Claire Akin's Blog, page 29
January 16, 2020
Marketing for Financial Advisors: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business Organically
I love marketing and I love working with financial advisors. When I started Indigo Marketing Agency in 2015, my goal was to make marketing for financial advisors easy and fun. Whether someone used my services or followed my content and implemented the ideas on their own, I wanted the experience to be exciting. This post is going to be an epic one. We’re going to cover all of the most important areas for marketing and growing your business as a financial advisor!
Specialize in a Niche
A niche is easier to market to because your clients have the same hopes, dreams concerns, needs and wants. You’ll be able to find out exactly what people in a specific niche want in the way of financial services. Because they will all want pretty much the same thing. You can craft one clear, compelling message.
Here are Three Steps to Finding Your Specialty.
Understanding Your Marketing Goals and KPI’s
How is your website performing? If you’re like most advisors, you have no idea because you can’t see your website traffic. This exclusive webinar will show you how to view and understand the traffic coming to your website!
Lead Generation Tools for Financial Advisors
Scheduling Calls. For the advisors I work with, an online appointment scheduler helps them streamline their scheduling process, convert more leads, and get more done during meetings. If you haven’t set up an online calendar, take 15 minutes to change your life today! Read more about setting up your online scheduler.
Content Marketing for Financial Advisors
Choosing blog topics. Video.
https://indigomarketingagency.com/201...
Social Media Marketing
SEO for Financial Advisors
Everyone wants to rank in search. Decide if your website needs SEO help by following these three steps.
The post Marketing for Financial Advisors: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business Organically appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
December 18, 2019
Financial Advisor Marketing Companies: Top 10 Companies To Work With In 2020
Most financial advisors don’t have a lot of time to devote to their marketing strategy. Not only are they busy running their business and serving their clients, marketing may not be their expertise or interest. That’s why top advisors outsource their marketing to proven professionals that understand our industry and compliance.
Which Is The Best Marketing Company For You?
But which marketing companies for financial advisors will help you grow your assets under management (AUM) and which are a waste of money? It’s hard to know where to start. Whether you’re looking to launch a one-time campaign or outsource your entire digital marketing strategy, there are marketing companies built to help you grow your business while you focus on more important things.
Here are the top 10 financial services marketing companies you should work with in 2020.
1. Comprehensive Marketing Solutions
FMG Suite
Best For: Advisors looking for a one-stop shop for all their marketing needs
FMG Suite is one of the largest financial advisor marketing companies in the nation. It offers comprehensive solutions, including personalized websites, compliance-ready content, email and social media tools, and more. If you’ve spent any time researching marketing for financial advisors, then you’ve probably seen this company’s name pop up a time or two.
FMG Suite was started in 2011 in San Diego, California (I worked there for several years!). It owns several financial services marketing firms, including Advisors Assistant, Marketing Pro, Advisor Launchpad, Platinum Advisor Strategies, and Agency Revolution.
If you’re interested in FMG Suite, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial on their website.
2. Websites for Financial Advisors
Twenty Over Ten
Best For: Advisors who want a modern website platform that integrates seamlessly with compliance teams and has top-rated customer service
Twenty Over Ten is a website platform built for the modern financial advisor. It features eye-catching website templates, free SSL certificates, editable content libraries, and more.
Twenty Over Ten is also dedicated to bridging the gap between compliance teams and financial advisors. Through its Providence Platform, you can quickly get website changes reviewed and approved by your compliance team (without having to go back and forth via email).
Twenty Over Ten has a free 14-day trial for new clients.
3. Branding and Communications for Financial Advisors
Impact Communications and Marie Swift
Best For: Independent financial advisors who want to enhance their reputations and increase their credibility
Impact Communications is a full-service marketing communications firm for independent financial advisors and the institutions that support them. It specializes in building brand awareness through communications and public relations tactics.
You can work with Impact Communications through their hourly consulting service. Or you can buy a turnkey package that covers anything from logo design and website management to media promotions and event planning support.
Impact Communications was started in 1993 by the one and only Marie Swift, who is known for her thought leadership in the financial services space. Her work has been published by Forbes.com, MarketWatch.com, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, NAPFA Advisor magazine, and MorningstarAdvisor.com.
4. One-on-One Consulting for Financial Advisors
Red Zone Marketing and Maribeth Kuzmeski
Best For: High-level financial firms in search of one-on-one consulting and digital marketing services
Once your firm has experienced significant growth, it can be hard to continue that trajectory. That’s where Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing comes in. Her firm provides one-on-one consulting services for two groups of people: elite firms managing $300 million to $1 billion in client assets and their high-performing assistants. She also offers digital marketing packages for firms that want to outsource their marketing efforts.
Maribeth Kuzmeski, president of Red Zone Marketing, is a legend in the marketing industry. She’s authored seven books, has been named a Top 25 C-Suite Speaker, and is a regular presenter at Barron’s Top Producer conferences.
5. Referral Generation for Financial Advisors
Bill Cates Referral Coach
Best For: Advisors who want to clarify their marketing message and attract ideal clients through increased referrals and word of mouth
If you’re looking for a DIY marketing solution that’s focused on helping you acquire high-level clients through word of mouth and referrals, look no further than Bill Cates’ Referral Coach program. This comprehensive online video training program teaches you how to grow your business by:
Focusing your message
Engaging your clients
Leveraging your relationships
An individual plan membership costs $697 a year and includes unlimited access to the video lessons, one-on-one online coaching with Bill, a 60-day action plan, helpful resources, and more. Most program participants see at least a 20% growth in business after implementing Bill’s strategies.
6. Digital Advertising for Financial Advisors
MBI Direct Mail and Brian Spicer
Best For: Advisors who need print and digital advertising materials for a marketing campaign
MBI Direct Mail offers fast and cost-effective print and digital advertising solutions to businesses, agencies, and brokers. While most direct mail production facilities take two weeks to finish a project, MBI Direct Mail has turnaround times as quick as 24 hours.
Here’s an overview of what it’s like to work with this company:
They perform a market analysis to better understand your target audience.
The design team gets to work creating your digital and print advertisements.
They print your materials and deliver them to you via USPS.
They help you measure your campaign’s performance so you can optimize future campaigns.
Brian Spicer is the National Sales Advisor at MBI Direct Mail. He’s been with the company for over 16 years and helps large and small businesses tackle their direct mail advertising needs.
7. Seminars for Financial Advisors
White Glove
Best For: Advisors who give educational seminars and want a professional team to plan everything for them
White Glove is an advisor-built and advisor-owned marketing company that offers two products: 100% done-for-you educational seminar and social media management services. They pride themselves on the “white glove” experience (hence their name). That’s why they plan everything for you.
When you hire them for seminar services, for example, you’re assigned a dedicated coach who finds and books your venue, deploys digital marketing strategies, manages registrations, sends email campaigns and reminders, trains and preps you for your seminar, and more. Their goal is to keep a steady stream of clients in your pipeline without requiring any of your time.
8. Education for Financial Advisors
Nerd’s Eye View and Kitces.com (Michael Kitces)
Best For: Advisors who want to stay up to date on the latest industry news, marketing trends, and practice management strategies
Michael Kitces is a self-proclaimed financial planning nerd. He created his website, Kitces.com, to serve as a hub where financial advisors can find credible financial planning content.
Michael offers free financial planning resources through his weekly newsletter and Nerd’s Eye View blog. But advisors who want to dive deeper into exclusive content can buy a Kitces.com membership, which gives them access to:
Exclusive whitepapers, webinars, and management resources
Continuing education articles that are approved for CFP CE credit
The Financial Advisor Success podcast series that shares stories of successful financial advisors and the steps they took to grow their businesses
Monthly memberships cost $5 to $29 a month depending on which tier you choose.
9. Business Coaching for Financial Advisors
Carson Group and Advisor Coaching
Best For: Advisors who want a one-on-one business coach and accountability partner
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a dedicated person you could call every time you had a difficult question about your practice, needed resources for your marketing, or needed help with creating a long-term plan for your advisory firm? In my opinion, Carson Group is the best coaching platform for financial advisors.
When you become a Carson member, you’re assigned a dedicated business coach who acts as your guide and accountability partner. They help you tackle challenges, big and small, in areas like:
Marketing
Technology
Succession planning
Investments
Compliance
Client communications
Budgeting
Hiring
Carson Group claims its members grow their businesses 2x faster than the industry average over a two-year period. Since its inception in 1993, it has coached over 12,000 advisors.
10. Custom Marketing Solutions
Indigo Marketing Agency
Best For: Advisors who understand the importance of a cohesive marketing strategy but don’t have the time or expertise to do it themselves
At Indigo Marketing Agency, we help independent financial advisors embrace a specialty through their marketing. By creating 100% custom marketing campaigns that explain what you do, who you serve, and how you help, we help you:
Charge a premium for your services.
Find more of your ideal clients.
Clarify who you want to attract and who you want to repel.
Get more referrals.
Work with more people you enjoy serving.
To learn more about our total marketing package, register for our webinar The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors.
Outsourcing your marketing is critical if you plan to grow your firm in 2020. Working with a team that understands your business, your ideal clients, and your industry will allow you to get the most out of your marketing dollars. Good luck with your marketing in 2020 and beyond!
The post Financial Advisor Marketing Companies: Top 10 Companies To Work With In 2020 appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
Financial Advisor Marketing Companies: Top 10 Companies to Work With in 2020
Most financial advisors don’t have a lot of time to devote to their marketing strategy. Not only are they busy running their business and serving their clients, marketing may not be their expertise or interest. That’s why top advisors outsource their marketing to proven professionals that understand our industry and compliance.
Which Is The Best Marketing Company For You?
But which marketing companies for financial advisors will help you grow your assets under management (AUM) and which are a waste of money? It’s hard to know where to start. Whether you’re looking to launch a one-time campaign or outsource your entire digital marketing strategy, there are marketing companies built to help you grow your business while you focus on more important things.
Here are the top 10 financial services marketing companies you should work with in 2020.
1. Comprehensive Marketing Solutions
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FMG Suite
Best For: Advisors looking for a one-stop shop for all their marketing needs
FMG Suite is one of the largest financial advisor marketing companies in the nation. It offers comprehensive solutions, including personalized websites, compliance-ready content, email, and social media tools, and more. If you’ve spent any time researching marketing for financial advisors, then you’ve probably seen this company’s name pop up a time or two.
FMG Suite was started in 2011 in San Diego, California (I worked there for several years!). It owns several financial services marketing firms, including Advisors Assistant, Marketing Pro, Advisor Launchpad, Platinum Advisor Strategies, and Agency Revolution.
If you’re interested in FMG Suite, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial on their website.
2. Websites for Financial Advisors
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Twenty Over Ten
Best For: Advisors who want a modern website platform that integrates seamlessly with compliance teams and has top-rated customer service
Twenty Over Ten is a website platform built for the modern financial advisor. It features eye-catching website templates, free SSL certificates, editable content libraries, and more.
Twenty Over Twenty is also dedicated to bridging the gap between compliance teams and financial advisors. Through its Providence Platform, you can quickly get website changes reviewed and approved by your compliance team (without having to go back and forth via email).
Twenty Over Ten has a free 14-day trial for new clients.
3. Branding and Communications for Financial Advisors
[image error]
Impact Communications and Marie Swift
Best For: Independent financial advisors who want to enhance their reputations and increase their credibility
Impact Communications is a full-service marketing communications firm for independent financial advisors and the institutions that support them. It specializes in building brand awareness through communications and public relations tactics.
You can work with Impact Communications through their hourly consulting service. Or you can buy a turnkey package that covers anything from logo design and website management to media promotions and event planning support.
Impact Communications was started in 1993 by the one and only Marie Swift, who is known for her thought leadership in the financial services space. Her work has been published by Forbes.com, MarketWatch.com, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, NAPFA Advisor magazine, and MorningstarAdvisor.com.
4. One-on-One Consulting for Financial Advisors
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Red Zone Marketing and Maribeth Kuzmeski
Best For: High-level financial firms in search of one-on-one consulting and digital marketing services
Once your firm has experienced significant growth, it can be hard to continue that trajectory. That’s where Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing comes in. Her firm provides one-on-one consulting services for two groups of people: elite firms managing $300 million to $1 billion in client assets and their high-performing assistants. She also offers digital marketing packages for firms that want to outsource their marketing efforts.
Maribeth Kuzmeski, president of Red Zone Marketing, is a legend in the marketing industry. She’s authored seven books, has been named a Top 25 C-Suite Speaker, and is a regular presenter at Barron’s Top Producer conferences.
5. Referral Generation for Financial Advisors
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Bill Cates Referral Coach
Best For: Advisors who want to clarify their marketing message and attract ideal clients through increased referrals and word of mouth
If you’re looking for a DIY marketing solution that’s focused on helping you acquire high-level clients through word of mouth and referrals, look no further than Bill Cates’ Referral Coach program. This comprehensive online video training program teaches you how to grow your business by:
Focusing your message
Engaging your clients
Leveraging your relationships
An individual plan membership costs $697 a year and includes unlimited access to the video lessons, one-on-one online coaching with Bill, a 60-day action plan, helpful resources, and more. Most program participants see at least a 20% growth in business after implementing Bill’s strategies.
6. Digital Advertising for Financial Advisors
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MBI Direct Mail and Brian Spicer
Best For: Advisors who need print and digital advertising materials for a marketing campaign
MBI Direct Mail offers fast and cost-effective print and digital advertising solutions to businesses, agencies, and brokers. While most direct mail production facilities take two weeks to finish a project, MBI Direct Mail has turnaround times as soon as 24 hours.
Here’s an overview of what it’s like to work with this company:
They perform a market analysis to better understand your target audience.
The design team gets to work creating your digital and print advertisements.
They print your materials and deliver them to you via USPS.
They help you measure your campaign’s performance so you can optimize future campaigns.
Brian Spicer is the National Sales Advisor at MBI Direct Mail. He’s been with the company for over 16 years and helps large and small businesses tackle their direct mail advertising needs.
7. Seminars for Financial Advisors
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White Glove
Best For: Advisors who give educational seminars and want a professional team to plan everything for them
White Glove is an advisor-built and advisor-owned marketing company that offers two products: 100% done-for-you educational seminar and social media management services. They pride themselves on the “white glove” experience (hence their name). That’s why they plan everything for you.
When you hire them for seminar services, for example, you’re assigned a dedicated coach who finds and books your venue, deploys digital marketing strategies, manages registrations, sends email campaigns and reminders, trains and preps you for your seminar, and more. Their goal is to keep a steady stream of clients in your pipeline without requiring any of your time.
8. Education for Financial Advisors
[image error]
Nerd’s Eye View and Kitces.com (Michael Kitces)
Best For: Advisors who want to stay up to date on the latest industry news, marketing trends, and practice management strategies
Michael Kitces is a self-proclaimed financial planning nerd. He created his website, Kitces.com, to serve as a hub where financial advisors can find credible financial planning content.
Michael offers free financial planning resources through his weekly newsletter and Nerd’s Eye View blog. But advisors who want to dive deeper into exclusive content can buy a Kitces.com membership, which gives them access to:
Exclusive whitepapers, webinars, and management resources
Continuing education articles that are approved for CFP CE credit
The Financial Advisor Success podcast series that shares stories of successful financial advisors and the steps they took to grow their businesses
Monthly memberships cost $5 to $29 a month depending on which tier you choose.
9. Business Coaching for Financial Advisors
[image error]
Carson Group and Advisor Coaching
Best For: Advisors who want a one-on-one business coach and accountability partner
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a dedicated person you could call every time you had a difficult question about your practice, needed resources for your marketing, or needed help with creating a long-term plan for your advisory firm? In my opinion, Carson Group is the best coaching platform for financial advisors.
When you become a Carson member, you’re assigned a dedicated business coach who acts as your guide and accountability partner. They help you tackle challenges, big and small, in areas like:
Marketing
Technology
Succession planning
Investments
Compliance
Client communications
Budgeting
Hiring
Carson Group claims its members grow their businesses 2x faster than the industry average over a two-year period. Since its inception in 1993, it’s coached over 12,000 advisors.
10. Custom Marketing Solutions
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Indigo Marketing Agency
Best For: Advisors who understand the importance of a cohesive marketing strategy but don’t have the time or expertise to do it themselves
At Indigo Marketing Agency, we help independent financial advisors embrace a specialty through their marketing. By creating 100% custom marketing campaigns that explain what you do, who you serve, and how you help, we help you:
Charge a premium for your services
Find more of your ideal clients
Clarify who you want to attract and who you want to repel
Get more referrals
Work with more people you enjoy serving
To learn more about our total marketing package, register for our webinar The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors.
Outsourcing your marketing is critical if you plan to grow your firm in 2020. Working with a team that understands your business, your ideal clients, and your industry will allow you to get the most out of your marketing dollars. Good luck with your marketing in 2020 and beyond!
The post Financial Advisor Marketing Companies: Top 10 Companies to Work With in 2020 appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
December 16, 2019
May I Ask You For A Favor? Book Review
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Hi, financial advisors. It’s Claire Akin with Indigo Marketing Agency, and today I want to ask you for a favor. I hate asking for favors, but it’s really important and I need your help. Today, I want to ask you to leave a review on Amazon for my book, The Marketing Guide for Financial Advisors. My book is coming out officially on January 1st, but I know a lot of you have already read it or a lot of you have already benefited from the knowledge in this book through my blog posts, and my webinars, and things like that. If you want a copy, I will send you a free copy by mail. Just send me your mailing address and I’ll send you a free copy so that you can read it and leave a review on Amazon because it’s really important to have a lot of reviews before January 1st when the book officially launches.
It really includes everything that you need to know about digital marketing for independent financial advisors. Everything from the basics about your website, search engine optimization, social media marketing, clarifying your target market and who you want to attract and who you want to repel, content marketing, email marketing. Really, everything I know is in this book. I give away everything for free. I hope that it’s really helpful for you. You could read this book and do your marketing yourself, or you could have somebody on your team read the book and do your marketing for you, or you could read that book if you want to know what we do when advisors hire us to do their marketing for them.
I think you’ll find it really helpful. I would really appreciate a review if you have the time. Just let me know if you’d like a copy and you can click below if you’ve already read the book or if you’ve benefited from the principles in the book, just click below to write a quick review on Amazon and I would really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your help and have a great rest of the year!
Please Click Here To Leave A Review On Amazon
The post May I Ask You For A Favor? Book Review appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
Announcing The Marketing Guide For Financial Advisors!
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Released Today: The Marketing Guide for Financial Advisors!
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I am proud to announce that my new book, The Marketing Guide for Financial Advisors, was officially released today!
This book includes everything that I know about marketing including:
Why digital marketing is so challenging in financial services
How to create a website that converts
Email marketing strategies for financial advisors
Using social media to get in front of your ideal prospects
Search engine optimization to get more traffic to your website
Content strategy to start the conversation
Embracing a specialty to command higher fees
Using webinars to warm up prospects
In this exclusive guide, you’ll learn proven strategies from top advisors to grow your firm and uncover a step-by-step process to build your marketing engine.
Please check out my book on Amazon. I would love for you to buy a copy and let me know what you think about it.
I wish you the very best of luck with your marketing in 2020 and beyond. Happy New Year!
The post Announcing The Marketing Guide For Financial Advisors! appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
December 10, 2019
Is Your Marketing Ready for 2020? (Video)
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Last Chance To Get Started On Your Marketing For 2020!
It’s your last chance to get your marketing ready to hit the ground running in January 2020 with our Total Marketing Package.
January is a critical time for financial advisors because prospects have an unprecedented urgency to act. It’s important to come out swinging with your marketing on January 1st.
But it takes about 30 days to get started on our total marketing package, so you’ll need to act fast to get started in the new year.
We’re offering $300 off your setup fees for our Total Marketing Package, which includes:
Setting up and optimizing your social media profiles
Our top-rated search engine optimization (SEO) package
Creating your email marketing engine
Building your marketing calendar
One custom article each month
Posting to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter three times per week
Sign up today to get started in January 2020 and save $300 on your setup fees! Watch this short video to learn more.
Not sure about your niche or who you should target through your marketing? Join us for our Advisor Mastermind Group to help clarify your specialty and embrace a niche. Sign up by replying to this email and I’ll add you to the list.
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Get Started With Our January 2020 Advisor Mastermind Group
Not sure about your niche or who you should target through your marketing? Join us for our Advisor Mastermind Group to help clarify your specialty and embrace a niche. Sign up here for the Advisor Mastermind Group.
Get Started – Advisor Mastermind Group
The post Is Your Marketing Ready for 2020? (Video) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
November 1, 2019
Why I Created Indigo Marketing Agency (Video)
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The post Why I Created Indigo Marketing Agency (Video) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
October 25, 2019
Podcast: Embracing a Specialized Niche As a Financial Advisor with Landon Loveall of KB Financial Advisors (Listen Now)
We know that embracing a specialty is the most critical decision you can make in your marketing. But where should you start developing a niche as a financial advisor? In this episode, we’ll visit with a top-performing specialist advisor, Landon Loveall of KB Financial Advisors. We will review how he built his firm from the ground up by embracing a niche, including:
How he chose his specialty
How he uses niche marketing to reach his ideal clients
His strategy to avoid alienating people who don’t fit his niche
Proven successful specialty marketing tricks
The one thing you can do today to start embracing a specialty today
Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen on your commute!
New episodes will be published weekly with various guests, including top advisors, tech consultants, and marketing machines who are excited to tell you how to use proven marketing strategies to grow a thriving practice.
Transcription
Claire Akin (CA): Thank you so much for joining us today. Today we have Landon Loveall with KB Financial Advisors. They are a wealth management firm out of San Francisco that exclusively is serving tech employees. They’re doing everything that I really am passionate about recommending for financial advisors. They’ve embraced this niche wholeheartedly. They have this clear specialization, and they have all kinds of amazing content on their site for young professionals and tech executives. They really focus around stock options, and have articles such as “How to Buy a Home With Stock Options,” “Three Things to Be Aware of Once Your Company Goes Public,” and “How Incentive Stock Options and the Alternative Minimum Tax Work.”
They are laser-focused on their niche, they’re doing amazing things from a marketing perspective, and they’ve had great success. Thank you, Landon, for being part of our podcast. I want to welcome you to the show.
Landon Loveall (LL): Absolutely. It’s great to be here.
CA: Great. Walk us through a little bit about your marketing, what you guys are doing, and how you think that it’s making you different.
LL: The main way that we market our business and market our services is through the internet, and primarily through writing two blog posts a month. We’re getting ready to move up to three blog posts a month, and that is the main thing that we do and that we’ve been doing now for about three or four years, to drive that marketing engine.
CA: Great. How do most of your new clients come to you? Where do they find you, and how do they make contact with you?
LL: I would say that about 75% of the new contacts that we get are coming to us through the website. On the website, we use ScheduleOnce as a scheduling tool, and someone who reads one of our blog posts likes what they read and thinks that we can help them can just schedule a call. They don’t have to call us, they don’t have to send us an email. All they have to do is look at a calendar and pick a time that works for them. That’s the way the majority of new contacts come in. When we look at our web traffic, about 90% of that web traffic is from organic searches. If you think about that, most people who end up contacting us are out there on Google, they’re typing in search terms, they’re finding our blog post, and then they’re scheduling a call with us. That’s how the majority of our new business arrives.
CA: It’s funny, the way you and I came into contact was that you had scheduled a call with me to talk about what we might be able to help you with from a marketing perspective, and you ended up not becoming a client just because you’re already doing so many of the things that we do for advisors. Our most popular package, Indigo Marketing, is two custom blog posts a month that we send out on their website. We share them by email, we share them across social media, and we really try to position them as a specialist, and you guys are already doing that and having so much success with it, so I think that’s really cool. You also do one of the main things that we recommend for our advisors, is having a “schedule a call” button front and center on your home page so when you go to the home page, people really don’t have to think too much.
There’s one thing for them to do, schedule a phone call to start the conversation. We want to make it easy 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for people to schedule a phone call when they’re motivated to do so, when they have a need. I think that’s great that you guys are implementing all of these strategies that are really working. Tell me a little bit about your marketing journey and when you started embracing this specialty, and whether or not that was difficult for you, because a lot of the advisors that I work with have a hard time embracing a specialty. They’re worried that they’re going to alienate people that don’t fall into that specialty, and they’re worried about narrowing their focus because maybe it will narrow the amount of potential new clients.
LL: Marketing is something that I love and that I’ve always been interested in, but it’s something that you’re also constantly learning. You’re learning just in general what works, what doesn’t, and then more specifically, what works for you. Even going back to nine or 10 years ago, I was reading Guerrilla Marketing, Duct Tape Marketing, reading “Copyblogger,” and through that became really interested in a lot of this stuff that we’re now doing. It took a while for me and the firm to get to the point where we could do this, and there definitely was some of that concern. For us it was a really natural fit, because what we did is, we didn’t just randomly pick a group or a type of person and say, “This is who we want to work with.”
We started with where we were, who the people were who already seem to be finding us, and then started to refine and get more focus from there. I can remember Jackie, my partner, and I having that conversation, “If we’re going to focus this much, what happens if somebody contacts us who doesn’t have stock options?” Eventually, what we came to realize is, so what? There are enough people out there who do that it doesn’t matter, and focusing on one group and having more people from that one group reach out is a lot better than not focusing on anyone and having fewer people reach out. Regardless of what marketing you’re doing, what’s really important is kind of the middle result, I guess we could say.
Not even talking about new clients and working with new people. I’m talking about the conversation that happens, that your marketing leads to, that’s in between someone finding you and someone starting to work with you, and the more of those conversations you have, the better you can get about what you offer and how you structure it and how you market it. The only way those conversations happen and a lot of those conversations happen is by you getting more focused with your marketing. We had some of those same concerns, but this is something that has really worked for us, and it’s been just a lot of fun kind of developing everything that we do with the website and everything that we’re doing with content marketing.
CA: Tell us a little bit more about what do you think is the most important thing that you’ve done to crack the code for your marketing. What’s the biggest decision you’ve made or the biggest impact that you’ve made on your marketing?
LL: I think you can just boil it down to one word, and that one word is focus. Jackie and I, I mentioned those conversations earlier when we first decided to focus on tech employees and then from there we said, “Okay, well, we’re going to start writing on a blog.” At first, when we first started writing, it was just, we kind of wrote about whatever we wanted to write about with a general focus on the things that our clients were concerned about, but our business coach actually told us that that’s not good enough, that you need to be even more focused, and she told us, “You’re only going to write about stock options.”
Her point was that there’s so much information out there that unless you’re very specific at first, you’re just shouting in a crowd, whereas if you get really specific, the crowd gets a lot smaller. We just continued to refine, continued to focus, and also thought a lot about, what can we write about that is going to be really hard for someone else out there to match? That’s what we’re doing now, and when we started doing that, that’s when we really started to gain traction. Every month, you’d just watch the web traffic go up and the number of new contacts kind of go up with it.
CA: I totally agree. Embracing a specialty and when you think you have a specialty, you push yourself a little bit further to dive even deeper. For Indigo Marketing Agency, we serve independent financial advisors. That’s already a pretty narrow niche. Then we take it a step further and say independent financial advisors who have a true specialty, and those are the people that work with us and need our help by creating custom content, like you guys are doing yourselves. I think that’s awesome.
Tell me a little bit about what you’re looking to do next or what you’re excited about on the marketing landscape.
LL: In terms of what we’re looking to do next, it’s probably going to be more of what we are already doing. I do two posts a month. Starting next month, we’re going to be adding a third post per month, and Jackie will be doing that. Eventually, as we grow the firm, my hope is to be less involved in day-to-day client work and more able to focus on the marketing side. Over the years, I expect that we will continue to add to the number of posts that we’re posting per month and then eventually start to move into other ways of promoting that material and other material. An example I would give you is, yesterday I spoke in an event, and the other thing that I’ve learned when it comes to content is if you’re generating ideas that are in the form of some sort of content, you can’t let that go to waste. That has to be used in some way for your marketing.
Yesterday I spoke at this event. I had to put together this presentation. We ended up hiring someone to come record the presentation, and then we’re going to have the entire recording. We’re also going to take that recording and break it down into smaller clips. That one event will turn into multiple different blog posts and multiple different ways that we can promote that work that went into preparing for that one event. In the future, we’re going to be doing more of what we’re already doing and then branching out into new and different ways of building on the platform that we’ve put together.
CA: You could even use that event recording as a webinar that you could have on your website, and so you could go a lot of different directions. I believe that one of the next frontiers for advisors is webinars and using different social media platforms to advertise webinars and get them in front of their ideal target market. I think that’s cool that you guys are thinking of ways to capture this content that you’re creating and reuse it so that you can get as much exposure as possible, because the hard work really is coming up with the unique ideas and unique content and then getting as much exposure as possible. With that, why don’t you walk us through a little bit about some of the systems that you’re using and some of the technologies that you’re using for your marketing.
LL: Our website is based on WordPress, and we’ve been really happy with what we’ve been able to do there. We use Mailchimp to manage our emails, and it’s okay. I would expect in the future we may look at a different tool there. Along with Mailchimp, we’re using OptinMonster, which is, if you go to our website, there’s going to be this little pop-up encouraging you to sign up for our mailing list in exchange for a white paper. Then ScheduleOnce, that I mentioned earlier, is on the website so that you can schedule a call directly from the website. Those are the main ones that we’re using, especially when we talk about that content marketing that we’re doing.
CA: That’s great, and it sounds like you’re also using Google Analytics to view the traffic to your site because you mentioned that you have visibility to how much traffic is coming to your site and where it’s coming from, so you must be using Google Analytics for that?
LL: We are. That’s kind of another interesting story about how we came to where we are. A little background piece of how we got here, about three or four years ago, we all of a sudden started getting a bunch of new contacts, and at first we really didn’t know what was happening. It didn’t take us long to figure it out, though. What was happening is some of Jackie’s clients had just, on their own, posted reviews of the firm on Yelp. It was only two or three reviews, but at the time no one else was on Yelp, and Yelp was doing a lot of local SEO work here in San Francisco. If you typed in “financial advisor” and you were in San Francisco, one of the first results would be Yelp, top 10 financial advisors near you. We were number two or number three.
That was great, and we got a bunch of new business from that. The problem with that, like most forms of social media, was that it’s not yours. It’s theirs. That belongs to Yelp and they control it. Just like anything that you do on Facebook or anywhere else, they control it. It’s not yours, whereas your website is yours. That’s something else about our website, in terms of how I think about it. I think about it like real estate that we control. The great thing about it is every time we post a blog post, we control a little more real estate. We recognized when we started getting all this traffic from Yelp, that’s probably not gonna last, and it didn’t, because a lot of other advisors kind of moved into that space and those new contacts and that traffic to our website from Yelp started to go down.
That was another thing that prompted us to say, “We need to do something that we control where we’re every month kind of building upon what we’ve already done.” It took us about a year, but after about a year, you really started to see the traction. You started to see the traffic. Every month, I have a recurring task where I go in Google Analytics and I just compare this month or the last 30 days to the 30 days prior to that, and then the last 30 days to the same 30-day period a year ago. For the last year and a half, every month when I do that, the month-over-month increase is a double-digit percentage and the year-over-year increase is 2- or 300% over what it was the same period a year ago. Once you get this ball rolling, if you stick with it, the consistency is what’s key; if you stick with it, every month, you’re building a little bit more and adding a little bit more to what you’ve already done, and it really works.
CA: Absolutely. It took my site three years to start showing up from the keyword search of “marketing for financial advisors,” because there’s a lot of big websites out there competing for those terms. I write a new blog post every single week, and three years later I come to the top of the list when you Google for that, especially if you Google for “search engine optimization” or “webinars for advisors,” my content is at the top, because I’m diving so deep on these subjects and that’s exactly what SEO is today. It’s being the go-to expert on a specific subject to give people quality, valuable information that helps them solve their problem.
LL: Absolutely.
CA: To close out, I’d just like to ask you a couple of questions that I like to ask all the advisors who are on the podcast. A lot of times, I talk on the phone with advisors and I ask them, “What one urgent problem are you solving for a specific group of people?” Most of the advisors I talk to can’t answer that question. They haven’t thought about their business and they don’t know the answer to that question. I’m willing to bet that you probably have thought of that and you can answer that, so I just want to ask you, what one urgent problem do you solve for a specific group of people?
LL: We work with tech professionals who have stock options, and the problem that we solve for them is helping them figure out this unique combination that they have. Stock options are not that different from a lot of financial topics. You’ve got your different types and you’ve got general information for each of those different types. Each person that we work with has a unique combination of those different types of stock options. That’s what we do, help them understand what they have, especially help them understand what the tax implications are.
Then the way I think about the impact of the work that we’re doing for them is, if we were to compare what they’re going to get from their stock options to a case where they didn’t have the stock options and they’re just saving year by year by year, if we’re doing our job and things work out well for them, they’re going to be able to make 10 years’ worth of progress and one of that. That’s our goal. That’s the problem that we’re trying to help them solve, is to make sure that they can capture everything that those stock options can do for them.
CA: Great. Then my final question for you is, if you were to meet an advisor who maybe hasn’t worked on their marketing yet, maybe doesn’t have a marketing strategy, or maybe somebody who’s new to the business who is just getting started on their journey, what is the one marketing recommendation you would give other advisers who want to be successful?
LL: I think the first thing is you need to pick an approach. You need to know yourself, you need to know your business, you need to know who you want to work with, and then you need to pick an approach that’s going to work really well for you. One of the most important parts of that is picking an approach that you can stick with. If you want to write blog posts, that’s great, but if you’re not going to stick to it and be on a regular schedule, it won’t work. Whatever you choose to do, you have to be able to stick with it, because that’s what really matters.
The other thing that I would say is, don’t be a cheapskate. Recognize what you’re good at and hire someone else who is good at the things that you’re not good at. And don’t cut corners, because for a while, I was working with someone who was supposedly doing all these things for me, and I’m writing and nothing is happening, and nothing was happening because I was working with someone who did not know what they were doing in terms of SEO and websites and whatnot.
I’m literally in a dark room shouting alone, and no one is reading what I’m putting out there. Decide what you’re good at and then hire out the rest, and when you hire out, make sure you’re working with someone who knows what they’re doing.
CA: That’s great. That’s fantastic advice. I want to thank you so much for being a part of our show. If you want to check out Landon’s website, go to kbfinancialadvisors.com. Landon, thank you for being a guest, and keep in touch.
LL: All right, thanks, Claire.
How can we help you with your marketing?
We help top advisors with a true specialty to create custom marketing plans. Our most popular services include our Independent Websites for Independent Advisors, our Search Engine Optimization service, and our Monthly Marketing Package, but we can also help answer your questions and work with you on project-based marketing campaigns.
About Claire
Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency, a full-service marketing firm serving financial advisors. It’s her mission to help independent financial advisors help more people through their incredibly important work. Claire is a former Investment Advisor Representative who holds her MBA in Marketing from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego as well as a BA in Economics from UC Davis.
The post Podcast: Embracing a Specialized Niche As a Financial Advisor with Landon Loveall of KB Financial Advisors (Listen Now) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
Podcast: Embracing a Specialized Niche as a Financial Advisor with Landon Loveall of KB Financial Advisors (Listen Now)
We know that embracing a specialty is the most critical decision you can make in your marketing. But where should you start developing a niche as a financial advisor? In this episode, we’ll visit with a top-performing specialist advisor, Landon Loveall of KB Financial Advisors. We will review how he built his firm from the ground up by embracing a niche including:
How he chose his specialty
How he uses niche marketing to reach his ideal clients
His strategy to avoid alienating people who don’t fit his niche
Proven successful specialty marketing tricks
The one thing you can do today to start embracing a specialty today
Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen on your commute!
New episodes will be published weekly with various guests, including top advisors, tech consultants, and marketing machines who are excited to tell you how to use proven marketing strategies to grow a thriving practice.
Transcription
Claire Akin
Thank you so much for joining us today. Today, we have Landon Loveall with KB Financial Advisors. They are a wealth management firm out of San Francisco that exclusively is serving tech employees. They’re doing everything that I really am passionate about recommending for financial advisors. They’ve embraced this niche wholeheartedly. They have this clear specialization, and they have all kinds of amazing content on their site for young professionals and tech executives. They really focus around stock options, and have articles such as, “How to Buy a Home with Stock Options,” “Three Things to be Aware of Once Your Company Goes Public” and “How Incentive Stock Options and the Alternative Minimum Tax Work.”
They are laser focused on their niche, they’re doing amazing things from a marketing perspective, and they’ve had great success. Thank you, Landon, for being part of our podcast. I want to welcome you to the show.
Landon Loveall
Absolutely. It’s great to be here.
Claire Akin
Great. Walk us through a little bit about your marketing, what you guys are doing, and how you think that it’s making you different.
Landon Loveall
The main way that we market our business and market our services is through the internet, and primarily through writing two blog posts a month. We’re getting ready to move up to three blog posts a month, and that is the main thing that we do and that we’ve been doing now for about three or four years, to drive that marketing engine.
Claire Akin
Great. How do most of your new clients come to you? Where do they find you, and how do they make contact with you?
Landon Loveall
I would say that about 75% of the new contacts that we get are coming to us through the website. On the website, we use ScheduleOnce as a scheduling tool, and someone who reads one of our blog posts likes what they read and thinks that we can help them can just schedule a call. They don’t have to call us, they don’t have to send us an email. All they have to do is look at a calendar and pick a time that works for them. That’s the way the majority of new contacts come in. When we look at our web traffic, about 90% of that web traffic is from organic searches. If you think about that, most people who end up contacting us are out there on Google, they’re typing in search terms, they’re finding our blog post and then they’re scheduling a call with us. That’s how the majority of our new business arrives.
Claire Akin
It’s funny, the way you and I came into contact was that you had scheduled a call with me to talk about what we might be able to help you with from a marketing perspective, and you ended up not becoming a client just because you’re already doing so many of the things that we do for advisors. Our most popular package, Indigo Marketing, is two custom blog posts a month that we send out on their website. We share them by email, we share them across social media, and we really try to position them as a specialist, and you guys are already doing that and having so much success with it, so I think that’s really cool. You also do, one of the main things that we recommend for our advisors is having a schedule a call button front and center on your homepage so when you go to the homepage, people really don’t have to think too much.
There’s one thing for them to do, schedule a phone call to start the conversation. We want to make it easy 24 hours a day, seven days a week for people to schedule a phone call when they’re motivated to do so when they have a need. I think that’s great that you guys are implementing all of these strategies that are really working. Tell me a little bit about your marketing journey and when you started embracing this specialty and whether or not that was difficult for you, because a lot of the advisors that I work with have a hard time embracing a specialty. They’re worried that they’re going to alienate people that don’t fall into that specialty and they’re worried about narrowing their focus because maybe it will narrow the amount of potential new clients.
Landon Loveall
Marketing is something that I love and that I’ve always been interested in, but it’s something that you’re also constantly learning. You’re learning just in general what works, what doesn’t, and then more specifically, what works for you. Even going back to nine or 10 years ago I was reading “Guerrilla Marketing,” “Duct Tape Marketing,” reading “Copyblogger,” and through that became really interested in a lot of this stuff that we’re now doing. It took a while for me and the firm to get to the point where we could do this, and there definitely was some of that concern.For us it was a really natural fit, because what we did is, we didn’t just randomly pick a group or a type of person and say, “This is who we want to work with.”
We started with where we were, who the people were who already seem to be finding us and then started to refine and get more focus from there. I can remember Jackie, my partner, and I having that conversation, “If we’re going to focus this much, what happens if somebody contacts us who doesn’t have stock options?” Eventually, what we came to realize is, so what? There are enough people out there who do that it doesn’t matter, and focusing on one group and having more people from that one group reach out is a lot better than not focusing on anyone and having fewer people reach out. Regardless of what marketing you’re doing, what’s really important is kind of the middle result, I guess we could say.
Not even talking about new clients and working with new people. I’m talking about the conversation that happens, that you’re marketing leads to, that’s in between someone finding you and someone starting to work with you, and the more of those conversations you have, the better you can get about what you offer and how you structure it and how you market it. The only way those conversations happen and a lot of those conversations happen is by you getting more focused with your marketing. We had some of those same concerns, but this is something that has really worked for us and it’s been just a lot of fun kind of developing everything that we do with the website and everything that we’re doing with content marketing.
Claire Akin
Tell us a little bit more about what do you think is the most important thing that you’ve done to crack the code for your marketing. What’s the biggest decision you’ve made or the biggest impact that you’ve made on your marketing?
Landon Loveall
I think you can just boil it down to one word, and that one word is, focus. Jackie and I, I mentioned those conversations earlier when we first decided to focus on tech employees and then from there we said, “Okay, well we’re going to start writing on a blog.” At first, when we first started writing, it was just, we kind of wrote about whatever we wanted to write about with a general focus on the things that our clients were concerned about, but our business coach actually told us that that’s not good enough, that you need to be even more focused, and she told us, “You’re only going to write about stock options.”
Her point was that there’s so much information out there that unless you’re very specific at first, you’re just shouting in a crowd, whereas if you get really specific, the crowd gets a lot smaller. We just continued to refine, continued to focus and also thought a lot about, what can we write about that is going to be really hard for someone else out there to match? That’s what we’re doing now, and when we started doing that, that’s when we really started to gain traction. Every month, you’d just watch the web traffic go up and the number of new contacts kind of go up with it.
Claire Akin
I totally agree. Embracing a specialty and when you think you have a specialty, you push yourself a little bit farther to dive even deeper. For Indigo Marketing Agency, we serve independent financial advisors. That’s already a pretty narrow niche. Then we take it a step further and say independent financial advisors who have a true specialty, and those are the people that work with us and need our help by creating custom content, like you guys are doing yourselves. I think that’s awesome.
Tell me a little bit about what you’re looking to do next or what you’re excited about on the marketing landscape.
Landon Loveall
In terms of what we’re looking to do next, it’s probably going to be more of what we are already doing. I do two posts a month. Starting next month, we’re going to be adding a third post per month, and Jackie will be doing that. Eventually, as we grow the firm, my hope is to be less involved in day to day client work and more able to focus on the marketing side. Over the years, I expect that we will continue to add to the number of posts that we’re posting per month and then eventually start to move into other ways of promoting that material and other material. An example I would give you is yesterday, I spoke in an event, and the other thing that I’ve learned when it comes to content is if you’re generating ideas that are in the form of some sort of content, you can’t let that go to waste. That has to be used in some way for your marketing.
Yesterday, I spoke at this event. I had to put together this presentation. We ended up hiring someone to come record the presentation, and then we’re going to have the entire recording. We’re also going to take that recording and break it down into smaller clips. That one event will turn into multiple different blog posts and multiple different ways that we can promote that work that went into preparing for that one event. In the future, we’re going to be doing more of what we’re already doing and then branching out into new and different ways of building on the platform that we’ve put together.
Claire Akin
You could even use that event recording as a webinar that you could have on your website, and so you could go a lot of different directions. I believe that one of the next frontiers for advisors is webinars and using different social media platforms to advertise webinars and get them in front of their ideal target market. I think that’s cool that you guys are thinking of ways to capture this content that you’re creating and reuse it so that you can get as much exposure as possible, because the hard work really is coming up with the unique ideas and unique content and then getting as much exposure as possible. With that, why don’t you walk us through a little bit about some of the systems that you’re using and some of the technologies that you’re using for your marketing?
Landon Loveall
Our website is based on WordPress, and we’ve been really happy with what we’ve been able to do there. We use MailChimp to manage our emails, and it’s okay. I would expect in the future we may look at a different tool there. Along with MailChimp, we’re using OptinMonster, which is, if you go to our website, there’s going to be this little pop up encouraging you to sign up for our mailing list in exchange for a white paper. Then ScheduleOnce, that I mentioned earlier, is on the website so that you can schedule a call directly from the website. Those are the main ones that we’re using, especially when we talk about that content marketing that we’re doing.
Claire Akin
That’s great, and it sounds like you’re also using Google Analytics to view the traffic to your site because you mentioned that you have visibility to how much traffic is coming to your site and where it’s coming from, so you must be using Google analytics for that?
Landon Loveall
We are. That’s kind of another interesting story about how we came to where we are. A little background piece of how we got here, about three or four years ago, we all of a sudden started getting a bunch of new contacts, and at first we really didn’t know what was happening. It didn’t take us long to figure it out though. What was happening is some of Jackie’s clients had just, on their own, posted reviews of the firm on Yelp. It was only why two or three reviews, but at the time no one else was on Yelp, and Yelp was doing a lot of local SEO work here in San Francisco. If you typed in financial advisor and you were in San Francisco, one of the first results would be Yelp, top 10 financial advisors near you. We were number two or number three.
That was great, and we got a bunch of new business from that. The problem with that, like most forms of social media, was that it’s not yours. It’s theirs. That belongs to Yelp and they control it. Just like anything that you do on Facebook or anywhere else, they control it. It’s not yours, whereas your website is yours. That’s something else about our website, in terms of how I think about it. I think about it like real estate that we control. The great thing about it is every time we post a blog post, we control a little more real estate. We recognized when we started getting all this traffic from Yelp that’s probably not gonna last, and it didn’t, because a lot of other advisors kind of moved into that space and those new contacts and that traffic to our website from Yelp started to go down.
That was another thing that prompted us to say, “We need to do something that we control where we’re every month kind of building upon what we’ve already done.” It took us about a year, but after about a year, you really started to see the traction. You started to see the traffic. Every month, I have a recurring task where I go in Google Analytics and I just compare this month or the last 30 days to the 30 days prior to that, and then the last 30 days to the same 30 day period a year ago. For the last year and a half, every month when I do that, the month over month increase is a double digit percentage and the year over year increase is two or 300% over what it was the same period a year ago. Once you get this ball rolling, if you stick with it, the consistency is what’s key, if you stick with it, every month, you’re building a little bit more and adding a little bit more to what you’ve already done, and it really works.
Claire Akin
Absolutely. It took my site three years to start showing up from the keyword search of “marketing for financial advisors,” because there’s a lot of big websites out there competing for those terms. I write a new blog post every single week, and three years later I come to the top of the list when you Google for that, especially if you Google for “search engine optimization” or “webinars for advisors,” my content is at the top, because I’m diving so deep on these subjects and that’s exactly what SEO is today. It’s being the go-to expert on a specific subject to give people quality, valuable information that helps them solve their problem.
Landon Loveall
Absolutely.
Claire Akin
To close out, I’d just like to ask you a couple of questions that I like to ask all the advisors who are on the podcast. A lot of times, I talk on the phone with advisors and I ask them, “what one urgent problem are you solving for a specific group of people?” Most of the advisors I talk to can’t answer that question. They haven’t thought about their business and they don’t know the answer to that question. I’m willing to bet that you probably have thought of that and you can answer that, so I just want to ask you, what one urgent problem do you solve for a specific group of people?
Landon Loveall
We work with tech professionals who have stock options, and the problem that we solve for them is helping them figure out this unique combination that they have. Stock options are not that different from a lot of financial topics. You’ve got your different types and you’ve got general information for each of those different types. Each person that we work with has a unique combination of those different types of stock options. That’s what we do, help them understand what they have, especially help them understand what the tax implications are.
Then the way I think about the impact of the work that we’re doing for them is if we were to compare what they’re going to get from their stock options to a case where they didn’t have the stock options and they’re just saving year by year by year, if we’re doing our job and things work out well for them, they’re going to be able to make 10 years’ worth of progress and one of that. That’s our goal. That’s the problem that we’re trying to help them solve, is to make sure that they can capture everything that those stock options can do for them.
Claire Akin
Great. Then my final question for you is, if you were to meet an advisor who maybe hasn’t worked on their marketing yet, maybe doesn’t have a marketing strategy or maybe somebody who’s new to the business who is just getting started on their journey, what is the one marketing recommendation you would give other advisers who want to be successful?
Landon Loveall
I think the first thing is you need to pick an approach … You need to know yourself, you need to know your business, you need to know who you want to work with, and then you need to pick an approach that’s going to work really well for you. One of the most important parts of that is picking an approach that you can stick with. If you want to write blog posts, that’s great, but if you’re not going to stick to it and be on a regular schedule, it won’t work. Whatever you choose to do, you have to be able to stick with it, because that’s what really matters.
The other thing that I would say is, don’t be a cheapskate. Recognize what you’re good at and hire someone else who is good at the things that you’re not good at and don’t cut corners, because for awhile, I was working with someone who was supposedly doing all these things for me, and I’m writing and nothing is happening, and nothing was happening because I was working with someone who did not know what they were doing in terms of SEO and websites and whatnot.
I’m literally in a dark room shouting alone, and no one is reading what I’m putting out there. Decide what you’re good at and then hire out the rest, and when you hire out, make sure you’re working with someone who knows what they’re doing.
Claire Akin
That’s great. That’s fantastic advice. I want to thank you so much for being a part of our show. If you want to check out Landon’s website, go to kbfinancialadvisors.com. Landon, thank you for being a guest and keep in touch.
Landon Loveall
All right, thanks, Claire.
How can we help you with your marketing?
We help top advisors with a true specialty to create custom marketing plans. Our most popular services include our Independent Websites for Independent Advisors, our Search Engine Optimization service, and our Monthly Marketing Package, but we can also help answer your questions and work with you on project-based marketing campaigns.
About Claire
Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency, a full-service marketing firm serving financial advisors. It’s her mission to help independent financial advisors help more people through their incredibly important work. Claire is a former Investment Advisor Representative who holds her MBA in Marketing from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego as well as a BA in Economics from UC Davis.
The post Podcast: Embracing a Specialized Niche as a Financial Advisor with Landon Loveall of KB Financial Advisors (Listen Now) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.
Podcast: Preparing to Sell Your Financial Advisory Firm With Ron Carson (Listen Now)
Ron Carson is one of my heroes and mentors. He’s the founder of Carson Group Holdings, he has grown Carson Group to over $15 billion in assets under advisement, he’s a New York Times bestselling author of Avalanche and The Sustainable Edge. In this episode, he’ll help us understand how advisors can prepare to sell their financial advisory firm, including:
What’s the selling landscape like for advisory firms today?
How can advisors plan to get top dollar for their firm?
What are the factors that go into valuing a financial advisory firm?
How can advisors prepare 5 or 10 years out to sell their firms?
What are the factors that impact the success of a transaction?
Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen on your commute!
Transcription
Claire Akin (CA): Thanks so much for joining me for The Marketing Podcast for Financial Advisors. Today’s guest I’m really excited about is Ron Carson of Carson Group. Ron has been one of my mentors and one of my heroes for years in this industry. He’s really one of the big players in the industry, one of the most knowledgeable people, and he’s done so much for advisors out there. Of course, he’s an advisor himself, running his firm with almost $10 billion assets under management, 124 locations.
He’s also a New York Times bestselling author with three books: Tested in the Trenches, Avalanche, and my personal favorite, The Sustainable Edge, which I highly recommend to any advisors out there. It’s like Tony Robbins meets business management for financial advisors. It’s an incredible read and I recommend picking that up on Amazon. He also created a coaching platform for financial advisors, and he’s coached hundreds of advisors to maximize their potential. He also developed a marketing platform specifically for advisors, and he’s one of only two independent financial advisors in the Barron’s Hall of Fame. I just wanted to take a moment to welcome Ron to the show today.
Ron Carson (RC): Claire, thank you. You’re so sweet. We’ve known each other for quite a while, and you do a lot for our profession. Really honored that you invited me on your podcast today.
CA: Great. Awesome. I just want to start out asking, personally, how is life going? What are you excited about? What are you most looking forward to, personally, in your life?
RC: I recently did a 100-mile mountain bike ride in Moab with some of my new partners in Salt Lake City, and they’re asking about my travel schedule, and I was talking about the next 11 cities, I think, I was going to be in before home. He goes, “Is it work, or is it play?” I said, “I don’t know. You decide, because I can’t really distinguish them anymore, because I love what I do.” So, when you say personally, I’ve got a new grandson, Carson, who’s a year old, who is just absolutely the light of my life. Also personally, working on our ecosystem. We at Carson are already out to the fourth quarter of 2020, into the first quarter of 2021 on deliverables, on value-add. We call it value beyond a doubt for our value proposition and our partners. That’s what gets me up out of bed and super excited every day.
CA: That’s awesome. Congratulations on your grandson. That’s so much fun. Talk just a little about where you think the biggest opportunities or the biggest new things are happening in our industry. What are you looking forward to in our industry and for advisors out there?
RC: I think we’re at a real turning point, Claire. Let me take a step back. Have you seen the most recent numbers on adviser growth by asset category?
CA: I don’t think I’ve seen those numbers.
RC: It is so telling, and I’ll paraphrase it, and anybody out there can go get the copy of this. These numbers are not up for debate, and I think it plays into your topic today on acquisition, because what they did is they looked at ADVs from five years ago, and then looked at the AUM change to the end of ’18, and the numbers directionally didn’t surprise me, but the gap shocked me. At the far end of one extreme they had firms that were 10 million and below in AUM, and then, at the other extreme they had firms that were 5 billion and above. I had always heard that. Over that same five-year period, the market grew 10.68%, so that’s a kicker for the S&P 500. We’ve always heard, oh, it’s easy to grow… If you have 10 million in AUM and you go to 20 million, that’s easy, because that’s 100% gain. To go from 5 billion to 10 billion is harder. Wouldn’t you think that would be conventional wisdom, Claire?
CA: Right.
RC: Right. The numbers, the flow… As you went up in size, the 10 million and under were going backwards quickly. In true NNA, when you strip that market growth, they were contracting quite a bit every year, and it wasn’t until you got to a billion firm that you were able to not grow, but not go… When you strip market growth away, you are basically staying even, and the 5 billion above are growing super fast.
CA: Wow.
RC: I know. Like I said, if someone had just said, “Oh, directionally, here’s what’s going on,” I would have said, “Ooh, that doesn’t sound possible that there’s that big a difference,” but it’s what’s going on today. You ask what should advisors be looking for. Really, for a strong partner, because I think you’re at this point where you have to decide, am I going to be disrupted, or am I going to be part of the disruption? I really believe it’s that. I know there’s advisors that take issue with this, but there are several things going on. I think the NNA tail is a huge one, and the reason I think advisors are struggling today is they’re asked to do so many things.
We started out as an advisor. I had a lady in yesterday, 96 years old, she’s been a client of mine for 34 years. She gives me a hug, she tells me she loves me, she could never have had the life that they had without us doing what we do. It made my year. There’s nothing that felt better. I’m thinking, when I started working with her and her husband, then it was so simple. I’d go in, I’d sit at the kitchen table, I’d give them basic advice, which, for them, was great advice. We did a financial plan, we got some state documents done. Pretty simple, charge them a traditional fee and use product, and they’re very happy. Fast-forward to today. We have a very informed buying public that will pay a fee, and I hate the term fee. Let’s call it investment, because no one’s paying an advisor 1% to make 1% a year less. They’re making an investment in their future; they want to see value beyond a doubt.
When I say what’s exciting out there is this turning point, there is massive opportunity, but there’s also a lot of risk. The opportunity is this: we have 111,000 advisors and most of them do not have a succession plan. I hear people that say they do, and we’ve done 124 deals, and we get into them and they really don’t. They don’t have one that would be sustainable, or their clients would stick around. You’re going to have a massive change in the marketplace with advisors. Clients are going to be in play because they don’t have an executable succession plan. Combine that with the fact that some of the coolest, newest technologies are allowing us to add value beyond a doubt, whether it’s getting into the banking business and disintermediating poor cash that banks are providing, legal document production, financial cognitive testing for clients. One we’re rolling out next week in Chicago at our Excel meeting is the VOR, value of the relationship, where we can actually monetize that.
Back to your original question, the opportunity for advisors that have the energy to actually want to be part of adding that kind of value. There are 65% of Americans who still do not trust financial services, and it’s not that they don’t trust you, that you’re going to steal their money, they don’t trust that, am I getting a return on the investment that we’re making? The holy grail that I think this technology… We just saw yesterday some AI that was demoed to my team that just blew our mind. Imagine a world where we operate… I call it the three dimensions of trust. The third dimension is we anticipate a client’s need before they even know they have it; we’re doing things well out ahead. We’re also experience-based behavior, where we understand what they’re doing and when they’re logging on, what they’re looking at, what they’re reading, so we can anticipate their needs. The opportunity to really move the needle in people’s lives has never been greater, and for them to be able to measure that. That’s why those big firms are growing, because they’re able to build out that kind of infrastructure.
CA: That’s incredible. One of the reasons I had you on the show today is I have so many advisors asking me, “What should I be thinking about when it comes to selling my firm?” My own dad is 70 years old and he thinks he’s going to work forever, but he realizes he has to protect his clients and he has to protect his family if something happens to him. He needs a plan in place that’s going to take care of these people who are his friends, people he’s been serving for decades. To come to an advisor and say, “You really have to have a plan in place for your clients. But what if that can be a plan that could provide better service, better value to protect them even more than you’re already doing?” Then it starts to sound compelling, and so we just want to get started talking a little bit about, what are you seeing out there? What’s the selling landscape? What should advisors really know when they’re getting started thinking about selling their firms?
RC: I’ll just share a real-life story that just happened. I had a lady that called me. She goes, “My husband died unexpectedly. I thought he had a succession plan, and I’m telling you, the assets all left so fast, and it was $1 billion of AUM advisory assets just gone.” We had an advisor in our coaching group killed in a hang-gliding accident, thought he had a succession plan, had a wife and two kids, nothing left. The people over there took the assets, or the clients just left. We go to a conference. How many want to be buyers? 95% of the hands go up. How many want to be sellers? Almost none.
The big question is, how many people have the ability to literally be a buyer? If you’re selling your firm, I would prioritize what’s most important to you. Is it terms? Is it optimizing price? Is it giving you optionality for the future? Can you stick around as long as you want, be a part of the future? Is it providing a smooth transition to the next generation? There are not nearly enough deals. What I would say is if you’ve made a conscious decision to say, “You know what? I’m 100, 200, 300 million. I just don’t have energy,” I think it’s smart to sell now, because these trends… You’ve got the market up. The market goes down and you’re not truly growing organically. Then, every day that goes by that you’re not growing organically, your firm is going to become worth less, and that’ll be exposed overnight in a bear market, and I think there will be a lot of shifting of relationships in that.
Start with making a list of what’s really important. There’s plenty of buyers out there, and I would look for buyers that are well-capitalized. Especially if you’re going to stick around, is there equity that you maybe would rather have? You can take some cash, take some equity, and be a part of the future growth. We just announced yesterday, this was a perfect setup, $575 million firm in Indianapolis. It’s going to take on the brand with Carson, but they needed succession, but they also really wanted to start growing again. Even at that level, they have been truly flatline for the last several years. I mentioned you need to make a list, Claire, of what’s important to you, and then that’ll start to sort out who the potential partners could be. If you decide, hey, I don’t want to sell and I want to plug in and be part of something, then I think that’s a separate path and decision-making process path that you would go down.
CA: Absolutely. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room that everybody wants to know but is afraid to ask. What kind of valuations are you seeing?
RC: I get asked this all the time, Claire. When they’re looking to join our partnership, they want to know up front what’s it worth, and what your growth rate is really… Your organic growth rate is going to be a big factor in price. Then I’ll answer your question. The other is, is there any concentration risk? What’s the age of the client? There’s basically a present value of all the cash flows that will be coming in. What’s the next generation that’s actually there? Is it in place, or does it have to be grown and imported from somewhere?
By the way, I can pay any amount for a firm if they let me dictate terms. Terms are way more than price, but no one ever says, “Hey, what are the terms out there?” I never get asked that question. I always get asked, “What’s the price?” The price is this: I’m part of two groups that are basically M&A groups on our own deals, and then we also brought on Jason Carver, who heads up our M&A group. He came over from Focus. So, he’s seen thousands of deals. They range anywhere between 2 and 21 times earnings.
CA: Wow.
RC: Think of that change. It’s massive, and there’s so many factors that go into it. I mean, I could give somebody an off-the-cuff, “Hey, it’s 2.2 times your reoccurring advisory AUM,” but it could go a lot higher, it could go a lot lower. We’re looking at a firm right now that is growing so fast, organically, through their lead generation system that they need us to provide advisors to them. So, that’s a whole other… We automatically know… We do an acquisition, they’ve got this recipe for generating lots of leads.
We can afford to pay more for that because we’re going to be able to plug in advisors that will dramatically increase that AUM over a short period of time. Those are all the factors that go into it when you’re evaluating the price. The first question I would ask is, what kind of terms do you want? Then you can start to back in. I sold a third of my firm to a private equity firm. I took a lot less, consciously, because I wanted 100% control and I didn’t want anybody breathing down my neck about how I wanted to grow and develop my firm. So, it was a trade-off.
CA: That’s great. I think that a lot of advisors just want to do that calculation and ask themselves, “Can I get financial freedom if I were to sell my firm today?” And answer that question yes or no, and either get better so they can get there, or maybe keep working forever. What are some of the mistakes that you see advisors, when they start doing these transactions, when they are moving along this pipeline, what are some of the big mistakes you’re seeing?
RC: I can give these from mine. I’ve made so many mistakes in this, and that is not getting the cultural fit right, and I cannot stress the importance of this enough. I’ve always said… I have a whole talk, culture eats strategy for lunch, and you can have the best strategy in the world, and if you can’t get people to buy in, be excited, have core values that they live by, the organization lives by, it doesn’t matter. So, getting the culture right, so spend enough time on both places. Is this really going to work? Always think of Monday morning. It’s exciting to do a deal, it’s exciting to talk about a deal, but then Monday morning rolls around, the deal’s done. Just imagine how you’re going to feel. Are you super excited, or once the foray of the deal wears off, do you have remorse that, okay, I shouldn’t have sold, or I shouldn’t have merged…Visualize that. But definitely, definitely, definitely get the culture right.
The second thing I would say is, think of it as a prenuptial. You never plan on getting divorced, but spell everything out. If things don’t go well, how would you unwind a deal?
Three, really spend time detailing. The more detailed you can be well before you get to a letter of intent… By the way, if you put a lot of time into the letter of intent and allow the deal to actually have a much higher success of closing, or there’s not a lot of detail in the letter of intent, the chances of actually consummating the deal go down dramatically.
I also see geographical reach. Toberson has some great stats on this, where he said if you’re number one or number two in your market, you automatically have a gravity pull of clients, and I believe that’s true. Or, if you try to dominate your area and don’t get geographically spread thin. That’s another mistake I made. My very first deal I did was in San Rafael, the San Francisco Bay area, and it’s taken a lot of importing our people, but it’s a long distance. Now it’s working fine, but when it was just Carson in Omaha and our first deal was in San Francisco, it would have been smarter to do my first deal right here in Omaha.
CA: Right. They say most acquisitions are within 90 miles of where you are right now, so it’s smart to stay local.
RC: Yes. I want to come back to… You’re going into this, what’s perfection look like? The things that you want out of it for you, for your family, for your stakeholders? This is one of those where… Please just be honest with yourself. You don’t have to show it to anybody, but hey, if the number-one thing is maximizing how you do, just be honest with yourself, because that’ll make a difference on how the deal is structured and who you partner with. If the most important thing is taking care of your clients, it’s going to be a different partner. If the most important thing is taking care of your internal stakeholders, it might be a third partner.
I think you’ve got to really be clear on what it is that you want to do. I can tell you without a doubt, my 124 offices, I would trust every one of them with my clients, with my family’s money in the event I died, because they all did deals based on the value proposition and taking care of internal stakeholders and clients first; not getting the highest price, but getting the highest value. We walked away from a lot of deals where it was just about a money grab, and that’s culturally not where we’re going, or the partners are trying to advance. So I think getting that right up front, Claire… It will save you a lot of heartache in the future.
CA: That’s great, that’s fantastic. What about advisors that aren’t quite there yet? Maybe they’re 5 years out, maybe they’re 10 years out. What are the things they should be thinking about and preparing for as they come to terms with the fact that they’re not going to work forever? Should it be marketing? Should it be client service? Should it be growing as fast as they can? What are your recommendations for those folks?
RC: There’s a lot there. First, an exercise I went through and I recommend everybody go through this, is do an organizational chart of what your perfect business looks like. Assume you’re going to stay in the business, you want to grow, and you’ve got a 5- or 10-year time horizon. Go through and say, “Hey, if I were to have the perfect business, here’s the services I want to offer, here’s what it would look like, and here’s what I would fit in the org chart.” Even if it’s just you, and then you write your name in every single box, and it helps you start attracting really good stakeholders that share your vision and even, I would say, hire ahead of the growth, because you’ll grow into them much faster if you have these stakeholders actually on your team if you can afford it. Hire as many as you can afford, because there’s never been a better time to invest in your business.
Also, have a very clear career path for how they can possibly earn equity, buy into the firm. What do they need to do to economically move up and have success? Who are your partners going to be? You cannot do it alone. Are you going to partner with a Fidelity, a TD, an LPL, Commonwealth, Raymond James, Carson, Focus, HighTower? There are a lot of different options out there for partnering, but it’s going to be driven by the value proposition you want to offer. Then, the final decision is, do I want to do it on my own, or do I want to try to plug in? Because you would have different kinds of partners. Some partners are plug and play, and others… Dynasty does this, where they’ll just help you go out and build the pieces. The custodian’s here, the record keeper’s here, trading is here, but not being intentional about it, Claire, you will not maximize your future value.
Separate yourself so you can get away from the whirlwind and actually be thinking about your business. Make no mistake about it, there has never been a better time to prepare for all these clients that are going to be in play, and it’s going to be huge. The analogy I use, build the ark right now. We’re building lots of them. We’re putting our energies, actually, not even into growing. We’re growing fast, but our energies are going into… What’s this ecosystem look like? I love what Jeff Bezos said. There’s a great interview. It’s called the Washington Economic Forum. It was October of last year. I watched it three times now, and I pick something new out of it every time, but he said someone congratulated him on a fantastic quarter and he thought to himself, you know, that quarter was baked three years ago, and it totally resonated with me because things that we’re delivering now we started on two, three, four years ago, and things we’re delivering in 2021 we’re working on today. It does take a massive commitment to plan and think about what that looks like.
CA: That’s great. Fantastic advice. You’ve given us so much to work with here today. One last question. If you were meeting with an advisor who knows they have to start this process, knows they have to start looking for the solution, what is the one recommendation or the one piece of advice you could give to that advisor?
RC: This is going to sound very self-serving, but I would do two things. One, I would plug into two conferences. I think Barron’s and our conference… We’ll have 1,200 people next week. We have very little sponsorship stuff, and immerse yourself into what the next generation of value proposition looks like. Barron’s is fantastic as well for this, and there’s lots of other good conferences out there, but I mean, as far as what’s coming down the road… The other is commit six months and do deep due diligence. Go out there. Even if you have zero desire to join somebody, understand what your competition is and what’s coming at you, and you may end up doing a 180, going into it just to learn. You may end up finding someone you may want to partner with. I’d make a list of, okay, what do I want? Who could fulfill this? Take the time to slow down so you can speed up.
CA: Thank you so much for being on the show today, Ron, and I’m going to link to the Excel conference below. I’ve been to every conference in this industry, and that’s one of the very best ones. For all the advisors out there that want to attend, you can go to the show notes, click there to learn more. Thanks so much, Ron, for being on the show. You’ve given us a lot of great things to think about. We appreciate it, and best of luck to you and your future.
RC: Thank you so much, Claire.
CA: If you’d like any resources from today’s episode or from other episodes, go to indigomarketingagency.com/remember. It’s hard to forget that address: Indigomarketingagency.com/remember.
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About Claire
Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency, a full-service marketing firm serving financial advisors. It’s her mission to help independent financial advisors help more people through their incredibly important work. Claire is a former Investment Advisor Representative who holds her MBA in Marketing from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego as well as a BA in Economics from UC Davis.
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