Think You Don’t Have a Niche? You Actually Have Several

Today, we are talking all about how to define who you work with, how to define your ICP, which we like to say. So we use the word niche or niche to get you all here because that’s what a lot of people think about. What we were gonna challenge you to think about it a little differently today. Right, Susan? Yes. And is it niche or niche?

I think it’s however you wanna say it. I don’t think it’s like, you know, I I was gonna say tomato tomato, but if someone told me they want a tomato sandwich, I would probably roll my eyes.

And I wonder I wonder, by show of yes, no, do people know what an ICP is? Niche. We hear back. Okay.

Niche. Niche. Does anybody know what an ICP is? We got a yes, and we got a correct to niche.

Good to know. Alright. We got a yes and a no. ICP is kind of a buzzy technical term, but you guys will sound really smart to any branding person you talk to if you describe it.

It is your ideal client profile.

So nothing that fancy, but it sounds like Joel got it.

He said ideal customer program.

I think he meant the same I probably got it wrong.

It’s customer profile.

Ideal client persona, said Laura. So we we have a good number of people who get it. Alright.

Yeah. We to get a sophisticated group.

We have to give our little ad here for FMG, which is what’s helping us to put this on for you today. So have you heard of FMG before? If you’re here, are you an FMG customer? We are the all in one digital marketing and compliant texting solution. And just like our website says, if you whether you’re an individual financial adviser, an RIA, a large enterprise, we work with people just like you to help you grow organically and to stay in touch with your current clients to drive those touch points that create more referable moments and keep you top of mind.

And we’ve been adding more and more tools lately. So we just launched a testimonial tool that many of you may not even know about.

Oh, thank you, Shelly.

You know what? We gotta do swag. We forgot to do it by the customer. Shelly, FMG customer for years and years and love it. Whoo. Alright, Shelly. Yes.

I we can note that down.

Swag coming your way. Well, we gotta send her something to keep her cool because she’s the one in a hundred and five areas.

Right. Totally. Okay. Mine.

And, we’ve won a lot of awards. We’re not gonna bore you with all of them, but Susan and I are proud of our team, and we just love working with all of you. We love working with advisers to help them grow and to market and to think about all of the things that go into that. So that’s what today is. One element of that, which is your ideal customer profile.

Exactly. So if you’ve been on a webinar that Susan and I have done before, you may have seen this. But one of the things we just really wanted to say is your, you know, ideal customer profile and knowing it has always been important, but it’s more important now than ever before. So, Susan, when you look at these, what stands out to you on this slide and what you see here?

Well, hopefully not the lawnmower that is right outside my window. I don’t know if you can hear it.

No, I can’t hear it.

Okay. I was like, oh, good timing.

I think, I mean, I think everybody knows this. We’ve got phases of the customer journey. And what you’re going to see is that the customer journey is now involving stopping off in AI and asking it questions. And so people are coming to you far more with a decision in mind than ever before. I think that’s one thing.

What else do you see?

One of the things that I see is a lot of people think about when somebody’s gonna, you know, look for an adviser, they ask a couple friends, which is still true. But now if you get a couple names, we are the whole way that we think about interacting and, you know, looking up information about people has been turned on its head. And now we’re going to Claude or ChatGPT or even still to Google, but Google’s AI tool gives us the answer. And we’re asking questions like, look at that second one.

I have concentrated stock from an IPO and rental properties. What should I ask advisors? So they might already get the names, but now it’s giving them the questions. Or it might say something like, compare these two advisers I’ve been referred to for my situation.

And let’s say they’ve already told ChatGPT or Claude that they’re looking for someone to help them with estate planning. And nowhere online do you talk about the fact that you help with estate planning, then the AI tool is gonna say, like, not found or I can’t find any information about that, which we don’t want. So that is why we really wanted to talk about this because in the world of AI search, an ICP is more important than ever before.

Absolutely. And, Susan, maybe you could, go through what people probably are thinking versus how they can reframe it because you explain it so well.

Oh, thank you. I actually this was somewhat of an for me in the last month or two because, you know, we’ve been talking about niches for a long time and especially in this world of AEO and the, you know, the answer engines, you know, people just typing in real detailed questions.

I, you know, I thought of myself, you know, if my financial adviser was going to say which niche I fit in, I was like, I don’t fit in a niche. I’m just like so, I’m just a generic person But then it occurred to me. I actually did.

You’re just a beautiful, lovely, successful seller.

Then that’s that that niche.

Yeah. And we’re getting question. ICPA is ideal. Now I’m insecure whether it’s client or customer.

But ideal customer profile. But what I realized is I went to my finance my now financial adviser. I went when my parents were changing their estate plan and when I had had a liquidity event. So I had two trigger events essentially that either one of those would have actually prompted me to think about who it’s time I would like to work with a financial advisor as I think about my own estate planning and taxes and a liquidity event.

And so when you think about I think how many of you agree with this, you’re probably thinking, I don’t have a niche. Let’s use niche instead of ICP. I don’t have a niche. I serve high net worth families with complex planning, tax, and estate needs.

That’s pretty much anybody with money. Does that resonate? Like, a lot of you are like, I don’t have a niche because that’s the type of customer I serve.

The thing is you do because each of those customers like me, when they first came to you, they likely came because there was some triggering event in their life that prompted them to want to either change advisers or find an adviser And if you think about those common buckets of trigger points, those events that cause them to come to you, those are your niches.

So moving from thinking that a niche has to be a description of a demographic to thinking about a niche as the problem or trigger event that prompts somebody to go to you. And then the translation of that is that that is what you put on your website copy. That’s what you talk about. Those are the FAQs that you answer because that is the question and the topic that people looking for a financial adviser are actually asking about.

So It is such a reframe from going from demographics, physicians, you know Yes.

Sales executives, all those things to thinking more about triggering event Features. And that mindset that someone is in. So tell us in the chat. Yeah.

I would love know. You have a specific ICP now that you’re thinking about it? Or do you have you had a niche that you’ve already been marketing to? And if so, can you share, you know, maybe what that looks like currently or maybe what you’re thinking it could be?

Either one. I’d just love to see kind of where people are at because we work with a lot of advisers. And I think when you explain it that way, Susan, it does sort of unlock for people this moment.

Yeah. I feel like I hope, like, a lot of people on the call are just like, oh my gosh, light bulbs went off. I’ve got five, you know, and you don’t wanna have ten niches, but, you know, the top five reasons, three reasons that clients come to us and the problems that we most typically solve, maybe for the, you know, when they join us, our ex, and that can be your niche if you currently are, you know, thinking I don’t really have one demographic.

So Yes.

So let’s see. We’ve got Paul saying busy parents with multiple kids. So that is more demographic.

But also, if you think about pain points, I’m sure you could come up with A lot pain points. Little kids. I have three little kids.

I can come up with lot of points. What do we got?

Kate said tax prep among others.

Grace equestrian. So that’s lovely. Laura what did Laura have? Successful, thoughtful family stewards in the sandwich generation approaching retirement.

So I think I’m seeing, like, there is not I don’t think I’ve seen yet somebody that is talking about a planning event that happened in or you know, like a liquidity event or something that happened in somebody’s lives. These are all demographic. And that’s like, we’ve all just been taught that a niche has to be demographic. What I want this to open up to you is that you have opportunities to define niches or ICPs based on more than just a demographic, which will apply to a much broader audience and enable you to market more effectively.

I love that. Wow. Paul just said he has triplets plus one. You talk about being able to juggle, Paul. I think you win the award. I want your secrets.

Okay. Keep your keep your niche, your ICPs coming because I think I don’t know about you all, but I love to read them and see where everybody’s at. And afterwards, I’ll probably go look you all up and see what you’ve put on your website to market these. Actually, that’s a great follow-up question. Do you feel like you’ve done a good job now that you’ve told us who that ICP or that niche audience is? Do you feel like you’ve done a good job when someone lands on your LinkedIn or your website home page that they immediately know that that’s the type of people that you work with.

That would be really, really interesting. No. My website is terrible.

Colin, we can help. We can help. We can help. Ellie, we can help.

I think yeah.

We we can definitely help. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about some ideas and best practices today. But FMG can definitely help you. It’s something we’re focusing on, deeply. It’s it’s really like our top priority.

Yes. And so I again, just to think about the shift, your ICP is not who your clients are today.

Right? It’s the pain point they have in common that made them reach out. Who were they when they walked in the door to work with you?

And I mean, it can be both. It just don’t Yeah. Don’t leave out the pain point, and the pain point is going to be easier for you to write about on your website because you’re not you know, doctor when you talk about doctors, if you’re serving doctors, you are probably writing the pain points or the planning triggers that they look to you to solve. So you’re probably already describing them, but they don’t even all have to belong to the same demographic for you to write about it.

Right. So when I look at these common entry points or where clients are coming from, one of the things I like to think about questions if somebody let’s just look at the very first one, liquidity event, business sale, IPO, RSU, vesting.

What are the questions they would have? And this is where FAQs become so amazing because we know that AI is reading our FAQs on our pages. It likes that structured content, but humans like it too. And, yes, you can have it as a FAQ. But on your homepage, you could build something that looks like this.

And it could be who you’re the types of clients you work with. But also think about what if you change these to questions? Would you be a good you know, here’s our questions people with our issues that come to work with us often ask. And then list out what those questions are.

And the person reading it’s gonna go, yes, I have that question. Yes, I’m wondering the same thing. Yes, I want someone to solve this for me. And they’re gonna start nodding their head.

Right? So I like this. This how do I know if I’m good fit? But you can, again, take it one step further by structuring it as questions.

And then it will help both AI find you, but also the the human reading your website to be nodding along as they’re reading it.

And I have a great example that just came up on this topic. So we have a program called Do It For Me. And in that program, we create a content calendar every month. And in June, I think it was June, maybe it was May, the blog topic, which has an associated email and social post was one of them was on what to do if you come into a windfall.

And so it went out advisors sent it to their clients and prospects. And we got a couple emails back, but one from a friend of mine, and he had been dripping on, he had acquired another practice and he hasn’t fully gotten to know all the clients of that practice.

And he got an email back from one of them that said, this was so timely. I literally just exercised my RSUs or if that’s the right, I think that’s the right term. And I’d really like to meet with you. And he just increased his assets under management by three X.

Woah.

Content on the topics that are in their mind, I mean, that drip marketing really works and then having that blog on your website with FAQs associated with it And then you just, you know, hit all the topics that you want to do.

And and we can help you with that, but it really does work.

And I just showed this example too because under this who we serve, you can see they do have here more of a demographic.

Right? People who work at specific country countries. Companies.

But then this biggest companies.

I mean, countries.

Exactly. But then this how do I know if I’m a good fit is on the home page. Right? So even if somebody doesn’t make it all the way to, like, a specific landing page, this is more the general idea of who they serve.

Let’s look at it. Oops. I have them linked. So when you get the slide deck, you’re gonna be able to click on them.

Okay. Let’s look at another example. So this is can you see this Aura legacy? Okay.

Yep. Awesome. This is a another FMG website that we worked with this team to build. They are really focused on ultra high net worth, Almost in a lot of cases, almost like a family office, but they have this when when you should think about working with us.

And they’ve got this during moments of transition or responsibility, and they’ve lift listed some of them out. So, again, very, very broad in scope. They’re not saying we only work with these types of people or people at these companies or people of this age group or whatever the demographic ideas, but they’re giving people the ability to picture themselves as an ideal client of the firm. So this is just another, again, idea or example.

Let us know in the chat. Does do the examples help? We try to include them to give you some ways to think about it, and we can certainly send more.

But we wanted to just show you some examples that, you know, we thought would would help you sort of picture it. George said, I found my ICP by asking Claude. Is interesting. He said, I fed it my web address and a few specific PDFs that had different details, and it helped me identify who they were.

Awesome. What did it say?

That’s can you tell us? He put that in the q and a. So maybe you could tell us. Let’s see.

He didn’t answer yet. But, George, if you could tell us what it told you, we would love we’re inquiring minds want to know. Okay. I don’t have the chat open, Susan.

Any questions, or can we keep going? Oh, no. I think we’re good. Okay.

So, most firms, right, are, you know, thinking about all these different people that they either serve or it’s sort of hard to narrow it in. So, Susan, what are the advice that you would typically give when people think about how many ICPs can I realistically have?

You know, I I think three is ideal, but you can I would say you can have up to five that you’re really focused on, and it’s not just bullets on the page? It’s really thinking about how that content flows through everything that you’re doing. It’s your blog strategy. It’s dripping emails on these topics. It’s, encompassed in your about section, so you don’t just check the box with the who we serve and a box that says we serve these types, you’ve got to think about how that messaging is flowing through your social strategy, just everything. It really is your brand strategy and so the more you have, the harder it is to weave them all in without it feeling messy but I think you can get away with if you’re distinct because a lot of people share multiple challenge like I think I would fit into multiple ICP buckets based on some of my pain points and challenges. I think it works.

Yes, absolutely. And I like the guidance here about really honing in on one at a time when you’re first doing this. Like, you could come up with a list, but when you’re thinking about your marketing messaging and maybe, okay, what kind of content is gonna work for that? When you gave that example before, if you just became you know, just got a windfall, you can kinda start with one and create content that’s gonna speak to that audience or send content. Obviously, we at FMG can help you with that. We have a content engine that can really help you target the right people and send you can group your ICPs into different groups within the email platform. And then rather than just sending everybody the same email every month, you can be sending much more targeted emails depending on those transition points, those pain points that these people have.

We definitely suggest, though, regardless that you’re at least connecting and having a pain pain point a touch point with everybody on your list at least twice a month to stay top of mind. So that is something we can certainly help you with if that is a challenge for you or you’re struggling to, you know, keep that content engine moving.

Yeah. It’s hard. And the more ICPs I mean, more niches you have, obviously, it just is multiplying the content.

Getting some questions about all of these slides and resources. Yes. You’re gonna get all the slides, and they are linked to the examples afterward. But I’m thinking maybe we need to create another, like, blog post in our next newsletter, Susan, that’s, best website examples of great ICPs. That would be a good one for me.

Love Love that. And on the FMG website, we have a gallery of websites, but I bet we could let’s come up with a a new blog with fresh ones, and we’ll add those to the gallery as well.

If you think your website would be great to be featured because you’re killing it, drop it in the chat and show it to us. We would love to see some great examples of people who have done a, you know, great job or, you know, you just feel like, specifically with that, you maybe there’s certain parts of your website you’re not happy with, but you feel like you’ve nailed talking to your ICP. We would love to see it.

Okay. So just remember, this is something Susan and have been talking a lot about that before, yes, we would say, okay. You need to have an ICP or a niche audience, and here’s, you know, what to think about. Because when the human visits your website, you have five minutes to Five seconds.

Seconds. Oh my god. Not five minutes.

Gosh. Okay. So You can do a whole book. Yeah. Gosh. Already. I I feel like I’m in mom mode right now.

You have five minutes to clean up your room and get it ready. So you have five seconds. So but the thing is we all now every business out there, we have two audiences. Right, Susan?

So I think the the the shift here is that with AI search, you’re either visible or you’re not. So you first have to win the robot over before you can win the humans over, if you will. Yes.

And And I love that little I love the little robot icon. But, yes.

Yeah.

This is the I always the other of this webinar, which I hope everybody will take away because it is a whole different way of thinking.

You didn’t use to think I mean, in some ways, SEO was writing for Google, but not the same way because robot I mean, the answer engines act like people. I mean, they’re answering questions in real natural language. So you need to be writing for them, but then you also need to be thinking about the human who then visits your site, and you wanna make sure that you’re writing for them too.

Just more But one of the things that is a shift with this ICP world, and I really want everyone to hear this, if you try to talk to everyone, AI will send no one your way.

And that’s the difference. Right? Before, you could do all these kinda SEO hacks and build backlinks and win awards.

But now because AI knows so much about us so that it understands the intent when we’re doing these queries, it knows we live in Chicago and that we’re married and we have three kids and all these things from our history of chat.

It’s not going to send you to somebody that is not more specific. And that is really the unlock here that makes such a why this is is so timely. So we actually built a whole tool because so many people were confused by this, to think about, am I visible to AI? How do I even know?

How do I find out? And you all are some of the first people ever to see this rubric. So, this is amazing. And what we did was over if I say it’s amazing because it was a lot of work.

Over the last few months, really, Susan and I have been looking at all the research out there across every marketing expert, every platform that analyzes data and tracking. And then also looking at our own queries of which firms are coming up and seeing and then also working with Claude and Chatty Beauty Perplexity test them against each other. What are they actually looking for when they decide which advisers to recommend? And this is really now the scorecard that you can all use to score yourself when you think about how visible am I.

So if somebody goes and they’re looking for an adviser in Minneapolis who helps business owners with succession planning, how likely am I to come up? This is the rubrics of what you need to think about in order to be one of the recommended people on that page.

And how likely is it that anybody could aim for one hundred?

Great question. In all the queries I have ran, no one has gotten above an eighty four.

So a b is great. Exactly. And one thing that I think is important for all of you to recognize is most people, ninety percent of advisers, do not have third party reviews or social proof. So that is, you know, a big chunk of the score. Again, FMG just launched FMG testimonials. The main reason that we acquired Testimonial IQ and built that product was we saw how important of a chunk of the score this was.

And we thought we can’t be telling everybody this is so important and not have a way to help them get these reviews.

So I think I don’t know if they wanna point out is as you look at these categories, there are categories that a firm like FMG can absolutely lean in and provide the resources that help you do better in these.

And there’s some that are just steering best practices that are going to be outside of anyone’s control but your own. So there’s always gonna be a combination of partnering to solve for some of these and then knowing what to do for yourself to change, to try to move some of the other levels up. But what’s great is that you can hit most of these by working with a website provider like an FMG that is focused on optimizing for AEO.

And so we’re talking about this today in this ICP webinar. You look at AI ready website content and FAQ structured question content. That makes up thirty five percent of your score.

You need to have an ICP in order to do this well. So this is all connected in this way. Right? So let’s just look at an example.

AI is not going to cite or pull in something like we help clients achieve their financial goals through personalized planning. Our team is passionate about serving families at all stage of life, like generic boilerplate copy. Right? But if you have a question and then an answer, it can extract inside it. Right? So this is just one example.

You can use these specific questions and specific answers throughout your site, and they should be written thinking about your ICP that you have in mind. So just like somebody George mentioned that he used, you know, Claude to think about, what his ICP was. There are lots of ways you can think about what questions your ICP has. Number one, most of you are now using AI meeting tools.

So you can use those meeting tools and look at what are the top questions that clients and prospects are asking in those calls and extract them and turn them into FAQs? I mean, I know a lot of you also know the questions, but you do wanna write the questions in the language that the client would use. So you can see here, this question is not when’s the best time to take Social Security. Right?

It’s more colloquial language than that.

Exactly. And one question came up on how do you get earned media and third party mentions. That could be an entire webinar.

I think the my tip for you know, to keep us on track here, apply for awards and recognition. That will help. It’s a lot harder to have a whole PR strategy and get incorporated into media mentions. But there are a zillion maybe that’s a slight but there is a proliferation of awards that are available to advisors from all the different trade pubs in our industry.

Apply for those. It doesn’t matter that it says, you know, top top forty of forty in the wealth management space. AI still sees that as an authority indicator and it will help you get ranked. So, if you’re in the Forbes, you know, or Barons or any of those, put those on your website and then, there are ways to put things on so that AI finds them better.

That’s called schema markup and a firm like FMG can help you with that But there’s the short answer.

Great answer. Yes. And, you know, an FAQ on your page. So if you do have any awards, you could have something like, has Russell Wealth won any awards?

And then or, you know, does does Russell Wealth have any awards? One might be a hard word for some of these award things. Right? So have any awards. And then list them out. It will help AI find it better. And when you add them to your website with FMG, we automatically add the schema markup in the back end.

Have you been recognized? That’s another one.

But I think that the client would prob or the prospect would probably search.

Does Russell Wealth have any award? Like, have they won a new award more.

Best reviews.

You know, they just say What are the best reviews?

Yeah.

A firm that has Right.

That’s definitely, like, out there. Does Russell Wealth offer estate planning? Does Russell Wealth file my help me file my taxes? Does like, those are the kinds of FAQs you can add that are thinking about what would somebody be looking for and what would an AI tool be wanting to find quickly to answer the query for the person who’s investigating you.

Does this make sense for everybody?

Naturally just asked what about business rate. I don’t know what that is, actually.

Know it, but anything that is a third party that is, you know, your compliance team approves is helpful. Hannah just said we threw FAQs at the bottom of every one of our ICP pages.

Really great idea. Fantastic. Let’s give Hannah some swag. Hannah swag.

I haven’t been I’ve got I mean, we need to do some more swag.

Sorry. Alright. We do. I forgot to get a swag. We’ll do some more.

And maybe this is a good time right now. So we’re gonna show you the tool that we created to help you get your score. But as you’re thinking about this and you’re thinking about how FMG can help you with redesigning your website to appeal to your ICP about creating FAQs that, you know, really speak to them about starting a testimonial program so that you can collect client feedback compliantly. Would you like to learn more about how we can help you? Aubrey, if you could launch that poll. If you just say yes, then we’ll know you’re interested in learning about how all these pieces work together and how our team can help you execute this and assist you with your marketing. So just say yes, and we will reach out.

That will help us yes. It we would absolutely love to help. So we got a couple more questions.

Yeah.

I love these.

Go ahead. I’m gonna take the CFP banner or something similar.

Absolutely. I am seeing the the answer engines love fiduciary, CFP. They’re those are very good. And then the LinkedIn one, I’ll toss to you because that is really interesting how LinkedIn plays both a big role, but not necessarily the way you would think.

Yes. So the thing about LinkedIn is they’re really looking to verify against all the other signals, these AI tools with your LinkedIn. And I do believe LinkedIn has two purposes, though. Number one, yes, it helps you be more visible with AI tools, but then more and more people are actually going to social media directly.

There’s a great chart from Neil Patel that shows it’s almost at ten percent now of people start their search journey within social media tools, and that’s gonna keep going up into the right as younger generations become the ones looking for these services. So with LinkedIn, what the AI pulls from most is your headlines. So your title, you know so instead of just having financial adviser at Russell Wealth or, you know, investment manager, you want to put, again, who is the ICP you serve or any of the pain points you help solve right there in your headline. You also could put any credentials.

Or if you did win a really big award, you could actually put that on after your title as well. That’s what LinkedIn is going to read. But then it does in the background wanna see that you have relevant new information linked to your name. So we say that AI has what we call a recency bias.

So it used to be, you know, you could have a great evergreen article you wrote five years ago, and it would keep you up in the rankings. With AI, it wants to see that you’re talking about things. You’re out there. You’re you know, you didn’t close five years ago.

And so keeping your LinkedIn up to date and active really helps in that regard.

So I have a question. So I think everybody should take as a to do to look at their LinkedIn headline. And we may do another LinkedIn webinar soon that even relates to AEO but look at the headline which is just under your name. You know, what is the descriptor, your subhead, and think of ways that you can change that to be more specific about your niche, the ICPs that you serve, the pain points, any way you wanna frame it, as well as putting in any designations or awards that you think are, you know, high intense signals, that is gonna have a big that’s gonna have a really big impact, and it’s just an easy low hanging fruit one. But I’m curious, Emma, we don’t need to go down a rabbit hole on LinkedIn but if you go on to Claude and you say, know, I’m curious about Joe Schmo, can you tell me, you know, what he posts on on LinkedIn? It will tell you it can’t read it.

So there it’s interesting because there it is considered a gated site. So you’d think it can just like oh if I have a lot of followers that’s going to help me. It can’t tell how many followers you have. So talk about that a little bit and how people should think about LinkedIn from that perspective.

Yeah. It is really interesting, and that’s why the title is the most important and what we coach on, and that’s also why the number is lower. Keep in mind, these things are often in flux. So because it can’t access it right now, doesn’t mean it won’t have access to it in the future.

And as I also mentioned, like, if you look at where do people under forty go when they wanna find a restaurant, Instagram is one of the top places they search more than anywhere else because they’re looking for the aesthetic, the vibe, the photos, and Instagram Instagram has its own AI search tool within the Instagram search bar. As people as LinkedIn evolves, I could see a world where people are in LinkedIn searching for, you know, different kind of financial information because they wanna see the post that the advisers are sharing. So I wouldn’t discount it, but you’re right. AI cannot read everything all of the time.

And so right now, what we’re coaching you on is what’s most important, which is the headline, and that you keep it fresh. Because the other thing the AI is it’s gonna say it can’t read your post, but it can see whether your profile’s active or not. And so if you haven’t posted in three years, that’s a negative signal versus if you regularly are posting on it to the robot. Obviously, the human that gets sent there also wants to see that you, you know, are active.

Yeah. I would say, like, it’s it’s very interesting. We we could spend a lot of time on it, but and I’m seeing some other questions. Good job, Tina. Have we given Tina any swag? If not, Tina, you get some swag.

She’s been Oh, we should read what she changed hers to.

This is This is great.

Co founder and wealth adviser, work optional planning for people who have built meaningful wealth. That’s fantastic. And if you’re a CFP or you have any word, throw them into.

But as it relates to LinkedIn, it is right now. And I think the other thing is what you’re hearing is a month ago, we actually didn’t even have all the information we have now. So this AEO tool that we’re going to show you is going to iterate monthly. And my message to you is you want to partner with a firm that is keeping you ahead, but who also is in-depth knowledgeable about compliance, our regulations that impact our business, and what really does truly help advisors grow their business. There is a lot of noise out there, and we’d love to be that partner to you that you can just trust. We’re going to keep you ahead of the curve. We’re going to continue to evolve our product based on best practices, based on what Sam and I are seeing, and we’ll keep you where you need to go because I know it’s a little bit overwhelming.

Very overwhelming. It’s overwhelming for us, and we’re studying all So this is the tool that we built that you are all going to have first access to as someone who attended this webinar in the coming days, week, something like that.

We’re gonna send it out next week. We have a couple more tweaks because we just learned something else that we wanna modify it. So Yep.

So coming soon, but it’s gonna be a page that you’re gonna go to. You’re gonna put your name, your URL. I really, really encourage you to put your city and state even though it says it’s optional because you’re gonna get better results. Same thing with the who you serve and what makes you different. The more specific you can be, the better result and probably better score you will get. Just so you know. Anything else we wanna say about this page?

Nope. I think it’s pretty maybe describe we’ve set a tool, but and we showed the rubric, but maybe describe a little bit more what you built because it’s so impressive.

Yes. So the the tool, basically, you’re filling this out, and then it’s going to go out and source the Internet. You can see here. And it’s going to look everywhere possible online to pull information about you, your firm, against that score, against that rubric that we built to then give you a final score of how visible you really are to AI.

So, again, maybe you offer estate planning, but you don’t ever post about estate planning on your website. The only thing you have is estate planning is like an icon or a box as one of the services you provide. You don’t have it mentioned on LinkedIn. You don’t have an FAQ about it.

You don’t have a podcast or a video. Like, there’s nothing about estate planning. And someone goes to Claude or ChatGPT, and they say, I’m looking for a financial adviser in Atlanta that could do all these things. And you would be a top candidate, but they say, and estate planning.

Well, you might get knocked right out because it’s not there. Right? So what this tool does is it it’s gonna look at all of that information. And so, again, if you want to be somebody who’s being found as well for estate planning, when you fill this out, you wanna make sure you put that in there, that that’s one of the services that you provide.

And then it’s gonna audit, and then it’s gonna give you a score. So the overall score is gonna tell you first how visible you are. Again, reminder, I’ve not seen anybody above an eighty four with this tool, which just tells me that it’s the Wild West in this AEO world right now and that, you know, we all need to be improving. We at FMG have a lot of things we’re in the process of adding to our own site to make us more visible.

Right?

You know, it’s so ironic that AI saves time in many ways, but I think we will all agree that it actually is adding work because there’s the world has just changed how you’re gonna serve your clients, the technology that you want to implement in your business. It’s like we will have to keep up on this. We will be introducing a you know, an update to this probably monthly.

And our product growth is blowing up with amazing ideas, so I hope you’ll ride with So, you know, to the point of there’s a lot that you could do to improve, one of the things that I like is that down at the bottom, three things that would improve your likelihood of being recommended.

So it gives it really, really clear to you. And then it’s gonna give you something called a sentiment review, which a lot of us have never thought about. But if somebody this is looking at everything for you know, how might somebody be talking about your brand? You might not think of yourself as having a brand, but somebody could be on Facebook talking about an amazing experience they had with your firm that they didn’t tag you in the post.

You didn’t see it, but this tool could find that post. Right? So it’s gonna look everywhere to see, well, you know, how are people talking about your brand? Do you have any reviews?

Do you have any press mentions, testimonials? And then it will give a overall sentiment about your brand in general.

And then it’s gonna look at everything we just talked about today with your positioning alignment. So, again, having an ICP is huge for this new world, and it’s gonna say how aligned you are and then any gaps that it finds and how you might want to fix those gaps, which I love. It gives you exactly what you should do. So then you get your full score breakdown by section, you can see nobody like, even in this example, like, it it really, really helps you hone in.

Okay. Doing well in the green and everything. Here’s the one yellow that I need to focus on. It’s pretty easy.

I can add some FAQs. That’s, like, an easy lift to become even more visible, and then it will tell you your priority actions. And I love this as somebody we all have so many things on our to do list. Everything feels like a priority.

It gives you quick wins that you can do that is gonna help you see results right away, things you can do over the next one to two weeks, and then anything ongoing. And I will say one thing to note, if you change these things and then go run the test again tomorrow, your score is not gonna increase overnight. Like, it takes AI tools just like with SEO. It can take weeks, if not months, to improve.

But when we say quick win, it’s something you can change right away.

Consistency. So if you just change it and post a blog and then don’t update your website for another three months, you fall back off. So I think one idea is I’m iterating. You guys know that Sam and I just like go rogue on these things.

On the fly.

I think it might be cool if we can embed within this results where FMG can help most specifically like explicitly we can help and where we can coach and have resources. So maybe we’re even linking to you know you can sign up to you know see a demo of how we help with that versus here’s a blog that we’ve done that you could just download.

We might make that kinda tie those Yeah.

Tell us in the chat. Would you like when we give the output for us to say, like, here’s how you could do it with a blog post or And here’s how if you wanna hire our team, we can help you do this. Yeah. That is a great idea.

Very, very smart. And I think go ahead.

Oh, just, you know, there’s never like, if your broker dealer doesn’t allow reviews, obviously, we’re not gonna implement the testimonial tool right now so that, you know, but as soon as it does, then, come to us and we can help.

Getting PR, like, you know, not something we can help with. Getting awards, not something we can help with but knowing that, you know, it is a best practice and have, we have blogs on ideas. So I think between I think it’s helpful to give the to do list and just make it clear like who you could hire us, you know, which of these we you can hire us to do and which you wanna follow our best practices that we’ve written about in our thought leadership.

Yeah. And the top two are things we can actually help with in this example, creating the dedicated landing page, adding schema markup.

Heather’s saying a blog post with directions would be great. And I think another thing that’s really huge is writing blogs on the topics of the ICPs that you serve consistently, two a month. And if anybody thinks that sounds like a pain and overwhelming and even coming up with the topics, that is part of our do it for me program. So we can make this an easier lift if you’re interested in learning more about that too. And Sam and I come up with the topics.

Here’s the just an example of that through our do it for me program. If this is sounding overwhelming, we we literally named it do it for me because people would say, love all your advice, but can you just do it for me?

Yeah.

So you could see here every month you have a calendar. And in this example, you the b is for blog. So there’s a post twice a month that goes up on your website so AI can read it. But then also twice a month, emails are going out to both your clients, your prospects, and any centers of influence.

So versions of that blog in an email form to those lists, and then there’s also social posts and then optional activities like a podcast script or a a video script, an event or webinar idea, tons of content that is specific for the month. So it has a theme, so it’s not erratic. And it really, really as Susan just gave that example, that story, we hear for people all the time who will say, I’ve been on your email list for a long time. And then you sent this post about this, and, oh, by the way, I am selling my business, and I would love to chat with you.

But you have to be consistent with it, and that’s where we can come in and really, really help.

That is really the biggest and AEO, you know, everybody wants to grow most people wanna grow their business and get prospects, but that prospect is obviously going I mean, I think, you know, they’re going we used to say they’re gonna Google you. Well, now we’re gonna say they’re gonna chat you or applaud you, And we want you to show up well. But also, if you just follow a lot of directions today, but six months from now, got busy and you haven’t done it, that same prospect that you might be getting is not going to stay. So the consistency game and that, you know, the foundational content strategy that we’ve talked about forever doesn’t go away. Like there aren’t magic buttons, but we can help and we will continue to do these webinars to share ideas too.

Yeah. Jack’s saying he’s an LPL advisor. How would we handle compliance in this situation? Are you submitting on our behalf?

Yes. It all goes through compliance. If you’re with any of the large broker dealers, we have compliance workflows. So if you use it as is, it just goes out whether to your social or out through your email or out to your website.

Or if you wanna change things, which we highly recommend, we think of ourselves. The last thing I want to hear is that we are canned content. We are not canned content. We are hiring the best.

Wouldn’t you want Sam and I to write your stuff? We write it and we want it. Put ourselves on the Five minutes to just customize it and make it yours.

That’s the way you write. I mean, that’s the way anybody writes. You have a a marketing person that writes for you, and you tweak it. That’s what we are. We have moved way away from canned content, and you should check us out if you haven’t recently.

Absolutely. And Heather just said, where’s the best way to see and set up for future FMG webinars? Which must mean that you’ve got some sort of value from this today. So thank you, Heather. If you just go to our web website, there’s always under resources, a webinars page, and you can see any of the upcoming ones. But there’s also a place maybe, Aubrey, if you could put in the chat where they can, sign up to join our email list so that you can get our emails, which makes a huge difference.

And you’ll be notified in advance.

Yeah. So Jack said he’d like to talk to someone. We will absolutely reach out to you, Jack. If any swag too.

Last the the last person to to comment gets swagged.

Go, Jack. If you if you missed the poll before and you want us to reach out to you, just drop your email in the chat. If you wanna learn more about this do it for me program or the way we do the FMG testimonials or how Susan and I are helping advisers, just put your email in the chat, and then you don’t have to worry. Did I hit the poll? Whatever.

I will make sure that we follow-up. But I wanna end by giving you all, oops, some more quick wins that you can do to really improve your visibility, how you’re thinking about your AI. So we’ve broken them down. Again, you’re gonna get all of these slides, but we talked already about rewriting oh my gosh. I can’t talk today, Susan. We whiting.

By the way, it’s like eight o’clock your time or nine.

I’m talking about we whiting. That’s literally what I just said. We’ll edit that out of the replay.

Rewrite your LinkedIn headline. Rewrite your headline. Claim your Google business profile if the firm you’re affiliated with allows. I think we’re hearing a lot of progress with broker dealers that are close to making this happen. I actually just heard about a pilot.

Add FAQs to your website if you’d like help with that. That is something that is core to us. Our websites include FAQ with Schema Markup and make it super easy for you both to use our copywriters to do that as well as to add them yourself. Also, if you already have an existing FMG website, we are just learning about this stuff.

Our product is evolving as fast as this is moving and you know, we want to help continue to make your website as modern and leveraging these as possible. So we’re open to that as well. Rewrite about page for AI in humans. Remember, there are two audiences.

Build your review presence across platform. That’s another dependency on the on your compliance team but if you have compliance approval, talk to us and convert your media appearances to text and if you aren’t doing media appearances, not everybody is, apply for some of those awards.

Yes, I love that.

And for people who are saying certain parts of these are challenging, focus on the ones you can do The AI score, the tool.

Oh, amazing tool. When when will they get that? We’ll do that next week?

So next week. But you are all on the list for the first people ever because you came to this webinar. So we love you all. And, actually, Susan and I would love to know after you try it because you’ll be the first ones ever to tell us so you can respond back at marketing at f m g suite dot com.

Give us your feedback. If you’re like, I didn’t think this was accurate. I mean, obviously, this is brand new. It’s it’s gonna be sort of in beta at first, but we were really **** ** it.

Our focus group. So please email us back after after you use it. We’re not we’re launching it live. It’s just going to this group. So our special little group.

Yes. You’re our unwilling or unknowing guinea pigs. So thank you for that.

And if you’re not connected with Susan and I on LinkedIn, please connect with us there. We also post the webinars that we’ll be hosting there. But we hope you found this helpful. Tell us if you did. And, I know we’re giving you all these, like, to dos, but once you get the score, we really would love to hear it. If you feel like it’s accurate, if you feel like it missed something, we would would love to hear that. But you all are awesome.

I congrats to everybody who won this Absolutely not.

If there’s there’s no downside, it’s just gonna give you a a sentiment score, and we’re just gonna keep refining it. We just love your feedback.

Absolutely. Well, Susan, I could just hang out with you all day and the rest of you all day. Wish I could see everybody, but we’re saying we’re being told it’s time to go, so we gotta stop talking.

Awesome. Thank you, everybody, so much. Thank you, Susan.

This was so fun as always, and we will see you all in the next one.

Yes. Look for our email next week. Okay. Everybody.