A Live Workshop: Build Your October Content Calendar in 45 Minutes

So, what we really wanted to do today, and please let us know if for some reason you don’t see it, is to have you again, if you’re just joining, in your inbox, you should have received a blank calendar for the month of October, and we want you to pull that out now. And we are going to altogether fill it in in this workshop so that you’re walking away with a content calendar that you can send to clients and prospects for the month of October. So get that ready to go.

Oh, I like Kemp said, too embarrassed to eat too.

I love that. I I wanted to just do a direct message and be like, don’t be. Definitely don’t be.

Okay. So if you’re just joining or if you haven’t, you know, come to one of our workshops before, I’m Samantha Russell. I’m the chief evangelist here at FMG.

So happy to be with you all. My passion is helping advisers market their business. So thanks for joining us today. And, Susan, please introduce yourself.

And I’m Susan Theater. I’m Sam’s sidekick and the chief marketing experience officer at FMG. And my favorite thing to do is to put on these workshops and to hear what you guys are challenged with. And I think I’d this is we’re shifting in this direction to make our webinars workshops so that you actually walk away with something actionable that you can use.

So, we’ll love to get some feedback at the end of this, but we’re excited to have you here.

And it’s funny, Susan. I always feel like I’m referring to us as, like, Batman and Robin, and it’s this is for October. I should have put little Batman and Robin.

Oh, you should have done that.

That number.

We’ll do that next time.

Okay. And we are so thrilled that we have an amazing adviser, Lance, joining us today. Lance, can you please introduce yourself?

Sure. My my name is Lance Steinberg. I’m president of of my firm Steinberg Investment Group. We’re, in Portland, Oregon, and, we’ve been, part of, Susan and Samantha’s, program, do it for me at FMG for, gosh, close to to I think it’s a year and a half to two years we’ve been using it.

Awesome.

Yeah. Awesome.

And, for those of you who are not familiar with Do It For Me, it is a program within FMG we have where you get paired with a marketing concierge from our team who actually works with you every single month to execute a content calendar full of blogs, emails, social posts, as well as help you with other things like, if you’re gonna host an event, how do you get registrants, create a landing page. So there’s a lot that goes into it, and we’ll share more about that as we go through today. Alright. So I’ve, we wanna get started here. The first thing that, you know, we wanna think about when we’re gonna build out a content calendar is what should we be talking about? What content does the audience want in the first place? Right?

Tell us in the chat maybe if you’re building out content because a lot of you are sharing, it looks like or thinking about this a couple weeks in advance. Where do you go to get inspiration for what you’re going to share? We’d love to know and hear from you all. How are you coming up with your content ideas? Is it well, well, I’ll let you all answer the question before I give you Yeah.

Because I don’t I don’t think there this is not a you know, there’s one answer. I mean, we’re gonna share what we do, but I think we can all learn from each other, which is one of the best parts of these webinars.

Yes. Absolutely. So Katie said questions from ideal clients.

Trying to get you to for yes. I love it. I figure out a monthly theme. Okay.

That’s really interesting. Aubrey said, figure out a monthly theme. Yep. Dominique said holidays.

Things I’m reading. I definitely do that. So I think I think there’s, like, a probably a theme of consistent, like, consistent approaches that we’re all taking with some nuances, so we’ll all learn from each other.

Yes.

So the first thing, and a lot of you said this, is just keeping a running list of the exact questions that clients and prospects ask you with the caveat being using the words and phrases that they use and not rewording it into the jargon we all get sucked into using because we know it.

So, you know, I like to just keep a notepad, you know, literally right next to my desk that has all all of those questions written down. And if somebody leaves a comment on a social post, if somebody emails me, if somebody, you know, I’m talking to them at a conference, I just write it down and use the exact words that they use, and then that can be turned into content, that you’re planning for. Susan, do you wanna talk a little bit about this one, though? Then what’s the second one that we do?

Yeah. One of the and people have definitely mentioned this. One of the other steps that I take is to look up, you know, what are all the holidays, what are the observances for the month. So somebody mentioned financial literacy month, which is October.

And are there any of those that I think warrant shaping some of the content around and or most of them make for social posts for sure.

So I definitely add that as a step as I’m starting to build the strategy.

Love it. And then I’m just giving two kind of bonus ideas in here. If you’re maybe your well is running dry, your notepad of questions is getting lower, or there’s not that many fun, maybe holidays for the month. If you look up conferences for the niche you serve and you look at the agenda, you can get such a good content ideas.

Great idea.

Because, you know, if you’re serving teachers or professors, they’re gonna go to professional development events, and the content that they’re gonna go and look at is the type of things they want to learn about. So this is one that I use a lot. I look at all the conferences advisors are going to with what’s on the agenda, and then think of ideas, for how we can be helpful to you all.

Yep. That’s awesome. And then the last one is I don’t know about many of you, but I am constantly in my neighborhood Facebook group or even on Reddit, and people are asking questions that, you know, trigger ideas for me. So joining some of these groups or being a, you know, fly on the wall in a Reddit group, like a personal finance group, you can get such good ideas for content that you could, you know, answer the questions for your audience. So those are two quick ones, that are a little bit different, maybe you haven’t tried before.

And I I have one more, which I did see in, one of the comments was, you know, just being an avid reader, which, of course, you know, a lot of us don’t have a ton of time. But as as reading, like, I literally have a huge folder, and it’s constant I’m constantly adding to it Articles from Baron like, typically, it’s Baron’s Wall Street Journal, sometimes CNN Business or Business Insider, but articles that just catch my interest and or my husband’s interest or, you know, one of our friends sends me. I ask my friends to send me things. I keep a pile of those, and those are sort of, like, long term inspiration. Like, if I’m ever, you know, a little bit dry one month, I just go through these articles and I find things.

And, Lance, is there anything that either we’ve said or we haven’t said that sticks out to you as something that is a trigger for you all?

Well, what what we do at our firm is we try and and take whatever content, is presented in in in the monthly calendar. Typically, it’s surrounding a holiday or something like that or or for instance, September is Hispanic heritage month. And we try and create something personal that ties into us that coincides with that. Yeah. So, so that that’s a trigger for us. I mean, we’re not recreating the wheel, but we’re taking the content that is provided to us and and putting our own spin on that.

And that’s perfect. And that that gets to you know, we’re gonna help the audience build their own marketing calendar of the titles of content that they want that that they could write for themselves.

Our do it for me customers are getting the content that we’re writing based on our content calendar strategy, but we totally I think the magic is that’s ninety percent of the work, and then they’re customizing it or personalizing it.

Alright. So everybody got their blank calendars out for the month of October, and we are going to get building. And I just wanted to point out, if you do not have this in your inbox, our amazing colleague, Aubrey, just posted it. If you put in the chat, you can see there is a blank October content calendar, and you can just download it right from the chat, to your desktop so that we’re all on the same page. She just posted it again. Thank you. Thank you, Aubrey.

Okay. So the strategy is that you always start first with the blogs that you’re gonna add to your website.

And then from those blogs, you create the emails, version emails that would go to clients and prospects. And then from those two things, you create social posts that, you know, are gonna be your top of the funnel things. So you’re not recreating the wheel for each one. Right?

They’re all building off each other and there’s some consistency. But then you also wanna leave room for timely content or breaking news or things that will kinda pop up through the month. Right? You don’t wanna be so preplanned that you have no room for some of these, things that are just gonna happen organically.

Because, again, you’re building this most likely thirty days, sixty days in advance.

Yep.

Perfect. And just one more versioning.

We also will version for a podcast script, a short video, a longer video. I mean, there’s there’s a lot of repurposing that can be done, which is very scalable. And I’m sure some of you guys are doing that, but that’s another cascade off of that.

Good point.

So, Lance, I hope it’s okay. I started with an example from you all, where as part of working with, all of us here at FMG in our do it for me program, we created a blog post for you, an email, and then a social post that you could use. So this was back in August. Everybody’s thinking about back to school. So these are some screenshots from Steinberg Investment Group, a blog post that went on your website called preparing to send a child off to college. Don’t forget these important topics.

So it was really well done. It talks about things that maybe a lot of parents aren’t considering or thinking about because, you know, we don’t wanna go there about power of attorney, legal authorizations, but really important things. And then from there was an email that you could choose to send of one version for clients, one for prospects that is seeing a lot of the same information, but it’s not as lengthy. Right, Susan? It’s a shorter version of the same content.

And, Lance, when you send these out, I think you were sharing with us, what is your typical open rate and, you know, any anecdotal feedback you get on these?

Yeah. Great question, Susan. Our our, when we look at our analytics, our our typical open rate is in the fifty percent range, somewhere typically between, I’ll get super specific now, between forty seven and about fifty five percent is typically where it comes in.

That’s awesome.

Yeah.

That’s amazing. Just because, you know, industry standard is much lower than that.

So that’s that’s absolutely wonderful. And I love that you are so specific with your data points that you know them that well. Kudos to you.

And the the more personal it is, the higher the open rate, typically.

Totally. In the past, we have included I mean, we we’ve taken this version, this back to school, and and put, like so the lead advisors at at my firm are myself and my brother, and we have kids in college. And so we’ll take a picture of dropping our kids off at college or something to that effect and and and intermingle it with with the content here.

And and it’s just, adding that personal touch has been, has been really helpful.

Yeah. And that’s like that takes two seconds, and I think the tides are changing. But I would say a couple years ago, advisors really were a little bit hesitant to share their personal life. They’re like, nobody wants to see that.

I do think the tides are turning, and I see a lot more of it. But it is so much that is powerful. I mean, they just a picture of you dropping your children off with this email would absolutely make a big impact. And I think the other sort of underlying messages, there also used to be this belief that clients only wanna hear financial information.

They just wanna hear about the markets or what it did, and that becomes somewhat just like background noise, and they’re probably not that interested. And I know so many advisers that, you know, did a newsletter for ten years, even longer, and they stopped it and were totally nervous that the world would blow up and started doing things like this, and nobody noticed. You know, changing up the content so it’s not expected, they don’t know what the topic will be, is way more impactful than just a recurring market commentary.

For for sure. I I totally agree. I mean, our our mile and it’s on the front page of our website, and it’s a quote from our dad is is don’t pride yourself on being just like everybody else.

Yep. Totally. I see a good question. Do you segment clients down to a level where you’re only emailing this, for example, to your clients that have kids in college? Just out of curiosity. I’ve got some thoughts, but what do you think?

No. We we send it to we’ll send it to everybody because if our clients don’t have kids in college, they might have grandchildren in college. They might have friends with kids in college. So, I mean, it’s really applicable to, just about everybody. And, I mean, they’re they’re touched by this in some way.

Yeah. I really agree. We we always, you know, I think, encourage you as you’re writing your content, there’s a call to action at the end. It’s not salesy, but there’s a a subtle, you know, feel free to share kind of sentence because if it’s valuable information I I worked for my my last company. I was the CMO at Advisor Group, and, actually, I think it was even when I was at Cetera. We were owned by this private equity firm called Lightyear, and the CEO was the founder of UBS.

His or the founder of Lightyear was the CEO of UBS. His name was Don Marin. And he told me something that I thought was so invaluable. I’ll share it with you.

He said, does your content pass the wife and does it pass the wife test, I think? And that might have been a little bit sexist at the time. But at any rate, he was essentially saying, is your content something that when they read it, they wanna go tell it to somebody else? And that’s the barometer that you want to aim for.

So thought that was interesting.

And that’s a much better way to get people to refer clients by them sending something valuable, a give, versus an ask to say, is there anyone you know that I can help Totally. Making something that’s that memorable.

So, so we had the blog post version. We had the social post version. We’re getting some good questions, which we’re gonna answer, I promise, in one second. And then this would be so we have the blog, the email, and then this would be the social post.

And I did just wanna point out because I still see a lot of firms not doing this. This is written in the approach of what we call zero click content. So maybe let us know in the chat if that’s something you’ve heard of before or not. We’ve definitely talked about it in previous workshops.

But what zero click content is, is it’s content where when you’re on social media and you’re looking, you know, at something, you’re able to understand without clicking to read a blog post or watch a video.

You’re able to get the gist of what the message is. So, you know, Steinberg Investment Group isn’t saying, kids are going back to college. Here are three things you wanna think about from a financial perspective before you drop them off, and then you have to go click to read it. They’re giving you the the gist of those three things right here in the post itself. And this is really, really important because the algorithms are really shifting to prioritize zero click content and show it more, and people like zero click content because we don’t wanna click off and go somewhere else. We wanna stay on Facebook or whatever platform that we’re on. So we really prioritize here at FMG with all the social posts that we write, writing them in the zero click manner.

Totally. And think about the you know, a lot of you are going through referrals. When your clients refer you to somebody and they look you up, they are absolutely checking out your LinkedIn. They’re checking out your digital brand. And when they go see your posts, if everything’s like, check out my blog, check out this article, thought this was an interesting article on Wall Street Journal, That is not I mean, compared to looking at a social you know, a stream of posts that’s all just really informative. I mean, scannable, but informative, it’s gonna be a differentiator.

One hundred percent.

And Aubrey just put an awesome, guide we have about zero clip content and making it part of your strategy in the chat if you want to learn more. Okay. So I we saw a great question from Bryn Tarbuck who said, how many blog posts do you recommend per month? So let’s start there.

So you got your your blank calendar. What I want you to do is decide what two days of the month that you would want to add blogs to that calendar. We suggest two. It’s biweekly.

It is enough that Google sees your site from an SEO perspective as being up to date and regularly added to, but not so overwhelming that it’s not attainable.

So Yeah. Two per month is really a good, magic number. And so we’ve got on this example here, we’ve got it on Tuesday the eighth and, Tuesday the twenty second, and you’ll see why we chose the earlier in the week in a second. But remember, the emails and the social posts are gonna flow from this.

So And you you do have to look at the calendar and where all the holidays and things are falling because you, you know, you don’t wanna have your blog post on Thanksgiving.

You know? So there’s there’s some strategy each month in terms of the dates and, you know, where they fall.

Very, very good point. So, again, we said we really wanted you to walk away and being able to implement this. So we’re actually gonna give you the titles of the posts, that we were using for all of our do it for me customers for this month. So, for October eighth, we have safeguarding your identity, essential tips for financial security, and for October twenty second, exploring the financial impact of electric vehicles. So you can write these in. You can pick which days you want, or you can just follow the exact schedule that we’ve outlined here.

And I think I debated there. It is national financial planning month in October, so that could also, for sure, be a topic. For our different for our do it for me customers, we’ve done a lot of posts or a lot of blogs related to financial planning, so we were sort of loaded up on that. But I we do try to think about something that’s timely and financial oriented and then something that’s a little bit more, human interest.

And, honestly, some of the human interest ones do better than the financial ones.

Right.

It’s a good balance.

So based off those blogs now, right, we’re gonna fill in the emails.

So you can see we have four emails, but only two blogs.

So we’re gonna talk about that in here in just a second. But you are gonna decide how you want those emails to flow through the month. Typically, I would say, the day that you post the blog, you post it the next day would be the version of that blog as an email. So that’s why you can see we have one on the ninth and one on the twenty third.

And then we’ll get to what the seventeenth and the thirty first is here in just a second. But first, let me show you this. So the one on the ninth would be safeguarding your identity, essential tips for financial security. Susan, wanna explain a little why we have two versions here?

Yeah. Actually, for our do it for me customers, we do three versions.

And so you’ve got your so you talk about segmentation. At the highest level, the easiest segmentation is clients, prospects, and centers of influence, which is a fantastic audience to be dripping valuable content on. But the messaging is slightly different. The subjects are slightly different. But it is not a huge, huge lift. It’s still work for sure. But taking that email that you’ve written to clients, versioning it for prospects and then for centers of influence is a I’d call it a best practice.

I’d love to know, from Lance, how are you typically sent do you do you do all? Do you do one for clients, one for prospects? Do you do one for COIs? What’s your, firm’s strategy?

It’s a great question, Samantha. We we, have not segmented, and we probably should. But at this point, we send, we send it to our our whole we call it our client list, but there’s some prospects in there, and there’s some centers of influences in there as well.

Okay.

And we’re getting a lot of center. I think so. It’s Bill. You’re so sweet. He just answered it.

Oh, thank you, Bill. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s gonna be somebody that, you know, could influence other people to work with your firm. So an attorney, they’re sending referrals to you, a CPA, some another business that you, you know, that’s in your local community.

So think of it as people that you hope would refer customers to you.

And it could be ones you’re already working with as well as those you know? I mean, you know the list in your community of those that you’d love to work with. But even those you’re working with, you know, it’s all about being top of mind. So this drip strategy is absolutely the most effective.

Oh, put up an example email. I mean, I think maybe one of the ones from that or we could pull up the live calendar and show them.

Yes. I can do that. Let me put up the October twenty thirty now, and then I’ll go and go into actual I’ll I’ll show you an example of one of these. So for October twenty third, remember we had said for the blogs, we had the electric vehicle one, and this is talking about what are the financial impacts of owning an electric car.

And so that would be the follow-up email from that blog. So you already had the title of the blog post. This is just a version of the email.

So let’s talk about those two other email placeholders that we have. Now not everybody is gonna send an email every single week. Some people are gonna send one biweekly, and that’s just fine. We we really, really encourage people to at least do it biweekly, for maximum impact.

But we have a lot of advisers we work with that do like to send them every single week. And so we have these optional emails that we can build into the calendar, for you know, depending on what’s going on. So for this month, we had scheduling a family meeting. But, Susan, if you wanna talk about that one, that was really popular, and a ton of people adopted it, and we had great feedback.

So what’s a family meeting? What was that email asking people to do?

Yeah. I’m curious. Lance, have you used the family meeting?

We have. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve used Talked about more than once, actually.

Why don’t you tell the group about what it is and how it’s worked for you?

Well, it it’s just we we send it out, I’m gonna say, a couple of times a year just to remind people that it is important to be discussing, their their financial futures, their succession planning with their it’s a call to action as much as it is a reminder, and, and it just it’s not a comfortable conversation for families to have, but it’s a necessary one. And we’ve been in business long enough to see, transitions, like this that go bad. And so, and typically, it’s because of lack of communication. So it’s just Alright. It’s encouraging our client base to be communicative, with their families, about about planning for succession.

Yeah. And I’ll call that like, I we have a a list of emails that you should think about sending every every month, you know, to different segments of your audience. So there’s birthdays, obviously. You should be sending something out to birthdays or texting, if you have a compliant texting solution, and then new client onboarding.

So if you have a new client, one of the things that we really recommend is a new client drip, but also the family meeting. And here’s an example. Here’s the family email that we have written. And I think, Sam, actually, if you get we can make a a note, and I think we’ve got our team listening.

Let’s send this out as a a giveaway to everybody.

So the way we’ve written it is really just about making it what’s in it for the client, not about, like, I’d really like to meet with your kids to make sure I can keep the assets. It’s way more just we wanna make sure your kids know what we’re doing for you and that they know how to reach out to us if they need it, you know, which is a totally different message. And we’re we hear from advisers that they get a lot of positive feedback, and then they get the family meeting scheduled. So we’ll share this with everybody.

Love it. So this was the somebody just asked what are we what are she scrolling through right now? This is if you are part of our do it for me program.

Every month, you get this. Susan records an awesome video talking about the strategy for the month and why we’re doing what we’re doing. And then you can see it’s the filled in calendar that we’re working through to create with you right now, and then the blogs, the emails, and then optional social posts, automations, a marketing tip, a podcast idea, a video script, as well as additional content. So there’s a lot here, and we’re gonna we’re gonna keep filling in the content calendar.

But if you’re interested in learning more about this, do it for me. And then, again, you’d have a concierge from our team that would help you decide which of these are gonna go where and how it’s gonna be executed. I mean, it’s amazing. It’s we love this program.

We’re so proud of it because it’s life changing. I mean, Lance, you’ve talked about how much it’s changed your business since you started. And maybe you could talk with people a little bit as I’m going back to the last, slide, you know, how it works for you when you get the calendar sent to you. What do you do in terms of going through and saying, okay.

I wanna keep this or, you know, change that or personalize that. Yeah.

So we have a meeting that the first Wednesday of every month, with our representative from FMG to go over the calendar to, decide which, of the emails or social posts we’d like to personalize, if there are any optional, posts or emails that we want to send out, if there are any things on the calendar that maybe we don’t want to send out.

And so, we just we we wanna make sure that we are we’re top of mind for our clients, for our prospects, for our centers of influence.

Front of everybody with relevant content, with interesting content, has been, a a a good thing for our business. I mean, there invariably, people will talk, when they’re looking for to change their financial adviser or looking for a different financial adviser.

And as long as we’re top of mind, when that conversation comes up, our clients can say, hey. Yes. My adviser, I just heard from him yesterday, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re calling them every day. We just don’t have time for that. We have a, a fairly robust book of business. But as long as we’re, in front of them on a regular basis, they’ll remember us at times like that.

I love it. Okay.

So let’s go back and keep keep this going because I wanna make sure, again, we all walk away with We gotta make sure we get some suggestions.

So we did we just talked about those emails that are gonna come from the blog post.

And so you should at least have two blogs and two emails a month. Two additional emails would be, again, something that you’re sending specifically to prospects. It could be something timely that pops up.

Like, Susan mentioned, there’s potentially gonna be some changes you set around. Was it Social Security or Oh, yeah.

So the process kind of is first, I probably look at all of the observances and holidays and see if there’s anything that really is sort of a foundational anchor for a blog. Then I think about timely, like the time of year. Like, for example, October is the month before the election, so we definitely need election content. Then I look at any announcements that are gonna be made from a financial perspective in that month.

So the Social Security, cost of living increase is gonna be announced in October as is the IRS tax practice contribution limits. Can’t write about them ahead of time, but I make a note so that I’m gonna be ready to write about them. Then we go, and then I kinda think timely wise, what are my two blog topics, version them, and then I fill out the social. And the social is kind of a combination of financial, the observances and holidays, lifestyle.

Like, for example, October is the NHL season kickoff, the MLB baseball world series playoff for those that have interest. The election is coming, so I’m writing on that. And then kind of fill it out with some of those interesting articles that I’ve read that I think are just, you know, gonna get an or somebody might share. So I can we can go through some of them next when we pull them up.

Yeah. So here’s, some more educational yet lifestyle, you know, different different ones. So, like, for instance, October twenty eight, unlock your iPhone’s hidden superpower, the back tap trick. There’s There’s a lot of people who are scrolling social media, not because they’re going there to think I need a better tax strategy, but they’re looking for a distraction in their day.

So you post something that’s interesting to them, you might get, you know, some comments on it and some eyeballs. So social, remember, is really top of the funnel. It’s not just about sharing financial tips. It’s No.

It’s it’s a mixture of things that are gonna work.

And I’d love to know in the chat maybe Like, pull up when you click on the iPhone hidden superpower, because I did not know this, and I’m guessing at least some of you didn’t know this.

Here’s an example of a just more of a lifestyle post. But this is you can program it. You can basically do one little click in your settings. And when I click once, it takes a screenshot.

When I click twice, it moves to camera. So you just have to tap the back of your phone. So we did a GIF and made that the image and things like that. So there’s just an example.

You can see what we wrote there.

Maybe click also on the S and P is not as diverse.

So everybody thinks that they should, you know, just buy an S and P index. Right? So reminding everyone that the S and P is not a very diverse I mean, there are it it has changed in terms of its diversity over time. So I thought this was a really interesting, an interesting topic, and I don’t think everybody is really aware of the channel that this has had.

Right.

Love it. So somebody said, for clarity, are you saying share the same content three times in three ways on three different dates?

We’re saying that the blogs are gonna be the backbone of your content from those two blog posts that are gonna go on your website.

Because remember, people are gonna visit your website, and and that’s kind of a part of your brand forever. Whereas a social post get shared once and it kinda goes into the ether after a little while. No one sees it anymore. So the things that you put on your website are really gonna be they should be the most tied to your business, the most financial educational type of post.

Then the emails that you send come from those blogs because not everybody reads your blog. Right? So the purpose of the blog is for SEO, for people checking out your business. The emails are way more direct, and people get them in their inbox and they’re gonna click and open them.

And then the social post is top of the funnel. How do we get the most eyeballs on Russell Investments or FMG’s brand or, you know, Lance’s company page? How do we get the most eyeballs on that? And for that, we need a mix of content types.

So that’s why you’re seeing all different varieties of posts here.

The other thing I wanted to point out was you can see here we had four social posts. You kinda pick and choose where you wanna put in. You may wanna do more than that. For for your business, maybe you need seven or eight per month.

And you can do things like every Friday share a financial Friday tip. Right? So, again, this is, the formula is you start with the blogs, then the emails come from that, but there’s room for flexibility for sure in kinda how you decide to execute it for your business and how much you wanna personalize it.

Yeah. It’s really just the strategy kind of shapes from the blog, but all the blog does is basically give me you know, give we give for us, it gives you the two blogs. It gives you the we version that into three emails for each. That’s six emails and then two social posts.

Then from there, you gotta fill out the rest of the social posts and also think about would there be other emails. So, like, in in November, in addition to versioning the blog emails, we would also wanna write a Thanksgiving message. You know? Things like that.

Okay.

So this is sort of on the back end if you were to get the content calendar, what it looks like when you receive it of, okay. Here’s the blogs. Here’s the emails. How you know? And you can pick and choose which ones, you’re gonna get. I’d love to know in the chat from everybody, what is the most, maybe, successful social post that you’ve ever had? Like, it got the most comments, the most likes.

A great question. That. And meeting Lance, if you could tell us while we’re waiting for everybody else to chime in.

That’s a good question. Samantha, I I am not sure what the I mean, it’s it’s just always something that’s personalized in some way that’s a that’s that’s a video by by either, my brother or me, in conjunction with, with the content that Susan has created. I mean, and that’s and that’s gonna run the the open rate on those emails is, like, close to sixty percent.

Okay. That’s amazing.

Yeah.

A lot I’m seeing a lot of people to talk about kids sports or pets.

Any pictures with that, get the most engagement. Annual college football team picture. I love that.

Love it.

Achievement announcement from our CEO. Dominic said he and my daughter getting a pedicure.

I didn’t see that one, Dominic, but I did get Here’s a tip.

Sometimes I do. I don’t do it off I don’t do it all the time, but sometimes when there’s, like there was National Golf Day. So I went into AI and said, you know, can you I’m a financial adviser. Help me write a post that talks about National Golf Day, high EQ, but professional blah blah blah blah blah, and tie it in create an analogy or a metaphor that ties it back to financial planning and what I do. And there so you can kinda tie your personal post, like, whether you’re, you know, at a at a baseball game or at a pedicure. There are it doesn’t always work, and you wouldn’t wanna do it all the time. But AI can help you kinda create a metaphor that brings it back and ties it into why you’re posting.

Yeah. Now everybody’s talking about this hundred and four year old lobster lady. It’s distracting me.

I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m We need to look that up.

I shouldn’t I should’ve that that clearly is a good post.

That sounds good. But, yeah, a lot of people are saying, you know, the the personal posts are the ones that get the most eyeballs. And and, you know, when you think about social media, remember, you need to have so many posts that are gonna bring people bring awareness to your brand and your page. So I say, usually, about thirty percent of your post should be doing that.

Having a personal photo, you know, tie and something personal. And then the other, you know, sixty, seventy percent are gonna be more educational. So when someone’s searching your company and your LinkedIn page or your Facebook page comes up and they click and they scroll, they’re gonna get a sense of you and your brand, but then they’re gonna get a sense of your expertise and what you can help them with. But it’s those personal posts that are gonna build your audience.

Yes. And it variety and consistency are the key and perhaps the biggest challenge.

I think that’s a a really good One note that is a whole different webinar is just by posting, you do not increase your engagement. There are other you know, you’ve gotta do you’ve gotta comment on other people’s posts. You’ve gotta send LinkedIn requests to other people, and you have to make sure if you do get comments that you’re answering them. So it’s it’s it’s not just singularity of posting.

There are other aspects to make sure that you’re building your network and getting more engagement, but we’ll stick here because I wanna make sure. So these are good ones. I think for everybody, these would be great social posts and possibly even emails that you could write for for October. Medicare open enrollment, national state planning awareness week, and the the, you know, backdoor raw strategy is really interesting, I think.

So, hopefully, now you’ve all, with these titles, have titles of what you could do for blogs, emails, and social posts for the month of October. Susan, if someone’s like, okay. But that’s really overwhelming. How the heck do I go about writing all of this or coming up with all the content for this? Do you have any tips on what someone can do?

Block off a couple weekends and spend a ton of time writing. No.

I mean, there’s no secret sauce, which is why, you know, I think Michael Kitsis and others talk about outsourcing as a great solution. But for those that enjoy writing have the time, it’s developing the calendar and then methodically, you know, getting through it.

AI can help, but we all know it has pitfalls. It’s gonna hallucinate.

It doesn’t have good source data.

You’re gonna need to edit it. So it it can help for sure, but you can’t rely on it for everything. You’re still maybe it cuts off twenty, thirty, forty percent of your time at best. But I think the the key is to put the strategy.

We all know, like, you can’t start with the tactics. You gotta start with the strategy. So putting the time in for the strategy and it doesn’t have to be you know, we are doing, you know, thirty different pieces of content. You don’t have to do that.

That might be, like, you know, best practice, but you can start with something that’s doable. I mean, for many people, they’re not doing anything. So just starting and doing something is something to applaud yourself for.

And I think, you know, finding a balance perhaps, like, you know, do you wanna do it yourself? Do you wanna have a combination? Maybe you can hire a freelance writer from a local college, or maybe you’re you know, we are certainly a solution for those that are interested in the do it for me.

Lance, I would love to know how many hours for is your team spending on marketing? So, like, obviously, you’ve outsourced it to FMG with our do it for me program, but you still are personalizing some things with, you know, meeting with your concierge for an hour a month, how much time would you say your team is spending on marketing?

I mean, it it’s it’s really outsourced, Samantha. I mean, it’s not much at all. I mean, I’m gonna say I mean, our meeting with our concierge and and and I saw her in the chat. She’s on the call, Lindsey till she’s on. So and, and she wanted me to remind everybody that the the highest open rate was National Dog Day where we posted a picture of her dog, Riley.

So, so thank you, Riley, for that. But, I mean, it’s it’s minimal. I mean, we spent in half a half an hour with Lindsay, and maybe we spend another half an hour to an hour personalizing some content, and that’s pretty much it. And then, I mean, the the the whole, the whole concept of do it for me is for you to do it for me.

We’re we’re busy managing our clients’ assets and developing our business, and and Susan writes such great content.

There’s there’s just no reason why why we should recreate the wheel. I mean, it’s just it’s so much more cost effective, for us to outsource that. So, really, I mean, the time that we spend on marketing, Samantha, is quite minimal.

So, Lance, we got a question for you about, are you getting feedback from clients about I’m gonna embellish the question about from emails and or social?

It’s way more emails than social. I mean, the the social posts, I mean, we we just we have followers, but but, I mean, the the the quantity of emails we send out is just way more I mean, it’s touching way more eyeballs in the social posts.

I mean, we we don’t have we don’t have the following that Selena Gomez has, unfortunately. Maybe maybe someday.

And but, but it’s the the comments that we get and the feedback that we get is is is almost all from from the emails which go out to, a few hundred people.

And and I don’t know if if there are peep the people that are sharing it with other people from there, but but that’s where we get the vast majority of our comments.

I just to kinda go off that, I would say that for most advisers that I’ve worked with, what I find is their social media is coming up for people when people Google them. They’re looking at those pages and seeing what kind of content they’re sharing, what their personality is online.

If you really want your social media to be a source of new leads and new eyeballs, you’re you can’t just have this posting strategy. As Susan mentioned before, you have to have an engagement strategy, which, you know, is something where someone from your team is gonna log in daily and engage with other people. You’re gonna let’s say you work with doctors and physicians. You’re gonna look at groups they’re belonging to and leave comments and talk a little strategy. You’re gonna every at the end of every week, look at everybody your team met with and send LinkedIn connection requests to everyone you emailed with and everybody that was on your calendar. Right? You’re just gonna be very strategic about growing your network.

So this posting is really, really important, but it’s not gonna build the following just by posting. It’s sort of like I give it the example of a lot of people get the media part of social media, but they don’t get the social part. Right? So if you went to a networking event with a big billboard and you just walked around holding it that said something and then you left, well, you didn’t actually talk to anyone or engage with anyone. So that’s the part of social media that can be a lot more time consuming, yet if you wanna build an audience that way. But for a lot of advisers, the email part really works wonders on its own, and then when somebody who has been referred to them is googling them and they look at this great content you have on your social post, that’s enough to really justify the expertise to to, you know, really show what value you can bring.

Digital brand. And I think the the underlying answer to that is social is a lot less attributable and measurable than email. I mean, you’re just getting an email back saying this was great. You know?

Social, you don’t know who’s seeing it. There could be, you know, ten likes, but ten thousand impressions. You know? So looking at the impressions versus the engagement is different.

The the social is having an impact that you likely don’t know about. We definitely hear from advisers who say, you know, a prospect commented on, you know, my social feed. I I think we’re at eleven forty five. I wanna make sure that we’ve given everybody the, you know, the content ideas that they can use, but there’s a perfect question to end this with, which is, Lance, how do you like the do it for me program?

I I think it’s great. I mean, we it’s it’s, it’s been really beneficial for us.

It is, in my eyes, totally cost effective. We had used a service prior to that that was way more expensive with, I I think inferior content.

And so, it’s, I mean, it’s it’s a value to us. I mean, price is only an issue in the absence of value, and we see lots of value. So so we’re we’re fans for sure.

That’s awesome. And and for those of you that, you know, are not interested, we are we don’t wanna be salesy.

This is a great strategy that you can, you know, you can employ. That’s the point of this webinar. You can employ the strategy on your own, you know, to whatever robust level you want to. I think, hopefully, we’ve walked through the strategy piece. We will send out that family meeting. We’ve given some great ideas for social posts and for blogs, and I hopefully, you’ve walked away, you know, with a somewhat filled in calendar for October. We’d love to hear just quickly in the comments if this was valuable or suggestions for next time.

Oh, thank you so much. Yes. I I I’m seeing some people saying that this was really well presented and well stated. If you have any constructive feedback, you know, negatively too, we’d love to hear it.

We wanted to make it a workshop that was interactive and that really helped you walk away feeling like, I could follow this for October and have something to execute. So, hopefully, we succeeded in that. And, Lance, thank you for adding color and, you know, from an adviser’s perspective of how this all works and comes together. We really appreciate your time.

My pleasure. Put my email in, which I actually don’t know that I’ve ever done, but this is, you know, a pretty small and intimate group. And if anybody has any questions or comments, feel free to email me. It’s pretty basic. It’s susan dot theater at f m g suite dot com, and I’m happy to, you know, answer questions for you.

Alright. Thanks everybody so much. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we’ll see you on another workshop soon.

Thanks everybody.