The Lead Gen Playbook Behind Faster Organic Growth

All right. Well, I’m gonna get started. A lot of people, in in our past, we’ve been doing webinars for a while, as many of you know, and we always skipped right to the topic. And then we’d get feedback like, who is FMG?

What do you do? And we forget, since we live it every day, we forget that not everybody realizes everything that we do. And we really have been growing our platform quite a bit. So we thought we’ll start with just giving a quick overview of FMG for everybody.

We are the one platform for every part of your marketing. Our goal is to make you an amazing marketer without having to do much work.

And so our product suite has evolved probably beyond what many of you know. I’m sure some of you are probably familiar that we have a marketing suite, which is designed to keep you visible, help you with email and social and automations and putting on events.

We also are known for doing websites. Our websites have evolved to be much more custom. We do not use templates. We work with you and a designer to build your site, but it is also super easy to edit with compliance workflows.

Many of you also are probably familiar that we acquired MyRepChat, which is a texting platform. But what you may not know is that we have completely overhauled the prod product and are continuing to, and we have a brand new interface that looks exactly like what you would use on your regular texting on whether you have an iPhone or whatever. So if you haven’t checked it out recently, it is way better. We also have our Do It For Me program.

And I think most people love the idea of anything that can be done for you. I think about that all the time in my house. I’m like, Honey, can you do that for me? So we have a program that’ll do it for you and I’ll weave that in throughout the presentation.

And there’s a question already. Can we incorporate the MyRepChat fee into the FMG fee? Michelle, what’s your thoughts on that?

We do have different bundles of offerings, so I think that’s something that you could talk about with your sales representative here at FMG, but certainly we’d like to get creative with our customers.

Yeah, I think right now because we acquired the product, we’re working on integrating it into our overall FMG dashboard and that is on the roadmap. And once it’s integrated in, then we will incorporate the billing so it could just be part of our billing suite. Oh, I got a smiley face for the MRC. MRC looks ten times better after the update. Yeah, I’d say maybe like a hundred times better. It’s really much better.

Yeah. The other question is on Agency Revolution. So yes, Agency Revolution is part of the suite of products offered through the FMG platform. There are many similarities between FMG Suite and Agency Revolution. And over the next twelve to eighteen months, you’re gonna start to see us integrate it even more deeply into the core platform.

Yeah, Agency Revolution is another acquisition that we made. We’ve kept the company somewhat separate. It serves the insurance property and casualty and benefit insurance agents and agencies, and it essentially is a mirror platform. So everything we are talking about is also a mirrored platform offering for agency revolution.

Okay, a twenty eight year old pet. Oh, my daughter.

That’s very good.

I love that one.

Moving on. Recently, we made an acquisition of a Nope, sorry, not moving on from the slide. We’ll go back. I’ll try to go quickly, but this is really exciting, and this is gonna be a big part of what we’re talking about today.

We made an acquisition of a company called Testimonial IQ. We’ve renamed it FMG Testimonials. But we have a product that enables you to collect testimonials and reviews compliantly and promote them automatically in your website in a way that compliance is happy with. We are working with if you’re an RIA, this is something that you can likely do right now.

But if you’re with a large RIA, it is something that has to be approved by their compliance teams. We’re working with all of the large firms to get compliance on board. And we have an exciting announcement.

Satera has approved officially testimonials, and we are going live with them, I think, next week. So if you’re with Caterra, this is available. If you’re with any of the other large broker dealers or RIAs, it is coming soon. Feel free to go up the poll and say that you’d like it.

And then two quick things. We’re working on two new offerings. One is institutional intelligence. We’re actually going to partner with asset managers and other wealth tech firms so that their content can be in the platform. Our goal is to be the one place you can go to execute all of your marketing, whether it be distributing content from say wealth dot com or say Allspring or a Capital Group or BlackRock.

And then this partner program, which we’re calling FMG Connect, we will be announcing in the next three weeks, will be integrating with your tech stack. So other technology partners that you work with, there are lots of them that are very exciting that will be in our first, announcements, so stay tuned, will integrate with us so that you can execute the communications and or marketing insights from those platforms through FMG.

So Yeah. We’re super excited about the FMG Connect offering.

So hopefully we’ll get a little bit more time to talk about it with you today.

So is anybody anybody that knew FMG? I’d love to hear if some of this sounds new and exciting and I’ve got anybody that’s like, yes, this is great.

And then we’ll move to the next slide.

Thanks for letting us do that little commercial. But just to wrap it out, the main goal for FMG is to save you time and improve your ROI. And we’ve got this proven. We’ve done studies with the main management consulting firms that go out there and interview clients and prospects.

It’s proven and it works. So let’s see what we can do for you. The rest of the presentation is just gonna be pure thought leadership that you can take regardless of whether you’re a customer or not. Go to the next slide.

So what we wanna convey is that the easy button isn’t just picking a vendor.

I’m pretty sure you guys are overwhelmed with options right now. There are the industry is swimming. If anybody looks at the Michael Kitz’s map, it has it’s like a technology ecosystem map, lists all the vendors by the type of tech that they provide. It has exploded with the advent of AI. But we are here to tell you just to relax, it isn’t about trying to pick the right vendor.

There’s a sequence of activities that you do that will yield the highest results in organic growth. So what we’re here to do is talk to you about that. Let’s go to the next page.

So this is interesting. Michelle, you know this about advisors.

Over the last decade, they’ve really grown just without having to work super hard at an organic growth strategy. Have you seen some of these stats?

I have and what’s interesting is I’m in a lot of client conversations, organic growth is one of the top priorities right now where firms are looking at this and saying, we know that advisors are doing really well, but they could do so much better. And there’s a huge focus on how can they get the organic growth numbers up from two percent more into the ten percent range. And a lot of that has to do with helping advisors be much more proactive, a little bit less reactive, more personalization, more automation, more integration and data activation so they can really start to target different segments of clients and shape their unique value proposition towards those unique niches and segments of customers.

And I think that’s an area here at FMG that we can really help them with. So absolutely I’ve seen these numbers and, you know, the other is just the percentages of time still that advisors are spending on administrative tasks and doing research. I think AI is starting to change that and is really helping to become much more of an assistive capability for these advisors to help them scale so they can focus on all these different niches.

I mean, think what’s I just put out there because I love chats. So everybody get in the chat. On a scale of one to ten, how important is focusing on organic growth to your business? And I’m curious, you can let me know whether you think that’s increased over ten.

Yeah. Whether that’s higher than it used to be would be my theory. Oh my gosh, we’ve got ten, ten, ten, ten, Awesome. And look at this, seven percent of advisors spent three hours a week on business development.

Do you know what the other ninety three? My math’s bad.

Three did?

Nothing. So it’s hard. It’s time consuming. You guys are swamped. And that’s what we want to talk to you about, what you can do that is going to yield the greatest ROI.

Because the other interesting thing, Michael Kitsis actually said this, it isn’t just the cost of the solution that you leverage. It isn’t just the cost of the website or the cost of an FMG. It’s also how much is your time worth? So if you’re putting the time in, you should figure out what the value of your time is by hour.

Lawyers do it, everybody does it. If you think about your revenue and how much time you’re spending, you can come up with that equation. If you can outsource it for less than you’re spending, then that’s an ROI just in and of itself. So you’re already a positive ROI by saving your time.

And then once those solutions pay off, that’s additional ROI. So let’s go to the next slide.

Hey, Susan, there’s a really good question in there, which is let’s define our interpretation of organic growth. I don’t think we should skip that one. So I’ll start and you add on. I mean, when I think of organic growth and what I’ve heard clients talk about, number one, it’s the lifetime value of the client. It’s the expansion of the share of wallet that maybe you’re able to capture.

It’s increasing the frequency of conversations with those customers to really uncover more financial planning opportunities and to potentially expand the ways that you’re helping them and not just them, but the entire household.

So those would be some examples I can think of, of organic I would just go super simply and say organic growth is growth outside of M and A and market appreciation.

So you guys are fee based. Many of you are fee based, some are transaction based. But if the markets are going up, you generally make more money.

And if you’re acquiring, you have more AUM, you’re making more money. Organic growth is your growth outside of that where you have done intentional things to drive additional growth. Yeah.

Net Net flows, perfect. So this is an interesting, this is Schwab’s study.

Thanks for picking that one up since it is, yes, it is core to our presentation. Ian, thank you so much for asking it because he just mentioned it to the hosts and panelists. So thank you for letting us call that out.

So Schwab does a study every year. The most recent one that we found was the twenty twenty four. There might be a new one out, but I’m sure the stats are pretty consistent. Fewer than one in three advisors under two fifty million in AUM have marketing plan.

And those that do grew sixty seven percent faster. That’s not like, oh, I’m not sure if that’s statistically relevant. That is a huge difference. The chat, I would love to see how many of you have a written marketing plan and have defined your ideal client and have a defined written value proposition, even if you have one of the three. And if not, you know that you are with the vast majority of like sixty six percent of advisors do not.

Really mixed. Look at the responses, very, very mixed. While you guys are responding, I’d say, I was at a pretty sizable financial services wealth firm last week and the focus was AI and how AI can help. And this was the focus.

They have dedicated marketing strategists assigned to thousands of advisors. And what they’ve discovered is more than half of them don’t have a documented marketing plan or don’t have a documented ideal client profile or unique value proposition. And they’re starting to get creative thinking about ways they can leverage AI to make this tool. One to change the percentages, to make it easier, to help the advisors, to give them a head start in this area.

Awesome. So let’s go to the next slide because we’re gonna tell you how to do this. This starts our lead genorganic growth playbook section. And again, it is a sequence, not a vendor.

So there are a lot of things that go into driving organic growth, net flows, increasing your revenue. But guess what? I hate to tell you that referrals still beat paid leads by ten to 25x on close rates. So everybody would love a lead gen solution, an easy button.

I would too. I really would. But I’m gonna tell you that it is the tried and true, which is still driving the bulk of people’s business. So what I wanted to show you is just as interesting.

There are a number of different ways, levers that you can pull for organic growth, but they each have some variables. Some are owned, which means that the prospect that is interacting with you is aware of your brand and they’re interacting transparently with you.

Then there are those that are rented. So those are the ones where you may be getting you may be paying for lead flow or paying for access, but it’s not you’re getting whatever you’re getting is not the you’re not known to that prospect. So, obviously, that’s a harder conversion. Look at this from a cost of acquisition.

It’s going from the cheapest to the most expensive.

And then look at what the close rate does. It goes from highest for the cheapest to lowest for the most expensive.

So any business school student would be like, well, then why don’t you focus at the top, except we all are getting dazzled by, can we just go to the bottom and have it all work? Well, the message I want to convey is, and we’re gonna go through all of these different This is a sequence. You can do all of them, but our suggestion is that you start with the ones that are the least expensive with the highest conversion rate and you move up as you master each, and you don’t try to do it all. So let’s go to the next slide.

I’m curious, and feel free to share any thoughts you have. So the other thing to think about is when we say referrals, you’re getting referrals from the AI search engines. Has anybody had a prospect come to them and say, Yeah, I found you on chat, or I was doing research on chat before I met with you, or Gemini or Perplexity. Let’s say yes, yes, yes.

So this is another referral source and they convert four and a half times better than any other source to your website. So this is something important. We’re gonna talk about how you can do this and improve the number of referrals that you’re getting from search. So let’s go on to the next.

This is really cool. So, and I think you guys can relate to this because you use, I’m guessing everybody is using AI for their personal life, for their business life. It is game changing. But this is interesting as you look at the ways that your prospects are using AI as it relates to finding a financial advisor. So there’s discovery where somebody would just type in, here’s my situation. I’m looking for somebody.

There’s the evaluation where they might be considering you and somebody else. That’s actually selection. But evaluation, like, tell me about this advisor and whether they’re good at something. But the bottom line is before they just used to say, find a financial advisor near me.

Now they’re able to, and naturally will, using natural language, provide so much more context. So your goal now is you need to provide that context on your website and through other things so that you are getting served. So you can see here, look at the selection one. So it will compare.

This is this is real. It compares based on the type, fee only, which means you need to be explicitly saying that on your website, whether you are or aren’t. It references reviews second. We’ll talk about that.

It references specialties. If you just talk about how you do general financial planning, that’s not gonna be a specialty.

Media and the consistency in which and frequency and recency of your content. So let’s go to the next slide and we’ll talk a little bit about this. So that was kind of the background.

What we’re gonna recommend is this sequence. So foundation steps one through four are the things that need to be in place before the others even start to have an ROI. So starting with your ICP, ICP, anybody know what ICP? I said it a couple slides ago. Was anybody reading?

Anybody know? It’s ideal client profile. So if you wanna sound like super, you know, private equity. There we go.

We got some. Yeah. Ideal client profile. Sounds like so buzzy. But anyway, defining your ideal client profile, that should be pretty easy, we’re gonna tell you how to do that.

Auditing your website and improving your website so that you get found in search. And when people come to your website, you’re converting.

What’s interesting is we like to say now that your website used to just be written for prospects, possibly for clients. Now your website needs to think about a second slash third audience, which is the AI engines.

And then content strategy and a content engine is critical. You cannot convert these upper layers without it. And then being intentional about referrals. Those are the first four to nail. Then build a structured COI, then layer events, then start with your paid owned SEM, which is like Google Ads, and then last, layering on the paid lead aggregators and prospecting. So let’s get into it.

All right. So an ICP, this ideal client profile.

I have talked to a lot of advisors and they’ll say, I don’t really have one ideal you know, client profile because I serve high net worth families. They all have complex planning and estate and tax needs. Well, that is, you know, all high net worth. That’s everybody with money.

And then I’ve heard some of you, I’m really trying to figure out who my ICP is. Here’s the moment. So your firm, I’m sure, serves all kinds of families. You might have some niches, niches, I should say.

There’s, I’d say, I’d even guess maybe twenty percent of all financial advisory firms have really defined, I serve Google executives. Most are serving high net worth families and or mid America.

But ICPs are actually really more about marketing than they are servicing. So you can have client segments that are ABCD. You can have niches based on what people do, and then your content is going to maybe tie into that. But for this purpose, for the topic of this webinar, your ICP can be when your clients Let’s go to the next slide because I think I touch on this here.

Yeah. And I’ll just jump in see that a cool one is like, hey, having a specialty helping women going through the divorce or men going through divorce just in general or trying to attract Henry’s high earning, not rich yet individuals. I have a household full of them making really good money over six figures but not really being smart about how they invest. So those would be two examples I think of.

Yeah. And I think what I want, what I’m hoping everybody walks away with is your ideal client profile. Think of it as a marketing tactic, not necessarily, you know, explicitly who all your clients look like. And you can have a couple of them. We’re going to suggest not having more than maybe three, but they are who your clients were when they walked in the door.

What was the triggering event that made them seek you out?

So although your clients may all look the same, when they first came to you, I’m almost sure there was a triggering event, whether it was a liquidity event, whether it was a divorce, whether it was, I’m starting out and I need help, but there were probably triggering events. And if you look at all your clients and how they came to you, why and when they came to you, in what stage of their life, those are your ICPs. Those are the problems that you solved. And those are the things that we want you to write about on your website.

Because think about that, this whole thing is geared towards changing the copy on your website and in any of the marketing things that you do to talk about the problems that you solve that people are asking Claude for help with. So if you’re on that, when we looked at those slides where people are searching for, they’re describing their problem and asking the AI engines to recommend somebody who solves them. So if your website says, I work with business owners. Well, nobody’s like, I have business owner problems.

They would write, I’m selling my business and wanna talk about how to structure estate planning around generational equity transfers or something. So the specificity is really big. It’s not the who they are, it’s the problem they had when they came to you. So go to the next slide.

Is that an for anybody? They’re like, oh, that’s a much easier way to look at it rather than thinking like, I need to have a niche. I go after bakers. Like, all of you have ICPs based on the problems that you solve for people, and that’s what you wanna write about.

So here’s an example of a website that I think has done a really good job. So look at the who we serve. So this has like explicit niches that fall into that twenty percent of all financial advisor firms. So let’s go to the next one.

This is the who we serve. They’re talking about career change or advancement, divorce or separation, executives receiving ownership, caring for aging parents. That is like almost everybody in their 50s and 60s. I read it.

Receiving or inheriting wealth. So these are, you could, and if you take those, that’s at the highest level but those were the problems that people were dealing with when they came to this firm and then within their website, they actually writing about these problems and that is what’s going to help you get picked up.

The actual stories, right, Susan?

You’re talking actual stories.

Yeah. Stories and just your ideal client profile. Don’t think about a demographic. Think about a problem that they came to you with.

Alright, on to the next.

Alright, the fewer treat each one like it’s the only thing that matters. That’s the on your website, when you think about your blogs, when you think about the copy on your website, the who we serve, we think like three, I could say, maybe four, and write specific content on each of them. Don’t try to write something that addresses all three at the same time in a blog. So build out that kind of content. So it’s really like niche specialization of problems, and you will see a difference. But let’s go to the next slide and start talking about some of the other things.

Referrals. So tell us what you think of referrals, Michelle, and what you hear from people and whether this stat of sixty eight percent of advisors growth is from referrals. This is from Cerule.

I mean, absolutely, right? So I just moved into a community, one of those communities fifty five and over. And what do people talk about, right? This is one of the things, financial planning.

Absolutely, they’re gonna ask me, who’s my advisor? Why do I like them? Why did I choose them? How did they help me?

Referrals are so powerful and not just at my age group, again, at that younger generation, yes, they’re using all the GPT tools but they trust no one else except their peer set. So referrals are critical, super powerful, as well as the recommendations that they’re gonna research when they go online.

Exactly. So how many of you in the chat have a strategy to increase referrals versus, well, I just get them when I get them. And let’s, Amber will keep the slides going while people write in. Do you intentionally try to create referral opportunities or you just thank people when it happens?

The other thing is centers of influence. So flip back to the other slide quickly. I think it was fifty four percent of new clients come from referrals of friends and family, but another fourteen percent come from COIs. So that brings the total to sixty eight.

I think I’m right, but the combination is powerful. So on the COIs, we’ll go to the next slide.

I think many of you have probably tried to forge relationships with CPAs and estate attorneys. I hear from so many people that are like, I tried, it’s really hard and it is. But I also think you can think beyond just CPAs and estate attorneys, and we’ve got some ideas for even how to penetrate those. But divorce attorneys, business and M and A attorneys, business brokers, trust officers, real estate attorneys.

So building that center of influence network is really important. And here I’ll do a little plug for our Do It For Me program, which as the name says, we do it for advisors who sign up for this. One of the things I actually write the content for it and we write two emails per month that can be dripped on centers of influence. They’re written, designed to be shared with centers of influence and they ask for nothing.

They just share First of all, we start with writing two blogs on very cool, like really topical relevant topics, like timely topics. So for September, the two blogs are, one is IPO hype versus reality with the SpaceX IPO in the rearview mirror and the OpenAI in the foreground as well as Canva and Anthropic, we hear that advisors are getting tons of questions, and I’d love to hear if you are too. Questions about, I want to get in on some of these IPOs. How do I get in on and they have this shiny object just like we kind of do about, I want lead gen.

They want they’re like, I think those are like they’re they’re given if I go into those IPOs. So anyway, wrote a blog about that and demyst demystified. So I’m pretty sure I haven’t looked in the last couple of days, but the SpaceX, last I looked, SpaceX was way below where it traded on its opening day. And we know that retail investors are getting in after everybody’s already made their money and they’re usually the ones holding the bag and losing.

So anyway, so that’s a good one. So that’s an example. So we version that into an email for clients and prospects, but we also version that into a center of influence email. And we just, I package it so that it’s like, I wanted to share something that we just shared with our clients, thought it might be of interest to you and or your clients.

Feel free to share this or leverage it in any way that it’s helpful. Hope you’re doing well. And you’re just dripping because just like with your clients and just like with your prospects, it is about being top of mind when something happens. So if you just call an attorney up and be like, let’s work together, it’s just not gonna work.

But if you drip on them without asking for anything and then they have a client that needs a financial advisor, you are going to be top of mind and you are gonna get that call. So anyway, content again is key. Let’s go to the next.

All right. So this is how you get found on the AI engines. Do you Michelle, why don’t you take us through This is We’ve put together a rank Basically a scorecard that tells you what is influencing the AI engines most to least to help you get found.

Scorecard we’ve built really will take a look at your website and give you indications on, can you be found or why aren’t you being found and give you recommendations on what you can do to improve your foundability percentage rate, right? So you look at at the top there, third party reviews and social proof, earned media and third party mentions. Are they finding anything about you? If not, they’re gonna make that a recommendation that you need to do some things to put yourself out there more. Your services as Susan described before, are you being prescriptive enough and detailed enough or are you being too vague? And so it’s really not clear how you stand out and how you’re differentiated from the advisor next door that someone else could choose.

Do you have AI ready content that’s easy for the AI tools to really access and learn about your services?

FAQs and structured questions and content. So again, that was a recommendation Susan made before the tool will assess if you have these things and if those FAQs are really answering the questions out there that are gonna be most relevant and helpful and really point customers to you based on the unique services that you can provide. So those are some of the key things, but I think it’s really cool. It’s fast.

It assesses the site. It gives you recommendations and we can help you take action pretty quickly.

Yeah, we can actually, we’ll send, we can include Amber, we’ll just make a little point. We will include this.

It’s like an AI quiz. But what is the most important thing to know here that you and we can help with is the third party reviews and social proof.

That is one of the that and AI ready and content on your website and FAQs on your website, if you just do those, it’s going to be a huge percentage will increase big time.

Yeah.

So let’s go to the next slide and talk about this third party or the reviews.

How many of you are collecting, are promoting testimonials or reviews or getting Google reviews or doing client surveys? Anybody using testimonials? Because as we know, the SEC approved this four years ago and yet so few people are doing it. I think it’s it’s Yeah.

Because of compliance. Oh, we got some yeses. Good for you So you are way more likely to show up in AI. But the compliance burden is a lot, and that’s why we acquired Testimonial IQ and rebranded it FMG Testimonials.

Just like we said, referrals are important, but to not have to just rely on friends and families and a COI when somebody is looking for validation is what really Michelle was saying. Like people want to know if other people think you’re good, This is so important and this is why the AI engines are prioritizing this over everything.

There were a couple of comments in there. So some folks saying not aware I could use it. Others are saying my firm hasn’t approved it or their compliance concerns.

And for the compliance concerns, a lot of the firms we’ve been talking to, we’ve been solving for that by integrating testimonials into our compliance workflow engine. So that can help get the compliance departments much more comfortable that, yeah, we can control, we can review, we can decide what is allowed to be posted out there as a referral that’s public. But the other is some firms are saying, you know what, I’m gonna allow this and maybe I won’t allow it to be shared out, but we’re gonna learn from it. We’re gonna learn about the customers we’re serving and the sentiment and how they’re feeling about their advisor. And we’re going to use it as a way to help the advisor be even stronger and provide more value. So I think there are different ways to use the referrals.

Yeah, And I see a couple of Ozaiks. I don’t know if you guys were there when I was there, but I was the previous CMO at Ozaik. I love Ozaik. And we’ve been talking to Shannon and others and Matt and many of the execs there. We are close and feel free to share that you’re interested in it. But I am hoping that’s imminent, not a no, but coming soon.

And as we said, Satera has approved and we’re working with everybody. I think it’s just a matter of time back like ten years ago when people were like, you can’t use LinkedIn or Facebook. Now that’s like, what?

But how it works, I’ll go quickly on how it works. I don’t know, what’s the next slide, Amber? Do I just show that?

No. Let’s go back. I’ll just quickly talk about how it works because I think people are like, how would I even do that? Well, what FMG testimonials does is it’s integrated with the FMG platform, but you don’t have to have an FMG website and you don’t have to have FMG marketing.

It can be a stand alone. All of the things that we talked about can be stand alone or work better together. But what it does is it lets you create an email that is sent out to clients that is a survey. So it is not it’s not sending them to the wild wild west.

It’s collecting a survey. It sends it so that it it it creates this little box that says, you know, it has a message that you write and put your branding on it and then it has, you know, on a scale of one to five, what would you rate us or something? And then it has the stars and then a little box. So it looks like a Google review.

It’s not intimidating. It’s super easy for people, but it comes back to you in a dashboard.

So you see this. This is not public. It’s just like a client survey at this point.

If you want to, so a lot of people do this. First, they just collect some feedback. Then when they’re comfortable within that little review box in the email, there’s a box that says a button that says, please share this on Google as well. And then they click that.

It takes them into Google, single signs them on, and they just hit a button and it pastes the exact same thing that they wrote. So they don’t have to write it again. So that’s the way. And then you decide how you want that to look on your website, regardless of who builds your website, and it automatically populates your website.

That’s how it prevents the cherry picking. So once you do this, yes, all of the reviews do show and everybody says, but what if I get a bad one? Well, we have like, I don’t know, thousands and thousands and thousands of reviews of advisers that are using us and the average is four point nine. So your clients love you, I promise.

Anyway, so it’s super easy. If anybody’s interested in a demo, Cambridge, I think is Cambridge live, Michelle?

I think they’re going live soon.

They are going live soon.

Was asking if there is a testimonials webinar. Believe in the past we’ve done a few and they might be accessible right on our FMG website, but we can certainly host an excuse me, another one in the future.

Yeah, go to the FMG website. We’ve got in our resources, we’ve got past webinars. You can totally find that there’s a ton of content online. Also, I just posted something.

Samantha Russell always posts about it. And did I say you can do testimonials as standalone?

If you got, I think if you got something approved by compliance, you might, but the overall process is you cannot cherry pick. You also cannot cherry pick who you ask. So there has to be a process, which is why you need software really, where you are consistently sending out requests for feedback. It could be at somebody’s it could be at everybody’s annual review. It could be after you have six you know, sixty days after you onboard them.

You decide what is the trigger. And it also can be just a link in your email. You just have to have consistency in how you’re asking it and be able to defend how you are asking and that you’re not excluding anybody from providing feedback. And then you also need to share all the feedback.

If you’re publicly promoting it, you need to publicly promote all, which on a website could look like you have five and then it’s a click to see more. It’s not like you have to have everything. And then the way we do it also, if you’re on an FMG website is all of the policies and procedures and everything is already baked into that. So when you add it to your website, it’s all done.

And as we work with firms like Ozaik and Satera and Cambridge and others, their compliance teams are putting all the messaging, their own policies and procedures in the document. So it’s already baked in. So when you use it, you’re basically just syncing your CRM and deciding when you want to send it out on what trigger, and then it’s good to go. So let’s move on.

I know it’s twelve forty Eastern time. I want to make sure we get to everything, I got to talk faster.

All right. So the AI engines decide. We’ve already gotten that.

Somebody asked like, why are FAQs important? They’re super important because now people are not searching for a financial advisor, they’re searching for a question. So somebody is gonna type in, I just, my company, like I’m at Jose, my company just had a recap. I got a payout.

What’s the best thing to do? Is the market too high? They’re gonna ask specific questions. And when they’re considering you, they’re gonna ask questions.

So to the degree you can answer questions directly, it’s easier for the AI engines to find you. So we’re doing the same for our own public site. We’re going through and we’re looking at what are people searching for, what are advisors searching for when they’re looking for a marketing solution, and then we’re changing the copy on our site to actually speak to those questions. So you just wanna think about what are the questions your prospects are asking and have FAQs with schema markup.

That’s just like it’s a programming language that helps the AIs read it, essentially. So for AEO, yes, there we go. Alright. Let’s move on because I’m only at, like, the second thing.

Events. Alright. We’re on to the fifth stage. Events are super important. How many of you guys do events on a somewhat regular basis?

And tell me if you do virtual and or in person.

So a lot of people don’t do events because it’s a lot of work.

This is something that was really important to me. Actually, at Mosaic, they have my CMO, which is FMG private labeled. And I think I was somewhat instrumental on pushing FMG to really enhance this event capability and now it’s available to everybody.

It’s so hard. So I wanted it to be like a turnkey thing where advisors could go in and fill out a wizard of the event that they wanted to hold. How many people, if there was a limit, put in their location, could be a URL or could be a physical location, have their branding already in there and or just do a copy and paste it, put an image in for their event. It automatically creates a landing page with a registration form.

That registration form creates a spreadsheet and goes into your FMG inbox, and it automatically sends out, which you can edit, an three drip email or it could be more and triggered social posts. So it’s basically this omnichannel promotion and all in one registration program. So it makes it super easy. It is one of I would say it’s not the highest used feature on FMG, but it is probably the most popular of those that use it.

So that’s a great one for anybody that might wanna demo. Actually, Aubrey, let’s do a demo we’re at the twelve forty five.

Let’s put the poll up. I’m curious, would anybody be interested in learning more about FMG or our do it for me program? We’d love to tell you more about testimonials and our FMG testimonial. We’d love to tell you about the Do It For Me and the COI drips.

And also our Do It For Me program will do an audit of your site for AEO and help you implement the FAQs with schema markup, as well as keep your site current with the blogs every month. So hopefully you’d like to hear more information and we will go back and get on to our five through seven parts of our foundation. So events, I think, are really important. Here’s some things to think about. So in three to eight RSVP rate, but I think if you promote it effectively, you’re gonna get more. Most people are saying in person, but low turnout. So here’s a tip.

Every month in our do it for me program, we take the blog and we version it for a webinar. And we make it into a fireside chat format, so you don’t even need slides. So you and somebody in your office could just have a chat back and forth, and we’ve scripted it out. And or ideally, I tee up a center of influence that you could invite that could be a great partner for the webinar where they would talk about their side of the story, whatever the topic is.

That costs nothing. You don’t even have to create slides. You don’t have to put anything through compliance because it’s a live chat, which is like a PR event. You might put the recording through compliance after it’s done, but it’s a great idea.

And you might say, but I only get like five people attending. If you get one new client and it took you practically no time and cost you nothing, that’s a good ROI. What if you did that every quarter, every month? So think about doing virtual events, webinars.

And to make it easy, FMG certainly can play a role in that. So let’s go on.

Yes, great for a widespread client base that can attend. Absolutely. And so easy to forward to somebody’s family. I mean, I’m sure you guys are trying to get into the next generation. Like, what if you did something like one of our blogs, our blog in August was about the things to consider for students studying abroad.

So many people either My daughter’s doing it in two weeks.

Yes. That would be so helpful.

It’s just like super top of mind.

And whether you have clients that have a daughter or a granddaughter’s grandson or know somebody, it’s the perfect thing that they would share. Are they going to share your market commentary? No. But could you do a webinar on what financial things to think about while studying abroad?

And then your clients and our prospects are gonna forward it and share it with their kids. Just super these are like the basics. So again, this is the foundation. I haven’t even started to talk about the lead gen stuff.

So if you do nothing else this quarter, I would definitely look into the testimonials, even if you’re just getting ahead of your broker dealer approving it, to learn more about how it works and start thinking about whether or not you’d like to do it. Email, and this is all about the testimonials. So we’ll go well, let’s move on because people can or can’t do the testimonials at this point.

But definitely plant the seed. Amber, go to the next slide.

All right. Now we’re at the shiny stuff. Okay. So I’m actually gonna mention some by name because I think they’re on your mind.

So the paid lead aggregators, when do they make sense? So the smart assets, and I’m not mentioning all of them, and I hope I’m not offending anybody if I didn’t mention you, but like asset smart asset, Catchlight, WealthRamp, Zoe, IndyThin, Dataline, NerdWallet, all these, where you are buying leads. So the realistic expectation is five to ten ks a month. That’s a lot for most advisors.

And the close rate is two to four percent.

So I strongly encourage you to add this layer, number six layer, after you have mastered zero through five.

And they can be successful, but I will say it is largely the firms that are big enough to have a team that is following up on these all day long, and it’s their top priority. What do you what do you think? Who are these good for, Michelle?

Yeah, a hundred percent.

Is also a top of mind conversation. How do you nurture the leads? How do you make sure action is happening against these leads? One of the ways FMG is trying to help goes back to that conversation around FMG Connect, right?

Having integrations with providers like this and being able to help you activate a campaign or an action or a targeted outreach by reading the data signal that these lead providers can provide. So some of the earliest partners that you’ll see that we’re going to announce next month will be some of those partners. I’ll name one as an example, like AI identified or Wealth Feed as an example of that. In the future, what we also wanna do is bring some of those data signals into the FMG platform and be able to go the other way and really put curated campaigns to help you nurture those leads.

But this is absolutely top of mind. One of the biggest struggles that we’re seeing across most firms and their advisor basis is being able to just spend the time to do more with these leads.

Exactly. And please let me know if you have any questions on this.

Let’s see. Oh, we’ve got, oh, Prosperity Advisors. I’m seeing that. Tell Paul Ewing that Susan says hi.

But if you have any questions afterwards, let’s move on because we’re at twelve fifty. I usually try to end these early. I think we’re getting close.

The last one is is the outbound layer where some of these firms are sending you cold leads that have been identified based on a filter that you set. So you might say, send me anybody who, you know, went to Harvard and sold a business in the last year who’s in Boston.

And you get that name and it’ll have an email, potentially, potentially not.

The email may be right. It may not be right. And you can email them. But what I would caution is a, do not use your work email to do this because these are cold, unopted in leads and you can damage the health of your IP if you are sending emails to people that haven’t asked to be emailed. So be careful with that. And secondly, obviously, this clearly, think intuitively seems like the last thing to layer on because anybody who’s just hearing from you cold when some event has happened in their life. And Samantha tells this, those of you that have met Samantha virtually, her husband passed away, I think it’s been three years now.

And she got a ton of advisor calls and emails. And they weren’t, I mean, were like veiled, I’m sorry, but do you wanna meet? You must have financial issues. She said it was so disgusting. It turned her stomach and it had such a negative effect.

Very intrusive.

Yeah, there are ways to do it. I think the way to do it is to just somewhat subliminally just share information, share your thought leadership. If you do go this route, just share your thought leadership without saying anything about their situation and just drip. Again, the key is dripping. It’s not gonna convert right away. Maybe once in a blue moon, but not long term. So we’d be happy to talk to you about the strategies that could work, not saying these, we love these vendors and they play a role, but they play a role once you have all that foundation in place.

And I’m just asking and answering another question.

And let’s go to the last slide. I think we’re almost at the end.

What to do Monday morning? Okay.

Michelle, you take them through what to do Monday morning. Next slide, Amber.

All right. So what to do Monday mornings? We’ve talked a lot about ICP. So certainly top of the list is if you don’t have one start to work on that ideal client profile and one entry point. So look at your top clients, what’s happening, what’s happening in their lives. What made them walk into your office and start to think about how you can update your assets in your website to focus on the fact that you solve that problem.

The second, write the value proposition in one sentence, right? So think it through and again, read it, write it, repeat it, post it, tie it to your ideal client profile.

Start prioritizing collecting compliant testimonials. So there was just a lot of excitement around this and how do you do it? We have the ability to help you with this. This is a really powerful tool and it’s gonna really help build the validity of you as an advisor and your advisor value proposition. And when I’m searching, I’m gonna be able to find all those rich referrals and recommendations about you. And then build a target list of thirty to fifty centers of influence.

And as Susan was saying, drip on them, build the relationships, prioritize them, get them to become people that refer you. I know for myself, working with my financial advisor, nothing was better than having kind of an all in one experience, a concierge service. So anything I asked for, if it was long term care insurance or something else, they had those connections. And I really appreciated that. And then industrialize your client referral process, really important. So think about and be strategic about how you’re going to build the referrals and the type of referrals that you really want to start to collect and build upon.

Awesome. Actually, I think we’re at I kinda I like to give everybody five minutes. So we’re gonna send this out and you can read the other six, the other the other five. But if you take one thing away, because I know doing ten things sounds like a lot. If you take one thing away, remember that foundation to the pyramid slide, and and we’re sending this deck out.

Start with the foundation and check off each level before you move to the next, which makes total sense, but I know we all like to jump to the shinier stuff. But we are here to help. We would love to help. We’d love to just even talk to you and see if there’s a way that we can make things easier for you.

And we’ll be back probably in another couple of weeks with something else. And if anybody wants to see any of the other webinars we’ve done, just visit the website. Thank you so much. And Michelle, it was great doing this with you.

Thanks, Susan. Thanks, everybody. Hope you found it helpful. Talk to you soon.