Your Second-Half Marketing Playbook: The Only 2 Moves You Need Each Month

Thank you for all of you for being here, and we are excited. So if you missed the first half of this workshop, we hosted it at the beginning of the year. And the whole idea was we thought if you could only have time, which most of us do, to do two things per month when it comes to moving the needle by taking some effort with your marketing, what would be the two things that our team would tell you to do?

So we gave you a playbook for the first half of the year, and now we’re gonna go through the second half of the year. So it’s June, but we’re starting with July. So we’re giving you a little bit of time to get planning for July.

And before I share my screen, Susan, do you want to share just a little bit more about who FMG is in case we have anyone new who’s not joined us before?

Absolutely. And I’d love to know if anybody is new, like first web first webinar, first FMG webinar. I’d be curious to see that.

If you’ve been to a million, tell us that too.

Yeah, this is my eightieth or this is my first or anywhere in the middle.

For anybody who is new to FMG, FMG is the leading marketing provider for independent financial advisors. And one of our value propositions is use us just to help with marketing and social media or just with websites or just with testimonials or just with texting. Or if you want, you can combine any of that. And if you do, you’re able to manage all of it all in one place, which saves you time.

I think the best feedback we get from advisors is that it saves them time and clients love them for the things that they’re able to do through our platform. So we’ll tell you more about it as we go through some of the ideas that we have. But Sam and I love advisor marketing, love working with advisors, have a lot of experience, and we really help steer the platform to enhance it in ways that are going to actually drive results for you. We are not the ones that just swivel our heads and do whatever advisors are asking for.

We actually put some thought into what is going to work. We stay up on all of the latest trends, and then we’re infusing that into our product roadmap, which is very exciting. So anyway, we are passionate about our customers and we love sharing best practices.

Yes. Okay. We have actually a lot of first timers here. So Henry, Sydney, and Jason.

Let’s see. Kyle I love that. To all of you. And for those of you who are saying, I think the the comment of the day so far goes to Adam who said I la la love these webinars.

Love webinars.

And we love having you here.

So thank you.

That was a great great overview. If you go to our website, you can see under products. We have all sorts of products, and we keep adding, as Susan mentioned, as the landscape keeps changing. So we’re gonna talk about this some of these things today, but everything from helping you with your website to social media, email communications, events to managing testimonials.

That’s such a huge part now of getting AI to recommend your business and even texting. So you can go there if you want to learn more, but I’m gonna go ahead and start the presentation. And this slide deck will be sent to all of you post event along with a PDF that goes through each of these two marketing moves to take. So you can scribble your notes, but we’ll be sending that out as well.

So let us know in the chat how many of you typically host a summer event. If it’s for clients and prospects or both, we would love to know as that is something that we’ve been paying a lot of attention to. But, Susan, you and I have been talking a lot about how in this world of AI, there are all of these really interesting kind of almost like backlash against it that’s happening. I’ve seen a lot of people my cousin is twenty one, and she said at her college, a really big thing now are these parties they call no phone parties where everyone has to put their phone in, like, a bowl at the beginning of the night when the party starts.

And it’s people don’t want it documented for social media, and they don’t wanna be distracted, and they want to be present with each other.

And what college is that?

Because I think anybody with college age kids wants their kids to go there. I have not heard my kids talk about a party where they put their phones down, but I’d love that.

It’s OU, Ohio University. Wow. In Southern Ohio. I’m a Cleveland girl. So yeah.

So, anyways, I just I would love to hear in the chat. Do you typically host events? This is one of the things right now we are seeing as just such a huge trend, and it’s they they can perform incredibly, incredibly well. So for July, one of your two marketing moves is to plan either a summer or a fall event that people will actually want to attend.

Yes. And I think, you know, we were the reason you brought that up is because in this world of AI and I was just a conference with a bunch of thought leaders over the last couple of days and guess what we talked about a lot of AI, what’s the future look like for financial advisors and wealth management? And the common theme, the net net is that everybody’s going to lean into your differentiator and what still matters is the being human part. So you’re going to do more and more with your AI is going to free up your time to do things that only a human can do, and the advisors that are going to be most successful are going to lean into that. And events and personal connections and surprise and delight moments, those are the things that only you can deliver. And so we really it’s sort of kind of contradictory in some ways, like everything’s getting so modern, but the way you’re going to grow your business is actually almost going back to Yeah.

Yeah. I love, and I hope I’m not butchering your name. Ami said we get a private box at a local semi pro baseball game for clients every summer. I love those games. My kids love those games where they, like, dress up, catch up in the mustard and go around the ball field.

And Kyle said we get a have a get together every June and host a client appreciate appreciation event. So great ideas here. The second thing is if for your marketing moves, if you’re not gonna host an in person because it’s either you don’t maybe it’s at the expense or the time, don’t sleep on webinars. We find that less than twenty percent of all of advisers are utilizing webinars as a tool.

Yet just like you’re all here listening to me and Susan talk about something and we’re demonstrating expertise or talking about something that it’s allowing you to learn from us, you can do the same thing for your clients and prospects. And it doesn’t even have to be you, the one doing all the talking. Right? You can invite someone to join you.

This type of Like, a great idea just thinking off the top.

Sam and I just wing this and talk a lot. Yeah. What makes sense to you? Try not to bore you.

But, you know, this July, the Trump accounts go live. So FMG for our customers, for our do it for me customers in particular, we’ve written an entire webinar outline, which could be something done in person, but it works great for either a podcast and or a webinar as well as video scripts. A lot of people have their misunderstandings. I think their misconceptions, misunderstandings.

There’s a lot that isn’t even decided, but it’s a great topic. Like when you can find something that’s timely, I think those tend to do really well. And as we’ll share with you, these are activities that you can do that you then repurpose, regardless of whether it’s an event at a baseball game where you’re taking pictures and putting it on social or whether it’s an educational event. It gives your marketing legs way beyond just that event too.

Right. So the the client appreciation events are great because you can get in front of family members. Right? You can meet the next generation. You’re you’re hearing things that you’re not gonna hear via email or just in a meeting where you’re talking about the financial plan. The webinars are great because it really is a great way for you to get in front of a new audience.

So I wanted to just point out because I thought this was really, really helpful to think through that if you are trying to get fresh blood into your pipeline, the way you invite people Fresh blood.

Fresh blood into these webinars. The way that you invite people matters. So you really for webinars, especially where it’s more thought leadership educational, focus on the pain point that you’re gonna help solve in that call. Right?

So here we’re saying, you know, are you gonna see low summer attendance rates? This was some we were inviting all of you to an event a webinar about event planning. And then we’re saying we’ve heard from so many people this is an issue. And then we tell them what exactly they’re gonna get if they attend the event.

So don’t just say, hey. Come to my webinar to learn about Social Security. Like, you need to be very specific in what someone will learn if they join you, and your rate of yes is way more likely to go up.

And I think worth pointing out because I see a question for Michael, but I also can imagine that a lot of people are asking like, well, where am I getting this list to send to people that the new blood that I want to get? And that I think our suggestion is to partner with somebody. And we always think about centers of influence as being a state attorneys and CPAs. Doesn’t have to just be that.

Like a lot of people have had success partnering with somebody at a continuing care facility or an elder care consultant or a designer or a health. It doesn’t have to be straight down the estate planning and tax stuff, and then they email it to their people and promote it to their constituents. And that’s how you get the new blood. And if you are a solo adviser or have a small team, the way we suggest doing this, we’ll pat ourselves on the back is our do it for me program because we are actually coming up with an event idea every single month.

We’re writing the entire script out, including the invitation copy that you would write, social media ideas, everything. And then you have a concierge who helps you execute it and promote it, which is really the biggest part of the work.

So partnering with FMG is a great way to create scale in doing events. And we do have an event planning tool on the platform that you can use yourself. So we have the do it for yourself and we have the do it for you version. It just makes it really easy to send invitations, create the invitation, create the design, send a drip email sequence, post on social, have it all route through compliance, have a registration page that automatically is created and looks great and the registration form is automatically there. So we just make it easy.

Well said. And I just wanna go back to, this other part because we have some of our do it for me customers who are working with our team to put on the event, but then they pair it with this strategy. So you could partner with someone and also obviously have them email out to their list. But if you have LinkedIn, you can actually create a LinkedIn event page and then add your Zoom link to it.

And you can use LinkedIn’s advanced search feature if you’re a little bit more advanced to look so let’s say you’re gonna give a talk and you think, oh, there’s some businesses that the employees of these businesses would be a great fit. You can go in and search by that employer and, you know, invite people directly without having their email. So, you know, if you have a little bit more scale or a little more time or someone helping you, that is a great strategy as well to pair with it. But as Susan said, the beauty of our do it for me program is we will build the landing page for you.

We will give you the scripts and the slides from our FMG event toolkit, and then all you need to do is show up and talk and run it.

So that is that. Alright. So that was July, and now we’re going to move on to August. And oh, I just wanna mention two other event ideas that came in the chat.

A monthly hike and walk with clients for the summer. I would love that. I love to hike. I just told Susan I’m going on a hiking trip in Switzerland at the end of the month, with my whole family.

And then the other one was a dog day, where clients bring their pets to a local dog park cafe. That is so cute. And I just got really, really going over.

I do too. I just wrote a little response quickly trying to multitask, but I and we can talk offline if you’d like to email us. But I think that could be great. That is going to play very well on social media and even as a follow-up, like an email to the rest of your to all of your clients just saying, we had this fun event. But I think it’s the kind of thing that people might bring a friend, the person that they walk their dogs with every morning, their neighbor or whatever. And if you put I think having something that’s unique, like whether it’s baking, getting cookie dog cookies made with your logo on it, or I would probably just ask AI for a ton of ideas, but that’s an easy one so that people have something to talk about when they leave. And that is when you’re going to get referable moments that drive business.

Right? Like, oh, it was so cute. They handed out these cute little things.

Everybody talks about their dogs every bit. But yeah, that’s a great idea.

For good reason. Okay. Alright. Let’s go to August. And for August, we’re talking about website optimization.

This is something we have done a ton of trainings about. So if you head over to FMG’s YouTube channel, if you wanna do a deeper dive on this, we’re gonna scratch the surface, but we’ve offered a bunch of trainings on this in the past. So there are two things that we want you to do. The first one is to make sure that your messaging is really focused on your ICP.

And we’re using ICP and not just niche. And Susan, I’m gonna let you kind of explain why, because this is also a shift in how we’ve been teaching it. It was a moment for Susan.

Yes, I you know, I think we’ve done so many. Every one of you has probably heard you need a niche, you know, niche marketing really works. And people are like, but I serve like a broad swath of people and I don’t really have one niche. And I think we have this moment that niche is like the perception is that it’s doctors. It’s some demographic, whether it’s by occupation or by demographics or by geography, something.

And what we’re realizing is so what the was I asked myself, what would my adviser say I am? You know, I’m just, you know, your average, you know, potentially high net worth sixty year old. And what I realized is the what I would fit in for them is the trigger point that brought me to them. So every client that joins you likely came to you because there was some pivotal moment in their life that made them want to either review what they are currently doing or talk about planning for what they want to do, either reaching a certain wealth.

It’s that trigger point that is your niche. And the way to think about it is an ideal client profile. So for me, it was a liquidity event. For others, it might be caring for an aging parent.

For others, it might be having a child. But you could probably bucket your best clients into a couple of different triggering events. Those are the things that you want to talk about on your website because that is what your prospects as they’re coming to your website. You want them to see themselves in the solutions that you solve for.

And it’s not about describing who they are. Like I work at a wealth tech firm. It’s about describing the problems that you’re solving for them. And all of you have niches as it relates to that.

And you don’t have to just have one. You can have several. But ideally, your website focuses on maybe three to five max. And I think it’s an for everybody.

And that’s what’s going to help you with answer engine optimization. Was that too long? Sorry. No.

That was great. And I just wanted to mention that because we don’t have a ton of time to dig into this, but this is something that I would say eighty percent of firms struggle with or could improve on in their marketing. I think they’re already doing it in their practice, but when they don’t know how to talk about it. So we decided to host a ideal client profile workshop to help you nail it down, to think about it, to create new messaging around it.

It’ll be in two weeks on June seventeenth, and you’re all invited to join us. So I don’t know, Aubrey, if we have the registration page live for that one yet, you could drop it in. If not, when we send you the follow-up materials, everyone, we will make sure to send that as well. I already see some people sending in the question box.

How do I how do I sign up for that? So we hear you loud and clear. But as Susan said, the other thing to remember is when somebody lands on your website, of course, they wanna see that you are a fit. You you know, you work with people just like them.

But AI tools, if someone goes and they’re asking a question, you know, I work here and I have these RSUs or, you know, my husband and I just sold our business and we’re looking for an advisor in St. Louis to help us with the the the the AI tool wants to make sure that they feel confident in who they’re recommending. And so you need to be able to really explicitly talk about these things so that AI can confidently recommend you as well.

Yes. Totally. And I think if everybody thinks about their website or just how they describe who they serve, I think you’re describing people. You’re describing business owners, retirees, buckets of people.

Change that to the problems that most of the business owners who came to you were looking to solve.

Change the retirees to what were the what are the top two to three problems or reasons people retirees came to you. It’s the problems you solve for those people, not the people that are the language you wanna be leaning in on? Problems within the people. Yes.

Yes. Not the people themselves. I love that. And so the second marketing move for August when we think about website optimization. So the first is really nailing down that ICP.

The second is then designing and optimizing your row your robot. Your Your robot.

We may have that’ll be in a year.

Yeah. All in a year. Right? The robot. Of things right now. We’ll all have a little robot following us around.

Like, at the at the airports now, how they, like, come and clean the plates. Have you seen those? Anyways.

Yes. No. I totally have. I’ve seen them in in Target. They’re, like, restocking. It’s crazy.

My four year old, like, screams every time he sees me. He thinks it’s the funnest thing ever. Okay. So but you you identify that ideal client profile.

We’re gonna build out our messaging, and then we want to make sure that our website is really built for both audiences. So you have two audiences now, and this is different than SEO. A lot of people are like, oh, this is just SEO, but it really isn’t. It is different.

Again, we have lots of resources on our YouTube page and our FMG webinars page that go into this in more detail, but I wrote on the left what you really wanna do when it comes to optimize your website for these things. At FMG, we are working with all of our clients all the time to think about these things. So you, again, are gonna be building your website for the robots and then also for the humans visiting the page.

Because if you don’t think about the robots first, the humans might not ever end up there. Right. And so we launched, for instance, this, FAQ tool, which is a widget that you can add to any page on your website, and it automatically has schema markup built in because AI tools love love love FAQs when they’re thinking about who to recommend. So this is just one aspect.

There’s a lot, again, that goes into it. I’ve listed them on the left. You’re gonna get this lift list afterwards. But just be thinking about this as you’re thinking about optimizing your website in general for the month.

God bless you. Sorry about that.

Okay.

And I saw a question come in from Chris. He noticed where I put ad transcripts for podcasts and video. And he said, what if this is all just on YouTube and Spotify?

So this is such a good question. We actually just had a moment ourselves where Susan and I are on podcasts and other people’s YouTube channels and speaking at conferences, and we never put all of those things on one, like, media mention page for FMG. And that was a huge missed opportunity. Because we wanna make it as easy as possible for the AI to recognize all those media mentions, all that great thought leadership. And if you don’t have it mentioned on your website, then it could miss it. It doesn’t recognize always that this speaking appearance over here is related to you or your firm.

Maybe they say Samantha Russell, but it’s the connection.

Exactly. And the transcript is what they’re able to crawl. So you I one hundred percent would build a page out where you’re listing those podcasts or those YouTube videos so that AI can read them. Great question, Chris.

Okay. So again, that was just scratching the surface for the websites because there’s a lot that goes into it. Happy to share more with all of you. And if, again, if you go to our YouTube channel, you’ll see a ton of tutorials Susan and I have done on those topics. But if you wanna build a website with FMG so you get these you know you’re getting these great AEO tools, we would love to talk with you about that as well.

Absolutely.

Moving on to September, which this is also going more into that AEO topic, social proof.

I think, Susan, the numbers are still less than ten percent of all advisers have any sort of written public testimonials or reviews of any kind. Can you believe that?

Anybody currently have testimonials on their website and, you know, think about using testimonials as part of your marketing strategy.

Or just say no, if you don’t.

Or just say no. Yeah, let’s get some engagement. Does anybody who doesn’t?

Yeah, who does and who doesn’t?

Who doesn’t but might be interested?

Oh, the first one, Rodney, a plus. He said, yes. We do. I love it.

Oh, awesome. So this is great. Yeah. And the biggest reason is compliance. Like, yeah. No.

Compliance. Compliance. Compliance. We have a compliance solution that makes it doable.

And Lauren said yes, but it’s tricky because compliance requires that all reviews be posted. That is not uncommon, but I want you to not be nervous about that because what we have found is that we are helping advisors every day through our new product, FMG Testimonials, collect this feedback and then display it. And the number of negative or bad reviews is so small that I don’t want say it’s nothing to worry about, but almost I want to say it’s nothing to worry about. Yeah.

And the other thing is, I think everybody thinks of, you know, the Wild Wild West like I’d be sending people to Google. Gosh knows what they’ll say. The way our testimonial tool works is that it sends out a client survey. So it’s just an email, the box that collects, it has stars on it and a little box.

It looks a little like Google, so it’s not some intimidating survey. It’s just like give a star rating and say a little bit. But it is a client survey. It’s just coming in.

In fact, you don’t have to. You could do this step and not have to publicize what you see. So a lot of people will do just a segment of their population, to send this client survey out just to see what people are saying. Then they feel comfortable.

And then, yes, you do. If you publish one, you have to publish all.

And the big thing, I think, is that it makes it easy. We have a compliance platform. So all of these reviews are coming in through this client survey tool. They are getting reviewed, and then you can just push a button and have them publish on your website.

And you don’t have to have an FMG website for this to work. It just is a widget. You just copy and paste this embed code and then they automatically show up on your website and you can choose the design that they’re in. To get Google reviews, there’s just a box that you can make available or not.

Some people just don’t want to deal with Google. But after the client writes their little review, there’s an optional box that you can add or not that says copy this to Google. And that’s how we handle the Google piece. So a few things I wanna hone in on.

Number one, all of FMG’s products and and services, by the way, can be unbundled.

So if you have a website with someone else, you currently have a whole system set up, but you’re like, this would be great. I would love to work with you guys for testimonials. Susan mentioned you could do that. But let’s just talk a little bit about why these are so important. Oops. I need to go back here.

When AI is thinking about who to recommend, we use the term social proof. It yes. It believes to an extent what we say about our own business, but ChatGPT, Claude, they wanna hear from other people that have used that business so that they can really feel confident in making the recommendation. And that makes so much sense.

It’s like the new referral. Right? We all when we’re choosing an adviser twenty years ago, everybody was talking to other people. They wanted to hear from family and friends.

AI wants to know what have other people who’ve used this business said about it. So when you’re thinking about, you know, what firms get recommended by AI, we have done a lot of research and twenty five to thirty percent of how AI decides to choose who to recommend is weighted by whether or not you have testimonials. So you will almost never see AI recommend someone who has none. Like they will sometimes, but very, very often they are looking for people who do.

So let’s talk about two things though. Before we go completely all in on the testimony and reviews, here’s something you could do in the meantime. So on your website, you can add case studies and client success stories while you’re waiting for compliance to allow you to do this. It doesn’t even have to be like, I worked with this specific client and this was the outcome.

Right? It could be we have a wealth of experience working with people in name the situation, and this is how we, you know, work with them. And just show your expertise in that area, whether it’s exit planning, whether it’s complex estate planning or taxes of some sort or a particular type of benefit package. This really, really can go a long way, you know, to making both the human and the robot feel good.

And then once you’ve done that and you are able to start collecting and displaying testimonials, you can move on to that. So this is just an example if you’re using our FMG testimonial tool. All of those reviews do automatically display on the website once you turn it on. So if you say, I wanna use it on my website, it will then add it.

And, again, research shows that when AI can find reviews from real people about a business, that business has a much better higher chance probability of being the recommended business.

Yes. And we did the other question.

FMG testimonials approved at the broker dealers? And the answer is we are really close with a couple of the largest broker dealers and working with all the firms to get approval. So you’re not behind. Compliance is definitely hesitant.

We’re in the process of just giving them demos and going through a lot of the tech due diligence. This is not an AI solution, so it’s not one of those additional hurdles.

So I’d say in the next couple of months, I would expect that we would see hopefully all the big, big broker dealers will have approved.

And I think from there, it’ll just By year end, I think we’ll see a huge shift.

And you know, the same way there were so many firms that weren’t allowing people to use AI of any kind. You know, what happens is there becomes a critical mass and people under understand the importance. And when every other firm is also doing it and then so and then they start to feel comfortable because they see it can be managed and we have an audit trail. Yeah.

The the people who built this tool actually sat down with the SEC for hours to build it. So all of those things really, really help. And I think this would be a good time. If you’re interested in getting more information about FMG’s testimonial product or our website tools or our marketing tools, just anything in general, Aubrey, if you put a poll up, you can just say yes, and we can send you some resources.

And sometimes even just having access to the information about how it all works with compliance and things. Enough advisors making the case obviously helps move it along a little bit faster.

Absolutely.

Yeah, we got a question about research that shows that testimonials actually make a difference. I mean, Sam, I think you’ve got a ton.

I didn’t actually include all of that in this one, but if you if you would wouldn’t mind putting in your email into the question box, Joe, I can send as a follow-up some of the previous, you know, webinars and things we’ve done that outline just how important it is because that, you know, it that is the reason why we launched this product. Right? We don’t just launch products for no reason. We saw that it was so crucial for advisers to have reviews and testimonials to be chosen by AI, and so that was the whole purpose behind launching this product. So we have tons of research that I can share with you.

Yeah. I would love it if everybody you know, I got out a question, you know, which broker dealers? If if you wanna just throw your broker dealer in the chat, that would be really helpful.

We are in deep talks with Ozaik, Satera, LPL, Kestra, Cambridge, a lot of the large RIAs. So Edelman is already a customer and has is now seeing two thousand reviews a month and has a four point nine Google rating and is seeing I think they’re like four X or something the number of website conversions coming from AEO, which is crazy. Mercer is another big customer.

Pershing is probably a custodian. So are you with Pershing Advisor Solutions or Pershing? I used to work for Pershing, but at any rate, Tara, Lincoln, LPL. Yeah. So we should be getting into all of those Commonwealth being part of LPL.

So the way it works is, A, it’s a client survey. So this survey is coming in. The tool does require you to send it to all of your customers, and you can do that either all at once. But we don’t recommend that. We recommend that you do it based on a trigger event that you can put in your ADV if you’re an IAR or an RIA or just in the disclosure of the form.

It’s going most people do it like on the client anniversary or at the annual review and it is triggered. So it goes out. So it’s just sending these out periodically all the time on a triggered basis because your CRM synced and it’s synced with FMG or it can just be synced directly. And then those are actually put into a compliance workflow and reviewed.

And if you’re part of FMG, I think by the end of this month, the compliance workflow is the same as all of the other compliance workflows for FMG. Compliance approves it. And if decided you want to promote these on your website, which is a conscious choice, then once compliance approves it, it automatically gets added to your website. So it’s just creating a compliance workflow and putting the rules in place about what the SEC is really most concerned about, which is you have to can’t cherry pick who you ask.

You have to have a process around when you’re asking and has to be consistent and you have to show all.

Yep. It actually isn’t as complicated once you break it down and you have a system in place. And I think that’s what’s so wonderful about this is you’re really able to prove that you, you know, you’re kinda hands off and that the system is the one making sure that you’re following all of those rules. So we just went through all this, but I put a few slides in there just to show.

And, again, don’t equate this with Google reviews. Yes. You can push it to Google if you want, but you do not have to. The reason you would was that it does offer a little bit of a bump in visibility for some of the AI search tools, but you still get a major bump without it just because right now, especially so few advisers have any reviews or testimonials at all.

And FYI, Lauren, with Pershing Advisor Solutions, which that was literally I joined Pershing to help start Pershing Advisor Solutions. Ben Harrison and that group are great. You are likely an RIA, an independent RIA. You can do this on your own because you’re not affiliated with a broker dealer.

Oh, we should yeah. We should have mentioned that. There’s a lot of people who can use it right away, so you can certainly reach out. We put our email in there if you want to get started or learn more, get a demo right away.

Okay.

We love our broker dealer partners, so that’s no knock on them. And they are all really close. And I think this I think the steps that the broker dealers are going take is first just to allow the client survey to be posted and then have Google be probably a second phase.

We can.

The tool can actually monitor Google reviews.

So a lot of advisors are like, but I want to have the Google reviews, but we’ll get to that enough on that.

We went off. We went off on a tangent. Sorry.

No, I think it’s good. It’s definitely something that’s still very new, so it’s the one that people have the most questions about. So I’m glad we double clicked on it. Okay.

Moving on to October. Two moves to take in October are related to just making sure that your client onboarding experience is as good as it should be. And this is something we did a client onboarding webinar recently, and it was one of the highest attended ones we’d ever had. And we realized a lot of people feel like they need to go back and look at their system and process.

So tell us in the chat, do you feel like you have a great client onboarding system, or are there some things that you could do to make it even better?

This is really, really interesting. When it comes to communication in general, you probably aren’t emailing clients enough. And I know most people are surprised. Like, they feel like emails are annoying or maybe they you know, they’re bombarded with emails so they don’t want more. But a recent Morningstar study asked how often clients wanted to be emailed.

And the numbers were sixty seven percent want at least once a month to hear from their adviser in some way. Yet we do not see that translate to what people are actually sending.

And it’s, you know, a lot of times people what they end up sending is just like a market update, and it’s not really going into more of the financial planning and the humanized topics that people care more about.

Yeah, I think the big we probably should underline and highlight it is educational. Like I was actually so at this thought leadership event, was actually the CEO of Morningstar was there and, you know, everybody agreed again, leading into the human.

AI could send out a market commentary.

AI can write a lot of things, but your voice and talking about what’s important to that ICP, again, thinking about the problems that you’re solving and writing about those topics, that is the kind of email that they want to get. So writing about the Trump accounts and what people need to know, writing about like for our do it for me program, I was just thinking about what we should write for August. So one of the emails is going to be if you or anybody you know has a child studying abroad, here are some things that you need to know both for cell phones and financial matters and all that. Like being top of mind with topics that are actually real to people’s lives, that is what you want to email. Market summaries, you know, everybody loves to do them, but those aren’t what probably is is driving referrals for you.

Right. Exactly. So when it so the first thing you wanna do is make sure you do have a seamless onboarding experience. So we recommend going back and look at every step of the way.

In FMG’s content engine, we have a bunch of resources that are premade that you can use. So we have a new client welcome message. We really want you to make sure you’re adding them to groups within your larger, you know, CRM. So a lot of people will just add new clients to a client list, but we talk about the ICP and how you should have a few.

You can, in your CRM, set up those ICPs as groups. And then whenever there’s something relevant to just the people within one of those groups, it’s a lot easier to not feel like, oh, I’m bombarding everyone with an extra email. Instead, you just send it to that particular segment. We also, within our content engine, have this new client welcome kit that you can download and print out.

If you are an FMG customer, that’s really, really helpful. And so that would be step one, just looking through your total onboarding experience. And then we really want you to create a welcome sequence for new clients. So this should be something, again, in FMG, this can all be automated.

We have one done, but you can go in and make it your own.

So it basically you should We wanna be I think I’m just gonna say it.

Like, a lot of for those that have heard of us, sometimes people will get like, aren’t you guys just canned content? And trust me, do you think Sam and I would recommend canned content? No, absolutely not. What we believe we are is eighty percent to ninety percent of the way there, and we want you to then take it and edit it to make it your own.

But we’re a marketing department. We have content people on our team. I have content people that write emails from me. It just saves me time.

It’s the same thing. Kitsis talks about how a lot of people equate their marketing investment to hard dollars. What are you paying for it? You should also think about the soft dollars.

How much time do you spend on it or how much time should you spend on it? And every hour of your time is worth hundreds of dollars. So if you spend three hours a week or even three hours a month, there’s a value to that. And if you can have somebody else doing it better and you get to spend fifteen minutes just personalizing something that has already been done, that’s where we fit in.

So I think worth debunking that myth or debunking, debunking. Debunking.

So the whole idea of this really is you’re setting it up once, and then whenever somebody becomes a client, you add them to this welcome series, and it’s just gonna run. So in this, it could be things like what to expect, and you’re not hitting them with all this information at once. Right? It could be one email a week over six weeks, and you can decide what in our system. You can say, okay. There’s six emails total, and I want one week in between each. And then maybe there’s two more hours.

Set up more like because that probably is scaring people. Most of it’s like the way we’ve designed it and you can change this is more like one a month, maybe one even every two months. Like, one of the emails that we’ve written in this is like email number five is an email that just says, just woke up thinking about you today, wanted to see how you’re doing. Just totally personal. And this is what we call personalization at scale. This is a sequence. You just add them and you’ve made your edits the first time and you never have to make them again.

But that email that says nothing but high gets a higher response rate and more wow than anything else.

That’s such like setting up a family meeting. Another one is to follow you on social. Like, there are all these reasons to touch them that aren’t like your your your portfolio is up three percent.

And that’s such a good segue. It’s like you plan to say that even though we did know for this whatsoever talking to each other, I shouldn’t say. We did perhaps.

But I posted this, and I I think a lot of a few of you came to this presentation or joined because of this LinkedIn post. So tell us in the comments. Did you see this LinkedIn post, and did it make you sign up? But this was a conversation that I had at a dinner the other night in Italy with a group of very successful women, and they were all basically talking about whether they had a financial adviser.

And if they did, whether they were happy with that adviser or if they felt like they should switch or with the value of their adviser. And really what it came down to is people feel like they’re not hearing from the adviser enough, and they don’t know how to evaluate what the adviser is really doing for them. And they don’t often feel like if I just have a quick question, I have a way to get in touch. They want me to be in these specific meetings, things like that.

And so those personalized check-in check ins like, hey. I just thought of you. Is anything on your mind? How are things?

Or anything you’re thinking about that I can help with? It opens up the door for person the person to feel like I can say what I need to say, communicate. And you often don’t know a client is unhappy or thinking about leaving until it’s just too late. So this is a big goal.

Which month are we in now? I’ve lost track of it. For November. Set up this personalized check-in, but you can still automate it.

It can be an email that is automated, but yet it seems very, very personalized.

Okay. And then the other one, and I, think this one, a lot of you already do, but just as a reminder, is to host some sort of client appreciation event for November or just a tangible way to show people that you are thankful for them. So we have, again, on our YouTube channel, one all about client appreciation events. And there’s a million good ideas that we’ve we’ve actually curated from all of you telling us.

So we’d love to know in the chat. Did you do you do something in November that has been a hit? We’ve had people say that they host, like, a wrapping day where they wrap Christmas presents for clients, a cookie decorating day, wine tastings, send pies to families. But November is great to do an event or something because it’s before the craziness of the holidays.

And so this is just such a good time to plan for that for the month of November.

And maybe just like we all when we hold ourselves accountable or somebody holds us accountable, I think that’s even more powerful. Even aspire to do one a quarter, and it doesn’t even have to be for all clients. So you could be thinking about a segment of clients. So as the fall is coming up, one idea we had is I’m sure you have a set of clients that are football fans.

We had somebody going, you know, go Ohio, do like just a tailgate kit or something or even just say, hey, the season’s starting. There are so many little things that just show you care that are going to go a long way. And if you just goal yourself to try to hit every client once a year and do something every quarter, you’ll get it done. And Yeah.

Certainly, we can help if you’re an FMG customer.

Such a good point. And Tina just asked, would an email have satisfied those ladies, or would they expect a phone call instead? This was a group of women mostly in their early forties, late thirties. And I would say we actually were talking that day about communication and what we like, and people were saying how nobody calls anyone anymore. It’s text or email. So I don’t think a phone call would be what they’d want at all.

But a a check-in text or Actually, honestly, this is where texting, I think the compliant texting, which is something else we have.

This is where I think texting for those little messages is way better than email. Like, just, you know, happy birthday. Have a great trip. Happy football season. Those, that’s pretty good. And then our texting platform is also a marketing automation platform with compliance. So you could send the same text to twenty people, but it would look like you just sent it from one.

One. If you don’t have my rep chat or texting well, it was formerly my rep chat. But the if you don’t have that now, you should really look into it because it makes it so much easier. And, again, it is compliant. And we actually did the Easier.

I think it’s the only way you’re allowed for most people.

But the other thing is the research that shows and this is true for me too. If you send, you know, clients a DocuSign or you’re waiting on something and then you send them a text saying, hey. Did you get a chance to sign those documents?

The the average client finishes it within five minutes versus sitting in the inbox forever. So in that way alone, it’s worth its weight in gold. Yeah. Okay.

We are running up against time. So let’s get through December, year end strategies. So this was, you know, something that I think is just really fun again as a way to position yourself as the go to person for all things in their financial life. You know, whether you’re doing a year in review or looking to the year ahead, you can make this an email, a blog post, it could be a quick video. There’s lots of ways to do this, but to plan for it for December so that you have time to create it. We’ve seen people do so many different fun things. I saw an advisor who talked about all of the trips his clients in retirement had taken, and he talked about like where they went.

So there’s lots of things. This one is a little bit more specific to what’s happening financially, this example. But this is a great thing to plan for December.

And then the second one, Susan alluded to this, a family meeting. So this data comes from Fidelity.

And they found that households in which the next generation is engaged have a hundred and sixty percent of the revenue and two hundred and seventy percent of profits of households without family engagement. So basically, if you don’t have, you know, the younger generation engage, it really creates a greater risk to the assets that you are managing.

And so we really suggest this thing called the family meeting where you’re inviting your clients to bring the multiple generations of the family together to talk about exactly that, right? The estate plan, how things look, and you can also really meet that next generation. You could talk about, you know, obviously, depending on the circumstance, the ways you’re helping the parents today, what people might need to think about in the future.

Oh, I thought I had a picture of it. We actually offer a downloadable in the FMG content engine that helps you facilitate this meeting as well. So if you go to the content library, you can find it there. But this is such an easy win and a great way to get in front of the next generation, but also to make your current clients happy because this is an ask a lot of clients have.

They want to work with an adviser who’s willing to engage the whole family. So those are the two things for the month of December. We were trying to get it done in forty five minutes. We’re at forty nine.

I feel very proud of us. Yeah. Those were a lot of tactics. So those were your two moves every month for the rest of the year.

Tell us in the comments. Was this helpful? This was very high level. We didn’t do a deep dive, but hopefully, it gives you a way to zoom out as you think about planning for the rest of the year and think about the big things you can do.

And you are all gonna And and mention anything that you’d like us like, the things that you most would love to hear more about.

We’re always looking to, like, our what what topics should we cover? So if there’s anything you’re like, I’d love to hear more about blank, throw it in there before you hang up.

Tell us more about testimonials or tell us more about the family meeting or tell us more about the events we can host.

With.

Yes. It would be really great. And you all are getting the PDF and the slides. Yes.

That was offered in the LinkedIn post, Natalie, and it’s coming to all of you. And we just wanna we wanna offer content that helps you. That is really our goal and the philosophy behind FMG. Whether you use our product, all of them or one of them or none of them, we wanna be a resource for you.

So thank you all for joining and for all of the feedback. And we hope to see more of you on these webinars moving forward. And let’s all have a great second half of the year.

Awesome. Bye, Sam. Bye, everybody. Thanks so much for joining.