Good afternoon, everyone. We are so excited. The best day of the year. It’s like Christmas come early. Right, Susan?
Best of the year. Okay. Sure.
Don’t tell my children I said that. Their birthdays are always the best day of the year for me. No. But best marketing day of the year.
How about that? Okay. Because we are revealing for the second year in a row, this has become an annual tradition now, the marketing guide. So this is the twenty twenty six marketing guide.
And if you could go back and look at what has changed in the last twelve months, I don’t think any of us were really prepared for just how much was gonna change and how much AI would change things in the last twelve months, and there is so much on, you know, board, I think, for twenty twenty six. So welcome, everyone. We still see people filing in. We are Susan and Samantha from FMG, and we are so excited to have you all here as we talk about looking ahead to twenty twenty six.
Are you excited, Susan? I’m excited.
I’m totally excited, and it is great.
I was actually thinking the other day. I’m like, for us, thank goodness, things keep changing. So we have new things to talk about. But this one is, like, probably the biggest inflection point I can remember in, you know, in many, many, many years, like, where everybody is asking about, you know, how do I capitalize on AI across all of my marketing? I know AEO is really at the top of everybody’s list, but it’s it’s impressive just to see how how quickly this has become the number one topic pretty consistently from everybody we talk to.
Absolutely.
Lots of other stuff to focus on too.
Yes. So okay. Let me go ahead and share my screen. You tell me when you can see that.
I can see it. Okay. Awesome. So we are so excited to be here with you all.
As we said, this is hot off the press tomorrow. It is being released. I actually have to record one more video that’s gonna be embedded in here. So including in this guide, in all the different sections that we’re gonna go into, which is the blueprint for your marketing plan for the next year, there’s also tutorial at the end of each section that I’ve personally recorded.
So we are holding your hand the whole way through this, and you all are gonna be the very first ones to get it from attending today’s session. So very excited about that. The other thing is we want this to be interactive and fun. This is the end of year celebration, really.
And so as we are going through today’s session, we want to hear from you. So the more that you comment or engage, the more that we will you know, you have a chance. We’re just gonna randomly choose comments and questions and hand out some swag. So what do we got here, Susan?
Got some yetis.
We got some yetis.
We got speaker. We got some hats.
We got wine yeti. We got fun stuff. The wine yetis are great in the summer. I do love those.
So why don’t we kick this off, Susan? What should we ask? Don’t know. Everybody loves the swag. I that’s always fun.
We love giveaway stuff. Yes. I don’t know.
I haven’t thought of the the The good question to get everybody question.
Yeah. I don’t know.
Like Mark just said my middle name is Swag.
My middle name is Swag.
Mark Swag. Alright. I’m gonna give Mark some swag. Alright. Let’s see. Aubrey, if you can write down Mark.
Mark called Mark called DNE.
I love it. I love it. How about this? We can tell you all the four sections that we are gonna be talking about today. And maybe in the chat, let us know the one you’re the most excited to think about for twenty twenty six. That’s a great one. Those four things are getting found online in this new world of AI search, social media, and what to think about with your social media and growing organically.
And then the third one is email and texting communications, and the fourth one is everything that makes you human, your human advantage. So, events, video, any of those human touch points. So what does everybody say? There’s a lot of different ones coming in here.
Coming in hot, and it’s all of them. Oh my gosh. That’s so funny. I actually am so thrilled. Like, pretty much, I think it’s kinda equal.
Yeah. I’m getting And you know the human advantage one.
There’s social media. There’s, I’d say, email and texting may be the one that I’m seeing the least, but the all the other three. And that makes sense because that’s what people are familiar with, but maybe not utilizing as well as they could.
Yes. This is awesome.
And for so many of these different sections, so we broke it into these four sections.
So we’re gonna start with the getting found online because this is really what she GFO, Todd Day says.
I love Todd. GFO. Getting found online. It’s a new acronym.
Oh, I was like, what is GFO?
I think that’s what he means.
Okay. Love it. So this is the first section we’re gonna go into because it is really what has changed the most. Has anyone come to one of our previous sessions on AEO or using testimonials and how they plan to search? I’d love to know if you’ve oh, Alicia said, she’s been to all of them.
I love I love that.
We got a no. We got a yep. We got a yep. Yes and helpful. So a lot is life changing, Mitch says.
Yes. A lot has changed. So we’re gonna start with this.
But one of the things So it’s definitely I don’t think this is like everything in marketing, I don’t think you ever get to the point where even Sam and I aren’t continuing to learn something every day that we wanna share.
Absolutely.
And welcome to all the first timers. I’m seeing a lot of first time attending one of your sessions. So we try to keep it really light and just help you learn things in a way that doesn’t feel too overwhelming.
But okay. Let’s go into this. So here’s just some of the things we’re hearing from people. Right?
I wanna be found by ChatGPT and AI search when somebody’s looking for an adviser. I want prospects to trust me before we even speak, which I love that one. Or I wanna start using testimonials the right way, which they are a huge component of AI search. So one thing to note is that, really, so much has changed in the last few years.
We look ahead to twenty twenty six, this is a brand new chart that just came out from Neil Patel. If you look at the bottom here, right, in twenty twenty, seventy percent about of all of the searches done were just text queries. Someone searching best adviser near me or retirement, you know, planner or whatever the keyword was. That is twenty five percent only now in twenty twenty six going into this next year.
And when we look at what has is filling in the gap, we have voice search. So people, you know, ask yeah. They might still go to Google, but now they’re talking to the quest or asking the question that way. The huge one, look at the gains from zero percent to a quarter share is AI search. So, Susan, what do you think? And everybody, I would love to know on the the the call here, how much are you using now either the Google Gemini overviews or just going straight to ChatGPT or Claude when you’re searching instead of doing a true Google search? What would you say your split is?
I’m probably I’m probably eighty percent chat and then twenty percent Gemini and then always the AI search overview pretty much.
Okay. Okay. So, yeah, you’re still you’re still I would say I’m, like, fifty fifty Google Gemini and ChatGPT, and it depends if I just I think I’m I still have Google Chrome as my default browser, you know, like, on your phone Yeah. Right there.
If I change that ChatGPT, if I oh, you’re Safari.
I am Safari, but I have ChatGPT is is right on my home screen.
Okay. Yeah. So I think if I move ChatGPT, which is such a funny thing, but, like, talk about habit stacking to that place, it would change it more. Because on the desktop, it’s always chat for me, but on my phone so what is everybody saying here?
We’re seeing a lot of Google and ChatGPT. Does anybody like yeah. Somebody asked what about Grok? I wonder if anybody likes anything else more.
Oh my gosh.
I’m gonna send it fantastic. I use Claude. I usually I’ll go to Claude when chat isn’t giving me what I want. Sometimes I’ll start in Claude, but mostly I start in chat.
And if it’s you know, nine times out of ten, it does what it’s supposed to do. And sometimes I’m like, no. No. You’re just not getting it.
And then I go to Claude is my second.
Said brave. I’ve never even heard of brave. Wow. Okay. No. So thanks for telling us that.
Well, if you want to get found by AI, we’re gonna we have so much to cover. We better keep going. There’s really three things you need to focus on, and we did a whole entire workshop on this that we can link.
Aubrey, maybe you can link it, and then we can also send a that in the the follow-up here. But there’s these are the three things that you really need to do. You need to get reviews and testimonials because these AI tools really lean heavily on social proof. They wanna hear other real people are talking about your business and have used it.
They want you to have a reputation online in the area that you’re saying you’re an expert in. So that’s something we obviously help tremendously with here at FMG, helping you publish all different kinds of content in different formats across lots of different places.
And then you wanna format the content on your own website for AI, and that is something we have been investing heavily in changing our product around in the last year as well. So if you’re using FNG, you’ll see now we have things like FAQ widgets and schema markup, which we can show you more. But those are the three pillars. But I thought, Susan, just for the interest of time and keeping it interesting, we do a little case study to show what this looks like in real life.
How does that sound? That sounds awesome. Okay. So Drucker Wealth is the firm, and they wanted if somebody were to go and ask Google or CheckGPT, you know, hey.
I work at Amazon or anybody that works at Amazon that had RSUs or a four zero one k, they wanted to be the adviser that was found. So you can see the end result that, yes, they made it happen. Now they are right there. Right?
And one of the things that’s really interesting about this for all of you thinking about whether you’re being recommended by Google Gemini or in the overview or is no longer is it a list of links we scroll through. Right? You’re either there or you’re not. So with SEO, it was all about ranking higher.
There is no ranking. It’s either you’re there or you’re not. So that is why the more specific you can be, the more you can be the the best, you know, obvious most obvious answer to the question, who should I work with, the better, you know, chance you have of showing up. So they made the list here, but let’s kinda go backwards and see how they did it.
So the first thing is they, under who we serve, have different pages set up for the particular types of clients that they want to work with. Now this is a very niche group, but even if you don’t have this specific of a niche, you should still be talking very specifically about the problems that the type of clients you work with are and then the solutions that you provide. Right? You wanna build a page that answers questions that your target audience is asking.
Because as we saw before in that graph from Neil Patel, these conversational searches where people are asking very specific questions are just shooting you know, they’re taking off. So that you can see through their content here, this is just on that page. They’ve got questions that that audience would ask. And the more specific you can be here, the better because, again, we know people are looking for very specific answers.
If you have a website with FFG, we have this built in tool called Muse. Susan, do you wanna explain this?
Yeah. And I also we got a question from you know, about compliance. And I know some attendees are affiliated with broker dealers who have not yet approved AI for you. So we are showing you features of of the FMG platform that it is dependent upon broker dealer approval.
So at this point, when we talked about AEO, but Sam was talking about all the tips, many of the the tips don’t involve AI. It’s really just how to get found when somebody is looking for you using ChatGPT. So for this, this is a really cool feature that we’ve just, I guess, in the last six months launched on our marketing platform. And again, it is only visible to those that are with firms who have approved it, but it enables you to get that first draft within our platform.
And we’ve trained it so that it is going to pass through compliance with a flying color for those compliance teams that have approved it. And it just helps you get that first draft. It’s done in such a way that you can alter the voice. You can ask it to redo it.
You customize the level of emojis you want and so on and so forth.
It’s very cool. Yeah. So imagine, right, if you were trying to target, you know, business owners in Saint Louis. You can come in here and you could say, write me a blog post about year end tips business owners in Saint Louis would want to, you know, think about.
And the reason you’re including that Saint Louis is so people looking in that particular area would be matched based on their intent with the article that you’re writing. Right? So we have this inside of inside of our platform. And, yes, you could just go to ChatGPT and create things, but it’s so much better for the experience to do it right in this platform.
A, compliance. That’s the main reason. But, b, we, after reviewing, you know, probably at this point, millions of pieces of content, our system is trained to know what would be flagged for compliance and what wouldn’t. So this is our own proprietary platform that we’ve built within the system here.
So let’s keep looking at this case study. The other thing you wanna really make sure you do is add an overall FAQ page to your site plus an FAQ widget at the bottom of any page that you specifically are hoping to be found for. So if you targeted physicians, you could have an FAQ page on your website overall. And then on the page where you’re talking about maybe specific, you know, concerns physicians have or what they’re looking for in a planner, you can add something like this.
And, Susan, somebody asked, does everybody get the FAQ widget who’s an FMG user now? And I actually don’t know the answer to that question.
I think it’s part of the premium website build.
So not essential, but if you have a if you have done the premium build, it should be visible.
And if you’re, you know, interested in doing the premium build, it comes with it.
Got it. Okay. So, yeah, so you wanna add an FAQ page. And the reason, again, this is important is the AI tools are really looking for what is the question, what is the easy answer? What is the question, what is the easy answer? So that’s why these are so important.
And, again, within FMG, you’ll see you have this little widget section and then this FAQ sketch section, and we’ve automatically added something called schema markup to the back end of this, which is really, really crucial for getting found by AI. So once you add that widget, you don’t have to do anything to the code. Our system automatically takes care of it for you.
I’m gonna give Alicia some swag. Alicia Van Van Lennen. I think I said that right.
Because her question so Aubrey, if you can jot that down. Should all FEQs be really specific and framed in the way that the client would ask the question? Or should we also add questions that relate to our business?
And I’d say both, but would love your thoughts.
I think the more that you can write it in a way you could still be talking about your business, but you should write it in a way that the client would ask the question. So for instance, yes, you should say, you know, I have a four zero one k at Amazon. What are my options? Like, really broad.
But then something like, how does Drucker Wealth work with Amazon employees? So it’s still being written as though the client would ask it, but it can be specific to your business. Hopefully, that answers your question. Yeah.
Okay. Awesome.
And then the third thing that they’ve done here is they’ve added a lead capture to that same page. So one of the things, Susan, we know, sadly, is that ninety seven percent of website visitors historically have not converted. Now the good news for you all I don’t know if anybody let’s see if everybody knew this. Do you think that conversions coming from AI convert better or worse than conversions that previously came from things like Google or Yahoo?
So somebody doing a search and they, you know, find you or AI recommend you to better. Oh, okay. Ding. Ding.
Ding. Ding.
That makes sense. Right? If we’re not getting a big massive long list of links, we’re just being told, here’s two or three businesses that are a good fit for you.
We’re gonna convert better. So once somebody does land on your site, the good news is with AI search, they do convert better, but you want a way to capture them.
So if they’re not yet ready to make a phone call to you or schedule a meeting, you wanna have some sort of guide or something relative to them that they can add.
Oh, interesting. Evan Hammond has said that he has found when searching for advisors in my area that AI is prioritizing fee only advisors.
And I don’t I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that. How do you recommend it says, how do you recommend fee based advisors position themselves to rank higher?
So it’s kinda saying That’s an interesting question.
And I wonder if it’s more, what’s the thing? It’s not causation, but correlation. You know?
I think yes. Exactly. And I think it knows you.
It’s not Because a lot of times, the people who, are the you know, historically were, I would say, the least regulated but, you know, didn’t have a home office.
They were self doing self compliance. They were the first ones to be able to get reviews or start implementing them, and so that might be one of the big reasons. And so it’s just a matter of if you don’t have any reviews or very minimal reviews or testimonials, I actually saw a question from Danica, and she said, what’s your number one recommendation for advisers in twenty twenty six? In other words, if I do nothing else, what’s one thing we should work on today?
And I don’t know. Susan, you could have a different answer than me, but I actually think for twenty twenty six, because we know that ninety percent of consumers want to read reviews about and testimonials from who they’re gonna work with, yet less than ten percent of advisers have them. And we know they’re such a huge part of AI search results. I would say getting having a system in place to get those reviews would be probably my number one recommendation.
Yeah.
I think that’s I totally agree. And, of course, there are many people that are dependent upon their firm approving and having policies and procedures around that. So we do these webinars and we talk to lots and lots of advisors and everybody has a unique situation. We just want to share best practices and we totally understand the compliance teams have different opinions around those. But I think talking to your compliance teams about their stance on testimonials and reviews would be a great next step if you haven’t already.
It was approved by the SEC marketing rule, but firms have to get comfortable with the rules and regulations and policies that they put in place to manage them.
Yeah. Somebody just wrote state registered advisers in California still cannot have review. So I know there are specific new ones right here.
State the state thing is different than the that’s right.
The federal. Yeah. Let’s give let’s give a swag item for that question. I think that’s a great question. What’s the number one recommendation? So, Aubrey, that was the first q and a in the q and a. So thank you for that question.
And, actually, since we’re we’ll we’ll come back to reviews in just a second because that’s the next section of this. But I just wanted to mention, if you are not yet adding things like this to your website, we make it really easy to do this. So you can come in here to our downloadables, and you can see all these. I actually hate the term white paper.
I wish we would relabel that to guide because I like the word guide better. But regardless, what basically it looks like is you can choose, you know, whichever one you want. So here are five retirement strategies for small business owners. We have an integration with Canva, so it’ll add your logo right to this.
So it looks like you created it. It’s specific to your firm, and then you can add this anywhere on your website, on the home page, on the how we help small business owners in Saint Louis page, wherever you wanna put it. And as those leads get collected, they will be dropped into your FMG account. If you’ve got it connected to your CRM, it will be added to your CRM, and then you will be notified that you got a new lead.
So this is such a great way, and you can use as many of them as you want.
And I just we got a question. We got we’re getting, like, three questions rather than typing all of them. Advizion is a CRM that we are looking to integrate with, but today do not.
So good question.
A bidirectional integration with Redtail, Wealthbox, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Ebix, and obviously, you know, Excel spreadsheets. And we’re working, to get an integration with Advise on it.
Looks like, given the Looks like it’s popular.
That’s great.
Yeah. Exactly.
I love the the folks over there. So that’s awesome.
Okay. So because we had so many questions about this, we’ll just get into this a little bit.
You do want to if you if you’re collecting client, testimonials, you do want to add them to your website. And that’s because somebody asked, did do I remember correctly? Alicia said, is it right on a past webinar you noted ChatGPT doesn’t have access to Google reviews? That is true.
So all of these tools are, right, fighting for market share, and Google doesn’t wanna give up one of the things that really helps them, the social proof. So putting these types of reviews and testimonials on your website is really important as a way for all the AI tools to be able to read them. So one hundred percent, you want to add them to your website. Don’t just collect them, you know, on Google.
And some of you, Google might not be the best way to start. Right, Susan? We might wanna talk about that for a second.
Yeah. I actually love this. The other approach is to leverage a consist there are lot of there’s some platforms out there that make it easy for you to send out a customer survey. So it has to be triggered.
It has to be consistent. You can’t cherry pick. So imagine if you set the trigger point at, you know, the day after an annual review. But everybody gets this email the day after an annual review, and it links to a survey where somebody can just give a comment and adds a star rating within this you know, like, it’s almost like a SurveyMonkey.
You are able to treat those in the same way as, a Google review. If you have that consistent take Testimonial IQ is is a firm that we partner with. It has the platform to enable you to send that email out. It captures the testimonial of the review and enables you to just have a snippet of code that you add to your website to then have all of those testimonials show on your website.
And we hear that like one of the number one concerns advisors have is what if somebody says something bad like I’m nervous about And I think we heard there’s a stat like the average overall of anybody who uses like, I think, for example, testimony like you told us this, is four point nine out of five of all surveys across all advisers. So I don’t think you need to be, afraid of getting negative feedback. It’s gonna be overwhelmingly positive. And, also, it’ll be great feedback that you can use to, you know, manage the business better too.
Yeah. And, honestly, too, from a consumer’s perspective, I don’t know about you. If I go to check something out and they had a hundred and fifty five star reviews, I would start to think, is this fake? Like, there’s not one single person that even gave them four stars.
So the exception definitely proves the rule. But we just got a great question. Adam said, what are the key ingredients to a great testimonial? For example, why they chose to work with us, what we specialize in, why they have confidence in us in the future, what differentiates us, both for written or video reviews.
So this is actually perfect timing because this slide talks about why become swag. Swag. Swag. Adam gets swag.
Adam.
Great question.
So one of the things that people don’t realize is it’s not just about, oh, I have a hundred five star reviews or my average rating is four point eight. What language and the context of the review matters? Right? So if Susan gets a review, she’s an adviser and she really wanna works with women whose husband have died.
They’re now a widow, and they’re going through this time of transition. And people are explaining that my husband passed away. Susan was so empathetic, and she helped me find all the right documents placed, whatever. That AI is gonna tie those types of search queries to Susan.
So it’s not just she’s a great financial adviser, but that particular niche, it will help, you know, pair those two things together. So the context of the review really does matter. Now that being said, you cannot ask people or tell people what to say.
Keep that in mind from a compliance perspective. Yeah. I think so.
Do I remember correctly that we saw a couple sample emails, for example, that have been used to collect the survey information, for example. And I believe they were they able to say, you know, for example, you could talk about this, that and the other thing or can you not even lead the witness?
That’s a good question for a compliance attorney. I don’t actually have as far as what I do have these, I have these examples here. The first one is would you mind taking a minute to share your experience? You’ll be given the option at the end to share it on Google.
So this is a first, you know, collecting it internally that you could put on your website and then asking to be sharing it on Google. And then this is just another way. In our guide, we have some email templates you can all look at, choose from, ask compliance to approve, and then use. So we’re giving you everything you need to get started with this for sure.
And these are some do’s and don’ts just, again, from a compliance perspective that, you know, we wanna put on there. The main thing is you want to be able to prove to an auditor that you have a consistent approach. So if your approach is you wait till someone is having a meeting with you either virtually or in person, you have a little QR code laminate on your desk, or at the end of the call, you ask them to do it, but you can prove you do it consistently at the end of every client meeting. That’s fine. It doesn’t need to be a email campaign, you know, that you’re emailing every single person at once. We actually think that the much more, you know, impactful way, right, Susan, is to do it at the end of a client interaction.
Absolutely.
Yeah. And I think you’re gonna get your best feedback then as well. So lots of advisors will add it as a link on their signature.
There are lots of different ways.
I do think this is one where I think partnering with one of the vendors in the space that helps you collect and produces, you know, a compliant way of doing it is probably a good a good solution.
Save yourself the headache and get the archive Yeah. Process. Okay. So we spent a big chunk of time on AI visibility because it really is the thing that’s changing the most in twenty twenty six.
So if we didn’t get to your question, keep them coming. We are collecting all these questions, and we and the follow-up, we try to answer as many as they can. And they also inform us of future content that you all would find helpful. So let us know in the chat.
Did does that get the wheels turning for you? Does it make sense? Do you understand some of the things you need to do? You wanna collect testimonials and reviews.
You wanna add FAQs and as much question and answer style content to your website as possible, and you wanna build out pages answering the real questions that the types of clients you would serve have. And if you do it in FMG, we make it really easy with our Muse tool, with our schema markup, and all the other great tools we have to automate those processes for you.
Okay. Awesome. Chapter two. Chapter two. Staying active and visible on social media. Now this can feel like a full time job sometimes for people, and you don’t wanna get, you know, people again, I wanna be active social media, but I don’t know the best way to do it.
I wanna have actual conversations because it can feel like there’s a lot of bots there. Or I wanna show up, but I don’t have the time to post consistently. I thought it would be interesting just to kinda paint a picture for you all. If you’ve ever gone to a big city and you don’t have a reservation somewhere and you start maybe walking around thinking about where should we go out to eat?
If you see a line or a really busy, right, restaurant where there is a ton of people outside, everyone’s milling around, they’re laughing, they’re eating, maybe there’s a short wait. And then right next door, there’s a very similar restaurant, similar menu, but it’s dead inside. Which of the two restaurants are you eating?
Right? Think of social media in that way. It’s this visible place online. And when people see that you’re actively posting, you’re engaging in conversations, you’re sharing info helpful information, it creates trust.
Hopefully that got a question. How often should we interact on LinkedIn? From Lillian. Lillian, we’re gonna give you some swag.
Good question.
My high achiever answer would be at least five times at least five times a week, log in and spend ten to fifteen minutes engaging.
I get high achiever, high achiever.
My my one zero one advice would I think if you can, you know, do three times a week or even two times a week. Again, like setting goals, don’t start from zero and go to I’m going run a marathon. For those, just step it up from what you’re doing today. I mean, you’re doing none, try to do two a week.
If you’re doing three, try to make it four. But I think you’ll get into this. It’s not just about posting. It’s also going on there and active.
Wait, I have got to give swag to Robin’s comments. Sometimes it’s too much. How can I miss you if you never go away?
That is so oh my gosh.
Definitely. That’s hilarious. I’m with you.
I love that so much. It can be a lot. But you shouldn’t be commenting. Okay.
Wait. Maybe I should should make this more clear. You should not be commenting on the same people’s posts consistently. You really want to change it up.
So this is just a screenshot from the guide, and we really give you a full plan on what to do. But one of the things okay. Here we go. I’m just gonna skip ahead to this.
The most important thing is to follow the eighty twenty rule. So what we see a lot is people posting a lot, but then they don’t engage at all. Right? And instead, for every one thing you post, you should be leaving comments on five other posts.
So that’s not that big of a lift. So if you’re posting three times a week, that’s fifteen total comments. But a big tip is that those comments should come right before your post goes up. So if you’re posting you have, you’re using FMG to automate your posting and you’re posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday around nine AM, then about twenty minutes before or first thing that morning when you’re drinking your coffee, you wanna go in and leave some comments.
And I just wanted to give you an example.
Is there a good time of day? Because we got the question on that too.
It’s the best time to post or the best time to comment is before your post goes up, and the best time to post it doesn’t matter as much as people think, but on LinkedIn, specifically, it’s usually weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
And mornings, afternoons?
Again, it depends again on your target audience. Like, I have found some of my best posts perform on Saturdays and Sundays because not a lot of people post on Saturdays and Sundays. So I think you have to sort of play around with it. And, you know, the science is not very firm on this. No. It’s really just lack content.
We got a two questions on quality or quantity and sort of Quality. And quality. Exactly.
Quality all day long. So a few things I just wanna make mention of. People always ask, what do the comments look like, or what should we say? So here’s an example here.
Daniel posted this post, and then you can see my comment. So I’m not just saying great post or that’s interesting. I’m saying something that’s gonna further the conversation along. Right?
So you when you’re thinking about who to leave comments on, by the way, think about who do you want to see you? Who do you want, you know, to become aware? If you want to become, you know, a bunch of business owners in your town to become aware of you, is there a group that they all belong in that you can join? Does one of them often post things that everybody else pays attention to?
If you work with a lot of physicians, can you leave comments on a top surgeon’s posts or a hospital group? Right? That’s how you wanna do it. And you don’t wanna just choose people you’re already connected to.
Me say that again. Don’t just leave comments on the people you’re already connected to. You should be actively looking for second or third degree connections. So that really, really makes a difference. But I just wanted to show with FMG here, we can take care of the great content part so that you can just focus on the engagement because that’s the harder of the two. I in my opinion. I don’t what you think, Susan.
It’s a lot easier for me to log in and leave some comments and boost people’s ego than it is to come up with all the great content to post.
So Absolutely. We have a couple different types of social posts you can choose from. So we have automated social campaigns. So those are ones, like, maybe at the beginning of the month or the beginning of the quarter you go in and you say, I know I wanna do a whole series on, you know, four zero one k’s.
And so you could see here it says delay seven days. So it’s a sequence. You could choose how long between you want each post to go up, but we’ve got the image. We’ve got the post itself all done for you.
We also have stand alone posts. So here, we’ve got a carousel of, like, ten images we’ve made for LinkedIn because carousels are performing really well right now, all about identity theft. So that would be like a stand alone post. And then oh, my GIF is not in here.
Using that same use tool that we showed you before, you can write custom social posts either yourself or you can use our AI tool to write them for you.
Okay.
The last thing I just wanted to mention, DMs. Here is a great example of a DM that I just got from somebody saying, I’ve been, you know, listening to your content. I’ve been reading what you wrote. I’d love to have you on my podcast.
This is such a good example of what a good DM looks like. So link the LinkedIn algorithm pays attention to how well your post perform. It pays attention to how many connections you have, but it also pays attention to your activity. So when you if you send just a few strategic DMs, it can go such a long way, but you don’t wanna just be salesy.
You want to add value. So if you, you know, you like somebody’s content, maybe, again, there’s a surgeon at a hospital that you’re trying to work with more physicians, you could just say, hey. I loved that recent post you did on x, and here’s why. You could invite a subject matter expert to be on your podcast or join you for a webinar.
You can if you’re hosting an event and you wanna add new body, new blood to it, and you don’t have a lot of fresh emails, use LinkedIn to DM invites to people that are a good fit for your, you know, your target audience using the advanced search feature. So lots of different ways on this. We have a whole entire LinkedIn workshop that we did, a whole hour just covering how to use LinkedIn to grow. So we will include the link to that, but the guide has so much for you about LinkedIn specifically and then all social platforms more broadly.
What questions am I missing, Susan?
Because I’m not looking.
Oh my gosh. There’s so many.
So if I look distracted, I’m just, like, trying to get through all questions.
And I also will plan to see like, we’ve been talking to the LinkedIn folks. There was a question here about the algorithm. We’ve got we’ve been talking to really the head of the financial services division of LinkedIn, I think we are gonna do a webinar in February with them. So that will be an awesome one.
So just We’re getting the insights. Scoop. Yeah.
We’re getting the inside scoop. Yeah.
And LinkedIn’s algorithm, just like all the social platforms algorithms, is changing all the time. But one of the things that is I don’t know if I put it in here.
I think, you know, really Like, the most basic level, it’s going to reward engagement.
Know, whether you engaging with the platform by messaging or commenting or by posting things that others are engaged in, it’s not overly complicated. Like we talk about ways to kind of help you be successful, but ultimately, that’s really what it comes down to. The platform is seeing those that are engaging and rewarding them. People like formulas.
We try to give you formulas, but, yeah, we don’t need overcomplicate This is just another reason, though, why we specifically do focus on LinkedIn more than some of the other platforms.
If you look at the most cited domains in those Google AI overviews, LinkedIn is third as of September twenty twenty five.
So you know? And there’s a recency bias with all of this. So, you know, they’re looking for fresh updated information. So if you are using FMG, you’re going into our library, you’re choosing pieces that you know are gonna resonate with your audience and you’re putting them out, that gives you a huge leg up.
Oh, I got we got a question submitted ahead of time that just recur just occurred to me. It was about the usage of social platforms by age groups and how it differs from sort of fifty up versus the younger generations.
And just doing a little bit of research just to confirm my assumptions, and I welcome your feedback, Sam. But essentially, for the fifty and up crowd, me, it was Facebook and YouTube being the top ones plus LinkedIn for professionals. And then for the younger groups, not surprisingly, it was YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
Thoughts?
I’d say that’s effective.
Then true. A, use of ChatGPT for search was about twenty five percent over fifty, which seems really low because everybody I know is using it. So maybe it’s just my little sample group.
And it is higher in the younger generations, but I I feel like that might be a stat that’s not quite accurate.
And is Reddit really gonna help our business? Somebody says.
As of right now, if you get people talking about your business on Reddit, absolutely. Absolutely.
But I compliance, I’m just gonna put a flag. I don’t know that you know, like, some compliance teams don’t even let you claim your Google My Business. So I don’t know if you can be actively engaged on Reddit.
I would talk to your compliance team first.
Probably not. But if people are mentioning your business, it will help you is the short answer. Yes. Yeah. The other thing I do wanna mention about that is one of the things people often forget is, you know, the wait. When it comes forget the poll.
I just saw that. We have to get the color poll.
Okay. Well, while I’m saying this, let’s put it up. We have a lot we have two more sections to still go through, but as you can see, there’s a lot of things that are changing in twenty twenty six.
And if you wanna learn specifically more about all the different tools FMG has that can help you, how we can help you with AI and get found visibility wise, if we can help you with your testimonial, rolling out a testimonial program, how we can help you with video and with events and with email communications and have making sure you put the right content out with schema markup, with FAQs. Oh my gosh. We with a lot. Let us know, and we would love to share what’s new and, you know, just walk you through it and give you an update on basically what these new tools are, where maybe we could take stock of where you’re at right now, and, see what you would need to institute a lot of this in twenty twenty six. So if you say yes, we will have someone from our team, reach out.
Absolutely. Okay. Let’s keep going because man, oh, man. We could talk about this forever. It’s a lot.
And I will say, what we did last year, we took all the different sections of the guide. We did a big overview, and then we broke them up into smaller sections. So we did, like, a whole, you know, webinar on just one of each of these sections individually. We’ll probably do that in twenty twenty six, so stay tuned for invites for those.
So email. I mean, it seems so, like, boring in a way, but at the same time, we know that email has one of the highest conversion rates of any tactic, yet it is crazy how few financial advisers have a systematic drip email marketing in place? This is from Michael Kitzes. So tell us in the chat, do you have a strategy to send out really great emails consistently to not just clients, but also prospects that you’re trying to stay in front of?
I would love to know.
No. Yes. No. Yes. Need one. No. No. See? Oh, we got a Yes.
Still a lot of people don’t.
Yeah. There’s still an opportunity. I think from our experience, there are a lot of people that do a newsletter, And that’s of the check the box. But we believe newsletters are a good foundational kind of drip strategy. But layering on additional valuable content that talks about the topics that are on the minds of your clients and prospects and centers of influence is one of the, I think, lowest hanging fruit ways that you can grow your business in twenty twenty six.
One hundred percent. Shauna just said, I use FMG’s do it for me program, so I have a great system. Woo hoo, Shauna.
We love that. Susan and I specifically, mostly Susan, writes the content for that program. So she’s thinking constantly, you know, we’re brainstorming. What kind of emails should we be going out in February?
What are people thinking about? And then you’re gonna get those emails ready to go, and your do it for me con marketing concierge actually executes everything for you. So for a lot of you that are saying no, and I need to do this in twenty twenty six, if you really feel like even if I had FMG and I have all this technology, I’m not gonna go into the system. That is such a fantastic option because you get everything we’re showing you, but then you also get paired with someone who’s actually gonna implement it for you from our team.
So highly recommended. I’ve changed.
I’ve been evolving the way we write all of the content, particularly the blogs and the social posts to be AEO optimized. So we’re adding you know, we’re structuring it more in a question answer format. We’re adding executive summaries. And the concierge is are helping our Do It For Me customers with their websites to add the FAQs, to make sure that they’re thinking about testimonials.
Then it also has an event that you can put on each month. Maybe at the end, we’ll put up a poll again. Just although it says marketing guide, if you’re interested in learning about our Do It For Me program, we’ll bring up this poll again, and you can comment there. But yes, we’ll we’ll stay on email so that we can get through our four chapters.
Yeah.
And Shonda, we’ll give Shonda some swag. Great. I love that. Thank you for that testimonial.
So somebody just asked, what kind of emails? So here here they are. You wanna have a regular touch point. By the way, in your email subject line, don’t say newsletter.
Say what’s in the newsletter. If you if you’re like, email newsletter number two hundred and eighty one, people don’t wanna open it. Or if you just say weekly newsletter, people don’t open it. But if you say, you know, what’s happening right now and whatever’s going on in the news and how it’s affecting the economy, then people want to read it.
Right?
The other big one is timely content. So if there is breaking news, our team is scrambling behind the scenes to have something for all of our customers to be able to send out within usually twelve to eighteen hours. You one hundred percent want to do that. The more timely, the better. You don’t want people thinking you don’t have an opinion on it or you’re not educating on it. Instead, CNBC is where they’re going. So the timely content, I think, is one of the biggest things you can do for the biggest bang for your buck, But you wanna have that system in place so that even not just based on breaking news, you’re staying in people’s inboxes regularly.
So, again, with FMG, if you add one of those widgets like we have, one of those downloadables on your site, people can, you know, get whatever that guide is. And then two times a month for those leads, you wanna send them educational helpful content in some sort of drip sequence. Right? And if you’re also looking to build your email sequence of prospects, you can post about on social media saying, hey.
I’m gonna be talking about this in my newsletter next week. Make sure you sign up for it here. So if you have an audience on social media and not all those folks are yet on your email list, that is a great way to get more people. And I barely ever see anyone do this, But it’s such a great strategy to build up that email list.
And in our FMG content library, we have pretty much every kind of content on this side. Could think of lifestyle content, you know, about golf and second vacation homes and things that are just interesting or of the moment. We have, you know, obviously, things related to portfolios and investment management, financial planning topics. And if you use one of our automated campaigns and you sign up for it, for instance, the monthly market insights, then once a month, everyone on your list, clients and or prospects, is going to get an email from you.
But included in the guide is this full communications checklist that will make sure that you take all the necessary steps to be effective. And, again, if you don’t wanna deal with all this, you can hire our do it for me program, and we will do it for you. Yeah. What questions are we getting, Susan?
Like what topics to send, what are the topics you should write about? So I just tried to just come up like the last six or eight blogs that we’ve written, I just tried to remember them off the top of my head and add them in there. But things that are, I said, seems obvious, but the things that are on the minds of your clients and prospects and centers of influence or of their friends so that they would forward it. You know, the tax law changes in the OBBBA, the you know, how to maximize gifting, whether to do a Roth IRA conversion, things relating like I’m really excited about one that we’re doing for I think it’s in February, but it’s on you know the best ways to help an adult child with a down payment. There are a lot of different ways to do it and they have estate and tax benefits and pros and cons. And actually it was a pretty complicated topic with lots of different ways to do it and I think that’s something that’s on a lot of people’s minds.
So And I love that because there’s been in the news a lot, you know, this idea of why wait till you die to give your wealth and instead, you know, facilitating it earlier.
Yeah. Not to mention that, you know, the average age of a first time homebuyer is forty. I mean, it’s just becoming so hard to buy a first, you know, to buy that first house.
So many more, I think I saw us.
I saw a stat was like, if you made two hundred and fifty thousand a year, five years ago, you could afford the down payment on ninety percent of the homes in America. Five years later, it’s fifty percent.
It’s crazy. Which is insane. So yeah. So those are the types of content that we have in the library. We would love to give you a demo, show you the content, show you what’s in there.
Why don’t we put up the poll one more time really fast and just it says, ask about whether you’re interested in getting any more information on the twenty twenty six marketing guide, but assume that it also, if you’re interested in learning more about the Do It For Me program.
I don’t know, can we do it twice or no?
I don’t know if we can. If you’re interested in learning more about the do it for me program, you could put in the q and a box.
Message us.
Yes. Tell us more, and, Susan, we can reach out to them that way. Okay. So the the last section that a lot of you mentioned that you were interested in is using your human advantage to create meaningful connection.
I don’t know about you. I actually had a post on LinkedIn that sort of went viral where I showed what AI images looked like just back in September versus today, like, if you gave the exact same prompt. And could you tell the difference? And it was crazy how many people could not tell the difference.
So it has come a long way, and I think the more we can’t trust what we see online I don’t know about all of you.
Do you feel like I can’t trust some of the videos I see or pictures I see? Is that real? Is that fake? I have fake AI videos in my feed on Instagram constantly. Really? Like babies falling out of ceilings and, like, superheroes saving them and wolves attacking someone’s dog.
I was wondering, like, who’s taking the time to make those stupid things?
I have no idea. People that, like, you know, get excited about it. But anyways, so one of the things that we see time and time again is that events move the needle. Events just like this move the needle so much.
You get to hear someone talk about what they are good at, hear their voice, see their expertise. It’s you know, does it doesn’t feel intense. You know, you’re not on the spot to make a decision about whether to work with them. But barely any financial advisers do events like this where they’re showing off their expertise.
So it is something we can really help with at FMG. We have an entire section of our platform that’s devoted to helping you throw events, and we even create tons of slide decks for you to be the expert. So if you are thinking about hosting more events, whether they’re in person or virtual, here is just a little snapshot from the guide about the frequency.
Hosting at least two a year is a great place to start. I’d love to hear maybe from everybody on the call. Do you currently host any events at all for prospects or clients? And if so, what are they?
Candice said both. Or how often? That would be interesting too. Susan, did your do you have any events that you’ve heard of people doing that you just think, wow.
That’s such a cool idea.
Gosh, I ping you every month because we have to come up with a marketing tip for our do it for me customers. I loved your idea and I think I actually saw an example of an advisor who executed it and it’s too late probably as a tip for everybody today but maybe for next year it was the gift wrapping event and inviting their clients and then giving them sort of an exclusive way like you can drop your presents off and we extend this to your family as well as two friends because it is really a perk. But I would love that if my advisor was local and I could drop off my gifts and have them all wrapped. Oh, you already found it. Yes. I think this is a great event for those that wanna just put it on the ear, you know, ear market for next year.
Yes. And we try to think of events where somebody actually wants to come. Like, you know, it’s I think that that is so huge. One of the things I’ve been seeing a lot in some of the ultra high net worth circles that, you know, I’ll be part of groups or education groups is a lot of people with a lot of wealth wanting their adviser to get in front of their children, their adult children, younger and younger.
And I think I Slacked you this idea, Susan. Somebody did it was a cooking class. Yeah. Where they facilitated a conversation around, like, taking charge.
Who’s the leader? You know? What about, like, when mistakes are made, but they’re using cooking as, like, an analogy for facilitating that conversation. But they invited, like, a really cool chef from a local area.
There was another idea where if there’s, like, a venue in your town, let’s say a brewery or a winery that everybody loves, if you did, a behind the scenes tour group where you invited clients that could bring a friend and you kinda they get an exclusive back behind the scenes type of thing. That’s great. But then from an educational perspective, what we’re doing here today is great for all of you to do too. And if you don’t feel like you could talk about something for an hour, invite a subject matter expert to come and join you.
This is just an example I wanted to show you.
These two advisers teamed up, and they had a preparing for a successful succession. That is a tongue twister.
They added this to their website. They had this invite. You could see they very specifically talked about what they were gonna talk about, and they got two new clients from this one event. So, again, I think the trick with any of these is just being really specific about who it will benefit, why they should come, and then not making it this, like, beat them over the head sales, but making it so that you’re showing all this great value you have to give so somebody wants to work with you.
Yeah, my favorite suggestion is don’t always think about the in person events.
Those are the most effort, usually the most cost, the most logistics.
Do virtual educational events and partner with somebody and it doesn’t have to even be like straight down the fairway on financial topics. It could be with a life coach, it could be with somebody from the FBI talking about identity theft, it could be with an antiques dealer who does virtual appraisals. I mean, there’s so many different ideas. And when you do it virtually, it’s so easy for people to join and to forward the link. And if you partner with somebody, then they are inviting people to which become your prospects. So I think that’s something that everybody should think about for twenty twenty six.
Wow.
We people have great ideas in the chat for I know. I was commenting like such a great group.
Alicia said charcuterie board, learn to create one and keep one, summer event, river theater play. I like the I’m such a history buff. If somebody had a historian come in or antique dealer kind of a thing, I love those. Those are so great.
I think anytime you can do something too where you have multigenerations, we’ve we’ve talked about, like, a family picture day before where you invite people to come get their photos taken. So these are all great ideas. Again, within FMG’s tool we have a whole event tool. Whether it’s it’s a virtual or in person, you can create a landing page that people can go to to learn about the event.
You can send out all the invites via email. You can collect the registrations via this event. And, again, if it is something you’re doing that’s more educational in nature, we have some out of the box ones. Like, every year, we do one a halftime report.
Like, what’s the state of the economy the last six months? We do a tax one every year in February, March. So hundred percent if you wanna get started with events, this is a great way to do it. And then in this guide, we have an entire events checklist to help you throw an amazing event.
Okay. Wow. We have five minutes to spare.
That was yeah. That was a lot.
That was a lot. So, again, this guide is very comprehensive. We usually don’t do really broad webinars like this. So if this is your first one, typically, we choose one topic and go very deep on it.
But because we’re unveiling the guide, we wanted to show you everything that was in it. So tell us in the chat, was this helpful? We hope you can’t wait to get your hands on the guide. We wanna hear your questions and your feedback.
Susan, what other maybe if there’s somebody else we should give swag to who had a great event idea.
Oh my gosh. Okay. I let’s see.
I feel like we need to give, swag to Mitch Slater who’s just been sharing lots of ideas throughout the webinar today.
Alright, Mitch. My friend my Mitch is my friend. He’s got a great podcast himself. Yes.
Oh, a planting class. That’s interesting. People are asking some questions about getting their hands on the guide. So, Susan, the plan is to email this out to everybody as soon as we finish it. It’s hot off the press, like I said. I have to finish recording my video this week.
Right? Is it it’s like it’s soon, and everybody everybody who attended, will be getting this as well as the replay.
Hooray. And there is a email right there if you have any follow-up questions. Again, we really just wanna be a resource for all of you. We want you to have a great twenty twenty six in growing organically. And if we can help you do that at F and G, we would be honored. So thank you so much, and happy holidays to everyone. And we just hope you have a great and joyful season.
Yes. Happy holidays and happy New Year to everybody. Alright.
