You’re Already Wearing Every Hat. It’s Time to Level Up Your Marketing.

Hi, everybody, and happy Wednesday. We are coming to you live from Pennsylvania. We just…

Michael and I just realized that we’re both in Pennsylvania. We did not realize that before. I’m Samantha Russell, the chief evangelist here at FMG, And we try to do a LinkedIn Live at least once a month where I’m able to talk to advisers around the country who are working with FMG on their marketing, and we answer questions that some of you might have, dig into what’s working, what they’re trying, what’s new, and really just make it a nice free flowing conversation where everybody watching can learn from each other. So if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat.

This is being streamed on both LinkedIn and YouTube, and the replays will live in both of those places afterwards. So if you miss something, you can always go back and watch. So joining me is Michael…

Is it Carwick? I I don’t wanna butcher you. Ah, I got it right. It’s always so nerve wracking when you say someone’s name live for the first time.

It’s a unique one. Yeah.

How are you, Michael?

Doing great. How about you?

I am doing great. Other than this head cold, like I said, that I have, so sorry about the way I sound. Three little kids. It’s bound to happen this time of year. So, do you have any children, by the way? I should have been.

Three of them as a matter of fact, but I can’t say three little kids anymore.

Okay.

But they weren’t just yesterday. They were little kids. So, yeah, they’re in their now.

Oh, okay. We are in the throes of, you know, Halloween over here. Because I live in State College where Penn State is. We actually have trick or treat on Thursday because you can’t interfere with the big football game on Saturday. So we have a trick or treat tomorrow. And so it’s been… Our house has been a buzz getting all the costumes ready.

And it’s not that you asked, but I think this is hilarious. I told my kids they could pick a costume for me. So they’re going as cowboys and cowgirls, and I am the cow.

Wow. Careful what you asked for.

Yes, exactly.

So it should be fun. I’ll have to post a picture later. But, okay. Nobody’s here to hear about our Halloween costumes. They’re here to hear about your marketing, Michael. So can you tell us just a little bit about you, your firm, how long you’ve been an adviser, just that background info?

Sure, I’ll try and give you my life history or business history at least in a brief summary. I started with some of big wirehouses back in the day. I’ve been doing this for, we’re coming up on three decades now, right? So a couple of different iterations of my career, but jumping to where I am today, just a few years ago, I partnered up with someone who I had met through this organization called the Financial Transitionist Institute, where we help people through major life transitions, right?

So Peggy, I mentioned her, Peggy Fry is my business partner. We just merged about three years ago or so. She’s been at it a long time. I’ve been at it a long time.

But just so any listeners or anyone tuning in understands where I’m coming from, despite doing this for a very long time, it’s almost like a startup and it’s very much like a startup atmosphere. We’re trying to build out the firm and we have big growth plans. And so a lot going on there. So as a quick summary, that’s where we are.

Two very experienced financial advisors trying to make stuff happen. Does that help?

And that’s amazing. And so you do you still specialize in helping people going through transitional life moments?

Yeah, that is the biggest thing that we work on, especially with working with family and readiness, like readiness for the next stage of life. And that’s a kind of preparation for transition. We love working with some of the hardest cases in the world, which are widows. So yeah, we definitely have a specialty in working with people going through major life change or planning for major life change or transitions. Yes, we do.

Well, I have a soft spot for that. I’m a widow myself. I lost my husband three years ago last Friday. And it’s so true. You know, all of a sudden, I tell all my friends who are my age, you know, all these women in their late thirties and like, make both of you write down for the spouses a document that’s like, if I die, read this. And it’s got not just like the financial information, but like the Netflix password if one person knows and the other one doesn’t, because there’s like just random things that you don’t even think about. So that’s amazing that you’re helping.

It sounds like we have a whole other broadcast to do sometime, different topic. We’ll save that for another day. But how do we specialize in that? That is on topic probably with what we’ll talk about today. Right? How do you tell the world what you do?

Yeah. And, I mean, I think one of the things that’s really interesting and a lot of people have been listening to me talk all over the country on this is that now that people are searching so differently on AI, you know, they’re telling ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, their life story, when they’re going to find an adviser, the world has changed so fast in the way that we’re searching for these things. And having a very specific type of person that you serve and offering very specific solutions rather than being a generalist is really the way whenever somebody’s like, how do I get Chechipee to recommend me versus other advisers?

That’s the way that you need to be. Because if you say you work with everyone, these AI tools have no idea who to send to you. So you really need to get more specific. So we will talk about that in a little bit.

But tell us about…

So three years ago, you guys merged together. And when did you start working with FMG in our Do It For Me marketing program?

The Do It For Me, we started about a year ago or so. I’d have to check the dates, but, we’ve used FMG for our core website and had a real basic service for a long time, but then we really stepped it up for this growth part of our lives together. So about a year or so.

Okay. And tell us a little bit about what it looks like from your perspective to have FMG help you. What do we help you with every month?

Well, it’s a long list, actually. I should have a good answer to that, shouldn’t I? But You know what?

I mean start with just, like, every month, we… How does it start? We send you a calendar.

Send a calendar in advance. Right. Exactly. And then one of my favorite parts is we meet with our specialist there. I call her our coach.

I don’t think that’s your language for her, that’s, you know, our I love it.

A coach is perfect.

Well, she’s our she’s our coach and she’s our tech person that makes sure we get everything posted that we want to post, whether we’re talking about blogs or website or what have you.

She lines up the calendar for and I guess a lot of people know how Diffm works. And frankly, Samantha, you could probably explain your full capabilities better. But I think your question for me is how do we use it? So when we get the monthly calendar in advance, the theory is Peggy and I read through everything in advance before our call with our coach each month so that we’ve seen everything, and then our coach will ask us, you know, what do you want to send?

What logs do you want to post? If there are any we wanna pull down or not do for any reason, if it doesn’t sound like us or what have you, then we don’t have to send them. But you’re showing right now, I think, the the whole list of things that we can send out, whether it’s email, blog, you name it, articles we can send as well. So we go through with our coach each item, and she’s just asking, alright, which ones do you wanna send?

Do they all sound like you?

If there are holiday greetings or holiday messages or miscellaneous ones coming up toward the end of the year, you might have an article on R and Financial D Countdown.

Here we go.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There’s so much there. So we’re choosing…

Bottom line is how we use it is is just we have that whole calendar for the upcoming month, and we go through item by item and say, what do we want to post out there? And I have some more thoughts on the customization of it. But just as a baseline, we know things are going to go out when they’re supposed to go out. Right?

Because everyone on this call knows new school or old, AEO or not, one of the important things in marketing has always been not just repetition. We know people have to hear from us a lot or see our name a lot, right, before they’ll even call for a first conversation. But consistency is also important, especially in the modern world of blogging and posting and emails and things like that. Even subconsciously, we know that consumers want to see things released on certain dates.

They may not even know it, but they’ll realize every other week, Mike and Peggy send this newsletter out or this blog gets posted. And they…

When they see consistency, I think they naturally subconsciously transfer that over to some level of competence. Right? Yeah. So even the subconscious stuff I find interesting that we’ve got this calendar that if Peggy and I don’t have the time to be more unique and do some other things, we know this stuff will go out.

And there’s plenty there, which is perfect.

Well, and what’s so interesting is there’s been tons of research about what’s the number one reason somebody will change financial advisors, leave the advisor they have, and it is never about portfolio returns or things like that. It comes down to communication. It’s the number one reason people will switch. And so what you’re looking at, like you mentioned, just so everybody can see, this is color coded here at the top.

We base this on the science of what we know works in general. Some firms are gonna have a little bit less or a little bit more communication, but every month, there are two blog posts. So this one’s why your Medicaid…

Medicare premium may reflect income you no longer earn. This one’s what’s your family’s money personality. And then those are turned into emails that then get sent out. And then there’s optional social posts as well as just regular social posts all through the week because we know that you need to have a decent number of of posts every week going out.

And then as you scroll through, again, we have additional pieces depending on your audience, who you’re targeting. So if there’s something that’s gonna be more for people going through transition, widows, of course, you’re gonna opt into those. And then every month, we also include a marketing tip and a podcast or webinar webinar outline and a video script. So do you use any of these, Michael?

We do, and and we don’t use them every month, but sometimes one resonates a lot with us. So we’ll… We recorded a couple of the podcast ones, and you provided the script. And then, again, you still want it to sound like you. So even if the topic sounds great, Peggy and I will just tweak it. You guys… FMG’s always been open to us, you know, making it our own and making it sound like us. So you’ve done all the hard work of getting it off the ground, and you give us the script, and then we can just tweak tweak it and make it sound like picking it myself or talk about a specialty within what what F and G have put out. So, yeah, we’re starting to use those more and more.

For the podcast, is it the two of you talking or will you have guests?

We will have guests. Right now, it’s just been the two of us to get it launched and get some practice and get it off the ground, but we’re on the verge of having guests start to come on. Yeah.

That’s great. I actually am hosting another workshop tomorrow with FMG. If anyone’s interested, you can go to our website and sign up about how to be confident on camera. I know so many people’s podcasts, they also record them for YouTube.

And to your point about the reps, that’s one of my top pieces of advice is you just sort of have to rip the Band Aid off and start and know that you’re gonna go back a year later and look at those initial podcast or videos and cringe. And one of my favorite quotes is, if you don’t look back at your earliest examples of whatever the creative thing is and cringe a little bit, you started too late.

You waited too long.

Hear you say that. I’m laughing because that was the advice we got from a company that’s helping us produce the the podcast. I thought they would say, oh, Mike, you’re a you’re a fine speaker. You and Peggy have been around a long time.

You’ll know what you’re talking about. It’ll be good. No. He gave the same advice you did, which is he’s like, no.

The first few are just gonna be horrible. The only way to get better is to get those out of the way. Just get them of the way. So that’s what we went with.

And I don’t know. I I haven’t watched many of the early ones, frankly. I know I should. But just like a lot of people, I can’t stand watching myself on there.

But we got the tough ones out of the way, and now we can get on to doing a better job. And and…

Anyway, that’s where we are. And so I completely agree with your comment about the tough ones. You know?

What’s the company you’re using to help you with the podcast?

Podpony. Podpony.

Okay. So for Nebraska.

There you go. Yeah. They’re helping us a lot with that.

Yes. Well, everybody always wants to know who who helps. So, you know, one of the things I think when people will say, like, oh, I already have a website or I’m already doing some marketing. So what’s the point or, like, why would I hire, you know, FMG’s do it for me program to do this? I already write a blog once a month, or I really want all of the content to only be mine. So talk to us a little bit about how you thought through that.

Well, when we… We’ve been putting a lot of time as as you might guess on thinking through our entire marketing presence and marketing plan. Right? So when people…

Even said to me the other day when I mentioned we’re doing a blog, and they’re, you know, you’re not gonna get a lot of hits, a lot of visitors, a lot of whatever. And I said, no. No. Like, a blog is just a piece of the whole puzzle.

This…

The the…

Or a podcast is just a piece of the whole puzzle. So the podcast is a better…

The best example maybe because one podcast, you should make sure you have the show notes from that. In other words, the transcript. You could write that into an article. You have to make sure that’s pieced out into a bunch of different blogs if you wanna do that.

There’s so many different things you can do with one piece of content, right? I’m trying to be efficient with my time, which is why we’ve hired Diffum and why we ended up talking today, Samantha, right? But I can’t do it all. And your marketing isn’t just any single thing that you do.

If you’ve written a book or written an article or maybe you’re consistent with your blogs, but are you doing everything that you can so that people I had mentioned earlier that you need to be consistent with marketing messages, right, in terms of scheduling.

People need to see you a lot of times, but they also want to see a lot of different forms, though.

They want to know you’re doing blogs and maybe being interviewed and maybe writing some things. So how do you do all of that? So, yes, any one of these pieces, we absolutely could do in house, no question. But could I do all of them in a month’s calendar every month, Peggy and I and me, and I could just envision the work that it would go into. Let’s schedule our month of communication with the clients, write everything that’s going to go out, post it to our blog, make sure it hits our website. I mean, I’m just getting exhausted thinking.

I mean… And I think you hit the nail on the head is we actually want everybody. So here’s an example, by the way, real quickly of what one of these blogs look like. So we highly suggest whether you use our service or not, by the way, make sure that you have an author for every blog post. I still see a lot of firms where they just put the blogs up and they don’t attach an author to it. From an AEO answer engine optimization standpoint, you want an author for every single blog post, and you want a date because AI has a recency bias, and it wants to show things that are up to date. But you can see, like, we’ve got them set up with what we call h ones, so headlines, that have keywords that, you know, you want to make sure that you’ve included.

And then at the bottom of every post, we also include frequently asked questions. So, again, we’re following the best practices of how to get these things picked up by these AI systems. But as you mentioned, you have the option if you want to go in here and say, oh, I wanna add in something specific to my niche audience and make it specific to you.

What are… What is the likelihood that you’re gonna be able to put out the number of pieces that, you know, I’ll just go back to this view here. The number of pieces that are in this calendar unless you have somebody on your team full time handling marketing. It’s very, very minuscule. So what we see the the firms doing that you’re doing that really utilizes program to its full potential is they allow us to build the calendar to get everything ready. They personalize the pieces they want. They add in some fully personalized pieces like a podcast, and then the mix of things together is what really makes the marketing sing and allows it to be that consistency that stays, you know, in front of all those prospects and clients.

Can I can I mention one other thing while you’re on that calendar? Because last time you were on this a few minutes ago, you had mentioned a couple of examples, and you were just giving examples of pieces that are in there. Right? I think there were blogs.

One of them was your family money personality, if I’m remembering right. See, that’s the kind of thing that Peggy and I would see, and all of those might be going out this month. Some more on topic, some different topics. But I would latch onto that one and we would see money personality.

Remember, told you one of our offerings actually is consulting with families about communication about money, multigenerational conversations. You can see how a family’s money personality would be very on topic for our target audience. So that’s when we might see and say, do we customize this? Do we blow it up in some bigger way?

Do we promote this even more than we normally would? And you’ve already written the core blog, email article, whatever that item was. So let’s just take something you’ve already started. We go, oh, that would resonate with our audience.

How do we how do we go a little more with that? Because you had said, I think, you you know, it was a rhetorical question. Know, what are your odds of producing all this stuff by yourselves? And you weren’t waiting for the answer.

You know the answer the best about Euro.

But like But when we see something that resonates, they’re like, oh, that’s a great topic.

How do we take that and make sure… Maybe I’ll email all our our COI list, which would be really easy to do with your dashboard is maybe we should draw extra attention to this blog this month because it’s so on topic.

Anyway, so that just jumped out at me as a topic that I go, oh, oh, we love that one. I mean, the other stuff is great to be in front of people, but this month, there are two pieces that really resonate with us.

I love that you just mentioned about the COIs too because one of the things we highly recommend is at a minimum, everybody segment their email list into clients, prospects, and COIs, which is stands for centers of influence. And a lot of people do not do this. So they want referrals from other businesses, but they are not staying in touch with those referrals. And we make it really easy through the do it for me program to build a list of COIs.

And we actually…

I’ll pull this back up. We actually have a version of…

Which I’m sure you know, but just for everyone listening, a version of the different content for centers of influence. So you can see here, like this one, does your Medicare premium reflect your income is for clients and prospects? This one is written specifically for COIs. So any CPAs you’re working with, state planning attorneys, other businesses, you put them on the list, and it really is written specifically for them.

And this goes such a long way in building those relationships, and we’ve already made the version for you. So I love that you’re actually doing it, Michael. Do you have any tips for people who are like, how do I build a COI list? Where did you get your contacts from?

Yeah. I don’t find that that hard, frankly. That’s…

And frankly, that’s probably one of my my best, you know, highest and best uses of my time. Right? This all comes down to what’s your…

What are the different ways? Dan Sullivan, I think, calls it your unique ability. They might call it…

What else do they call it? Zone of genius, or someone calls it your superpower. Like, what is your superpower? And and as Dan Sullivan…

I didn’t go through their coaching, just full disclosure, but I’ve read enough of Dan Sullivan’s marketing ideas and concepts in his book and whatnot. So he talks about what are you exceptionally good at?

What do you love doing? What gives you energy? And I’ll add a fourth one that I don’t think was in his material, but maybe it was implied. But what things that fit that unique ability description are going to grow my business?

Like what are the core activities that I need to Oh, love that. So let’s add that onto what we love doing, what we’re great at doing, right?

So instead of thinking first about what we need to get rid of, focus on just what should you be doing every day. And so when it comes down to that, building a COI list I have found to be easy just because I go out and talk about the pain points of our ideal client. So widows, for example, and I got in a conversation with someone at a a card exchange kind of thing the other day, and I just mentioned briefly what I do. And he just opened up, he’s like, oh, I work with these people. And so he turns out to be very good COI.

He’s a he’s a he runs a car dealership. Is that what you said?

No. No. No. No. I’m sorry. No. He’s a…

It was a a card exchange kinda thing is what I was saying. So it was a different COI, but he works with a lot of people who’s lost someone, including widows, but others. And he just…

When I mentioned who we work with, he just really lit up and started talking about the challenges he’s seeing and how he’s trying to solve it. And he’s like, how do you solve the the loneliness problem after six months or twelve months? It’s like people don’t talk about that piece of it. They wanna make…

Know that they’re financially okay. Now going down a little bit of a rabbit hole, but anyone listening should take what is their area of the kind of person they like to work with? What are the pain points that they see? And that’s what you talk about.

That’s what you put out in your blog out there. How do you make their life better because you work with them? Not just what do you do. Everyone wants to market what they do.

It’s like, no, no. Why is the person better off? What pain points are alleviated a little bit or a lot because they work with you?

That builds all the time.

Yeah.

Lead with the solution

And the outcome. Yeah.

Not So we take those names when I meet people, and they’re…

We instantly have a little rapport, and I add them into our…

We use Redtail for CRM, but there are a lot of great CRMs out there. We use Redtail, which integrates really well with FMG. And so I just have to add them into Redtail and tag them in the proper group because we have a group name that automatically tells FMG to include them now in our e newsletter. So it’s real simple to not just meet someone and put them into our CRM, but now all of a sudden they’re on our communication list.

It’s gotta make it easy for me. I don’t have the time or it…

They’ll get lost in the shuffle. I’ll forget to follow-up and start adding them to an email list. If I tag them properly, when I put them into our database in the first place, boom. We’re getting the the email.

And this is just showing you, like, in FMG, of course, you can tie it with any of the CRMs that you’re using. We have really easy setup, to make them go back and forth. So when you do something in FMG, it, you know, writes it over to Redtail and vice versa. But, you know, having just different ways of labeling your contacts. So for instance, in this example, anyone who came in and downloaded a specific guide could get put in a group. And then if there’s a certain tax article, you know, you’re gonna know those people are gonna be really interested in it or people of a certain age or maybe people who have young children.

So the more you can subgroup them together, the better chance you have of sending a lot more personalized marketing. So a 100% that makes a lot of sense. So when you meet with your FMG coach, as you call… Called it every month, talk through, like, what does that meeting look like? You’re going through the calendar. You’re making some decisions. And then what? Do they make you log in to the platform and push things out, or what happens next?

Yeah. Usually, we she slaps us on the hand and says, you know, you have three things in your dashboard that you have to approve because we also get to go in and from a compliance standpoint, it’s nice that they don’t, we need that meeting and we need to go into our dashboard to approve things that will go out, which gives us the control to make sure we know exactly what’s going out and when. So first thing is she’ll say, you you have three things that you haven’t approved yet this month, and so we’ll go in and do that.

And also she asked what else is going on in our lives that we want to make sure we include somewhere. I mean, because Peggy and I do some unique things outside of work or related to work, and she just asked, is there anything else we want to insert here in some way? A custom article or take a current article and make it sound more like us, like a National Pet Month? You guys have an article that you provide, and Peggy and I both have pets. Peggy has way too many pets.

I don’t know.

She’s… Well, she raises social media posts that have the pets always perform the best.

Well, she raises show dogs. So she has, like, 11 dogs right now. So she’s…

And look, the Internet loves dogs. Right? So back to your question, though, what does the coach do? She wants to…

Nope. And actually, she’s great about really getting to know us and the other fun things that we’re doing because that would mix well with all of the the more more direct business type things we might post out there. You know, even, you know, family money personalities, that’s a little bit on topic. But to have something about show dogs and Peggy going to Westminster this coming year to show a dog, like, that’s fun stuff.

So even our coach will just say, well, why don’t we talk about that during National Pet Month? Do you have some pictures? Or she got a medal at a recent…

Peggy got a medal for…

I guess her dog did for showing at a recent show. And and so our coach is like, well, why don’t we put that out there leading into National Pet Month? You get to be personal and blend the business stuff, if that helps. So that’s the flow of our meeting, which was your question, is the flow is like, what else should we know that’s not being captured out there and how can we make it easy to to get it out there?

As a matter of fact, Sam, can I break for one quick second? You know, let me really start while you’re having me on the the…

On this this livestream today. You and I just connected very briefly because I listened to you giving one of your presentations on AEO and AI in the current world, and I had a comment or two and a question or two. And so just from my question, I think you understood the kind of business we’re trying to run and what we’re trying to do, so we struck it off there. So if I come across everybody as just a raving fan, I think maybe that’s why I’m on or a heavy try to be a heavier user of FMG.

They’re not paying me to say this or to be here or anything like that.

This is one area of my life that I think we have the structure to grow into, which is the communication side. And that’s not small, emails, blogs, etcetera, getting the word out to the world. It’s one area that I know is taken care of because there’s so many other areas that Peggy and I are working on, like how do we do less compliance? How do we do less admin?

You know, the whole marketing thing to have a dashboard that makes it so easy. That’s why we’re talking today. Just maybe people wanna know what the heck is this guy doing here? Just a raving fan.

That’s all.

It’s Well, one piece of my life is going well.

We appreciate it. We love working with you. And, you know, ultimately at the end of the day, we used to just have people log into the system. We didn’t have this program and we would say, okay, best practice, you wanna post this many social posts a month.

You wanna make sure you have this many blog posts. And constantly people would say, can you just tell me what to do? Could you just do it for me? And so we built this program.

So rather than just using the technology, you know, we started as software as a service, Truly company, we now have this extra layer of this concierge level service. So you can still 100% use FMG, use the platform, schedule your own content out, or use some of the pieces we have. But what we find is the people who have the best results, when we look at all the advisors using FMG, it’s really people in this do it for me program because they are getting the consistency. Every month, we’re building a theme.

They’re getting these extra touch points and check ins from…

And we all know, just like you with your clients, when you have a meeting with your client, more gets done of what they need to do with their finances. More is gonna get done with marketing because you know you have this meeting coming up with your FMG marketing, concierge is what we call them. You call them a coach. So it really does…

You know, when we look at the numbers overall, we just ran an internal study. We found that the advisers in our do it for me program are consistently adding significantly more contacts per month. I can’t remember the exact number. I don’t wanna misspeak.

You know, it’s really, really significantly increased when somebody is in this program. I think so much of it, to your point, comes down to you wear a lot of hats and you’re able to hand this one off to us and just say, just tell me exactly what to do.

Yeah. And that’s the full blown version of it. The full name of your program is, right, DIFM. Do it for me, but I get to customize what I have time to customize.

Like, that should be the whole name of it. And that’s that’s what I like about it is when…

Like National Pet Month, and I’ll just use that again, when that came out and our concierge, our coach, was just saying, all what do we want do to tweak this? You don’t mind us tweaking the language in the emails or the blogs. As matter of fact, I mean, that’s part of what we get to do. Or replace it entirely if we want to.

So it’s the it’ll be done for us if we don’t have the time to do anything custom and different this month so we know we’re hitting the metrics that we need to, not just want to. This Yeah. This growth of our business is really important to us. So being consistent and having material to send out there that’s quality is important.

But if we want to customize it and make it more fun or personal or whatever, we can do that. But if we don’t get to that, which is the story of lives of all these financial advisors, we’re all so busy, we don’t quite get to it. And if nothing goes out that much, you’re really going backwards in your marketing, in my humble opinion.

Well, because I’ve So…

Yes. So we have a couple questions I just wanna answer.

Let’s see. Hannah said, I love the quote. If you don’t cringe, you started too late. Thank you, Hannah. We love it too. Someone else said, is FMG and do it for me content available in other locations outside of The US? So currently, we do have quite a number of advisers using, FMG that are in Canada.

For other countries, I do believe that there are… There may be some one offs, but it’s not… We don’t have a specific program built for them, but stay tuned. Might be coming soon.

And then the last one, this one is for you, Michael.

Everybody knows that return on investment ROI is notoriously hard to calculate with marketing, which is very true. Attribution is harder than ever. You know, where do leads come from? How do you personally, you know, justify the cost of the do it for me program? It said, clearly, it’s worth the cost, but what would you say that are the key aspects that make the program worth it for you and able to justify the cost?

Yeah, it is a little hard to put your finger on it. And I was thinking about today whether we’re talking about results or ROIs or not. And right now, again, we’ve only been using the enhanced, the DIFM program, Do It For Me, for about a year or so. And frankly, we’ve been a little slow to personalize it and to build a big enough list that everything’s going to.

So the bottleneck, least on us, at least it’s not in trying to figure out what we’re gonna use for the tech side of it. But you do need an ROI. I was thinking through this, there’s just one new client, and we’re fairly high net worth shop. So one new client is worth a lot to us, right?

So we just have one relationship that I would say was either fully came to us because of our work with Diffim or it was strengthened. Again, marketing’s tough because they heard from us a lot of different ways. So if we attributed this one client to it, that probably paid for the full year for FMG. That’d be a breakeven.

And all the other marketing is a bonus, is on top of that. So I think, you know, we’ve broken even on it, but only because it’s so early and we have a lot of leads that are in the early process. These are, these clients take longer to land, you will. It’s a long sales process.

So over time, ROI, I don’t think will be all that hard to calculate except we’re gonna have to lump all of our marketing together.

And I I can’t say they landed because of our blog or because of my podcast or because of the e newsletter.

It’s gonna be because they heard from us eight different ways and we did it consistently. So she’s right or whoever wrote that in is is corrected. It’s notoriously hard to figure out which stream did they come in through when they come in and say, oh yeah, I saw some of your articles. I heard you speak.

It’s gonna be hard to point to the one that did it for me. But if we’re growing, then I know it’s because we have the right, in this case, part of our marketing stack or tech stack, right? That I could go do those other things I have to, like add new COIs, new centers of influence to our database. I should be out meeting and greeting people.

It’s one of the things I love doing. I’m decent at. I should be adding more to our list and not then saying, okay, now where do I go right to drip on these people and stay in front of them? So yeah, it is hard to calculate, but I can say right now, worst case, we’ve broken even, but we’ve got a bunch of leads in the pipeline that all came from some combination of our marketing.

So the ROI is not just breakeven. It’s gonna be something with a good positive. I think a year or two from now, we’ll look back and it’ll be a big positive.

And I love what you said. I mean, and there… We do have people who are part of other programs. So they’re… I don’t wanna say buying leads, but sort of, you know, buying leads from other programs and then nurturing them through this system. There’s other people who are just doing organic there and then, you know, nurturing them this way. There… If anyone’s listening, the other thing that I really suggest you do is every single month, look at your calendar and every single person, I don’t know if you do this already, Michael, that you meet with, or email with, or you have a conversation with. And not just them, but their spouse, their admin, add them to your network on LinkedIn if you find them on Facebook. So that way then when you’re posting too, even if you don’t have their email address yet, you can make sure that they’re still gonna see that great content.

We ran out of time. That went so fast. We’re already actually over time a little bit, but thank you so much, Michael, for joining us.

We absolutely love working with you and seeing all of the great marketing you’re doing. I can’t wait to listen to your new podcast. Congrats on launching it. And thank you everybody for joining. If you have questions, you’re watching this after the fact, you can still leave a comment and we’ll be able to answer them in the comments And check back soon because we’ll be doing another LinkedIn Live with another financial advisor going over their marketing very soon. Thanks, Michael.

Thanks. See you now.