If I Were Planning Your Month of Content, Here’s Exactly What I’d Post

So today, we’re gonna go through this quick, hopefully keep you all interested. If you have any questions at all that you wanna make sure I absolutely see, put them in the question box because if you put them in the chat, it just goes away. But if you wanna share that question with everyone to get everyone else’s response or you want to say, you know, something that’s worked well for you and you want everyone to be able to learn from that, the chat is the best place for that.

Okay. So if we haven’t had a chance to meet yet, hello. I’m Samantha Russell. I am the chief evangelist here at FMG, which basically means I get to do a lot of this.

I am constantly looking at where the puck is headed when it comes to marketing, especially the intersection of marketing and finance and technology. And then I share all of that information both with our team at FMG so we can build better products and services, and then share all of what I’m learning with all of you, and we can learn in real time together. Previously, I was the cofounder and CMO at Twenty Over Ten, which FMG acquired in 2020, and I’m a mom to three little kids that keep me very, very busy. And we just got back from doing a study…

World school study abroad as a family program in Italy, so that was awesome as well.

And if you’re not familiar with FMG, we are the all in one platform that can help you really with every single level of your marketing. So if you are a 20 o…

20 of 10. If you…

Because I saw saw Mandy wrote yay 20 over 10. Yay, Mandy. I’m so glad you’re here. If you are using FMG for any or all parts of your marketing, I saw we have some awesome customers on the line.

Or if you’re not familiar, these are all the different parts of of your marketing stack that we now help with. So you can see it is a lot.

Yes. Lori said, Diffumrocks. Do… That is our do it for me pro… Program, which we are going to talk about today.

And we’ve got our marketing suite. We have websites. We can help with text messaging.

We have our do it for me program, which, again, I’m gonna spend some time talking about that today because that really applies to building out content calendars. We just, this past year, launched FMG testimonials, which if you’ve been paying any attention, you know that that’s a huge part of how AI searches like Claw and ChatGPT, Gemini will decide which businesses to recommend. So if you haven’t checked out that, we’ve been signing new broker dealers on.

It feels like by the week. I think it’s more by the month, but definitely check that out. And then we just launched two new products, our institutional intelligence and FMG Connect. So we can help you no matter where you are in your marketing journey. And, oh my goodness, I am seeing all of these amazing comments. We’ve got a lot of love for FMG, and, thank you so much for that. That’s so kind.

Oh, and I saw someone else is interested in doing boundless. Oh my gosh. We are all aligned, everybody. So final housekeeping things before we get into it. The session is being recorded, and we will send out the replay. But it’s always best if you pay attention because then you can ask your questions and get them answered.

And we will share the slides, and we actually have a really fun bonus. So stick around for that so you understand what it is and how you can use it afterwards. And we also will, you know, show you the the do it for me program. Love it.

Debbie said we use the marketing insights email every week, and our clients appreciate it. We get tons of comments. Love it. Keep the chat going.

You guys are awesome. Okay. So before we can actually make our plan of me telling you, okay, this is what I would post. Let’s just take a look at the current landscape.

So all of these insights come from NP Digital, which is one of my favorite places to look at data on what’s working. So this is a graph showing the cost versus the potential ROI for different marketing tactics. And what I wanna draw your attention to is, okay, this is how much you’re spending on the bottom axis. And on the top, this is the ROI you get out of it.

Right? So if you look at this top quadrant here, like…

Or the whole top half, we can see blogs, webinars, and tools, case studies, and emails are going to provide the most ROI. Now social media is not on this, and there’s a reason why we won’t talk about that at the moment. But this is a lot of what we’re gonna talk about today because this is where you’re gonna get the biggest bang for your buck. So keep that in mind.

The second thing is…

Oh, sorry. ROI stands for return on investment. So if you spend a dollar, are you only making a dollar back, or are you making a $100 for that $1 you spent? Right?

So for a blog, you don’t have to spend very much. It’s just your time writing it versus look at the ROI you get. So, hopefully, makes sense. Yes.

Podcast was on there. Does not give as much ROI as what this is showing. I think it depends on how well you do it, but we’re gonna talk about that.

And then the the next question is, okay. So blogging was a big one. Does how often you’re publishing increase the number of followers and brand authority you have? So they’re looking at published posts for both social media blogs, like any content. And what you can see is that the average follower count, if you care about that, doesn’t really start to make a huge difference until you’re posting 26 times a week or more, which none of us are probably gonna do that.

But if we look at the average monthly search right, you can start to see a very big, you know, increase happening very quickly. So, yes, having a consistent plan makes a big difference in how visible you are. And this is probably one of my favorite graphs because we have so many people that come to us at F and G. They get started. They start putting the blog post out. They start the social media, and then they’re two months in, and they’re like, where are all my leads?

This chart shows the exponential nature of contacts generated. Right? So what we want to happen is we have to be a little patient and understand that the number of new contacts you get from your current month’s content, that’s the black line, versus the content… Contacts generated from previous month content. So it builds on itself our… Over time.

And then this is one other chart before we dive into it because as you’re building out… We’re building out our content plan for the month, we wanna know, okay, for our demographic we’re trying to target, what do they care about?

And there’s some things you’re gonna see that is really, really interesting. Right? So first of all, baby boomers are some of the most engaged when it comes to all the types of content. And I think people are surprised by this, but right now, this age group in a lot of ways, you know, they’re… We have so many of them that are retired already. So they have more time to spend scrolling Facebook or keeping up with people.

But if you’re trying to connect with, you know, them on Instagram, it’s not going to be as successful. So this is gonna show you which platforms that you want to focus on. I would love to know in the chat when it comes to social media. So Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. I’ve heard sometimes people saying they’re using TikTok even though they’re not supposed to be.

Google, which platforms are you most focused on for social media?

Tell me in the chat because I’d love to see where everybody is spending the most time. What we find at FMG is that almost every single person has their LinkedIn account connected.

Not everybody has all the others. So… Okay. We got a lot of LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, some Facebook, a few… More Instagrams than probably ever before. That’s awesome. Facebook gets the most interactions.

Nothing. Okay. Well, we can help you fix that. So…

Okay. So now that we’ve set the stage on, you know, what we need to be thinking about as we’re building it, the next step is to have the placeholders in for the most important content. So if we go back to that chart that shows blogging and, you know, events and all those things, which ones are really gonna deliver the most ROI, that’s how we start in the email news. That’s how we start building the content.

So this is actually a screenshot here of one of our do it for me content calendar. So if you’re in our do it for me program, every month, you are pair…

Well, you’re paired initially with someone from FMG, and every month, they are gonna deliver a content calendar like this to you that is created for the month. This comes from my own experience and Susan, our CMO’s experience doing this for many firms. So what we would always do is sit down at the beginning of the month and think, okay. What are the nonnegotiable that we have to do?

And what that comes down to is two emails, two blogs, and at least…

Those are per month, and then at least three social posts a week. So as we’re building this out, right, you can see the the purple is the social media, the green is the email, and then the the blue right here is the blog post. And so that’s the foundation. So for any of you sitting there thinking about next month’s calendar, that’s what you know you need to come up with.

Right? Is we need at least two blogs. Now what you can do and what we do is not everybody goes to your blog just because you publish a post. So then we actually, take those blogs and iterate them into an email that is sent out.

So now we know people are reading that content because we’re emailing it to them. But we don’t just email it to our clients. We email it to prospects. We have a separate list for prospects, and we have a version of that same email for prospects.

And then we also have a version for COIs. COIs is center of influence. Who would a center of influence be? It depends on your practice.

If you serve doctors, physicians, it might be somebody who runs, you know, a residency program at a local hospital. But if you work with a lot of, you know, business owners, it could be somebody who works at a local payroll processing office. Right? It could be an estate planning attorney.

So the COIs that you build on your list is gonna be separate.

Okay. So once we know that’s what we need, now the next thing I like to do is think, are we gonna have any sort of theme for the month?

What I have found is that most people need to hear about something at least seven times before they start to associate you with it. So for instance, if you realize, man, a lot of prospects are looking for estate planning. A lot of our clients don’t even know we can help them with estate planning.

I would like to get that message out. You could have a whole theme about estate planning for a month, and then all your content…

Or not all of it. Right? You don’t wanna have 27 social posts about estate planning, but a lot of the content, especially at least one blog, one email will be about that topic. Right?

So you’re gonna choose a topic. So for the interest of this, I’m showing that for October, because it is cybersecurity awareness month, and there are AI scams like crazy. I’m hearing stories every week. It feels like my friend just had her mom get scammed.

Her mom gave her Social Security number over the phone to somebody.

That is just crazy. So, you know, we can make a whole theme around financial, you know, security and cybersecurity.

Okay. I see a bunch of people are asking a question. What was Spencer’s question before we move on?

Spencer, can somebody… Are the social posts just business related and major holidays?

Would your contact at FMG work with you to make nonbusiness related posts, team updates, accomplishments, etcetera? So when you mean business posts, I’m gonna make an assumption here. So…

And I’m gonna show you the calendar in full. But first of all, yes, your contact at FMG helps you thinking about how do you make it your own. So a big part of that truly is just images. So if you and your team, let’s say, Thanksgiving, go and give back, you and all volunteer to Habitat for Humanity Day.

You get a picture and you put that into your content calendar to say, we’re gonna post that, you know, for Thanksgiving as a team. We just went and volunteered at Habitat for Humanity. You have the picture and you post it. That is a fantastic way to, you know, drive engagement, to show your humanity, all of those things.

So, absolutely, that’s part of it. But the posts themselves are not just…

I wouldn’t say strict, like, true investment financial planning topics. We have, you know, content about buying a second home, for instance. We know a lot of high net worth people are thinking about that. And not just the money about it, but, you know, is it worth it from a lot of perspectives?

How much time are you gonna spend there? Is it gonna be another thing you have to upkeep? Are you gonna rent it out? So that’s just one example of the type of content that would be in there.

Okay.

Joe just said we had 76 out of 96 people open a cybersecurity email. That is an amazing open rate, and I’m not surprised. I mean, I think this is on the minds of a lot of people right now as we see more and more of those scams. So here would be an example.

Right? So if you’re gonna make cybersecurity awareness your theme, you could have an email that says clients and pros…

This could go to…

I’m sorry. Both your clients and prospects. And the subject could be, would you know if a scammer was using your daughter’s voice? And then go into all the nuts and bolts of the situation.

The social post could look like this. Right? So it’s giving really good tangible tips right there in the post itself. This, by the way, is called zero click content, and we we know that that is the format that works on social media now.

It’s no longer, oh, just go read my blog post. You want to give somebody something needy to respond to in the post itself. So all of our posts from do it for me’s program are…

And, actually, both of these are examples from October’s do it for me content. So this is what an actual social post will look like. This is an email that would go out. So once you’ve got your theme, right, then we need to start thinking about creating the content if we’re creating it from scratch for those of you not working with us.

Or if you are working with us, how do we decide which content to choose to use?

Good question. Many FMG social posts are long. Is that proven to be more effective than short and sweet? Yes.

It is long for a reason because…

Let me go back to this one. If you look at this post, when you land on social media…

And, actually, you know what I’ll do? I’ll just pull up my LinkedIn really quickly so you can all…

Can everybody see my LinkedIn? Uh-oh. I gotta update my credit card for LinkedIn here.

When you’re on, you you know, LinkedIn, you see over here this post how it says more, and we have to click it to read it. That is a a note to the algorithm that somebody…

When somebody clicks more, so the post is long, that tells the algorithm they interacted with the post. Then the longer I keep this post on the page and I’m reading it, that’s something called dwell time. And that tells the algorithm, oh, people are reading Jay’s post. So longer posts, as long as they’re good and people read them longer and dwell on them longer, the algorithm will reward you with more views and showing it to more people.

Does that make sense? So those two things are really important, which is why we format our post the way we do. The other thing is if you just say, go read my blog post. Let’s say someone goes and reads it, and it’s great.

How likely are they to come back to LinkedIn or Instagram or Facebook and leave a comment? Almost never. But if you write in the post itself, have all of this, he’s got 15 comments. People have something to respond to.

And remember, comments are the currency of social media. The more comments you get, the more the algorithm says this is a good post. We’re gonna show it to more people. So that is why we structure the posts in the way that we do.

Hopefully, that helps. Does that help everybody understand that way? Okay.

K. Good. Everybody’s saying that’s helpful. They didn’t know that. Awesome. I love it. So we’ve got the theme.

Now we’re gonna start thinking about, you know, what we wanna post. So for social media, we’re gonna start there, then we’ll go into email and then blog. Because those are the three we’re really gonna be focused on. Not everybody’s gonna make videos.

Not everybody’s gonna make podcasts. Not everyone’s gonna host events. However, everybody, at a bare minimum, should have social posts, blogs, and emails. The others are amazing to add into the mix, but this is the foundation we’re gonna start from.

And by the way, if you are part of the do it for me program, we do help you with those other things. So we give you podcasts and YouTube scripts. We give you the event playbook. So we’ll talk about that in a minute, but this is the bare minimum that you should be planning for the month.

Oh, and Debbie, I love it. Debbie just said the market insight email is long, and it includes lots of charts, but the clients respond positively to them each week. Such a good point. As long as there’s value, the length, you know, is not a deterrent at all.

Okay. Debbie, thank you. Let’s give Debbie some swag, Aubrey. Debbie, if you could send a a message to us and give us your email, we would absolutely…

Or not your email. Your address, we would love to send you some some swag. Okay. So here’s the the format.

Right?

Minimum three posts per week for social media. One, showing off your expertise, one that gets the conversation going, gets eyeballs, and one that shares some sort of personal photo or angle. And if you can, you want to ask a question that is easy for people to answer in the comments. Okay?

So I’m gonna pull back up my, oops, LinkedIn here and just pull up my own page just to give you an exam…

Give you some examples. Right? So I just posted this about our time in Italy, and I related it to why it’s so important to get testimonials. So you can see this is a very long post, but it’s got 34 comments, 26,000 impressions.

It’s doing really good.

I’ve got the picture of my kids. I talk about… All about our time in Italy, and then I explain how I vetted the program and why testimonials and reviews were so important. So I’m sharing a personal story, sharing a photo, but then tying it to something we at FMG can help you with. Right?

Here’s one that’s a video format, but here’s one that shows expertise. So I’ve got a chart. I’m talking about how things are changing in the world of AI. I’m showing that if you’re a financial adviser that I’m somebody you’d want to follow or who could help you think about your AI visibility strategy. Right?

Then you’ve got, you know, me talking on investment news. So, again, credibility, expertise, I was quoted in there. So you wanna have a mix of all of those different types of content. Now that is my personal, and I always will get asked, okay.

Well, what’s the difference between personal and your professional? If…

Especially on LinkedIn, also on Facebook. Think of it this way. The personal page is where you’re gonna do most of the engaging, get most of the comments, build, you know, your personal brand, connect with the most people. You can share with the personal photos, all of that.

On the brand page, your LinkedIn and Facebook pages, especially LinkedIn, though, are really gonna help more with search and AI engine optimization. So those tools will pull from your company LinkedIn page information. So I would leave it to be much more, you know, sharing press releases, sharing any kind of, you know, those market…

Weekly market insights, sharing financial planning articles. You wouldn’t just put, like, necessarily a personal photo from just one of your team members there. Right? Now if one of your team members went and volunteered in Nepal and was giving back and you got…

You know, your whole team fundraise for it, then, yes, that’s applicable. But you wouldn’t just have one person share a picture of their family in Rome. Does that make sense? Hopefully.

Okay. So you also…

When you wanna…

When we’re building out our social media, we wanna be thinking about what stops the scroll. Right? So I like to think of the what’s in it for me mindset. So on this post, I have this one simple change can double your email open rate and get thousands more views on your social posts.

So…

But we always wanna think about what’s that first line that’s going to make it…

You know, somebody pay attention to it.

No one cares what you can do, but they care a heck of a lot about what you can do for them. So I love this visual. This is from Apple. Imagine if Apple would have went to market originally with the iPod with the first portable digital media player. Right? That’s all about them.

Instead, they went to market with a thousand songs in your pocket. It’s all about what you’re gonna be able to do. So always keep that in mind. How is this gonna be interesting or beneficial for someone?

The only time where you can do a little different of a hook is if you’re telling a story about your own life first because we are all nosy. So if someone’s like, here’s how I got out of debt, everybody wants to read that because a, they think, well, maybe I’m in debt. How could I apply it to me? But also, we’re just nosy.

So those are the two structures that work a 100%. Oh, and I see a lot of people asking about the difference between impressions and views. So impressions is how many times that post was just in your feed, and that’s what LinkedIn shares. So, actually, I can just show you real…

Maybe this will be helpful to all of you. On any of your posts, if you go…

Let’s go back to that one, and you click view analytics. Did you guys all know about this button? So it will show you how many times it was in the feed, how many of them individual people were reached, and then you could see how many of them were your current followers or connections versus how many were not a first degree. And then down here, you can actually see was it reposted, and these are my favorite.

How many times was it sent on LinkedIn? Okay? And how many times was it saved? Those two things.

And how many followers did you gain? So what I have found is those three metrics, followers gained, sends, and saves are really important.

I will look at my analytics on my posts, and those really help me understand which are the ones that, you know, my audience likes the most, and I should make more content like that.

Okay. So let’s go back to this. We gotta keep going. We’re we’re… You guys have so many great questions. So, again, you just wanna help the person think, hey. That’s me when you’re writing the post. Over 50 and earning more than a 150,000, read this.

If, you know, you help them identify that it’s for them, then you also want them to think, I don’t wanna make this mistake, or I wanna save this amount of money. So first, you help them identify that it’s for them, and then you help them understand what to do next. Right?

You also want to aim, as I mentioned before, for at least one personal photo for per month. So, again, if you’re working with our do it for me program, you can simply email your concierge the picture and say, okay. For this month, I looked… I took a look at the calendar.

I wanna add to this post this picture, and they will tell you where it makes sense. Right? So if there’s something to do with back to school, they might say, hey. If you feel comfortable sharing any pictures of your kids or your grandkids or an old photo from the past.

So they’ll help guide you on, like, where those personal photos make a difference. But why don’t you all tell me in the chat, how often, if you have ever shared a personal photo, was that one of your most engaging posts ever? Because we have found that that almost always is the case. Whenever you share a personal photo and if…

Especially if there’s a story, it’s always where you get the most engagement. Everyone is saying almost always, a 100%. What you also wanna remember, you don’t need to tie it even to the post. So for instance, the other day, I was talking about something kinda boring about KPIs and that’s key performance indicators.

What are the most important things for you to track in your marketing? And then I put a picture of me and my family hiking in Switzerland, and I wrote something like kinda boring post, you know, not boring hike in Switzerland. You know, DM me if you want the the trail we took. People love that, and you don’t even need to tie it to what it is you’re talking about.

Man, you guys have so many good ideas. So celebrating anniversaries always goes well. Send a a photo of my two golden retrievers at the end of my newsletter. Yes. If you add photos to your newsletters, which we’re about to talk about email next, that is huge, huge, huge.

Pets are always loved a 100%. Yes. Instagram is a photo first platform, so you need to use photos or videos. And a lot of times, advisers will tell me, well, I don’t really have photos or, you know, videos to share.

You can even just use…

Let’s say it’s a picture of, you know, your family at Disney World, and then the caption is all about budgeting. Right? So you can do it that way. It…

You don’t need to make it too complicated. Alright. So let’s keep going, though. For email, the email content wanna have a minimum of two emails per month.

So, again, what we do is we take those two that we’ve already created blogs about and then version them for email. And by version, I mean, we’re going to, you know, either put a big chunk of in the email or write most of it and then send them to the full blog depending on the situation. But for the emails, I definitely keep them educational in nature. You wanna teach something and make it worthwhile, not just like, you know, hey.

It’s tax season. If you know anyone who wants to sit down with me, you know, you don’t want it to be salesy.

You can also… By only sending two a month, it leaves room to add in what I call, like, a breaking news one. So if something really happens in the markets or in the news and you wanna add in, like, a special email, it leaves room for that.

And you wanna also just make sure that you think about, would this be something someone would want to send to a friend? And, also, remember the subject line is the most important thing that you write. So if your subject line isn’t good, a lot less people are gonna open it. Now for a lot of you, especially in our do it for me program, what we have found is email open rates are tremendously high, you know, over 45%, which is well above industry standards.

I mean, we have some people 65%. So if you get your audience to trust you, then the subject line becomes a little less important. They’ll just know that whatever you send is gonna be good, and they’ll want to to open it. So here’s the same, right, that same version we talked about of that if…

Would you know if it was a scammer, was using your daughter’s voice? And so we start by telling a story.

And, you know, basically, if you go through the whole email, it talks about how you can tell if this this is a scam. This is a type of email that would get forwarded. Right? If I got this email, I would a 100% send it to my parents because I’m always, you know, worried that they’re going to not understand the nuances of all of this and give out personal information.

So that’s, like, my barometer of what I think about. The other thing about only sending two educational a month, if you do start to get more into podcasts or YouTube or events, you’re gonna wanna send emails about some of that content as well. So you could either add it to a newsletter you’re already sending, or you could have, you know, special event invite newsletters or emails as well. But…

So that’s why we have the two per month.

I just got a question. Can you send too many emails? It seems many are going out when I have them automated through my marketing suite targeting audiences. Yes. There… For sure, you could send too many. You would wanna check and see, you know, how many different ones you have.

We have some people that might have, you know, 10 different emails going out a month, but they’ve segmented their audience. So, actually, that’s a good time to talk about that really quick. How many of you have audience segmentation with your email? So by that, I mean, you have a list of prospects, a list of clients, a list of centers of influence. And then you also maybe within prospects or clients, you know, you have people that are already retired, people that are… Have an annuity, you know, whatever it is. Okay. We’re getting lots of yeses.

So the more segmentation you have, the more emails you can send because not everybody who’s on that already retired email, they’re they’re gonna get different things. Okay. The, you know, the COLA just increased. You’re gonna tell them. You’re not gonna tell everybody on your list who’s in their forties. Right? So that’s where having those different segmentations matters.

I would say I would…

You know, a planned email per per week, like, one week, I wouldn’t do more than that per, like, audience because it also, again, still gives you room. So let’s say my adviser…

I know every week I’m gonna get some sort of educational email from them, and then all of a sudden, you know, and it comes every Thursday. And then on a Tuesday, I see something about, you know, a news update. Well, that’s okay because they’re not emailing me every day or anything like that. There’s been a lot of research specifically why charts has done a lot, Morningstar that has shown most clients say they want to hear from their adviser more, not less.

So I would not worry too much that they’re gonna lose people. If somebody really wants to, they could unsubscribe. If they do unsubscribe, you would see that in your FMG dashboard, and you could reach out to them and just say, hey. Are we sending you too many emails?

How many do you really wanna get? And keep it an open conversation.

Armin said, yes. Tagging groups really helps with emails.

And then someone… Leanne, I think it’s how she says it. We send one email a week, and clients think it’s too much.

If you have a lot of people unsubscribing, you would probably wanna send less because you wanna keep the health of your list strong so that the emails don’t go into spam or, you know, if you have a lot of unsubscribes, it’s not great for your list. So if you get a lot of people unsubscribing, either think about… You know, I would think about reducing the cadence or asking people, you know, the clients specifically why they’re unsubscribing.

Okay.

So let’s keep going because I wanna make sure we have time for everything.

Playbook for blog content. And I saw someone asking before a lot about where would you put the post. So these are gonna go right on your website.

A blog is just a page on your website where you’re gonna, you know, keep updating and adding new content. With FMG, you have access to a bunch of different, you know, content in the content library. With the do it for me program, we will write you two blogs every single month that you can directly add to your… Or we will add for you to your website.

The main thing here that’s so important that a lot of people have not figured out yet is to make sure that these blogs are written to be optimized for these new AI engines because they like them to be written in a certain way. So I’m gonna show you what that looks like, and this is what we’re doing in the back end at FMG. We don’t do all of these exactly because this is more not specific to financial services, but I liked the image to show you. So number one, we wanna make sure that when we’re writing the post that we’re using a lot of question and answer formatting because that is how people interact with AI tools. Right?

We also wanna make sure that we have FAQs as much as we can down at the bottom of the post because, again, the question and answer format is great, but the AI search engines look for the schema on those FAQs.

We also wanna make sure that we write in chunks where the AI can just scrape out that content and easily understand it. So I’m actually going to, oops, pull up an example here. So here is, again, that do it for me calendar in October. So if we click on this, we have… You can see the question, and then it goes into the content. What does an AI voice scam actually sound like? And then the content.

How big is this…

You know, it’s question and then the content, including lots of graphs and charts as well and lots of stats. So when we’re writing these, we are making sure we’re following best AEO practices. And then you can see down here at the bottom, we have these frequently asked questions. This is all going to be in your blog.

This is the difference between the blog and the email. Right? We’re not gonna put these frequently asked questions in the email we send to someone, but they are gonna be on your blog on your website. We also know that AI has what we call a recency bias.

So it really likes to see fresh content. If you were to go do a search on Google two years ago, you might find a blog from five years ago as one of the top ranking pages.

But if you ask Claude or ChatGPT or Google Gemini a question, it very rarely will give you a source more than six months old. I’m sure many of you have noticed that. So we wanna make sure we’re adding content twice a month to the blog, and then also that if you can to format it, like I said, in the way that I just mentioned.

Okay. You all have so many good questions and information.

Let me pull up the next one while I look at them so you guys can look at some of these. Regardless of whether you’re sending though an email, a blog, or a social post, you want to always make sure your content starts with a great hook. So these are just some examples I like to think about whenever I’m writing. What if I told you that?

Have you ever noticed? Why does no one talk about problem solving phases? Here’s how to fix, or do you struggle with this, or this will change the way you think about curiosity phases. Here’s what nobody tells you about whatever.

That one always seems to perform really well for me, by the way.

So what I what I like to do is I like to think about, okay, the nuts and bolts of the content are done. And now what’s that one line, whether it’s the email subject line or the hook, that’s going to just take this over the edge and get people to pay attention to it.

Alright. Let me look at some of your questions.

If you send emails, should you make lots of different lists for the same audience so they don’t necessarily unsubscribe to everything?

Or that…

Could that backfire by making them think the unsubscribe didn’t work? I wouldn’t make it superly overcomplicated. I would just say, you know, if you think about the kind of content even within FMG’s platform. Right?

So we have things that only apply to business owners, and a lot of that is updated regularly. It has to do with legislation. You might wanna send that more regularly, so having a list just for business owners is great. But you don’t need to, you know, get it down to 20 year olds, 30 year olds, 40 year olds.

I would think more about what’s gonna nurture that list and make sure that they want to continue to open your emails and get value.

If we’re just starting to send emails again, would it make sense not to send a ton a month to start, ease into it? I think the first email you send have a great engaging subject line, a great hook at the beginning, and then maybe, like, second paragraph, you put a little, you know, parentheses that says, like, hi. We’re, you know, we’re gonna start emailing you all again. Expect to hear from us twice a month. Leave it at that. I wouldn’t…

Again, I wouldn’t, like, try to ease into it. I think starting a cadence right from the get go will be better.

Okay.

Can you use the same structure? Use Muse to create this structure if we already have an article to turn it into a blog post? Yes. So if you haven’t seen it before, F and G has a AI tool called Muse where you can write content within our platform with having the compliance guardrails, which is amazing.

So it’s not going to, you know, get…

It’s it’s really written based on all of our years, you know, decades of experience of what we know is a compliance risk. So it’s more conservative in the types of context it gives. You can still say, you know, use emojis, things like that, but you could take any of the pieces of content in the FMG library, copy and paste it in there and, you know, use that or you could ask it to write you a piece. So a lot of people will ask that about how do I make sure the content isn’t, you know, a duplicate or things like that.

Use those tools. We are, you know, constantly thinking about ways to, you know, personalize and things that I’m actually gonna show you a great tip next about how you can edit just the first line or first hook to really make your stand out and personalize, but definitely using Muse is a great way to go.

Okay.

Let’s see. Who at F and G could we ask to review our website? I would like to know.

Okay. Yes. We just sent an email. But if you have any specific questions about what plan you have, what tools you have, how we can help you, please send an email to marketing@fmgsuite.com,

and we would love to talk with you through it. Okay. So here’s the formula for all of those hooks, though. You wanna think about who are you targeting?

Who is, you know, who is that person? What do they care about? And then how can you make them think like, You know, that that applies to me. So what I see people do is here are some things to know about Medicaid, or here’s some things to know about whatever it is.

Instead, you wanna say, are you retiring soon? How much you pay for Medicare could be based on a paycheck you haven’t even received in Right? So you really don’t just talk about the thing you wanna talk about. First, you wanna get their attention and make them think, I I know that this applies to me specifically.

I see a lot of you asking, can you help with this? How do you help with this? How do I use FMG? So let’s talk about FMG’s do it for me program.

So we talked a lot today about how I would actually build out your content calendar. Right? We need to identify a theme. We’re gonna have two blogs, two emails, multiple social posts per week.

FMG’s do it for me program was started because I would go out. I would teach this. Susan or Sima would teach this, and then people would come to us and say, can you just do it for me? So we created the program, the do it for me program, DIFM for short, to solve for this very problem.

So, you know, we’ve got all these different things here included in the program, But you probably wanna know what the results are. So here’s just an example from one website that we we were…

I’m sorry. One adviser we were working with, a recent data that we pulled from them. So you can see here’s where they started working with the do it for me program to get regular blog posts added every single month, emails going out, social posts, and look at the huge increase in their traffic. So they’re seeing spikes when they’re sending out those emails, which is normal and which we expect to see.

But overall, their baseline is just higher as well as the content is formatted with best AEO practices and start…

To start. The other thing is that we have just done a huge study, a lot more information coming out soon, but you’re the… All the first to see this. When we looked at the last… The trailing twelve months at the net contact growth rate, right, of all of the people using do it for me, all the advisers using for using do it for me versus not, look at the difference in the growth rate. Do it for me advisers had three times the growth in the net new context. So these are people getting added in as a net new contact prospects and clients overall.

So you can see that the average number of new contacts added per year was 352 per user. So that is a huge, huge change, you know, overall through this program. And, again, this is all based on what we know works.

You do need to give it time to work just like we saw that HubSpot chart in the beginning. But one of the things which…

I just did a webinar yesterday, and I had a ton of do it for me users on there. And one of the things that so many of them said was the value they get in meeting with the concierge every month that will tell them things like, hey. We need to add a personal photo because we know it’s gonna perform better. Or, hey.

We just launched this new features in our event tool. You could run a webinar, and here’s what you could do. So there’s so much that goes into it. Every month, you are given a calendar.

Susan records a video that explains what the strategy for that month is, and then you are able to look at everything that’s planning to go out and decide, do I wanna just use it as is? Do I wanna edit certain things? You’re given a marketing tip for the the month. You’re given a podcast or webinar outline, a video script, and we actually do the implementation, adding the blogs to your website, scheduling the social posts out all on your behalf. Aubrey, while I’m talking about this, why don’t you put a poll up asking people if they’re interested in our do it for me program?

And then that way, we can connect with you one on one and share more about how it all works. But I also wanted to mention one of the things we hear a lot from people is I love the content in FMG, but how do I, you know, even make it more personalized? Remember all those hooks that I showed you all? One of the things that’s such an easy thing to do is to take any of the pieces of content and make it your own with a hook.

So if we’ve got…

We’re gonna give this to all of you, by the way. But if we have a post about Medicare and the Irma, you could then, through here, see, okay. Is it someone who’s approaching retirement that I’m trying to target? Is it a recent retiree?

Is it a high income professional? Is it a business owner? And then just take one of these hooks and pop it in before the social post. So now you know that they are going to be identifying themselves and saying, yes.

This is exactly applies to me, and, you know, I know that this firm gets it. So that is something we’re going to give to all of you today along with…

We are actually going to give you a ton of content from November for our do it for me program so that you can try it out for yourself and make your…

Make it your own. So here’s the email address as well as the QR code if you missed the poll, if you’d like to, you know, learn more about the program. But tell me in the chat, do you feel like this helped you think clearly about planning out your month’s content because I really wanna know if this was clear, if it made sense. I’m probably gonna teach this lesson again, and I wanna edit it.

And if I didn’t explain something, what was I missing that you would love to know for next time? What can we do a deeper dive on?

Is it more about the emails? Is it more about the blogs? Is it more about social?

A 100% I would love to know. And let’s give another piece of swag to Laurie. Laurie just said…

Laurie Howell said having a concierge to help you is part of DIFM, the best part of DIFM? Yes. A 100%. And let’s give Laurie some swag because that is a great point.

This all can be really overwhelming, and this is not your main job, and we understand that. We want your voice, your personality to come through, and we wanna help you make it happen. Happen. And that is why we started the do it for me program.

So, hopefully, that really helps you all think whether you’re using FMG, whether you’re a do it for me customer or just using our tools. I really hope this helps you think about how you can improve your content. If we are not connected on LinkedIn, please let’s connect there, and I share tips every single month that will help you as well. And keep your eyes on your inbox because we have more great webinars coming to teach you things just like this in the coming months.

So I said, oh, that’s funny. We got a lot of people cheering for their football teams as we phase out here. Yes. A 100%.

Go, Ninny Lions. Thank you all for your time, and we will talk to you on the next one.