Now, like I said, let’s get to the good stuff. Let me introduce today’s speakers. We have Susan Theater, chief marketing and experience officer at FMG, Samantha Russell, chief evangelist at FMG, and Patty Brennan, CEO of Key Financial. And you can find out more information about our speakers by clicking on the speaker bio widget at the bottom of your screen. Alright. And with that, let’s go ahead and get started. Samantha, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much, Shannon, and thanks for having us. So, excited to be here. So hello, everybody. I love the little emojis that are already coming up.
Thank you for that. So, just to give a little bit of background for those of you who might wonder what FMG is, we are a amazing company, if I do say so myself, that helps advisers with their marketing. So this is our website, financial advisor marketing doesn’t get any easier. And, we are so excited to talk with you about marketing tactics that we see advisors using that are really creating the most growth opportunities, organic growth, right now.
So you can go to that website to check out and learn more, but just know that over the last three years, we have racked up a ton of awards for our service and our product, which we are just so proud of. So, again, we invite you to learn more about FMG.
So I’m gonna start just by introducing myself. I am, as Shannon said, the chief evangelist here at FMG. You might be wondering why am I, you know, positioned to talk with you about marketing. So I’ve been in the industry just about, a little over a decade and have truly worked with thousands of advisers on their marketing strategies.
Every week, I try at least four or five times a week to post a really easy practical tip on LinkedIn that you can use to, you know, help you grow. So I invite you to connect with us there. And I’m gonna, now welcome Susan, our CMO at FMG. Susan, can you introduce yourself?
Yes.
I’m Susan Peter. As Sam said, I’m the chief marketing experience officer. I have been in the industry for over thirty years. We sort of balance each other out, and, I have found a passion, I think, in my last two roles for helping advisers with their marketing and helping to drive organic growth, which I know is on most of your minds.
And I love every day of getting to work with Sam and getting to work at FMG because that’s exactly what we do. And for the next hour, we will be sharing truly actionable tips and, things that you can walk away and just do today whether you’re an FMG customer or not. So hopefully, you’ll all get a lot out of this. And, with that, I will introduce one of the stars of our show.
We don’t always, have the pleasure of having an adviser join us, and we hear when we do that it’s always what advisors that are you know, the attendees of our webinars love to hear from advisors. I mean, I love to hear from Sam too. But advisers, you know, just can bring it to a a much more realistic, viewpoint that I think everybody to. So, anyway, we have Patty Brennan who is the CEO of Key Financial, and she has so many accolades.
I could take probably the rest of the next fifteen minutes. But I’m just gonna start with the top one hundred barons, top women’s barons. She’s top Forbes. She’s got lots of other accolades.
But I think many, many of you may know her as well. I’ve known Patty for, probably, I don’t know, maybe ten years, and we just hit it off at at an adviser event that I was at. And I think what you’ll love is just her candor, but she also has a passion for growing her business. I mean, she’s got a very disciplined approach to growing, and it is working.
So what she’s doing is working, and you’ll you’ll sense from her that she’s about creating authentic and, you know, an emotional connection with her clients, but she also has a major talent for marketing. So you’ll hear more about that as we go.
Thank you so much, Susan. Everybody. Yeah. What’s that? Oh, there she is.
I’m gonna make sure you had a chance to say hello.
Good.
Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us. And, Susan, thank you so much for that introduction, and thanks to all of you for being here. I know your time is important, and we’re here to hopefully give you some ideas and tips that have worked for me, and I’m gonna also share with you. I hope it’s okay with you guys the things that haven’t worked because let me save you some of the learning curve that we had to go through.
So thank you for joining us, and thanks for that intro.
Wonderful. We are so happy. Alright. Well, we’re gonna get right into it, but we wanted to say this event is really kicking off something really fun that we’re doing at FMG this summer, our summer marketing game.
So if you put your phone up to this QR code right now, you can go in, add your email, and it’s going to be, opening up this week. And every few days, we will have a new game, a marketing game. It’s really just, like, checking a box, like a quiz. Multiple choice.
Yeah. Multiple choice. And you but then as you choose, you’re gonna not only learn some great marketing tip, but you’ll be entered to win all sorts of really, really fun and useful practical prizes.
So, this is gonna be a one on one with Sam.
Oh, yes. I’m looking forward to that. So, yes, we’re kicking off the marketing games. My eight year old just brought me his gold his gold medal from swim team that he won, in honor of today’s presentation. He told me I should wear it.
It’s a little heavy around around my neck, but we are excited, in honor of the Olympics to to do this.
So let’s go ahead and jump right in. So we have four sections that we’re doing today, and the first is client engagement goal. Because before we can really start thinking about lead gen or, you know, different acquisition strategies, it always comes back to the clients that you already have. Right? That’s really obviously where we want our focus to be. And, I love this analogy.
I read about it from Rory Sutherland. He’s a great marketing and advertising guru, but he talks about how if we think about Uber and the Uber map and how it sort of revolutionized the way we all think about waiting for a ride, a taxi, It didn’t shorten the wait at all. It didn’t shorten the pinpoint of how long it takes to get a ride. What it did was give the consumer more insight into what’s happening.
So psychologically, we’re not as, irritated with the wait time because we can see exactly where the car is. Do we have time to run to the bathroom? Is it on the corner, the wrong place? Right?
And so I really want you to just keep this analogy in the back of your mind as we go through a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today because so much of adviser organic growth really comes down to communication and bridging that gap of the question mark of not knowing certain things. Right? Patty’s shaking her head. Yes.
I can see. So this really, I think, is such a great analogy for how you think about your own business and how can we make the experience better for the consumer.
Totally.
Okay. And, Patty, you said this and I found this beautiful picture that I love to go with it, But it’s not about you at the end of the day. It’s about what you can do for them. Right? So this is just, like, if Apple were to have have launched the iPad or the iPad with the world’s first portable digital media player versus a thousand songs in your pocket. Right? What a difference in messaging that that makes.
And when we think about communication, I’m just going to share this from YChart. Some of you may have seen this before, but they found that nine out of ten clients consider their advisers’ communication frequency and style when deciding whether to retain their services or make referrals. Yet half, about half, forty seven percent said they wish their adviser would contact them more.
That’s astounding to me.
Mhmm. Yeah. Maybe let’s let’s tee up Patty.
Patty, what do you what is your philosophy around client communication or just generally communication? And what you know, in a given quarter, what is a what does your communication strategy include?
You know what? I I love I love the I love the fact that you brought this statistic out because I also agree it is so important to communicate.
And communication to me, you know, you wanna be multifaceted. You wanna use multichannel.
And the style of the communication is really key. I think warm and fuzzy is different. How do you differentiate yourself?
Understand where people are coming from, what they might be thinking about. Literally, I sometimes I’ll start out by saying you might be thinking about what happened this weekend.
Right. Short, understood, etcetera. This is what we think about it. In terms of in terms of the volume and the content, I will tell you that our goal is to is to do two or to do nine social posts per week. Now just so that you know, that’s a lot. And I have I have people here who helped me with this. I’ve got one person dedicated to social media, and finding good content is really difficult.
Yeah. Frankly, that’s why we are with FMG because as soon as I saw that do it for me calendar and the amount of content and the way that it is written, I’m like, oh my goodness. This is this is up. This is the way we could’ve I would’ve written it.
And by the way, it’s seamless. We don’t even have to deal with, you know, compliance, any of that stuff. It’s already preapproved. It’s a phenomenal benefit for us, and it just saves me so much time.
So I think more is better. I don’t believe you can ever overcommunicate Yeah.
People open or not, and you don’t know where the trigger is gonna be for that particular person. I was sharing with everybody before we got on that, you know, yesterday alone, I had five people call in wanting to set up a consultation.
Where did they come from?
You know what? To use your phrase, I am sure that all the attendees are like, okay.
It might be on your mind to ask how how do you get to a point where five people are calling in? What would you accredit it? What would you credit that to?
I believe it’s because they that worked really well? Or No.
I honestly honestly, I just think that because we always ask. Right? You know, how did you hear about us? Yada yada yada. And invariably, they will come back with something like, I don’t know. We just see Patty everywhere.
The point is be everywhere all the time. That’s the goal. So you do the social media. We do the podcast.
We do the emails. We do it all, and finding and coming up with a systematic way to communicate the way that we like to communicate was the key. So Yeah. That’s that’s what I believe.
That’s a it’s all you know, it’s about the branding. It’s, you know, that kind of thing and how you wanna come across.
So you mentioned, a few things there. One of the things that I, you know, think we’ve we’ve we started a harp on a lot already is that client communication is really key to organic growth. And this was just more from that YCharts survey, basically showing that it doesn’t matter if somebody’s older, younger, has a lot of assets, not as many assets. You really can’t nobody is saying I’m firing my advisers because they communicate too much. Right. It doesn’t happen. Right?
And that yet email is still the form that clients are reporting that they want the most. So, yes, when you’re having a very personal conversation or a pain point, a one on one phone call, a meeting, But just hearing from you and keeping in touch, email can really fit that. And, Patty, do you find that to be true?
Percent. And also for me, email allows me and us to leverage ourselves. So we’re not Mail. Making all the phone calls and having because it’s not a five minute conversation. It’s gonna be fifteen, twenty minutes, and we have to prepare. It’s far more efficient and effective, and people feel like you care.
Yeah.
Love that. So yes. Love that so much.
So the next thing that I just wanted to talk about with client engagement, because because I feel like we’d be remiss not to, it’s such a buzz thing right now, is talking about the next generation and passing of assets. So when we think about the clients that we currently have, are we thinking about just, you know, the mom, the dad, and individual? Or are we thinking about the entire family? And this was a study from Fidelity recently where they found that households in which the next generation is engaged generate a hundred and sixty percent of the revenues and two hundred and seventy percent of the profits of households without family engagement. And, you know, thinking about how to engage the rest of the family in a way that that feels like it’s a give and not an ask, not just asking for that introduction, I think is a very, fine line. And, Patty, you kinda told us a story about a strategy that you’ve used, in order to kinda make yourself available.
I’d love for you to to share that with everyone.
So I’m gonna share the story, and I’m also gonna understand that many people who are watching and listening are gonna say, well, wait a minute. If we take on all the client’s kids, they don’t really have any money, and it’s a lot of liability exposure, etcetera.
Believe me, I get it. I’m with you a hundred percent. The way that we do it here, the way that I communicate it is when we bring in a new client or existing clients. I thought I I thought I took care of that. Sorry, guys.
I tell everybody when when we when you become a client of the firm, so does your family.
So if your kids get a new job and they need help with their benefits or their four zero one k, we are here for them. So and people love that because we are. And that’s a that’s an easy thing for us to do. It’s a phone call five or ten minutes. We’re not taking that child on as a client, but we are beginning to establish the relationship because it’s really about relationships and building up trust.
Yeah.
I love it.
That’s that’s a great idea, and I actually haven’t I don’t know that I’ve heard that before.
It’s just part of the onboarding and part of your messaging as you’re signing them up. And there’s nothing that analyze and do a portfolio review. Starting with the caring about the family is great. Have you had I’m guessing there was an inflection point where you strategically started doing that and prior to that maybe hadn’t.
Is there any advice you’d give to the audience who maybe hasn’t done that, you know, with with their new clients and but would like to engage now?
I would just say do it. Try it. And the way that I do it just because I it’s the way I do it is say, because I wanna be approachable. I wanna let everyone know that, you know, every family is different, and family dynamics are unique, different, and can be very messy.
And I give them very real examples. I’ve literally helped kids get out of jail. We’ve put people in rehabs, like, to let them know that this is about life.
This really is about life, and we are here through the various seasons of life.
I know. Oh my goodness.
In any way that we can.
Follow the instructions, you guys. So it’s, you know, it’s just it’s just important. I think it’s important because, Susan, to your point, there’s nothing more important than their family, and they love the idea of that seamless transition. If they got sick, if something happened to them, that and the other thing that I tell them is, we don’t wanna be the first person. Like, if you get a we don’t wanna be the first person you call or the, you know, the third, but maybe the fourth or fifth.
And by the way, tell your kids. We’re here. We already know everything about you. We’re gonna make their lives so much easier for peace of mind for everybody.
So it’s just kind of creating that picture on letting them know that this is this is who we are. We understand that there may be challenges that ahead of you that you may not be able to anticipate, and nobody can know, really. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, but we know what to do when it does.
Yeah. That’s great.
I love that. Scam. And this is this is just to go piggyback off that. It’s really just recently did a study, and they found that specifically with high net worth, clients, they mentioned, you know, experiences and family education and counseling as one of the leading services they’re looking for when they’re choosing an advisor.
And, Susan, you know, through our do it for me service, you did a great job. You wrote a a really great email about a family meeting and an idea of how to have a family meeting and as the adviser to invite, you know, the rest of the family to the table. And this is just an example of one of the advisers, that we work with who took that email and turned it into a social post.
But we have, you know, an email already written where people can invite their client’s family to start this conversation if you’re worried about the wording.
Yeah. And this was actually I versioned it for a social post because I was thinking, you know, every month we’re thinking, okay. What would be great content? So I was thinking for the month of July when lots of families get together, this would be a good social post.
So I versioned this for I versioned the letter for, For this.
Yes. Yes.
And tried to find a cute picture that and, of course, encouraged everybody to use their own picture too.
Love it. So wrapping up that first section, again, regular communication both via social media posts, regular emails, and then also in thinking about how you engage not just the client themselves, but the rest of the most important people around them is really, really crucial. So let’s move on though to talk about okay. This what you should do?
That maybe be the cadence. What do you actually send? What do you what does it look like? What do you talk about?
The first thing I wanna say is whether you use FMG or not, I love this. Somebody clued me on to this Reddit called rich people p f, which is personal finance. And it’s a Reddit, group where people who apparently have a certain amount of of wealth join, and then they ask questions. And there’s really interesting questions in here just to give you an insight.
If this is a group that maybe you’re trying to break into, but you don’t always know exactly what questions that you should put address in your content, I just love that and thought I would share it with all of you. You can definitely go down the rabbit hole, reading some of the questions, and they’re really interesting.
But so that’s one way to get great tip.
Yeah. One of the things, that was found was that the two kinda subject areas that keep coming up that everybody, but especially high net worth clients want more education and services around our estate planning and tax planning, and they want them to be more comprehensively combined in all of the information they’re getting from their adviser and what they’re they’re hearing about. So, Patty, I was wondering from you if you see that to be the case, in your own practice, these two subject areas.
One hundred percent. The estate planning is so important. And the way you know, what a lot of people don’t realize is that they’re first of all, they don’t even know what their documents really mean. They don’t know how it’s actually gonna work. So we kind of interpret it for them, put it in English, and then ask the question, is that what you want to have happen?
Because we kinda are the people, and we tell them we’re the ones that are actually gonna be doing the administrative work. And it’s so nice that we can talk about it now because I can’t tell you how many times we’ve met with people after somebody has died, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And we have and I will tell you, we’ve uncovered a lot many situations. I’m I’m gonna say ten to fifteen situations where we read the documents and people were like, oh my goodness. I don’t wanna do that. So it’s just a real value add, that we offer and that we care enough to take the time to talk about it with them in words that they can understand. Right?
Yes. Do you even do you use these themes in any of your content strategy, you know, as it relates to your blogs or your podcast?
Are these kinda top of mind because you feel like the customers are focused on this?
Yeah. And the thing about the estate planning is kind of interesting because a lot of people don’t think that they have an estate. And historically, it’s been about taxes.
To me, it is about so much more than taxes.
And, you know, again, I try to explain that this is a wonderful way to save your family from themselves. It’s really about saving them from predators.
They can’t do it for themselves, but they can you know, it’s it’s it’s trusts are wonderful vehicles. They don’t have to be complicated. You’re not keeping the money from them. They’ll you’re you’re protecting it.
And we talk about the different things, different types of trust, etcetera.
So, I don’t think that’s such a good a good oh, sorry.
I was gonna say I think it’s such a good point about the lack of knowledge that the general public has about estate planning.
And so there’s such a opportunity for you as the adviser to be the one talking about it in the content in a way that is attractive to prospects.
And I was just gonna say you don’t have to get into the weeds. Just make a general statement like there are fifty four different types of trusts that can be used right now under current law. Some work better when interest rates are high, some better when interest rates are low, and a lot of them are gonna be overkill. So what’s gonna be appropriate for you? And that’s what we’re all about. So it’s just nice that they know that we’re a resource.
Yeah. And I think, you know, back to your point about gotta be everywhere all the time. And so the question and, actually, we just got a question in the inbox. The question is, okay.
What is the right cadence? So you mentioned nine social posts is your goal. Do you have a goal around email and blogging and podcast? Do you have a schedule that you put together? We we, obviously, at FMG, we have our do it for me calendar, but I’m curious what you would recommend to the audience.
Well, I gotta tell you, that is a challenge because you’re right. And to have, that calendar is it’s made it so much easier for us. I will tell you that, again, the nine social posts per week, we launch a new podcast every two weeks.
An email blast is sent out to everybody in our database talking about what the podcast is about.
The email strategy is really more of a crisis strategy.
You know, we do letters, things of that nature. Well, we attach the the letters, to to the emails, but they’re really effective during crisis.
They’re really Timely.
Effective.
Timely content that’s done. I love the content that you had around tax time. That was and it was already done. And it’s just what they’re thinking about anyway, and it’s nice to know that we’re thinking about it too.
Here’s a helpful You know, it’s gonna be a great, I think, blanket topic that everybody can leverage for the next year is the sunsetting of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
At the end of twenty twenty five, that will give everybody some you know, both you’ll hit on tax, estate, timely, all in one, and planning needs to be done in advance. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity for everybody to, you know, from a content strategy to weave that into email, blogs, podcasts, social, and we will definitely be doing that at FMG.
And by the way, not only Hold on.
Not just once.
I would do it several times.
For example, you know, as it as it relates to, you know, the the, you know, the the sun setting, a lot of people were bringing it up with a lot of clients. And what are we gonna do about it now? We don’t know what’s gonna happen. No. So let’s just understand that it’s there. Mhmm. Wait for the election and reconnect maybe in November.
Yep. The end of November. Great for dripping on prospects.
And I think that goes to Sam’s slides because we gotta we have so many slides that we should be Yes.
Well, no. The I was just gonna say one of the things I think you hit on though, Patty, too, is that people don’t pay attention to messages until it’s their pain point. So if they know they have a whole year and it’s not affecting them right at this very moment, they can tune it out. And so one of the things with content marketing is you you don’t know when the pain point’s gonna, you know, hit for certain people.
The great thing about taxes, I like to tell advisors all the time, is retirement planning is often like a far away in the future thing you can kind of push aside. But taxes come up year after year, every year. So it’s a pain point we know people have, and so having it part of your content marketing mix is a great strategy. So this is just an example from the FMG library I put in here to give you some inspiration of something that, we write that, you know, the advisers using our do it for me program can send to prospects.
We have other ones, for instance, about estate planning. So this is an estate planning drip series that we created for our clients where over the course of, it’s a four part email. So to to Patty’s point, it’s not just a one and done, but, you know, you can set it up so that once a month or once a week or however you want, people are gonna get emails. And what it’s just doing is referencing that you’re not just you know, a lot of the general public still thinks, okay, of an adviser as investments or as an adviser as budgeting.
And so this is just really showing such a wider variety of the things that you can help with. I saw, and this is just an example, by the way, from our library of some of if you’re interested in checking out FMG, we have you search in the library and you can see here, you know, if you search estate under email, there’s thirty four different emails about estate planning that you could use. But I saw somebody did ask about, COIs. And, Patty, if you had already set up a relationship with the estate planning attorney, if that was a part of your, you know, using centers of influence was a part of your strategy for, you know, like, either getting new referrals.
And we do a lot to help advisers with creating content to help them have those relationship with COIs, but I think it’d be great to hear your perspective.
I will tell you, honestly, I have not never had a formal COI strategy.
We do the work. We connect with the, you know, attorneys and CPAs, and it it happens organically.
I haven’t had a strategy.
It’s it’s you know, for me, I I I feel like we wanna earn that business, but to have a proactive approach that’s automated would be just amazing. So Awesome. That’s my that’s my answer.
Yeah. Well, our recommendation is just like you drip on your clients and you we recommend dripping and nurturing on your prospect list, we recommend building a center of influence group in your CRM and dripping valuable educational timely content on them framed in a your clients might be interested in. No ask, no sales, but just keeping, like, the every you know, everything, you know, everywhere all the time. Just keeping yourself top of mind because you never know they might be meeting with somebody that afternoon, and it’ll just remind them, you know what? You could benefit from PADI services. So that’s something that we do every month. We have two COI emails that you can choose from or do both, and and advisers have found them to be a great way to open the door with with centers of influence maybe they don’t have a relationship with and to make sure they’re top top of mind with those that they do.
And I think the key is the give versus the ask. Right? You’re not just going to them saying asking for something. You’re saying, here, let me be helpful to you in some way. Mhmm.
And to your point, you never know when it’s gonna be that’s you don’t never know what the catalyst is gonna be for them to call. So just this is a great idea.
So the next thing that I wanna talk about, I think we’d be remiss to talk about content without talking about, social media. How do you what content gets engagement? What content do people pay attention to? This was a great post that, our friend Doug posted.
Susan, I was hoping you could because you were kinda the inspiration behind this. If you could talk about it a little bit.
Sure. Well, I have two daughters who are in college, and they both have internships this summer. And last summer, they they both had jobs, and I messed up because I am just so used to filling out, I think it’s the w nine and saying, you know, zero withholding. And so they withheld taxes.
Meanwhile, they don’t make enough money to pay taxes. So that was a lesson learned. But, also, my adviser suggested that we open up a Roth IRA for them, which I would never have thought of because I was like, oh, gosh. That’s I’m thinking it’s like an I r you know, regular IRA.
They would never be able to access the money till they’re sixty. They should save and be able to access it. Net net. I learned from my own experience, so I thought it would be great to write a social post as well as an email and a blog about, things to consider with, you know, children or college aged kids or anybody, you know, that’s young and has an a job.
There are some great financial planning tips. And this is also a great way to get into the next generation.
But Doug, took the post, and we recommend to all of our customers to take our content, tweak it a little bit. And certainly on social, if you have your own photo, you will get so much more engagement than if you use you know, I’ll find something that I think is, you know, as good as possible. But Doug put his own picture in with his daughter, and he had over fifty thousand impressions on this post and multiple, I don’t even know how many calls from clients and prospects wanting to open a Roth IRA for their kids.
It’s such a good idea. And I think the, you know, I think the thing here is if you look at the post itself, this is a really big tip for all of you. We’re gonna talk about it a little bit more. You don’t have to click to his website.
You don’t have to click to a blog to get all of this information. It’s right there in the post itself. And this is something called zero click content. And on social media, this is the future.
So we at FMG write posts for advisors using the zero click method. And the reason this is so important is for all of you, what’s your goal in social, right? It’s to increase your brand awareness to people who don’t normally see you to become aware of your company and start paying attention to it. And when you have something that’s written like this, people have something to respond to, so they will leave a comment.
And when they leave a comment, now everyone in their network can see the comment. So it just really creates the system of the more comments you get, the more people see it. So using the zero click model is really, really, important, but, again, you wanna be providing real value. This is an idea, as Susan said, most people are not thinking about, and so, to be able to post it.
And then include a picture of you and your kid or, you know, that just really takes it to the next level. So I love this idea.
We’re happy to share it for all of you, to, you know, copy this strategy because we know it works.
Okay. Speaking of pictures and video, another thing that we have seen work really, really well is advisers sharing quick videos. And this is a a new feature we have at FMG where you can actually, in our system, add a little widget that allows you to upload a video and send it via email without first needing to upload it to YouTube or Wistia, create a thumbnail. You just upload the video directly in our system and then you can toggle to choose what time stamp you want from the video and you don’t have to host it anywhere separately. It makes it so, so easy. And, Patty, I know you were telling us a little about video emails. Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done with them?
You know, I’m literally writing this stuff down as you’re saying it, Sam, because this is amazing.
And I’m gonna say to all of you, we have a video, you know, basically, when a new client comes on bar, part of the onboarding processes, we have a schedule of short videos. First one is from me. Welcome. Yada yada yada. Then it’s, you know, chief planning officer does a quick one.
And it’s and it’s scheduled. It’s a great idea, but here’s the downside.
We have no idea if anybody’s opening them. We have no idea the way that we set it up, if it’s even working.
So it’s a nice thing, and it’s fine, but, you know, this is so much easier. I I love this site.
The first time I saw it from our product team, I was like, this is incredible because I’m so used to doing it the old way ourselves, you know, where you first have to upload it to a hosting site. So we’ve taken out again, we wanna make marketing as easy as possible for all of you because we know that’s not your first job. So, yeah, we love this. And I think one of the keys is there’s something in psychology called the mere exposure effect.
And when you’re talking about prospects, referrals, staying in front of people, the mere exposure effect tells us that the more we see something, right, so in this case, your face, the more we will report that we like it, that we’re familiar with it, that we feel comfortable with it just because we’ve been exposed to it. So the reason video and pictures work so well is because they tap into that near exposure effective psychology. So we’re we’re really excited about this feature. And, regardless of how you do, you know, video, we really encourage people as part of their strategy to utilize video because we know it adds that personal touch.
And do you remember offhand at something like emails with video get opened six times as often? I mean, it’s it’s a huge, I forget the exact increase.
Yeah. I don’t remember the number either.
But It’s exponential.
And I would say I’m getting maybe the most questions about how to use video. Like, people are really starting to want to dabble in this, which is why we’re starting to do video scripts. But I’ll also just throw out next week, Sam is doing a webinar on video. So if anybody’s interested in learning more about how to use video and some tips on content and all the rest, we’ll make sure we include a link to register for that as well.
Yes. Absolutely.
Okay. So let’s, we’re gonna keep talking about in in all of this, social media content. But now we’re really gonna just focus on not just with clients, but getting new clients and what works, in this particular arena. So I wanted to just share this email success story that we heard from an advisor that we work with.
And I think this was just a couple months ago she shared this story soon. But, basically, she has been a big believer in, again, dripping. And dripping, again, just means that you get someone’s email, right, and over time, you add them to a group. And every week or every month, even though they’re not a client yet, you’re sending them content that’s helpful and valuable.
Not a book a meeting with me email, but a this is how you do this or this is what you should know about that. So she had a woman on her, segmented group of business owners. And for five years, this woman, who’s a business owner, read all these emails, had a pretty good open rate, but never once replied, never booked a meeting, never raised her hand. And then after five years, she all of a sudden emailed back to one of the emails and was like, hey.
I’m a business owner, and I’ve been reading your emails for five years. And I am, about to sell my business and I’m ready to work with you. And she brought over three quarters of a million dollars in new assets.
And I just love this story so much because, again, as Patty had mentioned before about the consistency and the long time horizon. But, you know, how hard is it to just keep someone on your email list? It’s not difficult to keep them there.
Yet, obviously, having the content to send, you know, that’s that’s the big lift, and that’s where we really come in. But, yeah, I don’t know if you remember her sharing this story, Susan, but it stuck with me, and it’s one I love to share with advisers.
No. I love that one. I think actually it’s an interesting thing to tee up to Patty.
You know, I Mhmm.
With podcasts, it was interesting in our pre call, we were talking about this. You started a podcast, Patty, and, you know, most advisers would do three and they would judge whether it was successful or not.
Tell us how you’ve looked at podcasting and whether it’s been successful.
And also just what is what are the biggest marketing?
So so here’s my philosophy, and it’s just what what I believe. I don’t I personally when I’m gonna try something, we don’t do it. I I don’t go into it saying, okay. We’ll try it for three times or ten times or whatever.
I wanna give it three years as a minimum.
Three years consistently to see whether or not and then we make an evaluation. So it definitely was a commitment on my part. And, again, it’s a content. Yeah.
All that kind of stuff. To me, the the thing that I’ve learned on the podcast end is that, you know, I’m not sure that we’re getting any clients from it. It’s it again, it’s in the spirit of education. It’s purely educational.
It’s on different topics. Again, once every two weeks, email is sent out. It’s easy to listen to. We’re doing video.
But to me, it’s it’s it’s one of those things that has side benefits, not the least of which it’s great for my team. They they’re learning things. I’m I’m giving them topics.
And it’s part of that multichannel approach. You just never know what’s gonna resonate. And I’m also surprised how many people listen to this podcast. People come up to me all the time.
Hey, Patty. I love your podcast. I’m like, really? You know?
It’s just more You know, I think one of the things that you said too about your team even learning, When you, you know, are whether you’re creating a podcast, doing a video, you have to prep for it.
You have to, you know, learn the information so that you can teach others. But one of the things that I’ve loved over the years of all the content we’ve created imagine you have a meeting with somebody. They come into your office and they’re asking you specific questions about a certain tax strategy or an estate planning question. And then at the end of the meeting, not only can you give them the information in the meeting, but you can say, and you know what?
We have a great blog post about that, or we did a podcast episode all about that. I’ll send it to you. You just reposition yourself as the authority and the expert, you know, a thousand times more, and you already have it done. So it’s not a one and done.
It’s it really just keeps paying dividends over time because you can repurpose it in so many ways.
Here’s another tip. One of the things with our podcast yes. Some of ours are longer, etcetera. The most popular pack podcasts are Ask Patty Brennan. They’re ten, fifteen minutes on something that came up in a meeting to your point, Sam, and we do a podcast. And it’s just this came up in a recent meeting, and I thought you might be knowing the answer as well.
So it’s that kind of thing.
I love that so much. So kind of on all of this, we’ve talked a lot about direct marketing just to make sure we’re on the same page because this is gonna go into the next point. When we’re saying direct marketing again, you’re collecting emails from people and then over time, they’re on a list of prospects.
You’re emailing them helpful content. And one of the things we really, really suggest you do is when news breaks and there’s something going on in the world and people are trying to make sense of it, make sure that those prospects also get the timely pieces. They’re not excluded from that because that is where you really, really will see the biggest bang for your buck. All of our research internally shows that that the timely pieces have, like, double the open and click through rates than the pieces that are more evergreen.
Yeah.
And, you know, one of the things that we really love to do in the do it for me program is we monitor what is really the barometer of the news and what people are paying attention to. And when something breaks, what does it choose? Within about twenty four hours usually, we have a piece ready to go for people to send out.
And this is what it looks like.
One thing we just did, and this was a suggestion from, actually, one of our one of our team members, We wrote one on, you know, weather or natural disasters that you could just keep in your pocket. One, for you to send any clients who or prospects who might be impacted and another if you happen to be in the impacted area and, of course, then would have clients, one that fits for that scenario. And, obviously, you know, Houston and it’s all over even every every week, it seems like there’s some area of the country. So capitalizing on the opportunity to show you care in a timely way is, you know, has huge dividends.
Mhmm. And you have that piece already ready to go and something happens in Houston and you can just, you know, retitle the blog to say Yep. Hurricane in Houston, what you need to know or or the email. Exactly.
Exactly. So we’d be remiss, I think, to talk about lead generation if we didn’t talk about, okay, building your list. You wanna get people in this drip campaign. What’s probably one of the easiest ways to do it?
And a lot of research, and we’ll be interested to see what everybody says if they’ve tried this, is to host education webinars. Just like you’re all here right now listening to us talk, you can do the same thing whether it’s you giving the webinar or you inviting an expert to join you, you know, an estate planning attorney, a CPA. And we have been telling advisers this for years, and people, you know, would always tell us, well, it’s just such a big lift. So our team over the last couple years has made it a very, very big goal to provide you with the slide decks, the script, the event landing and registration pages, and the emails campaign so that all in one place in your FMG dashboard, you can host the event, collect the registrations, and get people to sign up.
And, obviously, choosing a topic that people care about is really important. Timely ones always get a lot. But one of the quick tips, and then I’m gonna we’ll ask Patty and Susan some questions about this, is people will say, well, I don’t have a big email list. So how do I get people, you know, new blood?
And so an idea that we had for all of you and I just kinda copied and pasted it here, it was our marketing tip of the month for our do it for me program is that when you send out the event, you can about, you know, a week after sending out the in initial invitation, resend the invite and say to people, wow. We’re thrilled by the excitement for our upcoming event. We can’t wait to see so many of you. Several people have reached out asking if they can bring a guest.
We’re limited on space, but we would love to host your friends and family. So, you know, let us know who you’d like to bring or you can each pick one or two people to to invite. And we have seen this work time and time again, that exclusivity factor, and the idea that it’s something that so many people want in on really makes people think, oh, I should tell Jane about it or I should tell my brother about it. So this is a great strategy to get clients to refer friends and family without just asking for a referral.
Right? You’re asking them to invite people to an event where they’re gonna get that. Mhmm.
You know what’s really interesting to me about this, Sam? Just listening to you, it’s so interesting how you have integrated, and I kinda felt feel that way every time I read the stuff on Efet with on the do it for me, program. But you’ve applied what Robert Cellini wrote about in his book called Influence.
If anybody if you guys have haven’t read that book, please please read it. It’s such a good book. And and the reason I’m saying it is because he talks about influencing others. And and and, basically, the first version had six things, six principles.
Now there are seven, but you’re using the idea of exclusivity, scarcity Exactly. And social proof and, you know, congruence. And, you know, this they’re so and this guy is a social scientist. The research he did was amazing, and it is universal.
It’s not just in the United States. It’s a worldwide human nature, these six principles.
And I’ve got it literally, I’m I’m leaning over because this is how important it is. He basically says in his pod in the podcast I listen to, you gotta be be careful in the wrong hands. Like, this is this is really it could be very manipulative.
Something that you said earlier, I thought was also to the point. You know, it’s the whole thing. If you say something often enough and loud enough, people say it enough, they’re just gonna believe it to be true. And that’s basically what he found as well. So there are seven laws of influence.
Robert Cellini, c I a l I n I, The book is called Influence, and I believe in influencing equity.
So Well, one of the things you should know is that Susan and I love to think about from a marketing perspective and a client acquisition perspective, how do we look at the psychology of what makes people do certain things and love, you know, incorporate that into what we’re doing. So Yeah. You definitely have a moral purpose behind it.
Remind everybody back that slide that we kind of breezed over, but I think it’s so powerful when you showed the, you know, I iPod back in the day, and it was either here’s something that, you know, contains music or, you know, describes the what versus a thousand songs in your pocket. Like, if you can all just think about when you’re writing anything for your website or you’re writing for an email or social, be thinking about don’t describe the what you do. Think about how your client describes the value. Anyway, back to that emotional side.
Love that. So we promised you lots of good tactical things you could do right away. So I wanna make sure we to this because this is again if you do get someone’s email or they’re referred to you and you have that meeting or maybe you just correspond with them, one of the things is how do you keep top of mind? Patty talked about being everywhere all at once.
So one of the things is you want them to see your social media posts. But how do you make sure that they’re going to see them? So every week at the end of the week on Friday, this is what I suggest people to do. So you’re gonna go through your calendar and everybody that you had a meeting with, you’re gonna copy that name, if you have their email address even better, into LinkedIn, search them out, and then send them an invite.
And, honestly, I don’t even put a note with it anymore. I figure if we’ve already emailed or met, I I don’t need to write a note. They just they know that we met earlier that week. Some people might disagree with me, but it makes it a lot easier.
So I do that every Friday, and then the next thing I do is go through my email and anybody that I had an email correspondence with, same thing. Just by doing this, you will be astounded at how many people that you connect with and that will now be seeing the great content. And a little way the LinkedIn algorithm works, right after you make a connection is the time that LinkedIn is gonna show people your content the most. So it’s basically, like, for a couple days, they’re gonna see a lot of what you post because you’re new connections.
So it’s a really, like, ripe time to make sure they’re seeing good stuff from you. But this is a great way, again, when we’re thinking about staying in front of people, being everywhere all at once. This is such an important strategy and something you can outsource. You know?
It doesn’t have to be you. Somebody on your team can do this for you.
Great idea.
Alright. So the last thing we wanted to talk about was using AI in marketing.
Before we go to the tactic, Patty, are you using AI in your marketing at all?
I would love to say we are ahead of the curve. We are not.
Okay. We’re not. We’re not using it at all. I just, you know, it’s it’s there’s so much to AI, and there’s so much that we don’t know about it. And there’s compliance and etcetera, etcetera. So I’ve I’ve dabbled with AI as it relates to things that I might write, and that’s pretty much all we’ve used before.
Okay. No. That’s I would say probably we’re not alone. And we are not gonna spend too much time on this because I think so many people are asking questions about our do it for me program.
We wanna make sure we talk about that. But just so you know, we have an amazing use of AI in our FMG mobile app. So in the mobile app, and this this normally is a GIF. Sorry.
I realized now that when I exported this as a PDF, the GIF doesn’t work. But you basically yes. It looks pretty. So you go in.
You you talk about, you know, find it’s hard to find things to that are good enough to post on social media. In the mobile app are tons of articles that are applicable that an adviser would wanna share. You pick the one you want, and then you can see in that second slide where it says write text for me. You click the button, and this has been trained by me and Susan to Mhmm.
Write a social post that will be in an adviser’s voice. Right? Not too many emojis, not exclamation points, not using words or phrases that you wouldn’t say, but, again, in that zero click content style where it’s gonna be meaty enough to give away the gist of the information. And every single customer of F and G gets the mobile app for free.
So we love this tool. We encourage people to check it out. I’ll put the QR code up here. If you are already an FMG customer, you can download it and start using it right away.
And answering the questions that I know are in everybody’s mind, you don’t like it, you can say write it again. And if you wanna tweak it, you just edit it. And, yes, it routes through compliance, so it’s all good.
So so many people right now are asking about the do it for me program, and we’ve talked about the calendar a lot. So this is actually what it looks like. The do it for me program is the brainchild of Susan because, you know, we would go and do all these webinars and give all this educational, content and tips away. And then people would say, this is great, but I don’t wanna go into your tool and do it all.
Even though you have the content there, I want someone else to to implement it and execute it for me. So, we created this do it for me program, and every month you get a calendar. This is what the beginning of the calendar looks like, so it’s actual candle calendar on this day. These are what’s going out.
They’re color coded, and then you can go and dig in more to see what are the blogs, what are the emails, what are the social posts. And then there’s even optional Now we’re doing a podcast script and, I forgetting to mention about it?
Now we’re doing a podcast script, and, next month starts, we’re doing video script.
Oh, that’s I gotta tell you that I we used the podcast script last month.
It was amazing, by the way, and I haven’t said that to you two yet. But it was amazing. It was already written, and you had the questions. Because being the interviewer is very different than being the interviewee, and you guys set it up beautifully. The content was amazing. I don’t know who does all your research, by the way, and it was plug and play. It was all it was fantastic.
So, Patty, can you tell us a little bit you so with people might not realize with the do it for me, you you could have somebody on your team that’s managing marketing, but then you’re paired up with somebody from our team that serves as your marketing point person, your marketing concierge. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with the do it for me program and how you’re using it?
I would I would I should probably read the text that I got from the person who I’ve, you know, who owns it. Basically, for me, the the biggest thing is it’s not this is not a this is you guys are, like, legit.
You literally have a phone call with a marketing expert once a month with your person to say what’s working, what’s not. By the way, here’s here’s something that is new. It’s really an amazing relationship where, you know, I mean, I feel like you I feel like FMG is with us in terms of really wanting to, you know, help us grow the way that we wanna grow and are have have kinda some skin in the game.
And We are. You’re following through. We are following through.
And I I think one of the things I wanna highlight here is that what you execute everyone through do it me is gonna be different than another advisor because even though we’ve got these sort of, you know, this is an email we’re suggesting everybody send this month, Not everybody sends it. And then we have optional ones to say, hey. If you’re working with business owners or if you really wanna target estate planning COI. So the concierge on our team helps you customize it.
If you say Patty says, I wanna do an email campaign this month to anybody who, you know, signed up on the landing page for my podcast. We can, you know, through our system, help you do that. So this really is customizable and editable, and, we’re just so proud of this program because we see it working. And I’m gonna put the QR code up if you want to learn more, and the email address, and the way to get all the information so that you can learn more about it.
But what else am I missing, Susan?
Nope. I think you’re good. I’ve been trying to keep up with the chat. We’ve had so many questions.
I wish everybody could see everybody else’s questions because it’s been really active. But I hope I hope you’ll take advantage of, a chance to talk to us and and learn more about how we might be able to help. And I’ve I’ve shared my yeah. Go ahead, Patty.
You can close this thing.
One more thing because I really think that what Sam, what you just said is so important in terms of the just the sheer volume of content because I would imagine that there are there’s a lot of people who are already using this and want to use it. And so we all don’t wanna be posting the same stuff on LinkedIn at the same time. Right? Yeah. What’s very cool to me is that you can go back and look at other topics and maybe stagger it so that we’re not all doing the same thing all at once.
So that’s the thing that I I I just think that that’s important to recognize that we do need to differentiate ourselves, and we don’t want to be sharing that.
Yeah.
So And Jolene just said, I think this was a fantastic seminar.
So thank you, Joe. We’re glad that it was useful and helpful. Thank you. You. Thank you.
Just what an incredible presentation. Like I said, I always learn something from these. So Susan, Samantha, Patty, thank you so much for sharing your insights today. And as as you said, please continue to follow-up with questions. They will get back to you. I saw Susan furiously typing throughout the presentation.
So thank you for the engagement. Thanks for tuning in. But we have unfortunately run out of time. Again, thank you ladies, and thank you, FMG, for making today’s webinar possible. And just quick note, once you leave the event, a short survey will pop up in your browser window, and we would appreciate it if you’d share your feedback on this event as it helps us to provide you with the content that’s most interesting to you, and this one certainly was. So thank you again. And on behalf of Wealth Management dot com, have a great rest of your day.
Bye, everybody. Thank you.
Bye, everybody. Thanks so much.
Thanks, Patty.
