different triggers in our system.

So maybe a fourth of your client base is emailed every so once a quarter, those emails are going out. And our team can help you design it in a way that it is going to make sure it’s consistent.

Putting it in your email signature is another great way or having the trigger be after a client meeting. Those are all good ways to have it be more of a drip than all at once.

Yeah. That’s a great idea. Just thinking out loud, you could organize your you know, you could say, I’m going to email I’m going to do everybody who whose anniversary with us is in q one. We’re gonna send it out in q one. And q two, same thing. That would be a very, you know, ongoing recurring way that you could justify doing it in quarters.

Yes. Good point.

And we just wanna make sure that you are aware too. This is coming it’s not coming from FMG. It’s coming from your logo, your email. It is very much feels to the client like you’re just asking for their feedback.

We’re gonna have we have some more questions. We’re gonna give a couple more examples, but in the instance, we’re at the thirty five minute mark, Aubrey, we have people asking in the questions how we they can get started. So could you put up the poll? If you just reply yes, please, we can reach out to you and talk we can go through your particular situation, who your broker dealer is, what currently you can and can’t do with compliance, how we can help you work to get it set up.

If you were in talks with your broker dealer, we can let you know that. And then if there’s other things related to AEO even beyond the testimonials as you remember what goes into your AEO score, things like adding FAQs to your website, creating content in a specific format so that AI can find it, we can talk with you about that too. So if you just hit yes, please, our team will reach out to you, and go through what those options look like. But let’s so thank you so much for answering that poll, And let’s keep going through just some more best practices. So we talked about, you know, where you can collect them, so email signature.

Another one was after an event. Mission Wealth actually said this was really strategic. They do events a couple times a year. And right after the event, you know, everybody sees you.

They’re feeling good. It’s like, hey. Thanks for coming to our event. That was so fun.

By the way, we’re collecting feedback about your experience, you know, and collected then.

And I already showed that. So I think we’re good on that one. Oh, this was just about, tagging. So, again, don’t just think of it as you’re collecting information and it’s gonna live on Google.

Some people have asked, if I don’t push it to Google, will I it would still help my AEO? Yes. And especially if you add tags so that the the testimonials are on specific pages. So what you wanna do is have these testimonials be on certain pages tied to that content.

So if someone’s looking for an adviser to help them with business exit planning and you have reviews all about from clients who you’ve helped with that, that is really gonna help your AEO and your visibility. So in our tool, we can allow you to tag them in different ways. And then, again, once those reviews are tagged, they’re automatically gonna appear on those pages if you want them on those pages for your website.

Susan, I see some questions coming in. I wanna make sure we get to them. Were there any that we need to answer out loud?

I got them. There was a duly registered question. I just said, typically, where you hold your FINRA licenses is what will dictate the policies.

I don’t think I think I’ve gotten everything else. If I missed anybody, just scream at me.

Okay. Good. And then once you know, taking it even to a further level, if your compliance allows, that you can take those same testimonials and use them on places, you know, on social media. So this is just an example of how Mission is doing it. Again, you need to have the proper disclosures, which we would suggest you put in the post itself, but you can think well beyond just having them on your website and all the different ways that you could use them in your marketing. Oh, these were some of the pre submitted questions. We talked about the bad reviews.

Let’s see what’s the other one.

How do you leverage Google so let’s see. No controls on Google platform to add or archive. So for people that just get Google reviews without using something like FMG, how does that work?

It’s risky. I would not do that. I would definitely use a tool that helps with the compliance part.

And that’s why I think a lot of broker dealers, to answer the other question, have been so hesitant because Google is in control if it’s just all on Google. So you really this allows you to be in control of the collection process and allows your firm to review all of those testimonials as they’re coming in and only push out the ones that meet, the SEC rule. So this really is the key to making sure you’re doing it in a compliant way.

And I think somebody has two hundred and forty eight five star Google reviews. Wow. The best way to use them is to get them on your website. AI sees them anyway, but it’s also amazing just to have a tool that automatically will flow those into your website and have the compliance records and then get you more consistently because you’re probably getting those. It sounds like you’ve got an actual intentional plan around it. But if you have a tool like FMG testimonials, you’ll continue to, you know, automatically be reminding people to give more. So I think you’d probably see that boost up even more.

The other thing I would be aware of is that all these AI tools are fighting with each other for access to data. So Google, obviously, and Google Gemini have access to Google reviews. There has been ups and downs over whether Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT has access to Google’s reviews pages.

And a lot of times what happens is a third party tool that collects all of them will republish them, and then the AI tools have access to that. But that’s the first thing to think about. The second thing is AI likes what we call structured data. So when I showed you those examples where on a website, right, if we go back to this this example here, you know, if we click on under services and we’re under trust and estate planning and all those reviews at the bottom are coded to be what our clients have to say about working with us for trust and estate planning, it makes it so much easier for AI to know mission wealth offers trust and estate planning, and here’s what real people who’ve worked with them on this have said. When these are all bundled together on Google, it’s hard for the AI tools to extract the data.

So using the tool like that four star review, and I don’t think anybody’s like, oh my gosh.

How did they put that? I mean, it’s like, okay. And that I think is the worst anybody ever gets is four.

Yes. And then I thought about the FAQs. In an ideal world, you collect them, you put them on your website in these structured ways, and you push to Google.

But, you know, you can’t always push to Google. And if you’re somebody listening to this who has a bunch of Google reviews and you don’t yet have a systematic way to put them on your website, you are still missing half of the puzzle. So you want to do both if you can.

Okay.

We promise to try to keep these we we can just talk forever. But here’s, again, the QR code if you missed the poll before. I also put our email marketing at f m g sweet I missed the dot com.

And Susan and I get to see all of those. So if you have a particular question that you’d love to chat with us about, we also are on LinkedIn, Samantha c Russell and Susan Susan Theater. And if so if we’re not connected there, please, you know, connect with us there. But at the end of the day, the main thing is we know that this really does make a difference.

So as you’re thinking about the second half of twenty twenty six and into twenty twenty seven, whenever people I go on podcasts and we go to conferences all the time. Right, Susan? And someone will say, what’s the number one thing someone should do to improve their marketing? My answer right now is to set up a review and testimonial program because it is the single biggest lever you can pull to have AI send more people to you.

Absolutely.

I couldn’t agree more, and thank you. We had such great engagement. What a great audience. Thank you guys so much for joining and sticking with us and asking questions. We love that.

Yes. So hopefully this was helpful. Thank you for everybody for taking time to join, and we hope it made it a little bit more clear on how you can use reviews and testimonials. And we hope that you all will feel emboldened to reach back out to your compliance if if that’s been the hurdle and talk with them and have another conversation, and we’re happy to help in any way we can.

Just see George. Hi, George.