How Two Advisors Transformed Their Business with FMG’s Do It For Me Program

And welcome, everyone. Can everyone see that okay?

Yep. That’s perfect. Okay.

So let’s dive into how these two top advisers transform their business with FMG’s do it for me program.

So, again, I’m Samantha Russell. I’m the chief evangelist here at FMG. Susan, would you like to introduce yourself?

I am the chief marketing officer at FMG.

Awesome. And how about who’s next on my list? Chad. Can you share a little bit about yourself, please?

Chad Parmeter. I’m up here in the Seattle area. I have a practice by the name of Miras Planning.

We specialize in life transitions, emotional and complex life transitions, team of three, and, happy to be here.

Amazing. Thank you. And we’re gonna show you we are gonna show you Chad just launched a brand new website.

We’re gonna show it off today because it looks Beautiful.

Yes. Well done to you and your team. And, Doug, so nice to see you. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Hey, Sam. How are you? Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. My name is Doug Howes.

I am the founder of Sapphire Wealth Management. We’re based in New England with offices in Andover, Massachusetts, Burlington, Vermont, and most recently, North Conway, New Hampshire. So three of the six New England states, and, we specialize in financial planning.

Absolutely love it. Wonderful.

So, just to kick us off, you know, I think that one of the things that Susan and I really hear over and over again, we’ll go and we’ll speak on stage. We will go to all these events, and we love to share best practices. Whether you decide to work with FMG ever or not, we want to help every adviser be the best marketer they can be. But we would go and we would do this over and over again. In about two years, it’d be I guess it’s almost three years ago at this point.

So Is it three years?

Okay. People would constantly say, you know, we loved all the tips you shared, but can you just do it for me?

And after a while, we thought I think Susan, more than anyone, was like, we need to create this program because the the appetite is there, and people just advisors just don’t have have the time. So we’re gonna show you today how it really is possible to partner with FMG to allow us to do it for you, but also show you how Doug and Chad are working with us in two very different ways and that you can really work with our team in a way that’s gonna work best for you.

Absolutely.

Okay. Of course, it’s always like, we love when we do the Sam and Susan show, but I have to say, I think I think our audience really prefers when we have some advisers on that can talk about their real life experiences. So we do hope the chat blows up. Maybe we need an icebreaker. I don’t know. Sam, do you have a good icebreaker? Get the chat going.

I would love to know, where everyone’s favorite place that they’re traveling this summer is summer vacations because Oh. In Europe, I’m in London for the summer, and, I’m always looking for tips of new places to go to new places to go. So if anyone has a great spot, please let me know.

It’s amazing once you get here how easy it is to Oh my gosh.

We got the first one’s Peru. Mine was Martha’s Vineyard. Seems so, like, boring.

Oh, I’m gonna be playing Hamptons.

Oh my god.

Edinburgh.

Yeah. Rio, Chesapeake Bay, Saint Augustine. Oh my gosh. Everybody’s having fun this summer. This is great.

I love it.

I think I need to upgrade my vacation.

Hey, Chad. Doug, where are you guys going this summer?

I’m I’m dropping off my youngest son to Columbia, South Carolina at the University of South Carolina in August.

That’s huge.

It’s cool. It’s it’ll be fun, but it’s gonna be hot and humid and everything else.

But I’m I’m looking at these other spots, so and they look pretty nice.

Well, maybe you can jet out from there. But congratulations. Is he a freshman?

He’ll be a freshman studying international business. Yep.

Yeah. Oh, great. And, Doug, you always go somewhere good.

Yeah. Not as exciting as where everyone else seems to be going. We my wife and I just got back from Savannah, Georgia, and then we’re taking, the whole family to Big Sky, Montana in, about a month. Oh my gosh.

Okay. Well, we’ll have you back to talk about that because that’s on my bucket list. Yes.

And I you made me think, Chad.

You absolutely, when you drop your son off, should take a picture of it and post it on social media because that kind of post will get There you go.

So much, feedback. Absolutely.

But that also may reinforce the idea of maybe we need to get on Instagram too.

Right?

So Yeah.

Probably. But then, you know, you could tie it into college planning too, so it doesn’t have to just be personal a personal program.

We got a lot two of them in college now, so there you go.

I’m gonna go I’m gonna go I’m gonna go up.

Chad, I’m gonna go one further. Take snippets of videos as you’re taking your son to college over the trip, then embed it in an email to your clients what it’s like taking your child to freshman year.

That’s a good idea. I like it.

This is where you’ll get, we have, like, the best two people. This will be really interactive, but, you know, marketing has a lot to do with your personality. And I think what you’ll see from Doug and Chad, and hopefully we’ll be able to convey that is, you know, our do it for me me program, but also just in general, your marketing needs to reflect who you are. We use that word authentic probably too often, but Doug has a very you know, has his personality infused in everything he does, and Chad too has a different style. And so, anyway, we’ll give you examples, but I think the key is to make it your own.

But, anyway One hundred percent.

So, with that, I thought we could start maybe by, just kinda level setting.

Doug, if you wouldn’t mind, we’ll start with you kinda sharing before you started with FMG’s do it for me program, what did your marketing look like? Did you have someone internally who was, running point for you? Did you, you know, what were you doing?

It was awful. He was pulling out his hair.

But Yeah. Yeah. What do you think caused all this? Yeah. No. It was it was it was it was god.

It was a nightmare. So, yeah, I had someone internally responsible for it who happens to be my director of operations who has no interest. And and I’m not saying this negatively about her. She happens to also be my wife, but no interest or skill set for marketing.

And it was the least favorite part of her job.

And so it was way too much time was being spent in in producing average content maybe at best, I would say. I I mean, I’m probably giving myself ourselves too much credit for that to say it was even average. And there was no you can imagine there was no continuity. Like, the post had nothing to do with the emails, and we didn’t even know how to spell blog at that point.

We we in all sincerity, we didn’t. And so it was just a lot of heavy lifting, and we tried to encourage other team members to send in things to us, which just it didn’t work. So and then you have the the final part of it, which was we we had a plan on when we were gonna say post or send emails, and life and business gets in the way. And so our execute like, our our our consistency with that execution was hellacious.

I mean, that I can’t say it any other way.

And I would love to hear in the chat how many of you have been either are currently or have been in this scenario where you have somebody on your team who’s doing marketing as just an additional part of their job. It’s not their full job. It’s not even what they were hired for necessarily, but it’s just got added on because you don’t have a dedicated person. I think having an operations or an admin person, it’s a very, very common we run into that all of the time.

Yeah. I love that was just verbatim pretty much what we hear. It’s, you know, it’s sporadic. The intention is there, but it’s really hard to execute. It takes too much time. You’re not even sure it’s good. So, Chad, are you any different?

Yeah. I mean, we you know, so our our marketing was kinda limited to things that I would write. I I tend to be a fairly decent writer on on different topics and ideas and that sort of thing, but we didn’t really have we didn’t have a written marketing plan. We didn’t have somebody who was a a guru from a standpoint of of of marketing. As a matter of fact, I would almost lean into the fact that our marketing was sort of like building a baseball field and and a cornfield in Iowa and thinking that people are just gonna show up.

Yeah.

If you build it, they will come sort of thing. And so we would we’d be like, oh, we’re doing a great job for our clients. They’re gonna they’re just gonna, you know, show up. We’re we’re gonna have all these people banging down our door, and it turns out that, you know, we need to we need to be a little bit more proactive.

So, you know, it’s kind of a James Clear atomic habits. You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You follow the level of your systems. We didn’t have any sys you didn’t have any systems. I love it.

Atomic Atomic Habits, for those of you who have not read the book I that’s fine.

Let’s say that one more time.

I wanna I wanna make You don’t you don’t rise to the level of your goals.

You fall to the level of your systems. So we had no systems.

And I didn’t wanna re recreate the wheel. By the way, somebody asked me my dog’s name in the back here. That’s Arrow, a r o w. He’s a woodle. We carry a poodle mix.

And don’t get Doug on the topic of dogs or we won’t get back to this topic.

He has a he has a sister, another woodle, Adi, short for autumn.

But, anyway, so that was you know, so from our from my perspective and, Susan, I think you and I bumped into each other at a conference three years ago maybe. Yeah. And and, you know, I was like and we know we we have a background for with advisor group back in the day, and and I was like, I think I need some help. I think we could be better.

But because we really weren’t we really didn’t have a strategy.

So Okay.

Nope. That’s great great background. So we launched this program. I was just reminded. It was three years ago.

It was rolled out, and it quickly became, right, Susan, the number one, program that we sell and offer here at FMG. So for those of you not familiar, you can just have an FMG subscription, use our technology to send out your emails, host your website, but and then have access to our content. But there are a lot of advisers who then don’t wanna be responsible for going in, choosing the pieces, deploying them. And so we should also know and we will we will show you this, but the do it for me program has its own exclusive content separate than what, somebody with a premium or an essential subscription has access to.

So that it makes it a little different. But I’m gonna share my screen again, because there was this quote that I absolutely loved. Oops. Sorry.

Stop sharing. Let me reshare reshare here. I don’t know why this went away.

Sorry. I’m just gonna share. There was a a post that one of you made about your success in in the program, and I just thought it was amazing. Hold on one second. Sorry, everybody.

My window disappeared with the tape.

That.

I know.

It happens to me, not you.

No. No. No. It happens to, I guess, me sometimes because I don’t know where it went.

But The Sam and Susan show.

Right here. There you go. Just kidding.

Not not perfect. Love it.

Just kidding.

But when you think about, you know, when you think about what what it means to have success in a program or just in your marketing in general, I think one of the things that’s really interesting is people sometimes don’t know even what to measure. Like, what tells everybody that my, you know, that my marketing is good, or how do I know whether, it’s working? And so that’s why I thought this particular post was just so poignant. Okay.

Here we go. I finally found it. Sorry, everybody. Here we go. So, yeah, it was you, Doug.

Can everyone see that? So he said, he was talking about our program, and thank you for this lovely post, by the way, but he said, three different clients had offered you unsolicited praise for your website, that you were seeing an amazing open rate with fifty four percent open rate, and that you had nearly sixty three hundred impressions from social posts on LinkedIn alone for thirty days.

So, you know, I think think don’t underestimate because I honestly think I hear it the most frequent value proposition really is the time saver.

There it’s it’s the things that Doug was talking about where the time saver, the accountability to execution, the consistency, the quality of content, these are, like, the downstream benefits, but don’t underestimate the time savings.

I think, Doug, like Well, you you know what?

And, Susan, you and I talked about this at some point, but I’ve had this conversation with a number of of financial adviser colleagues because most of the people in my circle know I’m leveraging FMG to a large extent for our our branding and our social and electronic platforms.

And one of the things I’ve tried to convey to other adviser, like, so so why are you so committed to FMG?

My view would have it is in this industry, it’s it’s really not necessarily all that complex to get more. What do I mean by that? I can get more clients by making more air quotes dials.

And with more clients, I’m gonna get more revenue. With more revenue, I’ll need more staff and bigger space. Like, more is not necessarily all that complex in this industry.

The one thing I can’t get more of, the one commodity is time.

And that more than anything else is what do it for me. More than FMG, the DIFM program did for me, and I’ll give you an example.

Prior to DIFM, between me and my team, we’re spending between twelve and fifteen hours a month putting together crap and putting it out there. I’m just I’m telling you what it is. We were putting stuff and putting it out there with no rhyme or reason. Today, I’m down to two hours a month.

Oh my god. Amazing.

How about you, Chad? Were you even I mean, you were doing most of the writing. Has it saved time for you and, you know, tell us a little bit about the impact of it. Yeah.

I mean, I think, you know, we we we visit with Shannon every every thirty days from from your team on you know, kind of in a concierge sort of way. And we talk about what we’re doing in terms of marketing ourselves as well as what what you guys are bringing to the table. And so we we look at it from a standpoint of kind of as a as a starting point, and then we sort of customize things. And sometimes we just take things verbatim as to what you put together.

Other other times, we’re like, well, that doesn’t maybe fit right exactly as we would maybe say it. And that’s no offense, but we always wanna customize our our content. And I and I think so that certainly it just it it just creates a cadence for us. It’s it’s we know when it’s happening.

We know it’s every whatever Monday it is in the in the morning. And Miley in my office and I and Shannon get together, and we talk about all sorts of different things. And I and I I just find that to be, it just it just creates a rhythm. You know?

And then we we do a lot of in person, marketing. So in person workshops, visiting with centers of influence. And we really utilize, FMG and our our our website and the content that we’re putting out there, whether it’s on LinkedIn or on our on our website or wherever, as a supportive reinforcing tool Yeah. To that in person.

I I I’m a big I’m a I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m much better in person with people than, doing three things through digital marketing per se, but digital marketing is something I need to do.

It’s just that, it’s it’s a supportive piece to my my marketing strategy as far as who I am.

You You know what I’m realizing, Sam? Maybe the first question we should ask Doug and Chad is to describe the program because I think we got into the results, but many people on the call don’t even really know what it is. So we could describe it might be better to have if in their words.

Doug, would you take I love that.

Yeah? Like, how would you describe this program to all of the wonderful people we have on the webinar?

So how would I describe DiffM to all of the wonderful people we have on the webinar?

Diffum is the all in one marketing program that we’re using to create brand recognition amongst our existing clients first and then our community second, leveraging both social media, electronic communications like email and blogs, and a state of the art website. So it is our entire image and brand across all three of those platforms, which then allows me to do what I love doing most, which is meet with more people like Chad was talking about.

And, Chad, how would you describe it? Somebody asked, what is this different thing? What what do I get?

Well, so so I would say we can go back, a couple years, and we had our own custom website. So we did not have FMG helping us with the website. We made a decision last year or maybe it was earlier this year. Is it earlier this year? I think that we just got live this year. I think we in the last year, we decided, hey. We want FMG to help us recreate our website.

And so getting back to, again, that kinda concierge approach. On the on a monthly basis, we get some ideas about some blog posts, some time sensitive items, maybe about tariffs. It could be about, you know, it could be about anything, really. Father’s Day, as an example.

Different types of ideas that come come up, and we get to look at them as a team and say, yeah. We like that. Well, we’re probably not gonna go with that. Whatever.

And it might get posted into onto LinkedIn. Shannon helps us do all that. He puts it into our website now that FMG controls our website.

And we we may customize some things and tweak them a little bit, but then we push them in his direction and it gets it up up to speed. So getting back to the point of saving time, again, we have that cadence. It provides us some sort of ground rules of, hey. This is these are best practices.

Take them or leave them. Whatever. It’s not it’s not like a forced thing, and it’s not without some guardrails. I think that’s what I would suggest that everybody kinda pays attention to here. It’s like you can make this whatever you want.

Right.

Depending upon what you’re looking for. You don’t have to say yes to everything. And that’s that’s what I’ve always appreciated about it is the fact that you can customize and and design it in a way that that works for you. And then you could tweak it and say, well, we’re not we’re not gonna do this many LinkedIn posts or we’re not we’re gonna do more in the way of video or whatever.

But that’s been that’s so so again, that monthly and there’s the there’s the recommended content, emails.

And and we tend to we we have breaks on this. Like, it doesn’t for for our practice, it doesn’t just automatically happen. We like to have the conversation each month, and then we’ll say to Shannon, hey. We’ve got a couple upcoming workshops that we’re doing on retirement abundance, next month.

How how can we promote that? And he may come back to us with a couple different items. Or how do how can we nurture those those people after the after the fact? And so he’s been instrumental in in helping us be a thought partner, really, along those lines.

So one thing I love that you both said, you mentioned your concierge. So one of the things that we wanna make clear, DIFM stands for do it for me. That’s the name of the program that we’re talking about within FMG.

And when you sign up for do it for me or DIFM as we’re referring to it, sorry for the acronym everyone, you are paired with someone from FMG’s marketing team who serves as your concierge that meets with you every month. So think of it in the same way that you hold all of your clients accountable. This person is holding you accountable to continue with your marketing, and we all know how powerful that can be. I just met I literally just had this experience, and I’m sure many of you have had this.

Right? I had a planned meeting with my financial adviser. There was a list of things that I was supposed to do before the next meeting. I had not done any of them, so I hurried up and got them done before the meeting.

Having that set meeting, it really does keep you accountable to doing the things that you want to do that you just feel like you don’t have the time to do too. So even though we’ll execute for you, I’m gonna show you here in a minute some examples. Like, Doug will sometimes record a video or or make the content his own.

And having that set meeting, you know, really does hold you accountable for the things that you want to do, making sure that you prioritize it.

Can I add one more thing, Sam, on that? Yeah.

Of course.

I would say beyond the timepiece, also the level of expertise. This may not be your jam. Right? If you’re not focusing on marketing or you you know, this is this is what you do all the time.

You’re not gonna be that great at it. No. You know, Doug and I like to do financial planning. That’s kind of our thing.

Right? We’re we’re not marketing gurus or experts. So it’s it’s nice to be able to lean on other people that can can help our teams get better at it.

I would say it’s a lot it’s a lot of work.

Like, it’s it’s a lot of work. It’s a it’s a lot of work.

Come up with the content calendar and think about all the topics, and then we write them and come up with the thumbnails for every you know, for the blog and the email and the social posts, and then we write video scripts and the podcast webinar script. And trust me, it’s it takes a lot of time to make it feel good.

It it really is all in one marketing that you get to decide what pieces you’re gonna use, not use, what ones you’re gonna customize, what ones you’re not gonna customize. Then with diff I’m doing it for me marketing. Then you give me my concierge who then not only helps me analyze the success that our firm has have with our followers and our clients, but also helps guide me on what our people are interested in and where we should focus moving forward on top of just holding me accountable to getting certain things done. And then because he’s an expert in marketing, he’s also telling me where the ball’s moving to, like Instagram rather than just LinkedIn.

And, you know, putting videos into your into your emails to gain more, content. All things that I don’t know, he tells me now I get to decide if I wanna execute on them or not based on how much time or little time I wanna put into this. And if I don’t wanna put any time into it, I want nothing to do with it, talking about my consistency before diff them and after diff them. Sometimes it went out, sometimes it didn’t.

That calendar that you were just showing, even if I do nothing, I do not one thing. That’s still going out to all of my clients via the emails you’re sending, all of the social posts. So I’m still branding building my brand by doing nothing. Chad and I choose to actively engage in this more than someone may want to.

So you decide how much effort you wanna put into it or how many hours you wanna put into it. It’s all laid out for you, and don’t lose sight of for those of you who are working with broker dealers like Chad and I do, it also gets man they manage all the compliance.

Yeah. All is done. There’s no submission to compliance. They’re doing it for me.

I think you know what I was just what was I just gonna say?

So we have a do it for me advisory board, and Doug sits on it as well as, like, twelve other advisers. And here’s an example of how, like, one size doesn’t always fit all, but if you get eighty to ninety percent given to you, you just tweak it. I was writing the I think it’s August I think August is, disability independence awareness month or some something similar to that. So I wrote a post, and I sent it to everybody.

I said, does this hit right? Like, you know, it’s a topic I wanted to make sure I got right. And I think seven of the advisers on the advisory board replied, each changing it differently. And then they all were like, you know what?

It’s really good. One was gonna keep it as is, maybe one or two. Others were tweaking a sentence. But bottom line, it’s I always think of it as giving you the content that, yes, you can use as is.

In some months, you’re busier than others, so you do. But it’s really like giving you what we believe is the best content to get you ninety percent of the way there, and then you can spend very little time just making little tweaks that make it your own. And I think that gets to it. I might ask you guys the question.

What would you say if somebody’s like, but isn’t everybody using the same content then?

How do you respond to that?

I I mean, I I can’t speak to what everybody else is doing, so that’s kind of a hard hard one to answer. But I I will say we really do try to customize everything that that we put out there just as an example too. I mean, because we’ve been working with Shannon here for quite some time, so he kinda understands our our vibe.

Yeah. I think that’s the same thing.

It’s pretty important. And so we don’t like to have a bunch of emojis on our LinkedIn post, for example. Right? So we try to keep it really sleek and clear and simple.

Yeah.

So so maybe the content or the the topic might be similar to what somebody else might be putting out there, but it probably looks a little bit different.

Different.

And, again, it’s changing the thumbnail. I know both of you changed the thumbnails on the social posts and the blogs. Right. Honestly, we’re all very visual. We’re assessing sort of a a post based on the visual. You change that, and ninety percent of the people think it’s different.

Right. And I, you know, I mean, I don’t know. You know, it’s Doug, no offense, but I’m not looking at your posts.

And that’s And my yeah.

My my guess is you’re not looking at mine.

But now I’m gonna start looking at it.

I’m gonna say, Doug, are you using my same information? No. I’m just kidding. It’s it’s just one of those it’s just one of those things that I don’t I don’t think that’s I don’t think that’s a typical talk about it. Right? My clients in Seattle are not checking out, you know, what’s going on there.

And, you know actually thought I would just show while you’re talking.

I’m gonna show some of your posts, and then we’ll show some of Doug’s. And people can see it. It doesn’t look like copy and paste the same content at all. In fact, when I was looking at both of them, like, wow.

They really are doing a great job because Yeah. Yeah. It it does. But even if, let’s say, you did change nothing one whole month because you were it was a busy month, to your point, you know, a client who might be researching a few advisers is not following five advisers on social media and on five different advisers’ email us for the most part.

I mean, that would be very, very rare.

And so that is not the the issue. That’s not the issue.

Email and website. I mean, not even at all.

I think we what happens is advisors have a lot of advisors in their network, and so somebody might say, I saw, you know, I saw the same thing, but that’s we I think you always say, look at who is in your network, who your first connections are to involve advisers, then you’re doing social media wrong. And we also coach each month. We send a video on things that you can do to expand your network, and I know both of you, Chad and Doug, have done that. Maybe Doug speak to even off, you know, the different thing. What have you done to expand your LinkedIn network that you could maybe give tips to those that are listening?

Give I’ll touch upon that in just one moment. I wanna go back to customizations just for thirty seconds because I think Chad and I probably do things quite differently, but still ending up with results.

Chad, I’m getting the feeling you’re probably more custom than than I am.

I do lots of customizations, but for me, a customization is I get the calendar. I look at the calendar. Where can I insert, a personal photo? Oh, there’s something about college. Let me put my daughter or one of my sons when they graduated college. Last month, I think it was, you had a a a post about in an email about what would you do what would you tell your eighteen year old self about finances or or something like that. So I grabbed a photo of myself and my my my wife at our high school graduations.

Really? That’s customized. It’s all your words. I just put two pictures in. It takes me, I don’t know, five minutes to get it done. Yeah. Or sometimes I’ll change the wording.

Like, oftentimes when there’s an email, there’s an email going out about something markets or terrace.

I know you edited that one.

Right. And and so I’ll put pictures in there. I’ll remove your picture off time unless it’s a chart. I’ll put a family picture in there, but I’ll leave the content exactly the same.

I’ll just write a three or four sentence introduction telling my clients about, oh, Cheryl and I were in Savannah. In fact, there’s an an email coming out in just a a a few days, about market ups and downs and whatnot. I’m using that to tell our clients about how proud Shell and I, we had one of those proud parent moments about two weeks ago. Our three kids ranging in age from twenty to thirty four all took their very first sibling vacation without any input or financial resources for mom and dad.

That is a cool moment. Right? Yeah. So the intro was about their trip. The pictures are are of them in Austin, Texas, and then we tied it in because while we had time alone, we were contemplating about the first half of the year, which is what the email’s about.

So it took me fifteen minutes maybe at best to put the pictures and write the intro. I’ve just customized that email. It’s nothing like anyone else’s going out.

And do you just do you just email it to your concierge and then they take care of it?

The concierge already has it in there. So I actually literally just go in there, edit while it’s already in there ready to go, hit submit, it goes to compliance, and goes out. I’m done. So I don’t have to email it to them. It’s one last step.

So what was you asked me? Sorry. I went way off.

I think we’re talking about network a lot since you joined do it for me. And we were talking about how getting the right people in your feed, you know, not advisers, but the people that you wanna target. How have you expanded your network? Just some any tips for the audience?

So really great question. So I always go through and look at who has liked our images, and I try to make the extend those connections. Much like you mentioned, if initially, it was a lot of financial advisers in my circle, I’m trying to move outside of that circle and looking for folks that are not industry related. Sure. We have plenty of industry related, but that also leads to other individuals that I can contact.

Although I haven’t used it yet, I have a good friend who is using some paid service that you can put in there. I wanna connect with CEOs, and it will actually do it for you and help you connect with the type of people that you wanna connect with. I haven’t personally used it, but I know my friend is.

Chad, have you done anything consciously to try to expand your network?

So I’m gonna be totally honest. No.

That being said, it’s one of the things that we’re we’re talking about how to how to better nurture, our centers of influence. We’ve we’ve we’ve met a number of estate planning attorneys this year, CPAs. We’re constantly on the lookout for like minded professionals that we work with. And one of the areas that I think we can bring them to the table is to see who we are and plug them in within our LinkedIn. I mean, that’s it’s interesting. Most of my clients are are individuals or families.

Mhmm.

Do they get on the LinkedIn that often?

Not really. Right? Some of them do. Some of them are still working at places like Microsoft and Amazon and places like that, but a lot of folks are retired. And they’re not really jumping into LinkedIn all that much. But I think that the professional, folks that we work with who are still engaged in their careers where we can have topics that are geared around high net worth clients and dealing with certain items that their clients are gonna be interested in learning about and understanding that that’s an area that we specialize in.

I think Have you, Chad, have you sent out have you been leveraging every month?

We’ve, you know, we version the blog into an email that can go to clients and prospects, but a separate one that’s written to go to centers of influence. Have you been using that and had any success?

Yeah. I I believe so. Now this is a little one thing I’m I try to do with this is delegate most of this to Miley in my office. Right?

And it’s something we’ve been talking about. We haven’t been doing a lot with it yet, but I think that’s, again, getting back to recognizing we’re not doing we’re not doing a great job of nurturing the relationships that we’re establishing. So said differently, let’s say we go and meet with somebody, have coffee with them, talk about a a client that we’re both working for, and we see them one time. It’s like planting a seed in the dirt and then not coming back to water it, not having sunshine.

Here’s the tip.

Make sure your team is using the center of influence email, which is completely designed for For that.

Yes.

Just have to add them to your CRM group. You know, create that COI group into the web, and then tell Shannon to make sure that we’re you’re dripping.

Mhmm.

Those are written with exactly that in mind. It’s it’s high end, you know, sort of sophisticated planning topics, dripping on it, talking about, you know, no pressure, no sales pitch, but, like Right.

You know, here’s ways we could collaborate.

Doug, are you using the COI emails, and have you had any success?

So we are using the COI, emails to, obviously, our COIs.

Interesting thing about the the COI email coupled with our LinkedIn, and I can’t say there’s a specific referral that came to us as a result of specific content. I can tell you that, two of my COIs have now written endorsements that’ll be going on our our website, and I’m not spending every weekend going out to dinner with them. Yeah.

So I know I know there’s an impact there. There there’s there there’s the branding impact. It’s it’s kinda like if you have a LinkedIn and you’re not active on it, you’re not impacting your existing clients in the manner that you’d like to. When you’re active on it, clients are gonna continuously at times see things going on in your feed, whether it’s personal or professional, and that is creating that is legitimizing your business within your existing clients’ minds.

That was the first thing we noticed when we went to different is what a massive impact it had on our existing clients, which are much more important to our firm than the potential new client that’s gonna walk through the door tomorrow. So there is a massive impact if you’re active on it. And if you wanna expand your base, Susan, you taught me this a long time ago. I can still get better at it.

But if you wanna expand expand your base in LinkedIn, you wanna try to get active. Comment on other people’s posts. Like other people’s posts. Givers get in this world.

And just think about how much time we spend on our phones doing whatever.

Take five minutes of that time a day and go like and comment on five people’s posts on LinkedIn.

Like Sam, he could give our webinars.

I know. I love it. I love it. Well, a few things I just wanna point out too that you’ve all said that I think I wanna make sure that everybody hears is number one, Chad said not all of the clients are on LinkedIn, and that’s true.

If you if somebody’s already retired, they’re not gonna be on LinkedIn. But pretty much anyone who’s not retired, there’s a lot of studies that show that LinkedIn is, fast quickly becoming the one of the fastest, growing in terms of time used on the app. Like, the amount month over month that it goes up and how much we’re going to it is really rapidly increasing. And, also, the type of content we’re consuming there is changing.

So people are looking for more personal posts, personal updates, videos, gaining a lot of popularity.

So I wouldn’t sleep on LinkedIn, and I also it’s a great platform to connect with the next generation. So if you have clients who maybe aren’t on LinkedIn but their kids are, that is a fantastic way to reach out and connect with them. So they’re not seeing you regularly, but they can start seeing your great content and, you know, get a sense of how you work maybe with their parents or, the kind of expertise that you have.

I also of which, have either of you guys used the family meeting email that we wrote?

Have you gotten any any family meetings out of it? Mhmm. K.

Josh, you’ve done that one?

No. I I have not.

Alright.

We don’t we don’t need to get Doug Doug Doug was saying yes.

So I was giving him the bar.

No. We we’ve sent it out. We’ve gotten responses from it. We’ve had family meetings here.

They’re not every week. They’re they’re a little bit fewer far between, but it absolutely, we have gotten responses from that email, that specific email that you’re referring to and scheduled family meetings with the parents and the kids. I love that idea, Sam, about, in LinkedIn reaching out to the kids. Mhmm.

I have not done that one.

That one Actually, that’s a great one.

Take your take the family members and send connection requests. Just try to work your way through all of your clients and their next gen. The only thing I see a lot of like, I have I’m old enough to see to have friends who have retired. Lucky them.

They are active on LinkedIn because they have more time, and I think they’re still curious, like, what you know, maybe not in five years, but the, like, recently retired, I think they still dabble in LinkedIn.

No. That’s a good that’s a good point.

Well, if they’re not on LinkedIn, that’s another reason why we’re still doing Facebook and why why we’re bringing Instagram on. We do believe the older generation is on social media even if it’s not LinkedIn.

For sure.

So I wanted to just highlight some of the great posts that you all have done. Aw. Just to give everybody some some insight and some inspiration.

I wanna go to that pool.

Yes. Is that your dog, Doug?

Dog? That’s Doug’s pool and Doug’s dog learning how to swim.

She’s got a little video there, and I love it. And I think that it’s so cute that you tied that in. Memorial Day, we think about barbecues. We think about getting together with family.

We think about opening up the pool. So you you turn the Memorial Day post into something that obviously love people, loved, and resonate with you. Got lots of engagement on that one, and that you’re not afraid to just pull out your phone and make a video. Not everybody feels comfortable with that, but you are and you do it, and, it works.

But then you also see things like the seven year end tax ideas on your to do list. So I think it’s a nice a nice mix. Gotcha.

And when you do record things, like these videos, how long would you say it takes you to make them?

The video of the dog took me eighteen seconds. Yeah.

No. So one thing one thing no. In all sincerity, one thing that I’ve gotten really comfortable with, probably with the help of Will, my concierge, Susan, and others, is it’s okay not to be perfect on video and still post it. You know, I come from a generation when everything had to be perfect, and you would go through twenty seven takes to get every word, every pause, every, you know, impression perfect.

It it comes across phony. So I’ll just pick the phone. My wife gets a little annoyed with me sometimes, but I’ll just pick the phone up and start recording a video about something and just put it on to to LinkedIn. And it’s okay if I if I stumble a little bit, if I say three too many ahs, I’m not worrying about it.

It’s my authentic self, and that’s what I want people to know.

I want them to know You’re just using your phone, right, wherever you are, and then you use the FMG platform.

You just upload it or have your concierge upload it.

Right?

Hundred percent. Yeah. It’s that simple. And then I don’t have to worry about compliance because you guys handle all the compliance. It just goes through and comes out. Done.

Love it. And then here’s some examples, from you, Chad. And I what I love both of you too, is that they’re I think they’re great examples of the idea that it doesn’t have to just be financial related if it’s not a hundred percent personal either. I think people think either, like, I have to just give a financial tip or it’s gonna be a photo of my dog.

But these tap into the idea that, you know, like, the one about hurricane season coming. Right? It’s things we’re thinking about, things that are in the news, things that get conversations going. So, and they’re both what we call zero click content, so written in a way where you can read it and get the gist of it without needing to go read a blog post or something like that.

So, it’s a little bit about You know, one of the challenges to writing a content calendar for anybody is getting that perfect mix of content.

So these are both do it for me posts, and, actually, the thumbnails, I think, are are ones that we picked.

And they so we have plenty that are on financial topics, then we have observances, but we also are trying to think about what’s timely this month that might be on people’s minds. And then we’re also thinking about, you know, what’s happening in the world right now that clients might be nervous about and then writing about that. So it’s if you kinda have to be thinking about wake up every day thinking, is there anything that I should be communicating and or as I think about planning for the next month that would be relevant and then writing on all of those topics, which is a lot.

But I I would say a lot of people were probably like, what the heck are you guys writing about hurricanes up in Seattle for? Right? I was gonna say, we have clients all over the country.

Right.

That’s a that’s a big part of it who and we have I have a kid who’s going to the southeast for college, and we have, you know No.

Big time.

I mean, this is part of the ecosystem of what our what clients are thinking about. Right? So it’s, it’s important. And I I just saw something a note about how you guys are helping with regard to events and things.

I there is there is you talked about videos. Miley’s phenomenal in terms of doing videos that we actually Shannon helped put on our website. I don’t know if you guys have our website available, but I don’t know if you could show that or not. I don’t know if that’s important.

But we we she she takes videos, with her phone of attendees and all of us at our when we do our workshops, our abundance, retirement abundance workshops. And then people can get on on online and kinda get a a feel for the vibe and what we’re gonna talk about and what people are saying about it. And it has been incredibly useful for prospective attendees to get on our website ahead of time to kinda understand what what they’re gonna be hearing about. That’s been we’ve gotten a lot of very positive feedback. Almost all the attendees that come to our our workshops get on our website first. And so we have an entire section under our events tab, that kinda goes into that. I don’t know if that’s so I just saw somebody ask that in the in the chat.

So that’s that’s how we do that.

So every quarter Doug, have you taken advantage of help every quarter putting on an event?

We do not do one every quarter. No. We’ve we did a pie Thanksgiving pie thing, which was great.

In that, we were emailing it to the clients. And Will, my concierge, he created a a a a website that wasn’t viewable by the public. You had to have the link. Yeah. Folks would click on the link, and it was all the information. It looked like it was our website. It was ours.

But we’re not doing quarterly events. No.

We if you wanted to so for those listening, do it for me one of the other things they’ll do is your concierge.

First of all, almost every every month, Sam and I and others are brainstorming what would be an awesome event to put on the following month because they you need the lead time. And then we do everything from, like, what would the invite look like, social post, what would the agenda look like, what are your talking points, what’s the logistics, who could you ask to join, blah blah blah. But then the concierge, quarterly, will offer to actually help you put on, you know, the the promotion of the event from the landing page to sending out the emails to the post and so on. And I’ve heard from advisers that it’s been really, really successful.

Yeah.

You know what, Sam? I am getting I see some questions like how can I sign up? Do you think we should do the whole before?

That’s a great idea. I was just pulling up while while you’re looking at this. This is what the event overview would look like. It gives you everything you need.

But, yeah, if we would launch the poll, because so many people do have questions, we would love to walk through the price. If you currently are with FMG, what an upgrade would look like, what it looks like to meet with your concierge every month, walk you through examples of the content, answer all your specific questions, maybe have specific questions about your broker dealer and how that compliance workflow would be. So if you just say yes, please, we will contact you directly to answer those questions. And so if you would just say yes, yeah, then we’ll we’ll answer all those questions and walk you through specifically, what it would look like for you in your particular scenario.

So everyone can wanna make sure before we you know, people probably will start dropping a little bit as we get to the end.

I know everybody wants to understand how you guys measure success. So the do it for me program, you know, isn’t inexpensive. It’s eight hundred and ninety five dollars a month.

Sam and I think that’s a bargain for all the time that we put into it, but, and and getting the concierge. Hold on. I’m getting married. Absolutely.

But it’s a lot. So how do you, as a business owner, think about that expense, and how do you sort of report on it and measure it in your head at the end of the year?

You might want me to go first, Doug?

Yeah. Yeah.

I I did I I look at it from the standpoint of what it would cost us to hire somebody to just be a full time marketing person, and it’s gonna be a lot more than what we’re spending for this. Right? That’s that’s first and foremost. Second, I I I if it’s if if we believe that the content is supportive and we are we are believing we are playing the long game. Right? We don’t know when something is gonna resonate.

Yeah. Wanna be in front of people. It’s it’s out of sight, out of mind. It is not the field in Iowa that people are just gonna drive their cars to.

Right. There’s no, like, magic button.

That is not no. But if somebody has a moment remember, our we’re a life transitions. Somebody goes through a divorce. Someone loses a loved one.

Those are those moments that we specialize in. We need to be in front of the CPAs, the attorneys, our existing clients, and prospective clients who may have attended a workshop so that when that time does happen, they at least think of us, right, to give us that opportunity. And it’s hard it’s hard to say, oh, here’s why this works. Because it’s it is it it takes time.

It takes time to kinda matriculate and, sort of percolate a little bit to to to get get you to those results, but we’re seeing some of those results happening now. So it’s it’s a very supportive thing in terms of all the other stuff that we are doing.

I think it’s in a nutshell, it’s it is you have to believe in content marketing as a strategy. Doug, why don’t you answer the question?

First of all, I just wanted to say to Chad, what a relief to listen to someone who gets it.

Amongst my colleagues or advisers who aren’t doing the type of marketing we are, they’re always defaulting to the number one thing that I will I will advise all of you on this on this webinar. Do not try to measure this based upon revenues.

This is not like doing a seminar. I sent out x number of invitations.

I paid x number of dollars for dinners, and I got y number of assets, which did or did not pay for it. It was a success or not. This is not about the revenues. This is, as Chad said, the long game.

Some of the KPIs we’re using, Susan, because this is about building a brand, and I will give you a number in just a minute, but I believe revenue is an unfair barometer. I’m looking at things like what percentage of our clients are opening their emails. Fifty four percent versus twenty seven percent in the industry. That’s a win.

What’s going on with the impressions on my social media post? Predifferent, we’re at about fifty. Today, we’re at about three hundred to three thousand depending on what I’m putting out there. Our single best post, which was about, having your children open up Roth IRAs when they get their first job.

I put a picture of my myself and my daughter out there. Fifty thousand people saw that post. That was the largest one we’ve ever had. That’s a win.

These are the things that I I had three new clients. You mentioned three potential clients came in over the last month, All three independent of themselves and independent of us asking, made raved about our website and how well it’s been put together.

I don’t question whether this works. Now some of you out there still want numbers. So let me give you numbers. I’ve been using Diffum for two years now. First year, I could attribute almost zero to Diffum specifically.

By the end of the second year, I can attribute ten million dollars in new assets.

Whatever you charge for your fee, apply that to it. Eight hundred dollars a month, don’t even think about it.

That’s amazing. Well done.

Well done. And I think one of the things you know, Susan and I, full time marketers, this is our whole job. We coach people how to be marketers. We run a marketing business.

We just had this conversation yesterday about how the attribution funnel is so difficult in twenty twenty five because it’s not like it was ten or fifteen years ago where you say, I sent someone this email. They clicked it. Now they’re a customer. So we know that email worked.

Attribution is somebody gets your name. They look you up online. They see your LinkedIn. Maybe they follow you for a little while, then they forget all about it.

Two years goes by, but they’re on your email list. They’re getting your emails. Now that life event happens that Chad just mentioned. And so then they click the email, so you’re like, oh, it was the email, but we don’t know what exactly which of those touch points it was because you’ve just been staying in front of them in general.

So it’s really a combination of factors. And the main thing that we do know, though, is that having no visibility, not regularly sending emails, not having an updated website, not having a social media presence.

No visibility is no visibility. And if we could tell all of you, here’s all the AAUM you lost by not being visible, you know, obviously, that would be amazing, but we can’t because we don’t know. We don’t know all the people that didn’t say yes because you just weren’t visible.

So I’ve had I met an adviser who called it the referral leak, and he was like, I can measure the referral leak because he’s like, I know I mean, you know, I’m saying he he believed he was staying in front of his clients.

This was this was pre joining FMG. It was a long time ago, but he realized that referrals go to your website, but not all of them are calling. And if you’re not able to wow them, we can go into a website webinar where we talk about, you know, first impressions, five second rule, and all that. And then you’re not on social because they are looking at your social as well. You’re not even capturing those referrals, and, you know, that’s lost business. But we’ve heard I think we’ve I mean, every week in our different wins channel, we hear about somebody who converted a prospect that they’ve been dripping on for years, for, you know, months. Actually, usually, it’s years.

Like Chad said, you never know when they’re going to be ready. You just need to stay in front of them.

Well, and I would add, you wanna nurture that possibility of them wanting to talk to you. Right? And if you’ve gotta it’s like planting it. It’s the law of the farm, planting a seed.

You gotta water it. You gotta take care of it. You hope the sun comes along and helps you. I mean, this is that’s what this marketing is about.

It’s all of these all of these things build to a crescendo.

Right? And, not one thing is necessarily going to be the it may it may happen.

There might be that one, but it’s pretty rare.

Yeah. It’s it’s gotta be a combination of consistent, professional efforts, in my opinion.

Back back in the day, we used to say how in order for someone to become a client, you had to have nine meaningful communications with them.

Oh, okay.

In person or telephone calls back when we’re doing this. This is another form of that. This is another way to communicate. I saw the person who sent a message in about do we put prospects before we’ve met with met them in our email distribution. Yes. I put everyone in my email distribution.

Until they opt out, they go into the email distribution. Because with FMG, I can create different groupings. I can create a, b, c clients. I can create clients and prospects. There’s all different ways that I can slice and dice this to be more laser like or more shotgun approach, with my marketing. So everybody goes into the email because I never know, like Chad said, what the result is gonna be. Another area that I think oftentimes is overlooked by us advisors when it comes to marketing like this, and possibly even you guys at FMG, is for those advisors like me who are in acquisition mode.

When you’re trying to compete to acquire businesses, anyone in acquisition mode knows lots of buyers, very few sellers.

When you get that opportunity, those sellers are going to go see who you are out in the social media world. It’s great to have a presence rather than just a dormant social media site, so to speak.

It’s great for recruiting new talent. It’s, you know, young advisers who wanna join. Yeah. It’s it goes so far beyond, you’re right, just client client acquisition.

Great point. A really, really great point. I somebody had asked about, could they see more of this summer event? So I just wanted to say that this will be something you’re all very excited about to hear.

We are actually giving away to all of you who were here today this summer marketing playbook. So you’re all gonna get sent to your emails.

Our summer marketing playbook that has that example of how to host the event with the invitation, the email copy, the landing page copy, everything you need. Whether you ever sign up with FMG or not, this is our gift to you for spending this hour with us, and it will really help power your marketing. There are some sample emails in there, the sample event, and it should give you a real flavor of what the do it for me program does look like. So look for that in your inbox, and feel free to take a look at it, use it however you like. Susan, are there more questions that we did not get to yet?

I’m sure we missed some, and I’m so sorry. But, if you’d like to reach out, do we have a final you can email us at marketing at f m g suite dot com. If we did not get to your question, we would love to. And I just am so grateful for Chad and Doug and their passion for joining us. We’re so we so appreciate you, but I love everybody who joined us. Very, very, very.

It was so insightful to hear directly from both of you how you’re making your marketing work, and, we’re so thankful to be able to partner with you both and see the awesome results that you’re having with just putting a little bit of time into it. So thank you all for joining. And if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. See you.