The Only 2 Marketing Moves Advisors Need Each Month in 2026

So our idea for this, we were a little behind the ball. We should’ve did it in January, but we’re doing it in February, which is fine, is to give you a month by month playbook. So just two things to focus on every month to make it really, really doable.

And I don’t know about you, Susan, but to me, just two seems very, you know, attainable.

It seems very attainable. I wish that’s all I had on my to do list, but of course, advisors have about one hundred other things, so it becomes like, you know, number one thousand and two. But Exactly.

At least it’s just two.

Exactly. So we are really gonna focus on two marketing moves that you need to do every single month. And for housekeeping like normal, if you need to step away or anything like that, don’t worry. This will be sent out to you.

We would actually love to know too if you wouldn’t mind. Tell us in the chat, how did you hear about today’s workshop? We’re trying to see the how much we’re moving the needle on social media versus email. And then if there’s anything in particular you have a question about, you can also drop that in the chat.

Or if you put it in the questions panel, it won’t get buried as much, and then we’ll be sure to see it. Alright. So Somebody heard about it from their CEO.

I love that. Makes points to you.

Alright. So we’re starting right away. We’re gonna kick off with February and really laying the foundation.

So we have talked about this before if you’ve come to another session that Susan and I have done, but it bears repeating, especially, I would say, especially, I would say, right now more than ever, which we’ll talk about in a second. But getting crystal clear about who you serve. Right? If you don’t have a niche per se, just think about who do you serve? What do they have in common?

And we like to use the framework, I help who, to do what, so they can list out a few benefits. Right? And you want to really make sure that this message is consistent, not just on your website, but everywhere.

Yes. I actually love this. Like, a lot of people talk about their value proposition, and I think what they’re you know this formula I think is a little bit unique that the focusing on the two so they can really helps you think about the outcomes that you deliver not the fact that your value proposition is estate planning that’s not it’s not an outcome so forcing yourself to think, I do estate planning so they can is the big shift that we think really makes a difference in your messaging everywhere.

Yeah. And it really gets through to the person because nobody cares what you can do. They care what you can do for them. Right?

Exactly. This is just a great example. For some of you, you might say, I don’t have a really specific niche where I only work with doctors. I love this website.

This is a customer of ours at FMG. And these two ladies, you can see that they have we have wealth management solutions for multinational high net worth clients, but then they talk about the specific, you know, benefits of working with them. One thing I did wanna mention, though, is we are talking all the time now about the shift to people using LLMs, right, using ChatGPT or Google Gemini or Copilot to find things. And having a very focused niche or specific audience and messaging for them is more critical than ever because these engines really are focused on the user intent.

So it’s not about getting the most backlinks to your website or ranking for certain keywords. It’s when the right person asks the right question that your business could help them solve that you’re found. So this is why this is really the foundation before you do anything else.

I was gonna ask, who on who has gone on chat or Perplexity or Claude today? Don’t you don’t even have to say which one, but who’s asked a question in one of the answer engines today? I’ve asked about twelve. Right, I have too totally.

As you can imagine, I think you already know this, the average search traffic on Google is down about thirty percent, I think. Across all websites. Yeah. Across all websites and that’s increasing all the time and obviously the LLMs are the ones that are picking this up and people are just, you know, like you are. You’re asking a question and you’re getting an answer and that means that also when you come up, if you if somebody is asking, I think we saw this really cool chart. Is that chart in there about the number of times people are asking, you know, a financial adviser near me?

It is. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Well, I’ll I’ll let you go. Okay. So just auditing your messaging, and then before we move into next steps, you can take one other thing, and we put this first.

I debated where to put it, but it’s to audit your social media audience too. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about why LinkedIn specifically in this new world of these LLMs is so crucial for having a presence. But if you find that you’re posting to, you know, LinkedIn, let’s say, and everybody else who you’re engaging with is not the multinational high net worth employees you wanna serve or Amazon employees or widows or physicians in Philadelphia, but it’s just other financial advisers, you need to think about how can you reassess that. Right?

Because you want to be reaching the people that are your target audience. So, again, we’re gonna send this out, and you’ll get it all in the guide. We have some tips here on, like, how to think about that. But getting your messaging right and then auditing who’s actually in your audience is the foundational steps you’re gonna take for February.

Awesome. I love that.

Okay. So then for moving on to March, we’re gonna talk a little bit about LinkedIn and their your two moves are gonna be here. I just wanted to put this chart up first.

This is one of the latest charts. I’m constantly looking at these of what are the top places that these LLMs are pulling from. Right? So as of October twenty twenty five, if you look across all the LLMs, ChatGPT, Google’s AI, Perplexity, LinkedIn is actually the second most cited place that they are pulling from. So it’s now you can see rising above Wikipedia medium. Now this came from an SEM rush survey of two hundred and thirty thousand prompts that they looked at over time. And oh, sorry.

An LLM is a is any language model Yes.

Is what it stands for. And in other words, it is chat GPT. You need we’ve got the names up there. Chat GPT, Gemini, you know, which is in within Google, applaud, perplexity, any of those AI driven search engines, essentially.

Yeah. Someone said that Reddit is first. Woah. Woah is I know. Woah. For a month.

Yeah. Totally. Oh, you know, Susan, when you’re looking at this and you think about this, I mean, what does that say to you?

Well, we’re in a regulated industry, so I don’t believe many people can have a Reddit strategy. So LinkedIn is where you can focus to have the greatest impact, and that I think is I’m psyched because I feel like LinkedIn is controllable. It’s business. It’s professional. It’s where we live. So the fact that that drives a lot of the Answer Engine’s results, think, is fantastic because we at FMG, we can totally help you and these webinars can help you to up your presence on LinkedIn in a way that will be meaningful.

Yeah. So, and I love that Jim just said, this is old data. Reddit has already tamed. It is true that it’s from October. So the thing about these LLMs that is kinda funny is it changes so fast, and we are seeing Reddit not being as important because of some of the ways these places get paid, but LinkedIn continues to rise.

So across all of the different channels, LinkedIn continues to be steady. So that’s why we want you to focus on it for the month of March. And I just wanted to show an example here. So there’s two things we want you to do.

Number one is to make sure you’re posting the type of content that keeps people on LinkedIn. We call it zero click content. So rather than you say, check out my latest blog post about estate planning, and then they have to go read your blog post that the the LinkedIn does not like it. And also for AI, right, you wanna give information in the post that AI can connect you with.

So all these words and phrases that Michael has here is now giving these AI tools the opportunity to say he’s an adviser that knows about these things and can help people with them. So and the algorithm likes it because it keeps people on LinkedIn, and it also gets more comments. And the more comments you get, the better your posts will do overall.

And like we, you know, we have some of you that have been on previous webinars, we have a program called do it for me, which I’ll just mention here because we’re Sam and I really help curate a lot of the content, and we’re starting to write things.

Not every you know, you can’t do it. Everything isn’t all about questions and answers, but we’re starting to write things purposely thinking about what would a question be on this topic that somebody might ask and weaving that question into the post, into a blog, into an email, and then having the answer so that it’s, you know, exactly what would come up because the answer engines are looking for that question and information on that. So you really start shifting. It’s shifting how we’re even writing content.

Yes. Okay. So a couple questions that came up. Yes. Hashtags are not necessary anymore. You don’t need to use them.

That’s true. This one is actually something I’ve hear about a lot. From my experience, the answer is no. So the question, Susan, is do the algorithms treat a LinkedIn premium subscriber, someone who’s paying different than somebody who’s not?

I don’t currently have a paid subscription. And from everything I can tell, my content performs just fine.

I think, really, what I’ve read is that what, you know, having that premium subscription allows you to do is really send a lot more tailored, targeted, direct messages and do advanced filtering to find the people you want to connect with, send more personalized invites. Would you agree? I would agree a hundred percent.

Okay. I’m not even sure the Answer Engines would be able to access whether you’re a premium customer or not.

Yeah. So yes. Don’t worry about that if you’re just looking for organic reach. Okay. We have lots of questions about LinkedIn coming.

So maybe we’ll take just a couple more. Yeah. Susan, you wanna take this one? We’ve always posted content just to our advisory firm’s LinkedIn page.

Should we start doing it on our personal pages?

Yes. Yes. Yes. I think it everybody knows that social media is about being social, and we are people more than we relate to companies.

So having spokespeople at your firm that are posting is really important, and you can kind of think about the people at your firm. There’s generally somebody that’s more comfortable doing it, more of the face of the company, and you can have them post probably the same stuff that you were posting on your company page. Have them post it first and then have your company post your company page share it. That’s how, I mean, there’s strategies for what you post on your company page. It might be, you know, you had a client appreciation event or one of your employees had a baby but as you’re posting thought leadership, it really is better to post with a on a person’s page and then share it. What would you say, Sam?

A hundred percent. And, you know, we always say that people can form a connection with a face. Right? Michael’s face here versus a brand. So if he just had his logo of his company and it was his company page, it often doesn’t create as much of a connection. People don’t aren’t as inclined to leave a comment. They don’t know who’s running that page.

And then when it comes to the photos, a question about stock photos better than nothing. So there the algorithm’s always changing. Right? Yep.

One thing that we have seen for a while is it loving faces. So we will always encourage advisers in our programs, if they can to take any of our content. And if they just add a personal photo to it, they often will see much better engagement. Much better engagement.

And, you know, I’ve I mean, I’m starting to experiment with AI.

You know, those stock photo I I try to stay away from stock photos with stock people in them at least. Yeah.

And, you know, use use Canva to create something that’s, you know, for blankety blank awareness day. You can kind of use Canva for something like that. But if you can figure out a way to weave in a personal picture, it is always going to perform better.

I’m just going to show this really quick, quack, quick because I think it will be helpful to some of you when you’re thinking about it.

I felt cringe worthy doing this for a long time, but it works. My friend Stacy Huebner, who has a great LinkedIn presence, she was the one who inspired me to do it because we were talking a lot about personal photos working.

So and some of you might have seen this from you said you, you know, you came to us from LinkedIn. This is how I will do it. I’ll take a picture of me out in the world somewhere and then post that with whatever the text is. So it’s not like a close-up of my face.

It’s not nest you know, it’s just like a picture of you. It could be in your office, whatever. And for whatever reason, everybody, it seems to work. So you could try that.

It does.

And it doesn’t have I think the fear is that the picture needs to connect with the message. Yes. It it doesn’t actually.

This is just me walking out of a hotel in London and talking about this webinar. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. So you could try that. Okay.

So as we’re talking about LinkedIn, so number one, you know, thinking about the type of content that you’re posting, making it zero click, making it to tie in those words and phrases you want AI to associate with your brand. And then the second thing is before your content goes up, we there’s something you can do called priming the algorithm. Now if you’re working, let’s say, with FMG to outsource, you know, some of your content creation, which is a great, great strategy because you know you’ll be more consistent, you can still do this. Basically, what you wanna do is in the morning when you wake up, you’re having your coffee, maybe over lunch, depending on what time of day you’ve decided through our system to trigger out those posts, you choose a time a little bit before ten, twenty minutes, and you just find five to eight other people’s posts to leave a comment on.

And all this does is it tells the algorithm, hey. I’m a participant here. Like, I don’t just post and ghost. And Yeah.

Yeah. If you want other people to engage on your posts, you have to engage on theirs. Right? If Susan and I don’t really know each other, and she’s a business owner in my town, and I would love to work with her someday, and I’m constantly either complimenting her post or saying something thoughtful. When the day finally comes, when I do some sort of cold cold outreach, she will be much more receptive.

I feel like we’re friends. I’ve that happens all the time. But the other thing to think about, I don’t I don’t think we mentioned this yet.

I think you mentioned to look at your LinkedIn, but also look at who you’re connected to because what happens and and when you post who comments, tends to be friends, employees, and other advisers, and those are not your target audience. So if that’s if you’re in that situation, which I’d say eighty percent of advisers are, you need to intentionally broaden your network so the people that you do want to be seeing your posts are seeing it. And the way to do that is to send out connection requests in a disciplined way and to comment on people that you don’t know but want to know’s posts. Such a great point. In LinkedIn, you can go through your contacts and choose somebody. Right?

So before I went to London last summer, there was a few advisers I knew who had great great networks.

I literally just clicked on their, you know, five where it says five hundred plus connections. I clicked on them and go through their list, and I’d leave comments on everybody they were connected to his content. And it opened up so many doors while, you know, I was there, other speaking engagements, things like that. If so, if you wanna work with more clients like Jim Smith, one of your top clients, you would go through Jim’s contacts and see who does he know and leave comments on their posts.

I had a question that I have to we’re very transparent. I don’t know the answer to this. With the FMG license, can you choose whether you’re posting to the company page or the persona page?

Or is it just linked up?

I I think we have it so that everybody’s saying yes they’re answering.

Yay! Thank you everybody! Thank you!

That’s awesome! Yes you have an option which is similar to the email you can choose whether you want it to come from the company or email address or whether you want it to come from the persona but somebody asked a question what about like can I manage it for my president and for somebody else? We have solutions for what we call ensembles where there are multiple people in an office that want to use one account So that is something that we absolutely can handle. Yeah.

That’s we it was an addition we added the personas not too long ago, and it really makes if you have a firm with lots of advisers and this is becoming more and more important for everybody to have their own presence because of AI search, which is a great segue into our tips for April.

So there’s two things we’re gonna have you do in April, but let’s just lay the foundation of why I love this chart. So, Chris, yeah, why don’t you tell us what you see here? Oh, I don’t know. No.

Okay.

Well, we bought as I think oh, have we mentioned testimony like you yet?

It’s coming up. It’s gonna be in this section.

Oh, you see? Are you stealing your funds again? No. Well, anyway, this chart is showing the number of times people have searched for financial advisor near me.

And it starts, I think, I can’t say two thousand five all the way up till now. And I mean, that is just a crazy chart. So you can see recently, the number of people searching for financial advisor near me is really high. Yeah.

And, you know, one of the things that’s really interesting is obviously, we saw a big spike in twenty twenty, and then it went back down.

But it’s consistently been going up over time. And there’s a lot of different things to think about, but with if you could only do two steps to help AI, you know, show your name. Right? Because the difference is when this search used to happen, Google would give you page after page of results, and you could keep clicking through.

Right? You had a list of links. We no longer get links. We just get answers, and you’re either the answer or you’re not.

So it’s crucially, crucially important to take steps to make sure you are one of those recommended.

Yeah.

I would ask everybody, you know, either multitask during this during this webinar or afterwards, go into your favorite, you know, whether it’s ChatGPT or LLM, and type in best financial advisor near me.

Put your city or your zip code and add other things.

If you specialize in working with pilots, add that, and you’ll see who comes up, and then that will really inform your strategy around how to make sure you do if you don’t.

Well, and what you’re hitting on that I love, Susan, too, is with these AI tools, you can not only ask them to give you the answers, but then you can say, hey. Why didn’t you say Russell Wealth? Why did you choose these firms and not Russell Wealth? And I like to impersonate my target audience.

Right? So I could go in and say, I am a business owner that’s married with three kids, and I, you know, want to find an adviser to help me with estate planning, business succession planning, saving for my kid’s college. I’m in Atlanta, Georgia. Who do you recommend?

Then they’ll give you the answers. You say, why did they why did you choose these people? Let them tell you, why didn’t you choose name your firm? So it will tell you why, and that’s a great way.

Yeah. Definitely ask why. And it’s interesting. So somebody just said, it seems to point to people at big firms like Merrill Wells Fargo. I remember, Sam, we were doing a webinar, maybe we were on stage once. And I remember you saying it really favors independent advisors.

I said, well, I’m not sure because when I do it, so and so comes up with It’s definitely different per person and it’s looking at your past search history as well.

So that why. Like, ask why, and you’ll it’ll probably give you some some indication about why it was looking at big firms.

Yes. Good point. So, but let’s talk about the two steps you can take for this month to help yourself be there. So the first one is adding what we call structured content to your website.

So I put this little chart in here, and it basically goes complicated. What yes. It goes through everything. My point in showing this, though, is behind the scenes, there’s a lot of things happening that are telling the search engine what you need to know.

Right? It’s gotta you know, you’re answering the question. We wanna write everything, Susan, as you mentioned before.

A question and then an answer. We wanna be able to make sure that we have schema markup, which everybody hears eyes are gonna glaze over. What the heck is that? What does that mean?

The reason I show this is that we at FMG pay attention to all this, and we do this in the background so that you when you’re using our tool, know that we’re gonna add schema markup to your FAQ sections. You know that you when you’re doing an h one or an h two, so you don’t you might not even know that’s what you’re doing. But if you choose a title, we’re gonna code it as an h one. If you choose a subtitle, we’re gonna code it as h two.

So we take care of the coding and the AI AEO optimization so you can just add the content. You don’t need to worry about that point. You know, even big, big companies are going back and auditing their website to see if it is coded in the right way to be found on the AnswerEngine.

So this is you are not behind. This is, like, cutting edge. Yep. And I think a big reason why it would be great just to say, have somebody else do this for me. And I think it’s giving us a great opportunity to be helpful. So even if you have a great website that you’ve designed recently, to have somebody take a look and make sure that you’ve got the schema markup, we can’t just add it to a non FMG page or website, but we can build websites really quickly that even mirror exactly what you have and just incorporate that.

Such a good point. And if you currently have an FMG website, under the widget section, you can just add a widget and add an FAQ section to any page of your website. So that’s also a top tip for getting found by AI search. Add as many question answer based content as you can.

So at the end of your section about how you do investment management, add some FAQs. At the end of your page about financial planning, add some FAQs. At the end of a blog post, you can add FAQs. You can add them everywhere, and these AI tools really love it.

The second thing that you wanna do after formatting your content the right way is to get testimonials and reviews compliantly. So Susan, now now’s the time.

We, FMG, just announced today.

So the timing is perfect for this webinar. I don’t even know that we tried to line it up, but we just announced that we acquired Testimonial IQ.

So that is now part of the FMG family. We are rebranding it to be FMG Testimonials. And it is, I think, I’m so excited about this. But this is a way to compliantly collect customer feedback through surveys. So, I immediately think of testimonials as Google reviews and I get scared and that feels scary to everybody and there are a lot of compliance concerns about that.

The way TestimonyIQ works, which is why I love it, is it enables you to send out a customer survey, client survey, and collect the feedback, which there is no downside to doing that. Everybody should be doing that. And when you collect the feedback, you look at it and the way the survey tool is is done, it gives the people will give you a star rating and give you comments.

And you can read the whole thing. You can say, well, I’m averaging a blank. I’m looking at these comments, and you don’t have to do anything with it.

But if you like what you see, you and your compliance team will approve those testimonials. We call them testimonials. And with a just a quick widget, you can add those to your website, which will dramatically improve your ability to get found and for those that are looking you up to want to convert.

So, again, the first step is it just sends out the survey to collect the feedback, and then it is up to you whether you want to then promote them.

So either way, it’s either a client survey tool, and it can also be the way that you promote.

So there’s a lot to dig into here. I just wanna go back to this slide really fast. We are so excited about this because we have been saying for eight months, you need to collect testimonials and put them on your website and, you know, have this social proof because these AI tools are putting so much, you know, emphasis on it when they’re deciding who to surface. And because, you know, we know that it’s good for the customer experience, but we didn’t have a way to really help you solve this problem.

So we are so excited to launch FMG testimonials and help you solve this problem. And this is just kinda goes through why it’s so important. Basically, a nutshell, these AI tools, because they’re so focused on giving you the best possible answer. You’re not gonna dig through a list of Google links and you decide they’re gonna give you two or three businesses and that’s it.

They’re really looking at other people who’ve used the business and can vouch for it. Right? So that’s why it’s so crucially important.

Susan mentioned how you can put them on your website, and I have a slide coming up a little bit later that will show you how that works. This was kinda going into Susan for, in particular, FMG testimonials. But I already see people getting asking questions like, I thought RIAs couldn’t use this, or why would we wanna post negative, feedback? So maybe we should answer some of those questions.

Let’s answer. I’m gonna audible just because I love this question. I don’t again, I don’t know the answer to this.

I don’t know if you do, Sam. Is there any advantage to using the names of communities you serve on your site or by definition of being located at a certain zip, the AI engines already associate you with those nearby communities? I think the latter. I don’t think you have to write.

We serve blankety blankety blank communities, but do you know? Yeah. So you would definitely want to mention the other areas. I wanna go through and make a whole list.

Right? So if you’re saying the Chicago suburbs or Chicago metro area, that’s usually okay. You don’t need to go into all these details. But let’s say you really wanna target Evanston in particular, I would add that in there.

And if you have multiple offices in multiple locations, you can and should create Google business pays pages. There’s a way to do it where you can claim your multiple locations and also have multiple locations on your website, and we have a tool that can help you with that too at FMG that you absolutely wanna do. Yep. Alright. Lots of things here.

So first of all, RIAs, independent RIAs could use test this FMG testimonials right now.

It’s up to your compliance department if you have one, your CCO. For those that are affiliated with broker dealers, it does testimonial FMG testimonials needs to get approved. We are having conversations with all of the large independent broker dealers. I see a comment from William about Satera.

We are in talks with all of them. So, if you want to bubble up that you’re interested, that probably doesn’t hurt but we send an Email out to all of the home office professionals that we’re connected with and we’re doing a webinar for the home office teams to show how testimonial IQ and FMG testimonials works So, it’s we’re we’re working hard to get it approved at the broker dealers so that you can use it as well. Some questions about, you know, can the can we make the reviews or testimonials anonymous and the answer is they that’s the way they show. It it just shows, think it might show the first name but it does not show the last name.

There’s, you know, for privacy reasons and ninety, I think we have data that shows that ninety nine percent, I mean, almost every adviser that has done this is overwhelmingly happy with the feedback that they get from clients. Like, you guys know your clients love you. They are excited to share how much they love you. Everybody’s panic when asking for feedback whether you’re doing a three sixty review or whatever is like, oh my gosh, what will they say?

Will anybody say anything bad? People just generally don’t. They love you. You guys do great jobs and they write great reviews.

I think for those clients that we have FMG testimonials, I think the average aggregate review is something like four point nine out of five. Yeah.

So And I always say, you know, if you if you have you ever come across a page where every review is not only five stars, but it’s so glowing that it kind of makes you feel like, is this a bot, or did AI write things? Like, I often sometimes feel like if there’s something that’s not it’s written and it’s fine and they got four stars or whatever, that, like, almost makes me believe it’s real.

Yeah.

And here’s some, like, client permission. So the way it works, testimonial IQ well, I need to, like, start calling it FMG testimonials. FMG testimonials sends out the survey, and I believe I don’t actually know. I’m I’m sure it discloses that you may share this, you know, that they would be agreeing to have it shared publicly.

Love to get back up. We’ll include that in our email. That’s a really good question, but I’m almost positive. Otherwise, I don’t think it would be compliant.

And if you wanna and we’re gonna be doing a demo just showing this tool off coming up. So look out for that in your inbox, and you can Right.

Right. Right. And then from the perspective of being on Google, an option which not every adviser chooses to do is within the Email where it says, it’s just like a little firm, like a survey form. It just says, you know, give us a, you know, star rating and some comments.

Some advisers will put, and let me know if you’re willing to share this on Google. And then it sends a link to their Google reviews. Many advisers just don’t do that again because they wanna see everything first and decide whether or not they’re making it public.

So somebody that is reviewing you on Google is is making the explicit choice to do so. Right. Right.

I’m laughing because someone just said, how long is this call?

Because we’re not that many months in. It’s already thirty minutes.

That’s what Sam was like, oh, we’ve got, like, forty slides and just to July. No. Maybe we should do we’ll call it six months, and we’ll come back.

I think we’re gonna do we decided right before we got on this because we had so much to say, and we wanna give you the meat of it. You’re gonna get the full twelve months as a follow-up. But we actually thought we’re gonna do a part two. So that way, I hope it’s okay, and it’s worth all your time.

That way, we can be done with this in the amount of time allotted, which we try to keep them forty five, fifty minutes. And then you can do part two. You can look at, you know, what we send in the mail. You could send questions ahead of time.

So we’ll get through July. Why don’t we put up a poll now too just because I see there’s so many questions about this. If you would like to talk with us about how we can help you driving organic growth now that we have FMG testimonials. We have the all the ability to help you to make your site AEO friendly for your website.

All of the things we’re gonna be touching on with social media and email marketing and events, just hit yes. I’d like to learn more, and then we can do more of a consult call with you and get more into the weeds.

Yeah. And answer some of them. We haven’t been able to get to everybody’s questions, but our team can certainly address your unique situations and answer those.

And keep the questions coming. These are so good, and they actually help us write blog posts and social posts in the future that will be helpful to you.

Okay. So so we have May, June, and July. We’re good. So we’re we’re going to talk about video. And I just put a few stats up here that I think bear worth repeating why video is so important.

One of the things, though, is that really as we see more and more AI written content, which I’m sure many of you see it sometimes and can spot it from a mile away, and even AI video, having a real person that you can see and trust and hear their voice and see their face and their, you know, movements, I really do think helps build trust and credibility.

One hundred percent. And it’s, you know, found that that’s true. The other thing, though, is that so much research has shown that video gets higher conversions. So when you include video, you know, whether somebody’s finally driven to your website and you have a video just talking about why you’re passionate about helping people with their finances, it often will be the thing that then gets more calls booked.

And it’s also such a we talked about that zero click content before. It is a really great way to have more zero click content. So I know not everybody is bullish about video. We’re not saying you have to become a video influencer, you know, social media star, but incorporating a few key videos on your website and in certain specific areas can be a really great move for twenty twenty six. Totally.

So starting every video with a good hook is my first best tip.

When I did this, you know, ten years ago, I used to start with, hi. I’m Samantha Russell, and I help advisors with their marketing. And, like, people are already skipping off.

Instead so you would say, we’ve been working with sixty and seventy year olds for fifteen years. If they could go back and give their fifty year old self some advice, this is what they’d say. Right? And then you talk about some financial topic or new research just in on whatever it is.

So you wanna just start right away in the beginning of your your video with whatever it is even if that’s on your website. Right? So someone’s coming to your website and you have an intro video, you can still right away say the reason why you’re passionate about working with people with their finances before and then go and lead into the introduction where you say your name and all that. So you always, always start with the hook.

And then the second tip is just you don’t need fancy equipment. I already got people asking, what’s your favorite system? So you really record two different kinds of video. Right? If you’re gonna record for social media, you wanna use usually, I just use my phone, and you have it be a vertical video. For everything else, if you wanna put it in an email, you wanna put it on your website, you wanna put it on a landing page, you wanna upload it to YouTube, you’re gonna record it horizontally. And for that, I personally love v dot I o.

Will allow you to quickly add subtitles. You can have a little script that actually looks really, really intuitive, and it you know, I usually don’t advise using scripts, but if you need one, it puts it at eye level. It works really good. Susan, do you have a tool that you use for recording video?

I used Veed this morning. I did our do it for me March calendar strategy. I find it super easy to use. Yeah. And I’m not using any of the AI stuff. I just hit record.

And you hit record, and you can share on Veed. You can just record your face, or you can record your screen too. So if you want to, you know, share charts or graphs to talk about something, you can.

You can hit a button, and it will add all the subtitles for you. You don’t need to do anything fancy.

I just wanted to show with these these funny pictures here the importance of light, though. So the difference between these two pictures is the gentleman at the top. In this in this version, he’s got the light coming from behind him. And then in the bottom, he’s looking into the window. So you don’t need a lot of fancy equipment. Just record your videos where the light is coming towards you, not behind you.

And I think just know that the more authentic it is, which means the more like cringey you might feel the better like I mean within reason but it’s really the professional ones are a dud but it it the like real time ones are the ones that are gonna work.

We all skip through ads. Right? We we don’t want the ads. So Right. One hundred percent. And I saw somebody asking about AEO and videos.

With any kind of video, most of these crawlers, whether it’s, you know, Google or Gemini or ChatGPT, it cannot crawl the video. So you need to have the meat of what was said in the video exerted out. So that could mean that you put it in the post itself. If it’s your if you’re doing a blog, you could transcribe it. If you wanna get that AEO juice.

Okay. Let’s move on. We got two more. Email marketing is for June. So, again, we’re focusing on just two steps per month. So for this one, I would love to know in the chat. How many of you currently send a regular email to clients and tell us how often and then a regular email to prospects and tell us how often?

And centers of influence. That’s another one.

If anyone bonus points for that because a lot people points for that. Don’t do that.

Let’s see. One a week. Send weekly emails to both, monthly newsletter to clients and prospects.

And do we have any I’d love to know if we have any do it for me customers on here.

Oh, yes. Me too. We use a few FMG automations, like, once a month. So monthly seems to be probably the most popular or weekly less, not as many bimonthly. We got three times a week. Yes.

And I’m gonna come back to the idea of newsletters here in just a second. But what we have found our data after working with tens of thousands of financial advisers for years and years is that you need to send Truly at least two emails per month. So what that could look like, here’s an example of our do it for me, which I can I’ll pull up and just show you in a second. But we have a calendar that goes out every single month, and it tells you, okay.

For this month, these are the social posts that your marketing strategist is gonna send on your behalf. These are the emails that are gonna go out. These are the social posts. But you can see here when you hover in on the emails in particular okay.

So one’s going the second week, one’s going the last week, and then their version. So it’s the same email but for different versions. Do you wanna talk about that a little, Susan?

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s super centers of influence is a big opportunity for everybody. Think for the most part, I don’t hear a lot of advisers that even have them in their database. They don’t have a systematic way to try to nurture that segment.

And the easiest way is the same way you nurture your clients dripping on them with just completely valuable information. So this is the opposite of being salesy. This is not asking to work together. This is not saying we you know you should send me your clients. This is just sharing information about, you know, in this case, actually, most of the time, I’m the content is interesting to a tax person. In this case, I actually changed it quite a bit just to be like, I just wanted you to know what we’re sharing with our clients, but it’s a great way to just keep top of mind and earn their trust because you’re writing about or we’re writing on your behalf and you can tweak it about topics that are of interest to their clients as well.

And sometimes we’ve heard that the centers of influence have gotten back to the advisor and said thanks so much I actually you know flipped that I made some edits and flipped it around to our clients so that was really helpful.

That they weren’t even aware of.

Yeah it just goes to the strategy that staying, first of all, frequency and staying top of mind is the key to marketing and secondly, giving away valuable information altruistically, just freely sharing your expertise is what will in the long run be the winning formula.

A hundred percent. I did wanna mention this because I saw a lot of people saying we send a newsletter. Do you say in your subject line monthly newsletter or weekly email?

Because you shouldn’t do it that way. What you should do is tell people what’s in the email. Right? So I have some examples down here that are straight out of our do it for me program, but you really want to give them the meat.

Again, it’s just like that zero click on social media. Why should they open the email? What are they gonna learn about? So if you just say, like, monthly newsletter or quarterly newsletter and you try changing it to this, you will see a massive increase in the open rate in almost all cases.

Yeah.

And, like, this is another you know, just everything is total you know, just constantly evolving. I feel like it’s it’s getting harder and harder to keep up, and that’s why we are in business to help you so you don’t have to keep up. But another thing is changing the blogs. I used to just write the blogs that, you know, let’s try to get two thousand word blogs.

Now we write an executive summary at the top that has the key takeaways framed as sort of answers to questions. And, actually, we had some do it for me. Advisors be like, why are you doing that? It’s repetitive.

I’m like, because that’s how the answer engines are going to find this data really quickly.

Is a crazy world we’re all in and from a marketing perspective, it is hard to keep up, and we pride ourselves on doing that for you.

A hundred percent, which is why the program is called do it for me. So if you are interested in learning more about that, you can certainly let us know.

We pair you with a marketing strategist, and then we’re executing these things on your behalf through an editorial calendar that comes out every single month. And so you get two emails sent out to your clients and your prospects. You have two blogs added to your website, and then they work with you. So like we mentioned before, hey.

These social posts are going out. Would you one’s about college planning. Do you wanna send a put a picture of you and your kids for that one? So it really allows you to personalize it a lot more.

Yeah I’d love if anybody’s interested in the comments just maybe type in do it for me or you can click on that link but we can get back to you. As I said I just recorded the March content calendar and obviously March is Women’s History Month. For everybody, you should know, we actually didn’t say that, but that’s a tip. So March is Women’s History Month.

So doing some sort of content around that. And this is perfect because events in our Do It For Me content calendar, every month, we come up with an event and do everything for you, including what you should do. So here’s an idea for women’s history month. Our do it for me customers, we wrote an entire, like, playbook for doing a stylist, partnering with a personal stylist or boutique in your local area and inviting your women clients and asking them if they’d like to bring a friend and having a night where it’s, I think I called it style and planning, I forget what I called it, and I think that would be a really great event.

It’s kind of ties into women’s history month and then of course, know, stylists, you take up the centers of influence that are estate attorneys or CPAs, stylists, boutique owners, they have lots of connections with No one’s reaching out to them.

No advisers. No one’s targeting them. So even, you know, inviting them to invite some of their regular clients. I always like doing events where the person you’re partnering with opens up a new network to you.

So anyway, just a little That’s good way for March.

Such a good idea. And one of the things that I’m just gonna go to here. So there’s two things we’re gonna talk about for events because especially in the summer, events are a big draw. And I actually, there’s all this research that’s showing that anything that’s an in person event is, you know, exponentially growing in interest.

Right? Concerts are selling out faster than ever before. People are wanting to go you know, Netflix just opened this, like, Netflix experience in Philadelphia where you can go and be in person to experience your favorite shows and movies. It’s almost like everything’s going back.

Right? We want we want to experience things with other people, and so events are a really, really big one.

I just wanted to point out there’s two different you obviously can do in person, but you can also do webinars. So there’s two tips we have. I’m actually gonna start with the webinars, though, for a reason, which is that when you’re thinking about a low lift thing that you can do, hosting a webinar is such a good idea because you’re sharing valuable content, and you can repurpose it. Right?

So I have some ideas here on the left of how you can repurpose that content. You can put the replay on YouTube. You can email it to clients, prospects, and COIs. You can create little clips and post them to social, transcribe it for an AEO boost, and put it as a blog post, embed it on your website.

And this is a great example. I’ve linked it here. You can check it out. One of our do it for me clients, connect advisers, they took our we we give these to you in the do it for me program as well.

So they took our breaking down the one big beautiful bill act script and everything. So we had said for that month back in the fall, here’s an idea. You can host a webinar all about what you need to know, and then we give you everything. We give you the template, the follow-up emails, the landing page to collect the registrations, everything you would need to make the event successful.

So if you want to host more events in twenty twenty six, which you should, and hopefully in July, you’ll pry prioritize doing these too, But you feel overwhelmed just by figuring it all out. This is a great solution for that. Totally.

And I think it is it’s the promotion of it and the logistics that are overwhelming, especially, like, for in person. But even virtual, it’s like, ugh, god. How am I gonna get the landing page with registration link? And where am I gonna, you know, keep track of it? And how am I gonna send out the emails? And our tool is designed to do that for you. So Yes.

It makes it easy. So you’re we’re suggesting for July that you host at least one webinar and plan a summer or fall event that people will actually want to attend. I don’t know what happened to my picture here, but one thing just to think about is actually we have found and research has found that less than twenty percent of all financial advisers are using prospect events. So a lot of people host client appreciation events, but not as many host prospect events. And I think it’s because we still have this mindset, Susan, right, of, like, the steak dinner or come and listen to me talk. And so the types of events that work are not that in most cases.

I think it it’s, you know, it’s in my opinion, it’s it’s the client events that you can bring a friend, and that sounds very cliche. The difference is making the event something they would want to bring a friend to. So, like, the stylist one, I mean, I would absolutely bring a friend to a stylist event and be thrilled that my adviser was holding one.

A hundred percent.

You know, dinner a steak dinner at a restaurant to hear from a wholesaler, maybe not.

So the and, again, the other part about prospects is who are you partnering with to do the webinar or the event, and do they open doors to you by inviting their clients? So that’s a big one. Especially the webinars, a lot of our ideas revolve around partnering with an estate attorney or a CPA or local law enforcement to talk about identity theft.

You guys, you know, I’m sure you can think of them where they have a network and they’re inviting the people to the event as well.

Such a good point.

So I just wanted to also mention, you talked about automating all of this. We do in our dashboard have an event tool. We have some premade slide decks and scripts that you can use already all in there, and you can also hit one button, and it will create the landing page for you. The emails to invite everybody already there. The follow-up emails, you can collect registrations all within the FMG dashboard. So, again, it’s really an all in one marketing tool.

So we said we would go up through July. I just wanted to point out that all of the tips for both half of the year are going to be in your guide. So you’re going to get this. It’s gonna go through all the way to the end of the year. But I think maybe you guys should tell us in the comments, should we do a part two where we go through everything in more detail for the second half of the year or not? Was it helpful for us to talk through them?

I say part I’m gonna vote part two because I can’t even say I mean July, like I don’t even know what we’re doing in I almost say for the last nine minutes, let’s go back and recap the two ideas we have for each month for the first six months and let’s save, let’s let everybody execute on the first six before we drown them with the next six.

Oh, that sounds great. I love that people are saying, hey, Mandy said in a part three and a part four. You’re the best.

Three and four.

You are the best.

So maybe what I’ll do just to make it easier is pull up where is the guide? I thought I had it.

Oh, you got rid of your avocado cursor.

My son made my cursor a sneaker now.

Oh, it’s a sneaker.

I love that. Love that. Tell me how he did it. How did Does anybody know how you change the cursor?

Because he he just comes in here and changes it. It’s fun for him. I love that. I I Okay.

I’d like to have him on the next webinar, and he can show us that because it’s really cute.

So make sure your messaging passes the five second test and audit your social presence to make sure you’re connected with the right people was for February. So you guys have a few weeks to do that.

And then for March is LinkedIn. So step one, posting content that keeps people on LinkedIn, taking that zero click content approach, and using, you know, words that will help you for your AEO, and then making sure you’re engaging with other people on the platform.

And for April, we wanna make AI recommend you. You wanna add structured content to your website in the form of q and a’s, short paragraphs, bullet points, summaries at the top.

Oh, I guess I didn’t write it as okay. And number two, get testimonials and reviews. And we could, again, could not be more excited that we now have FMG testimonials as a new way to help you with this.

And I think within that was auditing your website, make sure that you’ve got schema markup and it’s structured in a way technically to be found.

And if you have questions on that, then, you know, reach out to us and we can take a look.

And then recording video in twenty twenty six, make sure you’re starting with a great hook and using tools that make it simple to do it and just making the light come towards your face. And then for email marketing, make sure you’re sending at least two emails to clients and prospects, and Susan will add COIs per month that just really show the value that you can provide and make sure that your subject line makes it so that they’ll want to open it.

Perfect. Oh, we have one. Yeah. Events. Plan a summer or fall event people will want to attend.

I just saw somebody said, should we do fall? Because in the summer, there’s a lot of vacations. I’ve had advisers have success with both. So I think you know, your own audience, you can kinda pull them first.

You could try both. But a webinar is also a great option because it’s evergreen. You can keep repurposing it, and people don’t have to show up, you know, live anywhere. So for informational based events, this is great.

So I’m gonna end with just Courtney shared her notetaker of the key takeaways. I love that. Thanks, Courtney. So, again, if you’re not already working with FMG, if you’re listening to this and saying, this is great that there’s only two moves per month, but this is still a lot to do every month as it builds on itself.

That is where we are here to help. We would love to work with you if you wanna outsource your marketing, the the parts that you can outsource to us so that you can focus on doing the things that only you can do. We would love to work with you. But thanks for everybody for joining, and I am so glad this was helpful to so many of you.

And I guess, Susan, I’ll see you for part two.

I’ll see you for part two. Thanks, everybody.

Bye bye.