Breaking Down The 2024 Advisor-Client Communications Survey

Hello, everybody. My name is Sean Brown. I am the head coach at YCharts, and I am joined by one of the most special people I know and smartest and the person who makes me smarter every time I talk to her, Samantha Russell, who is the chief evangelist at FMG.

Sam, hello.

That is the nicest intro. Thank you so much. I feel the same way about you. And hi, everybody, from State College, Pennsylvania. If anybody’s a Penn State fan, go Penn State.

Yeah. By the way, is Penn State in the NCAA tournament this year?

Oh, gosh. You’re putting me on the spot now.

Oh, sorry.

I’m like a fan because I don’t even know that.

That’s another question for the chat. My alma mater is not in. So, hey. Sam and I are gonna be talking today about, focusing on a survey that Whitecharts issued to advised individuals.

We’re gonna be talking about we what we learned. We’re gonna be talking about key takeaways, tactics, etcetera, etcetera.

If you do have any questions during this webinar, please feel free to submit them, at the bottom in the q and a, and either Sam or myself or our teammates who are joining, will try to either tackle those live or in the chat.

Please keep in mind, I have to give you the disclaimer that the content of this webinar is for educational purposes only, and it is not intended to be investment advice. Neither Sam nor myself nor our respective firms are financial advisers, and we are not acting as an advisory advising party regarding any funds.

Last thing I would say is you can find a recording of this webinar on our y the y chart’s YouTube channel, and attendees will be sent a link, after this meeting in addition to a link to our survey itself. So anybody who wants to dive into the details, it’s coming your way.

Awesome.

But let’s get started here.

And, you know, I I kinda teed up the topic. I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about the survey. There were some absolutely startling results for us that led to us actually running the survey two times because the first time through, the white sharks team that put it together and I said this some of this is just not believable. But we ran it again and confirmed that it was, in fact, what, what people were telling us.

But after that, we do wanna talk about, so what? What do you do about the, the learnings from the survey?

So let’s talk a little bit about the survey. And, Sam, jump in any absolutely anytime you want. So first thing I’d say about the survey, it would run twice, was that almost eight hundred advised individuals were surveyed.

And we felt like it was a very good cross section of gender, geography, age, and AUM.

So, you know, you can you can read about more details offline on that, but let’s talk about the big findings of the survey. First of all, Sam, maybe just my first question for you. What was the biggest thing that stuck in your head that you read in this survey?

Yeah. When when I saw the number of clients who already have an adviser who either switched their adviser last year or who thought about switching, that was mind blowing to me.

It’s and then when I asked you about it, you were like, yeah. We felt the same way. We actually took the survey twice. I kinda laughed because it wasn’t I had the exact same reaction.

Yep.

I I agree. And not even put on this page. But the number one most important thing that is the biggest takeaway is your clients are considering other advisers.

And I know, a a lot of people on this call are saying, well, not my clients.

You know, my clients are secure. My clients will renew at ninety five to a hundred percent.

Not all of us can say that. Mathematically, not all of us can say that because if all of us can say that, then that is completely inconsistent with what we heard in our neutral survey. So I’d ask everybody to keep an open mind to say, clients may not have left you, but they hopefully, we will can show to you they are considering it, and we can talk about the why that is.

Couple other key takeaways. Less communication leads to lower confidence and understanding about their financial plan and and how they’re tracking.

Less of your conversation is resonating with clients. I’ll talk to you about the difference in the survey results we saw this time versus last time, but, less understanding is going on.

Your highest value clients and your biggest up and comers are the ones that want more communication.

You’re gonna see that clients over sixty are probably pretty, pretty happy with what you’re doing and the status quo.

The younger and the highest net worth clients are asking for more communication.

And another big finding we saw is a surprising percentage of people’s total net worth is actually held away from their adviser, and we saw that as a wonderful opportunity.

In some cases, advisors advisors already know that. In other cases, they didn’t know that or they didn’t realize the magnitude of the assets that are held away.

And one thing that I just want to point out is I hear from a lot of people who will say, well, I send out an email or a newsletter, you know, every single month. I think one of the things we’re gonna show you as well is you can be communicating, but it might not be resonating. Your your clients might not be thinking of it as my adviser’s actually reaching out to me, depending on the kind of communication it is. And we’re gonna show you some examples of what would be a thumbs up versus a thumbs down a little bit later.

Yep.

So we’ve run this survey three times now, and we’ve run the survey with the exact same question. So we’re building up, obviously, a database of knowledge about trends. And and I wanted to share with you the biggest trend differences between our last two surveys, one that was published in early two thousand twenty three, and the last one was published just very recently in two thousand twenty four. So in two thousand twenty three, about half of advised individuals were had left or were strongly considering leaving their adviser.

That jumped up significantly to seventy five percent in two thousand twenty three.

Let let’s park on that one for a couple seconds, Sam.

Anything you’d share as to why why do you think that might be going on? Why more?

I would love to hear actually from all of you because I had the me and Sean had this discussion previously. But has any have any of you picked up clients in the last year, who came from another adviser, and maybe what was the reason for the switch on their end? We would love to know. Or do you have a theory as to why this did jump so significantly?

Right? Because twenty twenty three was an interesting year. I felt like even into twenty twenty two, we still had so much of the end of twenty twenty two, we were still in that kind of COVID or coming out of COVID world. Twenty twenty three felt like the first year where we were completely out of it, or I think for most of us, we felt that way.

And we’ll see in the some of the other things you mentioned in the results, of what people were looking for from their adviser has also shifted. But I would love to know so Lisa’s saying, yes. She did. For the rest of you, did you get a new client?

And if so, maybe what was their reason for shifting? Alright. We already have a lot of people saying new clients complaining about lack of communication, or feeling that they were a number, didn’t even know what kind of performance they were getting. Yes.

I haven’t heard from my adviser in two years. Yeah. So there’s a trend here.

Yeah. Boy, talk about something you and I both believe to be true.

My thinking on this, very consistent with what we’ve been talking about, but there is an expression that what do you do when there’s a crisis? And Anne Mulcahy said you do, three things that she learned from a farmer. Number one is if the cow gets in the ditch, that’s the crisis. You do three things in order.

You get the cow out of the ditch. Number one, focus all your attention there. Number two, find out how the cow got in the ditch. And once you found out how the cow got in the ditch, do everything in your power to make sure the cow never gets in the ditch again.

So my answer to this question using farmer’s logic is two thousand twenty two was a year where the S and P five hundred was down, what, twenty, twenty four percent.

The cow was in the ditch. People were working with their adviser to say, wow. What do I do? How do I adjust? My portfolio is a mess. The this bond things never happen. What’s going on?

People got the cow out of the ditch working with their adviser. I think two thousand twenty three was a year where people said, how did the cow get in the ditch, and what am I gonna do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? And in some cases, they may be saying, I think the cow got in the ditch because my adviser doesn’t know me well enough or my adviser didn’t have an optimized portfolio for my needs, and I need to be thinking about that now. Even though the S and P was up twenty plus percent last year, people were on step two, which is, find out how the cow got in the ditch.

I love that analogy, and it’s so applicable to so many things, you know, in in our world and in business and making decisions. But I I think really, you know, just reading the comments and from everything you and I have learned talking with advisers is communication really being that underlying trend. And a lot of people dealt with, you know, putting out the fire in twenty twenty two. And then in twenty twenty three, there was firms that felt like they could kinda, whoo, take a breather. While they were taking that breather, people were leaving.

Yep.

So let’s talk about a couple other things we saw.

Clients wanna be contacted either every three months or more frequently than that.

And that need grew, like, it it, by fifty percent, basically, from our two thousand twenty three study to our two thousand twenty four. And the final thing was, my satisfaction in two thousand the twenty three study was, you know, it’s all about the performance of the portfolio. That still matters. That’s the number two reason, though, in two thousand twenty four.

It’s a deep understanding of me and my financial goals. So thanks for all the information in the chat. It’s very consistent with what we saw in our study and what Sam and I are here to talk about, which is a big, big, big factor here is communication. Effective communication, timely communication, and communication that builds a sense of comfort.

So let’s talk about the, implications of, you know, how often do clients wanna be, communicated with.

So if you look at this chart, look at the focus on the blue and the orange.

Blue and the orange are how frequently, and that’s those are the three months or more frequently.

The chart on the upper left says, you know, roughly speaking, about sixty percent of people wanna be communicated with frequently. The chart on the upper right says that there excuse me. It says they are being communicated with frequently. The chart on right says, what is their need or preference?

Their preference is more. Almost eighty percent are saying I wanna be communicated with no less frequently than every three months. And the two charts at the bottom are saying your forty five to sixty year olds, again, focusing on the orange and the blue, forty five, to sixty year olds want to be communicated with at least every three months, and that’s eighty percent of them. And the highest net worth people, the bottom right chart, eighty seven percent are saying communicate with me frequently.

You’re only communicating you know, only sixty percent are getting regular communication. With your highest net worth, ninety percent of them want it.

And I think the takeaway from this chart is sometimes, you know, I’ll I’ll be helping someone with their marketing communication strategy, and they’ll say, well, I just don’t wanna be annoying.

I don’t wanna overcommunicate.

Right? I have never heard a story of an adviser getting fired by their client for overcommunicating ever, ever, ever, especially, you know, if if it’s email. Right? So sometimes people might not wanna be on an email list. They might unsubscribe from your newsletter if you’re sending it every three days, but they’re not gonna say, oh, I I don’t wanna talk to you in person or have you as my adviser anymore. Maybe they just wanna clear up their email inbox. So, you know, I think erring on the side of more than you think is better in most cases.

Yeah. And, Tim, what’s what’s the harm in in a in a a good, well placed, well intentioned email?

It may go unread, but My adviser sends me an email every single week, and it is three different articles that he has read online that he summarizes for all the clients of, like, what’s relevant about the articles, why they’re interesting.

And then there’s a little tidbit about his family and his kids that are so cute. And I open it every single week for if nothing else, just to see the updated picture of his sweet little boys and hear what’s going on in his life. There’s some weeks, you know, every once in a while I miss it, but I would never unsubscribe from it.

Mhmm.

I think that personal part, though, is what, you know, keeps me wanting to up update it and and open it. And so if you’re struggling with what to put in a weekly newsletter, try that. You know, having you’re summarizing what’s happening in the news when it comes to personal finance and then sharing something personal, it can really, really be a great, great formula for email.

Yep.

We I didn’t put a slide together for this, but it is in our survey.

People like you and I, we’re looking for information. And if that adviser is not sending that curated list of of good articles and stuff, people are going out to social media. People are going to CNBC.

People are, reading emails from other advisers. I think the big thing is you want them going to you for their their core information. And so be proactive in making that easy for people so they don’t go looking for it.

Someone just asked the question, do the emails need to be individual, or do mass emails count? I just wanna answer this because, the adviser I was mentioning, my adviser, it comes from the firm.

So there’s multiple people now, but he’s the head adviser of it all. And it’s, coming from the, you know, firm email, but you could tell that he’s writing it. I’ve seen other people. It works really well, though, where it is their weekly newsletter, and it’s Mhmm.

Maybe they have ten advisers on their team. It’s coming from everyone. They’re following a same similar formula, but kind of the personal tidbit from one of the advisers might change. Or there’s one firm they share, on this day in history, and then they pick a year, and they share something fun, and it’s usually a song because they’re really into music.

So you can the sky’s the limit with being creative on this.

Yep. And we’ll we’ll probably get to it more in the the broader q and a, but, you know, I I saw a comment in there saying, well, what about AI? Can AI help us do these kind of things? I think, one quick answer to that is it can.

Yes.

Yes. There there’s other manners to make highly customized, highly personalized, communications.

Yes. Absolutely.

So let’s let’s try to breeze through a couple of the other big findings. I I already touched on the punch line here. If you focus on the orange, the orange is you’re safe. Everything else is it’s either a risk or it’s damage to your practice.

The top shows the aggregate, the aggregate of considering changing advisers.

The bottom are the the breakouts. And I think, again, if you go with saying orange means I’m I’m doing great and I’m safe, the only place where orange is super big is in that, lower chart, the one rightmost, over sixty years old. You’re probably doing just fine with your over sixty year old clients.

Everywhere else, substantial risk. And the places you really don’t wanna have that substantial risk are those up and comers from forty five to sixty years old who are really building their nest egg and the ones with the highest net worth. And we and we, we did the cutoff in our study of over five hundred thousand was the highest net worth category. So be super careful.

You know, you’re probably doing right by your over sixties. You probably have some opportunity to get better for everybody else.

Let’s see. Going over just a a couple more is, on the left, in discussions with your adviser on investments, what percent of the conversation resonates? The long and short is not enough.

You know, last time we did the study, seventy percent of the information resonated. Now it was only sixty four percent. So, a lot of people got the message, but, either the bar went up for information or the, the communications are too complicated. There’s a big opportunity to communicate more clearly. When you are spending the time communicating, calm it down a little bit.

Yeah. We’re gonna talk about some strategies for how to do this here in just a second, but, the we wanted to show you the data first because Yeah. I think sometimes people hesitate. Like, we wanna sound smart.

We wanna sound like we know what we’re talking about. At the end of the day, especially when it comes to written communications, people are scanning. They are scanning information. They are not, you know, reading it the way they’re reading a novel.

And so, you know, really keeping it concise and easy to understand is gonna be crucial here.

Absolutely.

Hey. The the right, I’m just gonna speed round past some of these, but, lot more confidence in your financial plan in case of a recession if you’re being communicated with, clearly and regularly.

You know?

Saying I I I love you, and I’m taking care of you, and I’ve got an eye on you even if the markets get squirrelly is what people are looking for. They have more confidence.

I mentioned upfront.

Clients are holding away a lot of assets.

On the left is all respondents.

Seventy four percent or the the inverse, twenty six percent are trust entrusting an adviser with all of their assets.

The you know, those with the highest net worth, eighty seven percent of them held away a lot of assets, and the orange, purple, and green bars are more than ten percent of their assets are held away. So this was surprising to us. Everybody’s got an account somewhere else, and they may have a a brokerage account that they play with. But what we saw is it’s actually a meaningful portion of their total net worth anywhere between ten percent and, you know, more than fifty percent of their net worth is held away, likely not with another adviser.

So, let’s quickly shift to what would, what does having improved communication and frequency how does it benefit you?

Let’s call all of these figures ninety percent. Three big conclusions here. I’d have more confidence in my adviser and confidence.

Those held away assets, that’s fertile ground to have a discussion about held away assets when you have confidence. Number two is I’m not gonna be looking around for other advisers. When I’m at a dinner party and somebody at the other side of the table raves about their adviser, I’m gonna rave back because I have a great adviser. I’m not interested in learning about other advisers.

And the third big one was I will provide referrals. If I’m happy, I’m going to sing praises to family members and to those across the table at a at a a dinner party or at a social outing. So those are the big benefits.

And I wanted to just point out really quickly here because I you know, we got a couple questions about this already. When we talk about personalized communication, don’t think that this means that, okay. I have, you know, a hundred and fifty names on my list here, households, and I have to write a personalized email to each one of them, once every three months, or I have to pick up the phone and call them every three months. That might be part of your plan, but even something is accelerating within your email list, breaking people out into groups of people. So, you know, these people are all under sixty, or these people are all young people who are, young families with kids.

And then every year, kinda going through and and cleaning up this list, if something comes out about new requirements for the the FAFSA or saving for college, you know, you can quickly update everybody on that one email subgroup, without having to think too much about it. So spending time really cleaning up your contact list can really make it easier to send personalized communications.

Right?

And so doing that kinda work up front, your your future self will thank you later. And so I just wanted and I’ll I’ll show you again a little bit more, about that in a minute.

Yeah. I think we’re we’re quickly getting to the to the conclusion of, the survey stuff. Again, there’s there’s thirty some odd pages of the actual survey you’re trying to hit on some of the high points.

Definitely wanna download this and dig into it because it’s so interesting.

Yeah. And all these visuals are are are available to everybody too. So a couple other things.

Has the world moved completely virtual? No. It hasn’t. Your clients wanna meet with you a combination of in person and virtually. Virtually is more efficient, in maybe half of the time, but most of the world is back out of the COVID mindset. Most of the world really values the face to face and seeing each other in three d and reading body language. So I think what clients are asking for is a mix of in person and, virtual meetings.

When you meet with them, what do they wanna be talking about? Well, first of all, stating the obvious. They’re entrusting you with their nest egg. There’s a whole lot of other things that advisers do for clients besides manage their portfolios.

But at the end of the day, they probably came to you not because they needed another friend and somebody who who could talk to them. They came to you because they had a nest egg, and they wanted to realize their goals and dreams.

They want to hear your perspectives on personal finance topics, on the economy, on macroeconomic things, on topics like what happens what could happen to my portfolio in an election year based on past elections. So they wanna hear from you, especially those of higher and worse. They wanna hear absolutely wanna hear from you. And what do they wanna hear from you on? Investment opportunities. Hey.

You may not recommend they go into Bitcoin. However, that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in knowing a little bit more, so they’re a little bit smarter on the topics.

You know, they might may wanna know about the new ETFs associated with Bitcoin. They wanna may wanna know about the EV manufacturers outside of Tesla. You know? Tell me about Rivian, etcetera.

So, they wanna hear about investment opportunities. They wanna hear about market trends. Tell me about AI. You know?

Is NVIDIA the only investment that’s available in AI? They wanna know this stuff. Don’t waste wait for them to ask you. Share it with them.

And they also really wanna know what, what Powell and team are doing with interest rates and economic insights. They’re thinking about their future. They’re they’re wanting to have smart questions to ask you. They wanna know about things like interest rates, about bonds, about equities, about international, about large cap, small cap.

So those are the three things they wanted more advice on and more information on.

So, Sam, do let’s do a a quick run through of maybe our big, the you know? And and we’ve used the same thing last time because the the message is the same between two thousand twenty three and two thousand twenty four.

Do you wanna start? You want me to dive into these?

Yeah. Sure. So, you know, there’s four big takeaways, and then after this, we’re gonna show you more of the how. This is the what.

But if you’re really thinking about your communication strategy overall, number one, you know, when we say explore new channels and new topics, don’t be that adviser that just once a month sends market commentary. Right? And it’s via email. You wanna be more of the places where your clients are consuming information, and you wanna be going beyond just investments.

I mean, I think one of the fit my favorite things I’ve learned in the last year is that the origin of the word wealth actually comes from Middle English. I think it was pronounced wele, w e l e, or well-being. And so the word wealth, you know, back in the middle ages used to actually the connotation meant your whole well-being. And I think the advisers that are moving beyond just talking about traditional wealth management topics and are expanding it are gonna be poised to reap the most benefits.

So that’s one. I’ll let you do two, Sean.

Yeah. So, there was a line in the, book Animal Farm that was all animals are created equal, but some animals are created more equal than others.

And that always resonated with me about clients, and clients are not animals, but it it’s the analogy from the book.

Some clients are more important and more valuable to you. Either they’re AUM, which translates into fees or their referrals or their ability to, otherwise impact your business.

Treat your clients all very well, but treat some even more special than others and have a way, Sam was mentioning earlier, ways you segment your customer base, etcetera. Find a way to give some your equivalent of sparkling water and to others your equivalent of champagne.

Both get bubbles, though.

Both get a bubbly drink that they will remember. Yeah. Consistency is a key. One of the one of the things Sam will talk about is you you can’t try something once and hope for big results.

Commit yourself to a tactic and and expanding your boundaries and commit yourself to for three months, six months, that’s when results start to happen. I think if Sam, you’ve got a very large social media following.

How how long did it take? Did did you get your social media following? They all come in the first month or two of you being on active?

A long time. Actually, you know, it’s funny. This is a good question. How many of you that are on the call right now have a editorial calendar mapped out that you know the topic of what you’re gonna post for social media for your business and the emails you’re gonna send for the next I’ll I’ll make it even a shorter time frame for the next two weeks.

You know, what emails are going out and what social posts are going out? I would love to know because what I find when I ask this question is for most people, it’s no. They do not know. And so what ends up happening is it’s really hard to be consistent without a plan because it’s you’re constantly behind.

Right?

And this is something our team at FMG really, really helps people with, I’d say, the most out of anything is that you don’t need to show up everyone and hit a home run out of the park every single time. You just need to come to the game every single time, right, and play. And so that consistency part is so crucial, and people are so focused on going viral or having this big email that gets forwarded a bunch of times. Like, that’s not how it happens. It just happens little by little over time.

And so having an editorial calendar planned out is gonna be a huge part of it. And we’re gonna show you actually a visual of it here in a second.

Awesome.

The I think the last the last, piece of advice on this section is prioritize your clients and their goals.

They said in one of the slides I already showed you, they want to to know you know about them in-depth and their goals and dreams, and you have a plan to support. They they also wanna hear about financial concepts. So prioritize your clients and their goals and remind them that you know their goals, and everything’s good even in the event of a recession.

So, again, a lot of lead up to saying, woah. Give us some tactics. You know, hopefully, everybody’s bought into the fact that your clients are saying, please communicate with me more. It will benefit you, and it will benefit me, your client. Let’s start talking a little bit about the tactics.

I think the last of these, things we got from survey results is email’s still really good. Email is still a great way to get in touch with people, and the reasons why is it’s asynchronous. I can look at it when I want to. I I and, my schedule’s busy. I may not be able to make a call, and I, you know, I I I don’t have time necessarily to look at big paper things. So send me an email. Love detailed reports.

Do appreciate the one on one calls and make it visual and simple. Keep it easy for me. I I I’ve got too many things in my day to day job or life that I have to read. Don’t make me do too much work.

And same thing with with, financial market stuff. People are saying the same channels. You use these channels. So, Sam, like, like, I’m gonna turn it over to you because you are an absolute expert in marketing and communications from advisers to their clients. Anything you’d add on this slide?

I would just say be happy that email’s number one. Because with email, we can schedule it. We can plan it in advance. We can do a one to many approach, which is a time saver. So, hopefully, email stays top of the list here for a while. But, since you have control of the slides, I’ll have you just advance.

Mhmm.

And this is what we were just talking about. So for those of you that were saying, I don’t have a plan or I’m not that planned that far out in advance. What you’re seeing on the left is an example of an editorial calendar. That just means what are we gonna share in marketing language? What are we gonna share, and when are we gonna share it on what day?

This is an example. At FMG, we have a program called do it for me marketing, and we will actually create this for you, and then we actually implement it for you. So we write the email.

We write the social post. We write the blog post, and you have a concierge on our team that will execute it on your behalf. We truly do it for you. But in addition to the plan, you also wanna have wiggle room where if something is happening, right, we don’t have to wait till, okay, my newsletter always goes out on Thursday, so I’m not gonna email anybody about it until then.

We can have a timely piece. So you can see the example on the right is that. So it’s saying this was, something we had sent out to all of our do it for me members, when the Fed was making a bunch of changes. And so we had this email that was fed managing banking issues and inflation.

And then people could say, yes. It’s good to go. Send it out on my behalf, or, no. I wanna edit it first, or, no.

I don’t wanna use it at all. But this is allowing all of your clients to be absorbing the news, knowing what should I pay attention to and what shouldn’t I from you rather than just from what they’re getting, you know, in the media. And what I love about the editorial calendar is you can start to really hone in on certain themes. Right?

In my house, I have three little kids. When I really wanna work with my kids on honesty or respect or, self discipline, right, it’s too much to do it all at once. So we’ll pick a theme for the month. We stick it up in our kitchen, and that whole month, right, we might work on, being self reliant.

Like, you put your own shoes on. You find your own backpack. All these things that month, and we keep talking about that value. With your editorial calendar, you can do the same thing.

Right? So May could be estate planning month, and one of your your blog posts could be, something specific about estate planning and then an email about something like that. And so you’re just building on it, and so now they’re really associating your firm with, oh, they also really help with estate planning because they’ve seen it over and over again. Most people are gonna see a message up to seven times before they really start to absorb it.

So you you can, you know, frame it in different ways, but sometimes you kinda have to beat a dead horse a little bit. Mhmm.

So if you go to the next slide.

Hey, Sam. Real quick on this one. One of the things I I I know we both encourage people. The calendar is the first way to tell you about the finish line.

It also helps you back up and say, when should I have a draft? When should I start writing? When should I start producing? Those things.

So Absolutely.

So these are the four things, and and I really wanted to make them as simple as possible instead of working on you know, people always ask me, should I be on YouTube? Should I be making videos? Like, what tactic works? And I always tell people to start with the basics because that is still something most firms truly have not mastered yet. So the first one is to shift the way that you communicate to really be using client centric language. So I’m gonna show you some examples.

Using the words, phrases, questions that clients would use. So in this example from Money Maven Financial, you can see right on the left hand side, questions we’ll answer through our planning process. Right? Am I on track based on what I’m already doing?

I’m new into investing. Where do I start? How do I align my money with my personal values? So this is website copy, but you can do the same thing with email subject line.

So if a bunch of clients are asking you a question about the fed and rates, that can be the the subject line of the email that you then set out, which then answers it to the best of your ability, which is probably gonna say, we don’t know. But still, you know, you’re answering the question that they all have. And on the next slide, this is one that you can all leave here today and do. So you pull up your own website, and maybe you can do this along with us in the chat.

Look and see on your own website how many times are you using you versus I or we. What I find is that a lot of people are constantly talking about themselves because they’re trying to explain why their business is great and justify why someone should wanna work with them. So we’ve, you know, been in business. We have combined experience over fifty years, or, we’re so great because of x.

And instead, they forget that the focus should be on the client. What problems do they have and how are we solving them? So this is a great example.

Instead of, you know, saying, here at Investably, we help you keep more of your income, They change it to you. You want to explore ways to keep more of your high income and put it to work for you. Right? You have stock options, our issues, and are concerned about the effect of an upcoming liquidity event. They could have wrote that we help, you know, clients who are executives at tech tech companies with their RSUs and stock option.

That makes it so much more passive and doesn’t make it feel like this person gets me. Me. Right? So look at your own website.

How much of the copy is written as I or we, and how can we flip those to make them use statements? It seems like such a subtle thing, but you’ll notice really great marketing does that. It is gonna help you raise your hand and say, yes. This firm gets me.

They work with people just like me.

And this summarizes it all up because at the end of the day, people do not care what you can do. They care what you can do for them. Right? So just look at the difference in the ad if Apple would’ve went to market with the world’s first portable digital media player.

Who cares? Right? Versus a thousand songs in your pocket.

So with your messaging, with your emails, always be thinking about what is the benefit to the people that I am messaging right now, and how am you know, how am I going to deliver it? Okay.

So being specific about your target audience is gonna make it a lot easier to write those messages. So let me show you a a what not to do versus do.

Again, if I were to go and look at the websites of a lot of the people on this call today, I would see over and over again, we help businesses, families, and individuals with financial planning or with investments. That is very, very common, and we see it all the time.

Instead, you wanna be as specific as possible in your messaging so that people know, is my adviser work with, you know, other physicians? Should I refer them? Does my adviser work with people who own a business and wanna set up a four zero one k plan for, their employees. You need to be very specific. Look at the difference between these two messages. Right?

Huge, huge difference in being specific.

And many of you might say, well, we work with pre retirees and retirees. Like, we work with a lot of different types of people.

So do I just put that? Look at the difference here. So instead of saying we work with pre retirees and retirees, this firm says, if you’re in your late forties and early fifties, let’s establish your plan to get to the next chapter. Here’s some questions you might have.

Right? That’s the pre retirees. And then if you’re in your late fifties and sixties, here’s some questions you might have. Such a great way to focus on this niche without keeping it so broad and allowing, again, people to really feel like you get them.

And if you’re struggling, you know, again, with how to be creative with this, I love this example from IWM, Financial. So Financial. So this is their website. So they have income retirement tax planning and then the specific location.

But then I love this line. It’s right below the fold here. We work with people who feel they pay too much in taxes and are ready to make an intentional plan. Who doesn’t feel like they paid too much in taxes?

Everybody feels that way, yet when you read this, you’re like, yes. That’s me. Right? So it’s still broad, yet it makes you feel like you’re part of this group.

I absolutely love this. So creative.

Okay. And then for this one, this seems so easy, everybody, but we just saw on these slides how many people feel like I never hear from my adviser.

I don’t meet with them that much. I would love to hear from them more. One of the things is being, you know, more easily accessible. So if you go to, the next slide, you know, of course, you wanna be proactive and reach out, but this even goes when it comes to, prospects.

You know, I can’t tell you how many times I’m checking out an adviser site and I have a question for them, or I maybe wanna feature something they’ve done well in their marketing, and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how to get in touch with their firm because they don’t make it easy to contact them.

So I love this one, schedule a quick call. You can click the button. It pulls up their online calendar, and then it says, are you just checking us out? That’s okay.

They put their phone number, and then they put a link to their blog. Right? Really friendly and accessible. And then on the next slide, I love this too.

Right? Sometimes prospects think that they can’t just book a time on your calendar because your calendar is reserved for clients. So this site, they have a free meet and greet virtual call. When you click it, their Calendly comes up, and they say a free thirty minute virtual call to learn more about our service and see if we’re a good fit.

You all would be astounded by the number of advisers who tell me, I have a calendar integration, but I don’t get anyone to click it and book it. And then when I go look, it just says contact us. And so it appears to prospects that that is just for clients. Right?

So this is fact that you do offer these free virtual calls.

And, again, we talked about find you know, meeting people where they are. I’m just gonna go back to this. We talked a lot about email, but, again, maybe for younger clients or for people who are not on your email list, how do you show up for them? This is more of a prospecting than a client communication tip, but social media is where oftentimes you can, you know, be known to somebody for the first time.

And so this is just another example. Again, we have the calendar here, but, with FMG’s program, we don’t just do timely emails. We also do timely social posts. So when the CPI was the lowest it had been in two years, we created a really cool graphic, and we put it together.

And we said, hey. This wasn’t in the editorial calendar, but if you wanna, you know, post this, we can post it on your behalf this week. So also going off the plan if need be with your social post is something I wanted to point out.

And then the last one is just to keep messaging simple. So I just wanted to throw in a couple examples here again. You know, I always like to tell people write so that a sixth grader could understand what you’re saying. You know, we saw how low comprehension really is across the board. People aren’t always understanding things. Writing using the words and phrases that your client uses is so crucial for good messaging.

This is just I I know we’re running low on time here, so we can just a couple, other examples of social posts, emails, and web copy, and you guys will get these slides. But, again, I love this one from Thomas Copeland. He explains what a Roth versus, you know, traditional and or Roth Roth IRA or traditional IRA and, you know, what the difference is, and he keeps it super, super high level. Don’t overthink it.

Sam, and and this is such an important point. I I think some of us feel like the only way we can look smart and look like we’re providing value is to sound smart and say say, things that are complicated.

Actually, the mo the most effective communicators ever are the ones that don’t feel the need to say things in a complicated way. They dumb it down so that all of us can understand it.

Right.

So, Sam, I I guess I was thrilled in our chat. I saw a couple people saying, where’s you know, tell us about your businesses. What do you guys do? How can you help us? And and the first thing I’d say with that is well, first of all, thank you for asking the question. I think, first and foremost, both, YCharts and FMG love to interact with advisers, and we love to provide value. And and our hope is that if we provide value, that’ll help our whole industry, and it may lead to a dialogue between our businesses.

So it’s not our lead, which is, hey. This is a sales pitch. But, Sam, to answer the question that we did get in the chat, do you wanna give a quick minute on how FMG helps with these problems? You showed a couple, and then I’ll give that in return.

Yeah. Absolutely. So I showed you, some highlights of how we help advisers with their communications both to clients and to prospects.

So whether you’re coming to us and you don’t yet have an email list and you want to, you know, work on building your email list, but email the clients that you currently have and start coming up with communications for prospects. We have our do it for me program, which I showed you. You get a editorial calendar sent to you every month. You have a dedicated concierge from our team who meets with you monthly and will actually do your marketing for you. But then we also just have an amazing tech platform, and there’s advisors who are more DIYers.

And they use our platform to, you know, make updates to their website, to push out their own emails and their own social posts. And then we have a lot of people who combine both. Right? So they have us do certain things, and then they do some on their own.

We’d love to teach you more about it and connect with you. And if you go to FMG’s website, you can sign up to connect with our team, and we’ll show you all the bells and whistles.

Yeah. And and from my angle, I I work at YCharts, and, we work very closely with m FMG.

We do two things for advisers. We have about ten thousand adviser clients, and our adviser clients tell us we save them anywhere between four and five hours of time a week. We help them with two things. Number one is we help them make better investment decisions, and number two is we help them better communicate their insights.

So the investment decisions part is do good research, you get better results, obviously, and we’ve got a whole suite of tools for that.

As far as the communication, let me give you a couple flavors of what we do. One, our our tool helps you provide your own bespoke content, charts, tables, whatever it is.

We produce a lot of content on our own that we encourage our clients to white label. Things like what happens in recessions to markets.

What should I expect in an election year? What do I need to know about an IPO? We also produce quarterly economic analysis that allow the of our clients put their logo on, edit a few of our words, and send out so they don’t have to sit at their, home office on a Sunday evening pulling their hair out writing these themselves. So we produce a lot of content.

We have proposal generation functionality, custom email reports that can go out on a daily, hourly, weekly, or monthly basis. And, in a lot of what we do with Sam and her team is we produce content that they’ll end up, putting in, some of their, do it yourself kind of functionality. So we’re both here to help advisers succeed to the degree anything you learned, leads you to wanna speak to either of us. We would love that, and our contact information is here.

Again, an email will go out with the recording and the survey tomorrow, but we do have a few minutes left.

Sam, is there are there any questions that you saw that we may want to, to pick off? Yeah.

I was just looking through them. And keep them coming if you all have more. I’m going back because there I think there might have been oh, about the AI.

We can address that one. So AI is a, you know, an amazing tool. I think the first time anybody ever saw it, we probably all remember seeing it because it could be mind blowing. And I think it can be a fantastic tool.

If you wanna do the strategy that I mentioned my adviser does where he finds a few articles that he thinks are relevant to his particular clients and, summarizes them, sends them out with a hyperlink, I think using AI and that kind of use case is great. Right? Ask AI to summarize the article, double check it to make sure it is, correct, and then, you know, go through compliance, and then you can send it out. There’s lots of ways, you know, that AI can help you, and learning the best ways, you know, is certainly a learning curve that we’re all still on, but I think that’s an a great use case.

FMG actually has in our mobile app. So if you’re an FMG customer, you get the mobile app for free. Everybody does. So if you haven’t downloaded, take a look.

But what’s so great about it is you can go to any, social post and ask the AI tool to write you a caption, and I actually personally trained it to write these captions. So it was lots of trial and error to say, no. Too many exclamation points or don’t use all these weird emojis or we gotta break up the text. So we trained it very specifically, and so that is a cool feature that we have, recently.

I I didn’t I didn’t see anything. So maybe we’ll, maybe we’ll just restate, the crux of things, which is there is an opportunity for advisers to do a lot better in their communication. There are risks to your client’s confidence, to their desire to look around for other advisers, and to their willingness to provide referrals to you.

Please, commit yourself to be the best communicator you can be. That doesn’t mean any or all of us should aspire to be everything, a a personality on CNBC or or a social media star.

Stay within your comfort zone, but stretch yourself. If there’s anything that Sam’s firm or mine can do to help you on your journey, we are happy to do so. But, otherwise, we’re all in this together to help hardworking people realize their dreams. And thank you very much for making your time to, spend it with us this afternoon.

This was awesome. Thank you so much, Sean, for having me.

Thank you, Sam.

Everybody for being here.

Thanks, everybody.