Want to actually capitalize on Financial Literacy Month this year?

Okay. We’re always trying to think of creative ideas. Susan and I are thinking, if we were in, you know, your shoes, what would we be talking about this month, this month? What would we wanna capitalize on?

And so financial literacy month is one that comes around every year, but we see sort of it’s kind of like a womp womp. Never. Nothing often comes from it, but we think it’s such a missed opportunity. So today, we’re gonna give you some actual practical strategies that you can walk away with that we really think will be engaging and help you start new conversations with the right people.

Absolutely. Yes.

And I think part of it is just, you you think financial literacy, and you just you think, well, those are the people that don’t know anything about, you know, investing.

Those aren’t my target clients, but we have some ideas for you. Yes. Absolutely. So let us know in the chat two things.

One, have you ever posted about financial literacy month or done any content around it, and what happened? And then and or you can answer one or both. We would also love to know for you when you’re thinking about engaging the next generation of clients because this comes up all the time, the number of advisers who, you know, are working with clients. And then when the wealth does transfer, that that’s it.

The client leaves with the money. So do you currently have a strategy or a plan in place to engage that next gen? Is that something you’re proactive about? Is it something you’re creating content about?

And we’re gonna give you some ideas today. You’re gonna walk away. Everyone’s gonna get this kit that is gonna give you blog posts, emails, social posts that you can use for both of these things. We’re getting some no’s.

No’s is a good question.

No. Well, some are no no notable. Some are just no plan. So I’m I think I think we may have some good ideas that will change those to a yes for twenty twenty six.

Awesome. I love it. So let’s maybe start by talking a little bit about when Susan, when is financial literacy month for those who don’t know? It is in April. So coming up so soon.

Yeah. This is why where are we? We’re Mid March. Mid March. Yes. So we wanted to give this to you a little bit ahead of time so you could do a little planning and capitalize on it.

Yeah. And I think April usually ends up being a lot of tax content, but tax is really that content should have been previous. Right? Like, right, by the time April comes around, I don’t wanna say it’s too late. There’s people pushing it off, but people are thinking about that earlier. And so that is why we think it’s a great time to do this instead.

Absolutely. And, you know, the tax stuff is we wanna we drip on we drip you know, we have a lot of content that drips on tax related topics, but we do find that what performs best is what is a little more fun, relatable, you know, something that you would talk about over lunch with a friend. So I think this fits into that category nicely.

So I’m seeing a few people saying that, yes, they do have con or they do have a program or a strategy to to engage with the next gen. So if you do and you wouldn’t mind sharing in the chat too, we’d love to hear what you’re specifically doing. Again, we’re gonna share some ideas, but I think we want these to be webinars where we can all learn from each other. So please share if you have a specific thing that you do or maybe it’s just reaching out and engaging and setting up a family meeting, but we’d love to hear what it is that you’re doing as well.

So here are just some of the questions that came in before today’s webinar, and we’re gonna get back to these two. But, again, we just wanted to remind you, Susan and I are both laser focused on just helping you however we can. So if you have a specific question and you want us to address it, if you would put it in the q and a box, we’ll make sure we see those, and we’ll get to as many of those questions as we can as we are talking today. Okay.

So let’s talk about I’m actually gonna pull up, Susan, our do wanna start with the do it for me, and we can start from there, or do you wanna do the game of life first? No.

Let’s do the do it for me, and then we’ll talk about the the content calendar.

So what we’re showing you is from our do it for me program at FMG. And what we wanted to do is basically give you all the content and strategy that we do for our do it for me customers for free just because we wanna help everybody out for April. And we’re really actually very I’m very excited about our April content calendar. So the do it for me program, just to give you some context, is Sam and I meet and we think about, okay.

So for April, what would be the ideal content strategy across blogs, emails, emails to clients, emails to prospects, emails to centers of influence, what social posts would be ideal, what video scripts, podcast, and a webinar outline. And we also come up with, which honestly is the hardest thing to come up with every month, the marketing tip. And then we write it all, and we really, really work hard to make it in your voice. And then you anybody who’s one of our do it for me customers gets this calendar, and then they meet with their marketing concierge who goes through the content with them, makes personalizations and and customizations, like changes out the thumbnails and puts their own pictures in.

And then they get off the call, and the concierge executes the whole thing for them. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to send you this financial literacy kit, which is basically our April content calendar.

You’re not part of the do it for me program, you don’t have somebody to do it for you to execute it, but you can use all the content. So for April, we just got really excited about the ideas that we had leveraging financial literacy month. And so one of our our blogs, which doesn’t seem that bizarre, is is, you know, what teaching, you know, young adults about financial literacy. And in the past, like, you know, obviously, we’ve been writing this content for years, talked about, you know, stats of, you know, what does what does NextGen think about financial literacy, the percent of the population that’s, you know, financially literate.

This time, we just we actually went out and surveyed a bunch of our clients and friends and came up with real life tips of how parents and grandparents are teaching financial literacy in real ways. Like, for example, that picture that I had is about, instead of going back to school shopping with your child or with your grandchild, give them a budget and let them go do the shopping themselves and tell them that they can keep the money that’s left at the end.

I’m sure we’ve all done back to school shopping. Like, kids are putting everything in that basket. Like, I need this. I need this.

As soon as it’s their money, they’re like, I don’t need that. Yep. Like, these are the real life ways that financial literacy is conveyed. So this is a great blog.

Just to be clear too, what I was showing you here before. So we’re giving you these assets. The way we have it mapped out, as you can see, is the blog is this light blue here. So two times in the month, the blog would get put on your website.

You’re not gonna just go post them both at the same time. We want AI, and we want search engines to see that you’re regularly adding content to your website so that they’ll continue to rank you. So you can see at the beginning of the month, and then midmonth, those blogs will get added. And then there’s an email that goes out either same day or the day after, two different audiences that share that piece of content with them.

So you’re you’ve got it living on your website, right, Susan, so that it helps your SEO, AEO. And then it’s also being emailed out, so it’s a touch point, a drip marketing with your current clients, prospects, or if they want to it with other family members or friends.

Yeah. So and this is the type of content that does get shared. So, we did get a question. What is do it for me? I might have missed it. Just again, quickly, do it for me is an FMG program where Sam and I are creating a content calendar for every month. And then you work with a concierge, a dedicated concierge who helps you personalize that content, and then executes it all for you, gets it on your website, sends it out on posts it on social, sends out your emails for you.

So it’s a huge time savings.

And today, we’re giving you a bunch of this content for you to use. You just won’t have the concierge.

Although if you wanna sign up for the program, then you can get the Yeah.

We’ll give you a chance. But we wanted to take you through our strategy so you could kinda learn how to approach. Like, on your own, you can think about, okay. For you know, we’re gonna take you through how we did April, but you could be thinking about applying the strategy logic to May for your for example, if you don’t want to, you know, look into the do it for me program. So we think about, okay. What are two great blog topics to kinda anchor the month?

Obviously, what would be other one?

When should I start taking social Security?

Five factors that are So I try to do one that’s a little bit more lifestyle inter human interest with financial ramifications and then one that’s really more financial planning.

So that was, you know, five factors to consider, for when you start taking Social Security, which is sort of an evergreen question that, you know, everybody asks. And some of the I try to we try to come up with interesting stats and situations that the goal is that your clients have not heard this and or your prospects have not heard this, so it’s net new information, making you look smart. But we version the blog for an email to clients and prospects and then a different email that goes to centers of influence because we know that those are such a great organic growth engine for you, and dripping on them is with just valuable content without asking for anything is the best way to open that door.

So you’ll get those two blogs and then the emails that we version for those. And then I think I’ll jump so we do a whole bunch of social posts ranging from, you know, what are the observances in a given month? So think about so for April, it’s National Stress Awareness Month. It’s National Siblings Day.

For anybody that has siblings, that’s a great opportunity to post and show a personal picture. National Pet Day, everybody that loves pets, these are usually the most engaged posts. Administrative Administrative Professionals Day is a great one. Lets you take a picture of your team at the office and celebrate people that are supportive and take take your child away.

So those are all great ones that you can personalize.

So your concierge, if you work with us, is actually pointing these out and helping you think through, like, the picture.

And I wanna just bring up one quick point too. So let’s say you were gonna do this post about teaching teens and young adult financial literacy. Right? Just to give you an example.

So on my own LinkedIn just this morning, I posted something, and I used this photo of me and my kids at Disney.

If you were talking about teaching kids about budgeting and money, right, you could put a picture like this, and you can see here. I write photo. Me and the kids in Disney at this last week because boy, oh, boy, does it require a lot of budgeting to make this trip happen.

And so it could be a picture of your kids somewhere. It could be a picture of a family trip. It could be a picture of you dropping a kid off at college.

But those personal photos, your concierge, when you work with FMG, will point out to you. This is the type of photo that would perform well to attach to this post. Because what we find is when people are scrolling on social media, the picture is what grabs their attention first, right, and gets them to read or engage. So And you can say, like, click on national siblings.

So so we come up with pictures or national click on national pet day. We try to find image and create. Most of them I actually create that seems super authentic, but there’s nothing better than pictures of you. So yeah. It’s so you don’t have to add it, but it just performs better when you do. And then so thinking about, again, from the angle of this webinar is to help you think about how to develop a content calendar, taking you through how we did it for April.

In addition to the observances, then we think about, okay, what are some topics? So it’s National Stress Awareness Month. I know one thing that is causing a lot of people stress is caring for aging parents. So wrote a post about that.

It’s April. So wrote about tax loss harvesting and mutual fund capital gains explained because that’s one of those people are like, I didn’t even sell my mutual fund. Why am I getting a capital gains tax, you know, form? So it’s just thinking about what’s on people’s minds and making the content so that those that are in the do it for me program, you know, we’re doing this for them.

But you can apply the same logic to create that content calendar. Then we think about, okay, which blog is sort of the most timely? In this case, it’s financial planning.

I mean, is the financial literacy. And then we version it for a webinar outline. And this is where Sam and I, like, just wanna lean in, lean in. This is such a great lead gen opportunity.

And we like, right now, we’re not doing any slides. We’re just talking, and those tend to be the best kind of webinars. And most people don’t do webinars because they’re like, what am I gonna talk about? I don’t wanna do slides.

So we take the blog, and then we version it into a fireside chat format that you could do with someone in your office, just two people from your office, or you could invite an outside, you know, center of influence to be the other speaker. And we write the whole script out for you, which, of course, I assume that you would, you know, iterate a little bit on this, but it’s all there for you.

And you know what I think is so great? Most people are not, I hope, actually, not gonna exactly say verbatim word for word this. But for I don’t know about all of you. When I go and I read through this, I would walk into that recording feeling like, yes.

I know the keep talking points. I know the main things that we should be hitting on that people are gonna be interested in. It will really, really help get your creative juices flowing, and maybe you’ll read this and say, oh, and I also wanna tell a story about x, y, or z when we’re at this point. You wanna, you know, infuse your own storytelling or your own points into it, but this really, really, really helps.

And so, again, we’re giving this to you. You’re gonna walk away with this today so that you can actually do this on your own.

But if you’re part of the do it for me program, you get this what we’re showing you here, this whole calendar, all this content, all these ideas every single month. And so if you wanna go to Disney with your kids or grandkids, you can be away, and these things are still going out. And I think that that is just so huge because we work with advisers every day. We know marketing is not your number one priority.

Taking care of your clients is. And so when things get busy, a lot of times what we see is people stop posting. We stop emailing. And then when things get slow again, then there’s a burst of activity.

This allows you to be systematic with your marketing, and we know that that consistency is what helps you have good results more than anything else.

Yeah.

And you know what?

We just saw this. There’s a there was a Kitsis report that came out that was super interesting. So the program is eight ninety five a month, which is a lot of money. But what Kitsis showed is the people that are driving organic growth are outsourcing because you don’t have time.

And guess what? Your time is money. So especially as you get bigger, the value of your hour, because as a percentage of revenue, just keeps going up. So if you think about how many hours it would take you to do something like this, I’m pretty sure the value of your time would be more than eight ninety five.

So sometimes people are like, what’s the ROI? Well, the ROI there’s an ROI just on your time. But then from an organic growth perspective, what we see happen most consistently, and Kitsis points this out, is a lack of consistency.

So we’ll send you all this content, and you may have an awesome marketing month in April, but then you’ll get busy, and then you won’t be consistent and do it in May and July. And it really it’s an engine that compounds with consistency, and that’s the hardest thing for almost, you know, any adviser. Yeah. Just like anything good in life. I always use the equation of the gym. Right?

It’s you can go to the gym once a week and have a three hour session, or you can just thirty minutes a day go for a walk and which is gonna move the needle more.

It will be the everyday activity. And one of the things that I think is so important about this, we get a lot of people who will ask, well, you know, am I gonna, you know, all of a sudden start doing this and having leads pounding on my door. The main thing about that a lot of people struggle with is the consistency of following up with the leads that they have and with the clients that they have that will unlock doors to more leads and with centers of influence. So when we go and we speak to people, I don’t know about you, Susan.

I barely ever hear of anyone who is consistently engaging with centers of influence other than maybe just asking them, hey. Do you have any clients that, you know, you think would be a good fit? They’re not sending the centers of influence helpful content that prove their expertise and why they should be the one to get that business. So every single month with these emails, you’ll see where it says COI.

There’s a version of that content that is going to those centers of influence. So when you work with us, what we suggest doing, you can obviously do this on your own, is you want a prospect list, an email list of clients, and then an email list of your COIs. Right? You wanna segment it into those three categories.

And then every month, you should be sending content to those three people at least biweekly. So twice a month, they’re gonna get an email in their inbox, captive, right, audience that is going to share something helpful. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s something that’s going to reinforce, oh, I didn’t realize Samantha Russell could help me with tax guidance. Oh, I didn’t realize that they could help me think about estate planning. Oh, I didn’t realize they could help me, you know, whatever the fill in the gap is. And so the this program is amazing for be keeping you consistent and also that as you do want to expand, and I I think maybe we should talk about this next season, hosting events, doing webinars, you can you can do the things only you can do because behind the scenes, you’re outsourcing the part that someone else can do for you.

And I can actually show, we got a question about the kids’ study, and, I actually put the study into a deck.

And it just says that advisors dramatically undercount marketing costs. You know, time has a real dollar cost. An adviser spending twenty five percent of their time on marketing with an income of blank is is actually spending a lot of money on marketing. But it’s it’s those soft costs. So you’re like, well, no. Not really, but you are because that time could be used elsewhere. And I’ll just flip through these quickly.

But as you grow, as I was saying, the cost of that marketing hour gets even more expensive, and client acquisition costs explode as you scale.

The whole point of this was to shift the mindset from thinking about marketing as only hard costs and instead reminding yourself that the soft cost is also an equal investment and maybe even more expensive than the hard cost and that outsourcing is the best way to get an ROI on marketing.

So let’s go to so for the events, let’s get to the marketing idea. So almost every month, we also in addition to doing a, webinar outline, like we said, we also come up with a marketing tip. And I like, I’m so excited about the April marketing tip. That’s honestly why we did this, webinar because I wanted to share it.

So even if you don’t use any of the content that we are sharing for, blogs and emails and social posts in April, which I really hope you do, I think this this is a great idea. So when you think about financial literacy, it’s all about helping those that are, you know, not super fluent understanding in all of us, really. What do you do when things happen? And what about what are all the decisions that you make throughout your life that impact your outcomes financially?

And it occurred to me that and no AI did not come up with this idea. I swear to god, was just me. Game of life is like exactly that. Like, start out and, you know, it’s how many children you’re gonna have. It’s whether you go to college or not. It’s whether you get hit with a tax audit, it’s, you know, something happened to get in a car accident, you’ve got to come up with money for that. Like, it literally is the out I mean, it’s financial literacy happening live and not and super fun.

And so we thought, what if you guys do, game of life event? And you could buy the game. It’s not very expensive. It also help you could do it with like, a lot of client events really don’t work well for those clients that are not local, but this is easy.

So buy the buy the game. You can very easily I even tell people how to do this, like, choose a tagline, pick one of these, and then brand the brand the game. You could just create, like, a paper belly band and get it printed, and I tell you exactly how to do that. Here’s how to here’s, like, your firm logo, how to do it, and then use a sticker so that the box looks like it’s from you.

And then you could have, like, a whole week dedicated sending out an email to your clients, and they can come to your office to pick up a game. And then you can take lots of pictures for social. And for those that are remote, you can send it to them. Either, you know, you just send it through Amazon without the belly band or you assemble the belly band in your office and then send it out.

But I have like, if you go along, and then you could add things in there. Like, I have ideas, like, you could add microwave popcorn or hot cocoa. And then if you keep going down, you’ll see, like, I’ve mapped out the execution plan, how to assemble and distribute, and then I give you all of the emails that you can do. So if you keep going down, it’s like the first email that you would send out.

We’ve got something for you this month. You know, April’s financial literacy month.

We’re doing people saying they love this idea, and we’re so excited.

If if anyone uses this, please, like, send us an example of what you’re doing because we’d love to see it in action. And we are gonna collect these to maybe share later, but we would love to see if anyone does execute it. But, again, we’re sending this to all of you after today’s event, so you’re gonna get everything you’re seeing on the screen. We promise. But this is what you get every month if you’re in do it for me. So, anyway, just wanted say people are loving it, saying it’s so fun.

A belly band is just I think it’s in the brochure in the slide.

Like, go back to the slide deck. It shows it, I think.

Oh. Oh. Oh. I see what you mean. Yes. Right here.

So you so you put, like it’s just a paper that goes around the box, and then you put a sticker in the middle.

So it just it looks like a belly band. It just wraps it so that it has your brand on it, essentially. But it’s just a piece of paper that’s cut, and then your sticker does that.

Yeah. And then it’s really like sometimes events can be really expensive, but this one, I mean, twelve ninety nine a person is not gonna break the bank. It is a business expense, and you get people to come to your office and bring the next generation or bring their grandkids. And I mean, it will open up family conversations.

It will be something that I call a referable moment. They will be out and about talking to their friends, and they will say, my adviser did this cool thing. They gave out the game of life. There’s so many ways to riff on it.

I think it would be an awesome, awesome, easy to execute.

Is such a good idea.

Susan, when you told us, we all loved it. Kim Peter said, I think Susan is my spirit animal. You know, one of the things I think is that just how do we talk to people about sometimes a subject that they don’t wanna talk about or they’re not in the mood to talk about or whatever it is and create those referable moments. And especially when, you know, you’re think anything tactical, anything hands on, especially now more than ever.

Don’t know about you. Sometimes at the end of the day, I’m like, if I have to look at a screen for one more minute. And so when we get something tactical, we love it. And it you know, it’s so different than normal.

And I just I think that all of the ideas about what to give with it and the emails that you can, you know, to go along with it, somebody’s you know, from today’s webinar, we we gotta see how you execute this because we know it’s gonna be a hit, and we’re excited to see our If you guys execute it, first of all, in the webinar chat, hands up, say yes, anybody that thinks they’re gonna do this.

And then if you guys would please take pictures when people come to your office and post on social, and will you tag Samantha and or me? I would we would love love love to see it.

It’s it’s an easy, good way to show your involvement and support a financial literacy month, but also, I think it will generate referrals. It would be like, you could offer it to the centers of influence that you wanna get involved with so that you could say, hey. Feel free to have your clients. You know, it’s financial literacy month.

I’m doing this. Feel free to let your clients know. I’m happy to have them, come by. It’s just you could ask, you know, within your clients, you could say, feel free to bring a friend and, you know, give out an extra box.

There are a lot of ways to do this.

Yeah.

I love it. And, again, we think that one of the things when you’re thinking about just marketing in general is thinking outside the box, being creative, and that is what we love to help all of you with, and why so many of the customers or the clients, I should say, that are in the do it for me program say that they love is that we’re coming up with these creative ideas. We’re putting it all together for them so that all they have to do is say, yep. Execute. We need to do a poll. So That’s right.

We get so excited about the game of life. We see so many of you asking how much does do it for me cost? Can I do it if I’m already an FMG website customer? Can I do it if I have premium?

If you wanna learn more about it, get the answers to all those specific questions, just say yes, and our team will reach out to you. But, again, every single one of you is going to get the content that you see here today. You will not get the concierge to execute it for you, but chat with us, and we’ll talk with you about how we would actually execute it for you going forward as part of that do it for me program. But we’re trying to do more of these.

So if you liked today’s webinar where it’s just thirty minutes and we’re going through a plan or an idea with you, and then we’re actually telling you, here’s how to execute it, and then we give you what you need to do it after, tell us because we will do more of these rather than higher level marketing Called leadership. Yeah. This is more just very tactical. Here’s what you can walk away and do.

If you think that this is helpful, we would love to know it.

And do we have any questions we didn’t get to yet, Susan?

Anybody want to throw in any questions? We have the questions on the slide, but I’m not sure we have enough time. I think we can just take those as ideas for maybe the next webinar, some of those questions. And I’m so thrilled that we got some feedback that people love it, and I can’t wait to send the guide out to you. Please, you know, give us feedback. We’re just talking at you guys, but we can’t hear you and see yourself. Yeah.

Oh, we’re seeing some people saying thank you. We love it. We think it’ll be well re received. Oh my gosh.

I can’t talk. Hope you have a great day. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Susan.

And everybody, enjoy the rest of your week. Bye, everybody.