Questions-réponses sur le marketing en direct : Demandez-moi ce que vous voulez avec Samantha et Susan

I’m Susan Theater. I’m the chief marketing officer at FMG, and this is our first ask me anything. We’re calling it the AMA. And, we got tons of questions in, so we’re really psyched. Some of them were stumpers. I actually was like, I’m just gonna throw that one to Sam, but they’re some really good ones.

Yes. So if you didn’t submit a question in advance, feel free to go ahead and write it in the chat if you want or the q and a box. The q and a box will be one that only Susan and I can see. The chat, we can all see together.

So it’s something especially you wanna get the weigh in of other advisers on the call, that’s a great way to do it. We are also streaming this live to YouTube, so hello to everybody on YouTube. Thank you for joining us there. And, again, this is really us. We didn’t prepare anything really. It’s more just, an opportunity for you to ask us your burning marketing questions.

So, with that, just to make sure that we’ve got everybody can hear us loud and clear, why don’t you tell us in the chat, if you wanted to learn more today about video, email, website, branding, social media, which of those buckets of categories would you say maybe you would most wanna hear questions other people are asking or, you know, get more intel on? And then we can kinda see in the chat to make sure everybody can hear us and, that we we’ve got an audience ready to go. So, again, it could be video.

It could be email. It could be branding. It could be your website. It could be social media.

What do we oh, Susan, I think you’re muted.

Well, I just got off a call with an adviser who we wanted to talk about attribution, which is a tough one, and metrics.

Yes. Now that comes up too.

And I think, every you know, things are changing a lot when it comes to attribution, because of the way that people you have so many touch points before they find Exactly.

Exactly.

Make the the move. Okay. So it looks like in the chat, we’ve got video from Daniel, both short and long form. Heather’s saying social media. Jen is saying branding.

Dan is saying a newsletter, Beehive.

And Patrick is being loud and clear here. All topics. Welcome. So welcome, everybody, and I think we can just dive right in.

Let’s see here. Okay. Oh, and in the in the q and a, we’re starting to get some questions too, which is awesome. So, Susan, where should we start?

Wanna start with some of the video questions that can I was gonna say, I when I was looking at the q and a, I think I think the majority might have been around video by a slight margin?

Okay.

So the the first question we got was from Brian Lahue, and he’s this was his question. He said, what are some of the video editors you recommend? And, also, if I plan to include a few videos each month to accompany the do it for me content, do you recommend shooting in portrait or landscape mode? Or well, it’s social, but landscape seems to be better for blog and email.

And we maybe should just explain that the do it what do it for me is too so people on the call understand that.

So if you take that part question, Susan, then I’ll go into the rest of the question.

Do it for me is exactly what it sounds like.

Sam and I come up with a monthly content calendar. We think about what are the best topics for the month, and we write blogs and version them for emails and social, and then write another twenty social posts ranging from financial topics to lifestyle to quotes to holidays, to just timely news.

And then we also write a podcast script and two video scripts, one for one minute and one for three minutes. And then you have a do it for me concierge, who is your dedicated content, dedicated, you know, contact to help you customize the content because we do recommend flipping out the thumbnail or, you know, changing the content just slightly so it’s yours, and then they execute it for you. So I think in this case, they’re talking about the do it for me video scripts.

Yes. Exactly. So the first part of the question was what was a video editor we recommend?

And my favorite and, Susan, I’m curious to hear if it’s your favorite is v I do too.

Yeah. I use v too.

So it’s v e e d dot I o. Aubrey or at least if you put that in the chat for everybody. And the reason that I like it best is because whether you have never edited a video before or you’ve edited a hundred videos, it is both easy and intuitive to use, and it kinda grows with you as you become more comfortable. So you can start off by literally just clipping the beginning and the end to make it less, you know, the intro and the, the outro, like, really seamless. And then you can click a button and add all your subtitles, which we know are really important because you always wanna make sure you have subtitles because people watch video with sound off.

But then there’s as you go forward, if you wanna make it a lot more jazzed up, if you will, there’s so many other great features.

And the price point is really reasonable. And if you have multiple people on your team, you can do it together, and you can even record right within Veed. So if you wanted to upload your own videos, like, from your smartphone, you can, but you can also record in their platform. And you can record yourself and your screen at the same time or go back and forth.

So, I’ve seen advisers use it for one off videos. Like, if they’re gonna send a client they’re going through their latest open enrollment benefits, and they’re saying, here’s what we should you know, you should do. You can just make a one off video and send it, but you can also record videos that you would use in your marketing as well. So it’s really all in one in that way.

And I like you can also just save it as a GIF or save it as the thumbnail. So we love like, if you can do a GIF, it really, I think, increases engagement a lot. But if it makes it easy like, I was just talking to advisers. Like, how do I make a GIF? Well, if you use something like Veed, it’s super easy.

Oh, one hundred percent.

And so then that he asked, should he which way what orientation should he, record it in? I always recommend, recording it more in landscape mode so that you have a you you know, you want the horse horizontal orientation and not vertical.

And that’s because from there, if you need to crop it into more of a vertical orientation, there are you’ll be able to do that. But most of the places you’re gonna use it on social media and your email and specifically if you wanted to upload it to YouTube, that’s the orientation you want it, to be in. So more of that horizontal landscape orientation.

I think that was the rest of that question. Awesome. So thank you, Brian, for submitting it, and we hope we get to see one of your videos soon.

Absolutely.

Do you see another good question on the list here, Susan?

Let’s see. There was one on what is the, best lead generation tactic from an ROI perspective?

Oh, that’s not video. I just jumped.

Let’s see. Let me pull it up.

About what kind of lighting and, you know, does it have to be you know, I’m just gonna embellish on the question. This was Josh Josh Ross. But lighting equipment, and how how buttoned up and professional do you think it needs to be?

Such a good question. So Susan and I both do not have any fancy Clearly.

Lighting. And, normally, my lighting is actually a lot better than it is right now, but I’m on a new machine and the lighting was being funky, so I had to shut the windows. But I, really suggest if you can get in front of just a really big bright window and orient yourself. So, actually, the opposite of what Susan is doing now.

Don’t don’t. This is the don’t do and Sam this we just wanna make sure you know that, you know, we’re human, and we have a do and a don’t do. I’m the don’t do.

So instead of having the window behind you, if you look into it, the light will come in. It will illuminate your face. And best of all, it makes all of us look younger and, you know, be and just barely continue to light.

Even go on the other side.

The light is just illuminating your face. Face. And the reason I you know, of course, there’s some instances where you don’t have a window and you need to buy equipment, and we can link to, a webinar we did all about recording a video. We did that one, with just recently with IdeaDecanter.

Aubrey or Elise, if you could, go to our YouTube page and drop that link in for everybody. And we talk about equipment and everything else you need so you can watch that. But the reason I really I suggest starting with what you have is because it’s gonna be the easiest to keep it going. If you just use a window and it does really look great.

And then in terms of, like, what to wear and how buttoned up to be, I really suggest wearing what you would wear when you meet with your clients. So if you’re not wearing a suit when you meet with them, don’t put a suit on just to record the video.

Did we miss any other part of the question, Susan?

No. That was it. And I think it I think on the formality, I think it depends. So, I mean, if you’re doing a brand video for your website, I think you want it to be pretty polished.

But if you’re just recording something on social, I think you can be incredibly casual, and I think it’s actually nice to vary it. I don’t know if you guys have watched a lot of Sam’s videos, but she’s done some in the car. She’s done some in her hallway. She’s done some on the soccer field.

I think it’s the variety that is incredibly appealing.

So thinking about where you’re gonna use the video is sort of the first question in terms of how formal.

And then on authentic, I think, over overproduced and scripted.

Yes. One hundred percent. And people can tell you from a script.

Oh my god. They totally can. They’re yeah. You’ve got to just ditch the teleprompter. It’s it just it’s hard.

I don’t think you can make that look right. But can you explain the option with FMG that provides the scripts for you? So, again, that’s our do it for me program. It’s our highest package, and it contains a whole month of content.

And the content is designed to enable you to market across every channel because the ideal marketing strategy for advisers, in our opinion, is having a great set of content that is distributed consistently, that’s the key, across multiple channels. So blogs and emails, emails to prospects, so to prospects, clients, and centers of influence, having content that is both video and podcast.

So we make it easy because that seems that’s really somewhat insurmountable for most advisers. So the video part of it is I take one of the two blogs that I’ve done, and I create the two video scripts out of it. And, obviously, taking a blog to a minute script is super short, but what it basically do does is tee up the blog. And then the three minute one is just a little longer, and we always try to think about diff them. I mean, not diff them.

WIFM. What’s in it for me?

WIFM and diff them. So with them, when I’m writing, I’m thinking, okay. What would the client or prospect find valuable? So I’m taking a couple of the key points that are your suggestions and putting them in the video script.

And I think you talked about length of video there too, which is really important. Our attention spans, just as consumers, have gotten so incredibly short.

You know, really a one minute video is what you’re gonna want for most things, which is great because, hopefully, it makes it easier to record it in some ways. You don’t have to use as much.

But, you know, YouTube has shorts now. Instagram has, like, stories and and reels. If you look at LinkedIn or Facebook, what videos perform best? They’re under a minute. So that’s intentional.

I did see that we got a question.

Let’s see here. It says, not sure if you’d be including YouTube as part of the call, but any information or tips to improve YouTube engagement would be awesome. Looking forward to it from Daniel. So thank you, Daniel, for that question.

When it comes to YouTube, one thing to know is that there’s two factors that go into how YouTube ranks your channel and videos and and recommending them to people. So one is the percentage of your videos that people are watching. So if you go look at any video in your analytics, it will tell you what percentage of the video, what were on average do people complete. So did they watch sixty percent of it on average, twenty percent, eighty percent?

The higher the number, the better. So if you can imagine, if you have a one hour webinar, you’re not going to have that many people watching a hundred percent of it. Right? But if you have a one minute video, you’re gonna have a much stronger high percentage of people watching the whole thing.

So that’s the first part of the equation. But then the second part that YouTube takes into consideration is the total number of minutes of video on your channel overall. And so in that part of the equation, longer videos help you because even if you have just a few people, that watch a whole one hour webinar, that’s sixty minutes times a few people. So you wanna have a combination of longer videos and shorter videos.

And so that’s where, you know, the shorter ones are gonna be great to share on all your social channels. You can put them on your your website. You can use them in blogs. But then if you do record something like a webinar or tutorial, a workshop, go ahead and add that to your YouTube channel as well.

So you wanna have a mixture of the two. Totally.

Alright. Awesome.

Let’s see. Another question. Let me go there.

What about Keep your questions coming live too.

We love getting them from people on the call.

What are the, you know, some ideas for how to generate, you know, ideas for the content? And we were asked, what are the numerical steps from creation to publication from Mike Kaufman?

This is for making a video. Yep. So let me just maybe walk through what I do because I think that would be helpful.

So That would be totally helpful.

Let’s say I wanna make a one minute video on, you know, the number one mistake I see advisers make on their websites. So before I record the video, I have exactly what I want the title of it to be written out because that’s it’s gonna be the hook that’s gonna get people to wanna watch it. Right? So if I say, what’s the number one mistake advisors make on their websites?

Or if you’re a financial advisor, don’t do this on your website. Right? That is gonna hook people in to want to watch it. So I always wanna start with what’s gonna be that opening line I say.

Whatever you do, do not make the opening line. Hello. I’m Samantha Russell from FMG because we’ve already lost people. Nobody cares.

They wanna know what’s in it for me. So start with that hook, and then, you know, let’s say there’s three points you’re gonna get at. So you’re gonna say what the top mistake is, you’re gonna say why it’s so detrimental, and then you’re gonna say what people should do instead. Those are your three main points.

In a Google Doc, I would have the title, what the three main points are, and then maybe if I have a stat in there or an example I know I wanna reference, I have that in the Google Doc as well. Then when I go to record, if I open up Veed or I have my phone, I have the camera, you know, right there I’m looking into, and then right underneath it, I have that Google Doc open. So my eyes can see those prompts and, like, those top takeaways. And I know what I’m gonna talk about, but it’s not a script.

It’s just those bullet points. So then I go ahead and I click record.

And then when it’s done right in Veed, I can export the video, add the subtitles, and clip it. And then I can upload it to YouTube, and now I can, from YouTube, embed that video anywhere I want. So on my website, in an email, FMG has a really cool feature. We can, upload it right into the into our email widget.

And then from there, you can share that video on social media or any other, avenue. If you are gonna share it on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, rather than resharing it from YouTube, you actually want to, download the raw file from Veed and then upload it natively. And so that just means that you’re not resharing from another platform. You’re gonna download the video after you edit it and then upload it to the other social platforms, and that’s just because it will perform better, on those platforms with the algorithm.

And those I actually I take the I do something very similar, but I print out the Google Doc or Word doc, whatever it is. I print it out, and, you know, you can change your font, make it bigger, whatever. But if you notice, like, your camera is at the high part of your, you know, computer, You can put stuff right under it. So I will print it out and, like, have it right right under it.

And so I can very easily just scan to remind myself of the of the, you know, bullet points here or there, and I almost always retake it. So Veed and others have this very easy thing. You just say retake. You don’t have to, like, stop it.

You just retake, retake, retake. It’s it’s totally fine to do it, like, three, four, however many times. Sometimes I’m like, oh, that first one was great. Lots of times, I’m like, okay.

That was not good. Oh, the dog barked. So it it takes a couple takes.

Yes. Absolutely. I mean, I can think of maybe a handful of times I’ve done in one take, and that’s after years and years of doing it.

Yeah. Exactly.

Don’t be afraid. And I just put a link to an article that we published on adviser perspectives, on how to create high quality video. That one’s specific to your phone, but it walks through the same the same process.

So check that out if you’re interested. Alright. Great questions. Keep them coming. Alright. So we’ve got it.

We’ve got it. We’ve talked a lot about, video so far, Susan. Should we move into email? Yes.

I was just thinking that.

Yes. Let’s shift to email.

Okay. So right out of the gate, we had a question. This was an anonymous person, but they said, how many times per month should I email clients, and what about prospects, if any? Do you wanna take this one, Susan?

Yeah. I mean, I I think there’s not, like, some magic answer, but what we do for do it for me is we have, two emails per month for clients and prospects and COI. So the same topic, but versioned slightly for each of those audiences, so you’re really speaking to that audience. And then others will layer on, potentially, a newsletter.

Others will and then we call that sort of foundational drumbeat content. And we’d love to add in anything super timely, which doesn’t happen every month, but this month, I think, in particular, there was, I don’t know if it was a Monday, but the market, you know, took a little nosedive.

Like, two weeks ago, I think, at this point.

Two weeks ago. Right? So that day, Sam and I immediately are, you know, texting each other, and we write something.

And we for our do it for me customers, we then send it out for them.

So I think as a rule of thumb, maybe you’re having you have a newsletter, but newsletters really are the drumbeat. They some clients love them, but they you know, anything that’s just repeatable becomes a bit expected and therefore not you know, doesn’t break through. But if you’re sending emails that are on specific topics that are really of interest and relevant and timely to the people that you’re e that you’re emailing, they will not only read it, but they will share it. So some of the topics that, you know, we’ll do are, that have been really popular on identity theft.

You know? So is it the core thing you do? No. But is it something that’s on the mind of your clients?

Absolutely. And it’s also about protecting their financial security. So sending things out that are helpful on topics like that. We’ll do things on, you know, the topics that you need to know as you send a kid off to college, you know, some of the changes when they turn eighteen that you need to know about, you know, how to, things that you need to make sure, you know, as you think about mistakes people could make if they don’t look at the tax cuts and jobs act, you know, expiring.

So that’s what we try to think about, like, really relevant specific topics that, a, you know, look like you’re thinking about the problems that are on the mind of your clients and prospects and possibly the clients of your centers of influence, and you’re writing it as a benefit to them.

So we think that works twice a twice a month.

Yeah. And I was just gonna say, I think there’s some people who do it twice a month. There’s some people who, you know, do once a month. There’s some people that do once a week.

I think I wouldn’t suggest doing a regular email more than once a week, and I wouldn’t suggest doing it less than once a month. So pick something in between there that works for you. There was a really interesting report, YCharts did, and they found that, you know, one of the number one reasons people choose to leave the financial adviser that they have is from lack of communication. It, you know, was up there higher than performance than, you know, how comfortable they were talking with them.

So many other factors, it was lack of communication. And so I like to say nobody fires their adviser for communicating too much, but they might for not communicating enough. So on the side of more, if you’re a little bit, you know, apprehensive. And when it comes to prospects, Susan and I talked to an adviser recently on a live event who told us this story.

She’d been emailing her list of prospects, which included small business owners, and someone had been on her list.

I think she said it was, like, five or six years. And every week, getting her content that was helpful to small business owners, and then the woman never messaged her, never got in touch with her. And then one day, she just, out of the blue, responded to the email and said, been reading your email weekly emails for years. I own this business.

You know, I have three quarters of a million dollars now that I’m ready to move over. Can we meet? And became a client. So you never you know, just because somebody is on your list and you’re not hearing anything, it just means that they haven’t had that pain point yet.

It doesn’t mean that they’re not interested.

Totally.

And I think net net, if you’re sharing valuable information that is relevant to your target audience, you’re never doing anything wrong.

If you are talking about yourself, if you’re selling, if it’s, you know, not relevant or timely, then you wanna cut back.

Right. Tell us in the chat. I’d love to know everybody on the call. Do you have a regular email that you send out? Is it once a month, twice a month, once a quarter, once a week?

So we can kind of bench for everybody’s at or maybe you don’t and if you don’t, tell us that too because it’s important to know.

Live charts and you’ll send it.

Yes. Weekly. Good job.

Study that we did with wealth management dot com several years ago. I mean, there’s a big chunk of advisers that are not emailing. And some of them will say, you know, I just don’t wanna bother people. Well, that’s you’re not bothering them. You’re showing them that you’re not thinking about them.

Okay. I’m in person. Kirby said, we’ll need personalized emails, not group ones.

There’s a weekly, weekly. Just got started. Need advice on frequency.

Yeah. Awesome. So, you know, one of you we’ve all heard that not having a plan is planning to fail. I think one of the things that people struggle with the most is the consistency of it and what the heck am I gonna say every week or every two weeks.

So that is truly what what we love the problem we love to solve for advisers is taking that off your your shoulders and your, you know, making it so that you can send those personalized one off emails and let us take care of the one to many for you. But, yes, if you’re just looking for advice on getting started, for sure, you know, at least once a month would be our suggestion, but you could also do it twice a month or once a week. Yes. Okay. What’s the next question we got? Let’s look and see here.

Let’s see.

I’ve heard you mentioned that it’s a best practice to segment your clients. So can you send so you can send more personalized. Can you explain that more? What types of groups and segments have you seen work well? And if we have our CRM connected in FMG, will people move from one group to another automatically?

Okay.

That’s a good question.

So when it comes to segmenting, what we’re really talking about is, you know, if you have great content for business owners, but not everybody on your list is a business owner, it’s just one segment that you serve, you don’t wanna not send the content because you are worried that all the people it won’t apply to will get frustrated and great experience for everyone overall because the people who get it are gonna say, wow, this advisor is really thinking about me, understand my problem. So you can easily, you know, segment people obviously in your CRM a million different ways. And then when you connect your CRM to FMG, and we work with all the ones everybody’s using, by the way. So if you’re using it, we most likely integrate with it.

When you when you bring that over, those groups are gonna be there. So if you have a group of all the people that are already retired in your CRM, and so these are gonna be the people that are gonna be thinking about, you know, required minimum distributions, for instance, or Social Security types of questions, and there’s content related to them, then you can choose them from the groups and only send it to those people versus another group that you have that’s maybe your younger families group in your CRM.

And when it comes to what kinds of groups work well, you know, obviously, it really can depend on your business and your practice. There are some firms that segment by occupation. Like, they work with a lot of firms from, Silicon Valley, like tech companies, and so they might literally put people in groups based on their employer. We have other people who do it, like, really simple. Prospects, clients. That’s it.

Because Right. That’s at least you should do prospects, clients, and we recommend that centers of influence. That’s, like, bare minimum.

Bare minimum. Yes. And collecting emails from centers of influence is something we don’t see a lot of people doing, but highly, highly recommend.

And it you know, if you’re connected with them, excuse me, on LinkedIn, for instance, you know, a CPA or local attorney, attorney. A lot of times on LinkedIn, you can get their email right from there and then, you know, send an email from your system. We have actually in our, platform and do it for me, we have a lot of options there for COIs where it’s just educational content, introducing them to you and what you do, making kind of that instead of an ask, hey. Can you refer people to me? It’s giving them something informative so that they’re thinking of you as an expert in this area, which is really important.

Totally. And I think, the other popular segmentation that’s really easy is is age based. And and they can you know, you don’t have to be micro segmenting by five years, but, you know, just sort of that swath of retirees, the swath of pre retirees, the swath of those that, you know, are sort of in the young family children phase.

Though, they definitely have generally some different topics that are top of mind, and it’s easy to find content that’s specific to each. And then there are topics that are just universal.

And that one, I actually talked with an adviser.

This was really interesting. He was really making an effort to do things like, you know, the family meetings and meet with the client with his client’s children, adult children. So he had created an entire segment for them. So the children of clients and let’s say there was something about, you know, scams, popular scams that were targeting the elderly.

He would send that kind of stuff to the client’s children who might not even be his client yet, but or, you know, a potential new client as a way to say, you know, hey. I’m working with your parents. I’m sharing this with them, but I thought it’d be helpful to you too. And I think that is so valuable.

Like, I think of myself and my own parents. Like, I would love to get an email like that. So Right.

And I think that’s that’s another you know, trying to get the next generation involved is a huge thing.

We know about the wealth transfer, blah blah blah. And a lot of advisers don’t know go how to go about it, and that’s the way to go about it. It’s the next gen wants to be able to care for and help their parents. And if they don’t so it’s not you know, we wanna talk to you so we can manage your money.

It’s we wanna talk to you so you know what we’re doing for your parents, and you know we’re here for them. I mean, make it all about how you just wanna make sure that they know what you’re doing for their parents, and that will endear them to you. And the rest will sort of work its way up. So we have letters and things that help with that, but that’s definitely the right approach.

So a question just came in.

I think we should address it while we’re on this topic from Kathy. Great question, Kathy. She said, curious how people are getting list of COIs and also new prospect emails. Our list seems old now.

So if you’re on the call, you have a good idea for Kathy, share. One thing I just wanna share that I’ve seen work well for advisors we work with is hosting an event, that is gonna be a huge value add. So, again, look, let’s think about the example we just gave. If you bring somebody in who’s gonna talk with your client base and their children about the most popular scams out there targeting seniors or, you know, and and what to look out for, how you know, like, a red flag, how to identify it, maybe what it would look like, and you can make it virtual.

You can invite the person to come and you say, hey, everybody. You send an email to your clients and to their kids, and you say, we’re gonna host this, and you can sign up for it and it’s free. And then maybe wait a day or two, and you send a second email and you say, we’re getting an overwhelming response. So many people wanna come, which is great.

So some people are asking if they can bring a friend or a family member. We’re gonna let everybody bring up to three guests. So you can forward this email to three people that you know, and they can go ahead and register. It creates, like, this air of exclusivity exclusivity.

Yet but you’re doing something valuable that people want the information for. So those kinds of things are really gonna help drive new prospects, and it’s coming from your clients, but you don’t just have to say, hey. Can you you know, do you know anybody who could use my service? You’re actually giving them something, which is such a stronger way to get a referral.

Yeah. And I think that answers one of the questions I have thrown out out of order, which was, you know, what’s a high ROI activity that I can do to get leads?

Webinars really are probably the best way to add prospects to your database.

And Sam’s tip about that exclusivity, you know, where you say, you know, we wanted to keep this as an intimate event so that we could get a lot of questions and answers, and things are filling up. So, you know, you can add two more people, but we wanna cut it there. They will probably send it to two more people, but that’s I and we do think that webinars are the easiest way to get new prospects.

Obviously, also optimizing your website with gated content like ebooks and quizzes and downloadables, that is obviously another huge way to get prospects.

Centers of influence, I think, Sam has a great idea. I mean, you know the centers of influence in your community, in your area.

Seeking them out and sending and looking for their email on LinkedIn is one great way. You probably can go on LinkedIn if they don’t have their email and find shared connections that you can ask for an introduction. Takes a little effort, but it is it’s absolutely possible these people are out there. They’re marketing themselves too. You can get in touch with them.

Yeah. I love love love love that.

Okay. And Dan Bennett just said, we sent out a bulk email to clients offering a personal finance one zero one Zoom for their kids, anyone sixteen and over, and it went really well. Yes. Out of it, but most parents know you help my kid out and you’re part of the fam. I love that.

Absolutely. And if you help the parents out, you’re part of the kids’ fam. You know what? I had another heard a great idea, from Bob Veris, actually. He had talked to an adviser who was, you know, lots I’ve heard lots of advisers that do client appreciation events with, like, wine tasting or cheese plate making or whatever it might be. He was doing that, but instead of just calling it a client appreciation event, he called it practicing retirement.

And so he had a whole series of practicing retirement and had various, you know, passions that people could get involved in in retirement. So, you know, one was, like, gardening and golfing or, you know, you can make the list. But just by calling it practicing retirement, he got so many people that came but also wanted to bring friends. Because bringing a friend to a practicing retirement sounds great. Bringing a friend to client appreciation does not. So thought that was a really clever idea.

That is a great idea. And I actually I met with him, an adviser who he found that about, you know, a good handful of his clients loved pickleball. And they I love pickleball. Yeah.

They were really getting into it. And so but he found that some of them didn’t know that many people in the area to play with yet. And so he put them you know, reached out to them individually and said, are you okay if I connect all of you? You all love this.

And he created a group and, you know, found a court that they could all go to. He said, let’s all go there this day and time and told them all, you could bring a friend or two.

And they created this, like, pickleball club that at the end of the summer, he ended up inviting a pickleball pro to come and they had a tournament.

And they, you know, announced it in a local Facebook group where there’s a bunch of people who like pickleball, and it was sponsored by Facebook group where there’s a bunch of people who like pickleball. And it was sponsored by his company, but it wasn’t, like, they weren’t talking about financial education or anything. It was just this commonality that everybody, you know, had, and it has opened up doors. He he got two new clients sign on from it because they you know, everybody’s talking.

How how are we all involved in this? How do we all know each other? What’s the common denominator? The common denominator was him.

So, really, I think you you can think outside the box for sure.

Totally. Alright.

Let’s see. Do you want me to look for another one here?

Yeah. Should we move to a different topic since we No. Let’s do.

Websites. Because we do actually have a lot of we have a lot of questions there.

A lot you know, best ways to collect leads from websites, that’s a general one I think everybody’s interested in.

Yeah. So the number one thing I would say when it comes to leads from a website is that ninety nine percent of the people coming to your website are not yet ready to talk with you. So they are getting names. They’re investigating. They’re looking at checking you out.

And so you don’t want them to come and look at your website and leave. Right? You want to collect their email so that you can start dripping on them, with emails over time so that you stay top of mind so that when that pain point that led them to check you out gets just big enough that they really need to make a choice, they remember you. And so the way to do that is to have something really compelling that they wanna give their email up for in the first place.

So something like the top five biggest retirement mistakes we see people make. Right? People are don’t wanna make the mistakes, so they will wanna put their email in to download it. Or if you specifically work with a certain niche, the more specific pinpoint you can help that niche solve, you know, creating some sort of download.

You can also have, a video gated. So maybe you did a workshop and people have to put their email in to watch it. So those are all the kinds of things you can do to collect leads. But then you also want to have a really good, what we call, primary call to action.

So those are all secondary. Those are for the people not yet ready. But for someone who is ready to work with you, think about when that typically happens. Right?

It might be eleven o’clock at night and a husband and wife are like, we have got we’re we have all these questions that we’re all doing. You’re retiring from your company and we got this four zero one k bounce. Like, what are we doing? So it’s eleven o’clock at night.

They go to your website. They do not wanna fill out you know, they don’t wanna write you a letter. They just wanna book a time to meet with you and talk about in person. So I really am a huge advocate for having a calendar widget right on your website so someone can just book a time, and then they can explain everything when they come to that meeting.

And so we’ve seen really great success in conversion rates for people who put the calendar widget in versus making someone fill out a bunch of information.

Yeah. Absolutely. I was actually just, meeting with adviser this morning, and I was he he was the winner of the summer games consult with Yay. Peter. So we had that. And I was going through their website, and their call they had primary calls to action. It was all schedule a call, schedule a call, and, you know, at the top and very bottom of the page, but no gated content.

So that was, you know, one of my takeaways, but, also, thinking about the placement of where you’re putting that gated content, remembering that the home page and the about us are the two most visited pages and making sure that you’ve got that secondary call to action in a place where they’re gonna see it, not buried in, you know, the third section of your our services page.

So the place of it is really key, and I think Sam hit on something. The fear or fear of loss aversion or the the emotion of loss aversion is so much stronger than, you know, the the attraction to gain. So writing things about mistakes, I mean, you don’t want the whole you know, your whole gated content strategy to be mistakes, but those pieces of content do tend to perform the best. People wanna know what not to do.

Yes. So true. So I just put a link in the, chat to a great website we just launched with our friends at Cadence Wealth Partners. If you click on that, you’ll see when it opens up, there is their schedule, call button that you can check out.

But I specifically, put the your guides page on there because I think another part of websites that people really, really overlook that really help with conversion is having a personality. So you can see on this website, these two gentlemen and, one lady have such fun, about pages. So they have their CliffNotes bio, and they have things, if we click on Sean, right, super dad, bald, marine, monitor moderately intelligent, plays banjo, builds tree houses, hates closed toed shoes. And then if you click in school bio, you know, they have these fun little bars for their skill sets, and then his professional version.

And then one of the things I really love is I always tell people if you in first person, it really sounds less like an obituary.

Oh, do you hear me now? Yes. Okay. First person.

Yeah. So you can write in first person. You know, it sounds much less like an obituary. Samantha Russell went to this school and did this and did that, and it sounds more like a conversation.

And conversations are what engage us. So if you write your bio as if someone’s interviewing you, it allows you to talk in first person but not feel awkward about it. So you can see in this bio, you know, what is Sean like outside of work? Why financial planning?

You know, asking questions and then answering them. That’s such a fun way to really spice up your website and make it more engaging for the people coming because of you know, ultimately, why are they choosing your firm? It’s most likely not because of some investment strategy you have, but it’s because they feel like they’re gonna like working with you. We we wanna really, really like the people that we’re choosing.

So I think having personal photos, having these first person bios are all gonna go a really long way.

Here’s a great question. How many pages are too many? We’re working on a refresh right now, and our team is in disagreement in terms of how much information we should include. I think we should keep it high level and focus on giving just enough information to get people intrigued and book a call, but others think we should include everything in the kitchen thing sink. What are your thoughts?

So if you’re thinking about, like, the top of a website where you go and it says home, about, services, whatever, a design rule, a rule of thumb, is that you should have no more than seven main pages in the navigation. Really five, if you can if you can make it five, but no more than seven.

So that’s rule number one. And then when you click on any one of those pages, the parent page, if you will, you have child pages that can come down below it. Right?

You really don’t want more than three child pages per main page, and it’s all about our brain’s ability to get overwhelmed by choice. We really wanna make it clear and easy for people to navigate navigate.

So I would air on the side of less is more for the more what we call static pages. So your homepage, your about page, your solutions page, or services.

Mhmm.

Yeah.

I do I actually saw a really interesting study that found that consumers were much more drawn, like, sixty percent to thirty percent when peep when advisors called it solutions instead of services. So Alright. It’s a little tip. But, you know, the one area where you can give a lot more information and go in-depth is like a blog style page where you would put videos, podcasts, or blogs. So there, yes, you can get really in-depth dissect topics. But for the people that are in the browsing category and they’re just coming to learn about you, you wanna keep it high level.

Less text is more, you know, way, way, way better. So you can use icons and columns to break things up, but we do not re read a website like a book. We scan it. So you wanna make it really, really easy to scan.

Yeah. I think we just and one of our for those that participated in our summer games, one of our questions was, which of the following is the most important to an effective website? And all of them were really it was it was actually kind of a trick question because it was all of the above, really. But the one that was the gold answer was writing short and succinct and, you know, copy.

Others, you know, SEO and conversational tone were there too. But to your point, and this was Helen who had asked the question, yes, airing on, you you don’t nobody wants to read, you know, your financial planning process from start to finish. You could have it as a downloadable for those that did, but they want they wanna scan. They wanna understand who you are.

Remember, people are really choosing you for who, not, you know, how you describe your estate planning philosophy.

So keeping it high level is really important. You’ve gotta make sure your personality comes across. Make sure they understand who you serve. Maybe you can talk about the five second test, Sam. But the who you serve, what you do, making sure they understand sort of what makes you different and and why you do what you do and can easily, you know, get more information.

But outlining everything that you do in the kitchen sink is not where the not where the website comes in.

No. Not at all.

Okay. Since we’re starting to get a little less on time, maybe we should move because we did have I think the most questions after video was social media.

Should we ask some Oh, yeah.

Oh my goodness. Yes. There are tons.

Which one do you have one that jumps out to you, or you want me to pick one?

How about this one? When creating a post for one platform, do you replicate the post exactly on each of Oh, yeah. That was a good one. From Jeffrey Morrison.

So, you know, not everybody who follows you on one platform is gonna follow you on another. And so I often see people sharing the same post on multiple platforms, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, in case there are some people that do follow you on both, I like to stagger the times. So if you’re gonna post something about the the best time to take Social Security on Facebook, Monday at seven AM, maybe you share it to LinkedIn, Thursday at nine AM.

Right? So you you change it up. The other thing to remember is that, not not everybody who follows you on every platform is seeing all your posts. Realistically, probably only about ten percent of your followers are seeing anything you share.

So I see people get nervous sometimes about resharing the same thing more than once. Do not be afraid to repurpose because the majority plan has done that. Yeah. Yeah.

If you go look at all articles, you’ll see a lot of them are, you know, reshared after three or four months because if it performed well once before, it’s gonna perform well again, and not everybody who saw the fur or not everybody saw it the first time, and there’s a chance for them to see it the second time. So, you know, really learning a little bit more about the way the algorithms work will help you understand that, you know, you don’t have to be afraid of sharing the same thing because at the end of the day, most people are not seeing it, so we need to reiterate the same points. And

really with your content, you know, you can share something once about Social Security and then maybe share it a week later with just a different image and people won’t even realize it’s the same post. Right? So, yeah, I would not worry about that at all.

There’s one question I think is probably on almost everybody’s minds, which is, you know, we suggest that you post at least some personal, posts. You know, you’re mixing in personal with professional. But what’s the right balance? You know, some people get turned off by too many personal posts. And so I’ll I’ll give my two cents, and then I’d love you to weigh into.

I think one of the best strategies I’ve seen is a personal photo, but tying that personal photo into a message in your post that actually connects to what you’re doing and and has a what’s in it for the audience. So, for example, FMG, we wrote a post. We had a post in our content library about when if if you know somebody that has a child that is getting a summer job, you know, here are things to think about. A, it’s a great time to open a raw for them. B, you know, make sure that they’re filling out their w nine the right way, blah blah blah, and, you know, tips They’re really relevant. And we had advisers that put a photo of their child’s graduation or a picture of their child and a dog. Like, it really didn’t need to be super connected.

They just had a personal picture and then used that same post, and they got tons of performance. So you could be really creative about not just you know, you know, Bob and I went to the baseball field last night. There was one adviser, I think, that that won an award.

I’ll never I thought this was brilliant, and he had a picture of himself and his son at a baseball game. And he said something like, you know, what a great night out. You know? Billy just won his, you know, baseball world series, and I get a night with my son, which, you know, I’m celebrating. I don’t know. He tied it in, and AI can help you with sort of the analogies of tying things in. But, anyway, that’s one idea of ways to do personal and professional at the same time.

Yeah. And I think to what to remember, you know, is that social media is, like, what we call a top of the funnel, strategy in marketing. So we are trying to get attention and bring awareness to our brand with social media. It is not where we’re converting people necessarily.

So what how do we get attention is by playing into the algorithm and what the algorithm wants to feed to people, and they like to feed people photos with faces, personal photos, not stock imagery.

So, you know, every three or four posts having a personal photo, doesn’t have to be every single one, is a good strategy for that. And you’re picking up new people who are saying, oh, who’s Samantha Russell? Or who’s FMG? And then if they go click on your page, we don’t want them just to see a bunch of pictures of me, right, that don’t say anything about FMG or marketing.

When they click on me, though, that brought awareness. Now the next post behind it might be something about how the best way advisors can market their business. So the personal photos are bringing awareness, leading them to your profile, which then helps them to understand what you do and why they should follow you. So that’s the strategy is to mix in those personal photos to play to that top of the funnel purpose of social media.

And we all know that if your clients or friends see a picture of you on social media talking about something, they are a million times more likely to like it and leave a comment than if you just are talking about a tech strategy. Right? And so the more comments you get, the more second and third degree connections who don’t follow you yet on faith or wherever it is are going to see it as well. So that’s why that strategy is so important.

Yep. Hopefully, we explained it well.

I think so.

And if you worked with our group four week program, we just tell you, it’s time to share a personal photo. Give it to us, and we’ll we’ll help you.

Or I’ll recommend, like, for, you know, half the seriously, half the post I write, I suggest, like, a personal picture of blankety blank or something like that could work with this post. And, you know, for those that aren’t FMG customers, you could just use AI. Like, I wanna do a post about blankety blank, and I wanna use a personal photo. Can you give me suggestions of the kind of photos that would go with this? And they you know, you’ll probably get something that would work. Alright. Other social media.

This is a quick one. Is it possible to add view my website button on my LinkedIn profile? And I know you have another suggestion on what to put on your LinkedIn profile.

Yeah. So, I’ve seen some people say that, you know, they don’t have access to adding that button yet. What he’s talking about, there’s a new feature you go to edit your profile. So I think LinkedIn must be rolling it out in phases. If you do have it, instead of just saying visit my website, I would do something more proactive. Like, you know, let’s meet and talk about your finances or see how we can help you. Something that’s got more of an active versus a passive, mindset to book a time to to to schedule a call.

But in terms of if you have it or not, you can write into LinkedIn support if you don’t see it, and sometimes they I’ve heard people say they will add it for you. So you can try that.

So it’s a great thing to add. If it shows up when you go to edit your profile, it’ll show up right there. Add, you know, a link, and you can, visit my website or, you know, add your Calendly link or something, then you can name the thing whatever you want. Yeah.

Alright. The other one was how many times minimum a week do you have to post to start seeing results? And this, I think, has something we get a lot. Something sorry?

So, you know, one of the things that I think is, like, for instance, I was just in Europe, and I did not post for ten whole days. And guess what? The world still spends. You know, it’s it’s kinda We messed up.

I could have scheduled things ahead of time, but I really like to be active in the comments. And if I know that I posted something and people are asking me questions or DM ing me, then I feel bad not responding. So for me personally, if I’m taking a true break, I won’t always schedule. Sometimes I will, but sometimes I won’t.

So in this this sense, I did it. Now you don’t wanna take ten day breaks, you know, once a month. That’s not good. But I think what I’m getting at is there’s no hard and fast amount of time, but you wanna be consistent.

So I would say, you know, for most of the social platforms, a few times a week you wanna be posting, and you need to pick which one. So, you know, maybe not all of your audience is on Facebook, but you’re working with a lot of people who are managers and they’re all active on LinkedIn, then you should prioritize posting three times a week to LinkedIn.

And maybe, you know, you have some people that are using Facebook, so you post there a little bit less. So you you gotta choose the platform where your audience is and think about that.

But I would say, you know, typically, you want at least a few times a week to be posting to whichever platform that you, you know, wanna show up on. And scheduling in advance really is the best way to do it, and our platform makes it very, very easy for you to do that because you could schedule out, you know, a whole month in advance very easily with the content that we have in the platform.

And I’ll just add to that. The the thought of posting three times a week makes makes my stomach turn. So I’m like, oh my god. I don’t do it.

I’d love to do it. I just I can’t which is why I think do it for me is so awesome. I wish I had somebody to do it for me. But, you can be fine without doing three times a week.

That is ideal.

And, you know, most importantly, you’re sharing valuable content. You’re sharing something that your audience is interested in. But I think the most important part of your question is let me go back to it. The most important part was that you said to start seeing results.

So you can be sharing five times a week, but if you don’t have followers, you’re not gonna get results. So you it is a two way it is a two pronged strategy, and it does not work unless you do both parts of the strategy.

One is posting. The other is commenting on other people’s posts and sending out connection requests. You’ve gotta build your network, and you’re not gonna do that just by posting content. So maybe, Sam, just talk quickly about that. This hour went really fast, but I know.

It did. Yeah. So the last thing we’ll leave you with when it comes to social media, if you write down nothing else, we call it the eighty twenty rule. So for every one thing you’re posting, you should really be leaving comments on five other people’s posts. And it’s such a great way to build your network because you can go and filter and search whatever social platform you’re on, and search content so you can, you know let’s say you’re serving doctors, you can look at groups of physicians or, you know, people that are that you’re hoping to target and strangers, you know, second degree connections, go and leave a comment on things that they post, and they’re gonna go, who’s Samantha Russell? And click over to your page. And the more comments you get on your post, the more that the algorithm says, oh, this is good content and we’ll show it to people.

And so when you leave comments on other people’s post, if Susan sees Samantha Russell’s always commenting on her post, she’s gonna be like best friends.

Like, you people at conferences who have literally they meet you and they give you a hug and they’re they feel like they know you just because you’ve commented on their post. I mean, we are all kinda insecure when we post or most of us. And when somebody says something or even likes it, we’re like, oh, I love that person. Yes. And I think the algorithm also if you are going to post, go on LinkedIn and comment on a bunch of other people’s posts first, and that will boost your, exposure.

One hundred percent. And if you just get a connection request with somebody, that’s a prime time when the algorithm will show them your content.

So, if you, you know, post something really great, then go and make some connection requests, those people now are gonna be much more likely to see what it is that you just shared.

Wow. This hour did go by so fast.

I know it will be.

Yes. I hope this was helpful to everybody that was on the call today. Thank you so much for sending in all these great questions, and, you know, let us know in the chat. Did you learn something? Was it helpful? Did you find it was a good use of your time? Because that’s why we’re doing it.

What else is there any closing thing that we need to go over before we let everyone go?

I don’t think so. I was just thinking what would be valuable to this audience and others is we should you know, we’ll summarize some of the questions and answers we had and share it in a social post and email it out to everybody that joined. Yeah.

I think we might need to do another one because I think we have about sixty five questions.

Yeah. We do have a lot of questions. Yes. Totally.

Yeah. When everybody’s saying great. Next AMA day. AMA day. We’re we’re my favorite. Awesome.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Susan.

It was nice to see you, and we’ll talk to you also.

See you too.

Have a nice nap. Okay. Yeah. Right. Thanks.