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Podcast: Preparing to Sell Your Financial Advisory Firm with Ron Carson (Listen Now)

Preparing to Sell Your Financial Advisory Firm?

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 best selling 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 five or ten 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

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

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.

Claire Akin

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?

Ron Carson

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.

Claire Akin

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?

Ron Carson

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?

Claire Akin

I don’t think I’ve seen those numbers.

Ron Carson

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 five 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 five billion to 10 billion is harder. Wouldn’t you think that would be conventional wisdom, Claire?

Claire Akin

Right.

Ron Carson

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 five billion above are growing super fast.

Claire Akin

Wow.

Ron Carson

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.

Claire Akin

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?

Ron Carson

I’ll just share a real life story 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 bare 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.

Claire Akin

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?

Ron Carson

I get asked this all the time, Claire. When they’re looking to join our partnership, they want to know upfront 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 two and 21 times earnings.

Claire Akin

Wow.

Ron Carson

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.

Claire Akin

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?

Ron Carson

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.

Claire Akin

Right. They say most acquisitions are within 90 miles of where you are right now, so it’s smart to stay local.

Ron Carson

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 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.

Claire Akin

That’s great, that’s fantastic. What about advisors that aren’t quite there yet? Maybe they’re five 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?

Ron Carson

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 five 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.

Claire Akin

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?

Ron Carson

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 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.

Claire Akin

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.

Ron Carson

Thank you so much, Claire.

Claire Akin

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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Podcast: How to Become a Specialist Advisor with Doug Rainbolt (Listen Now)

How to Become a Specialist Advisor

We know that embracing a specialty can help advisors be more successful in their marketing, charge a premium for their services, and make it easier to find their ideal clients. But how can you go about choosing a specialty that’s right for you? In this episode, consultant to top advisors, Doug Rainbolt will explain how to become a specialist advisor:

How to evaluate potential niches
A proven process for defining your ideal client
Solving the biggest problem facing your target market
How to embrace a specialty you love
How to market to your ideal prospects as a specialist advisor

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 for this episode of the Marketing Podcast for Financial Advisors. I’m your host, Claire Akin. Today I’m really excited to have Doug Rainbolt with us. We are going to be talking about how advisors can figure out how to embrace a specialty. What’s the right specialty for them? How can they test out a different specialty before they put a bunch of marketing dollars towards that. I’m really excited to have Doug with us.

Doug is a partner and CMO with Chief Outsiders. He has been a senior marketer for many years. I actually came across Doug when we were working with a financial advisor together, who had a fascinating niche. He was doing financial planning for Intel employees. Doug, I know, really helped their firm to focus on that specialty, and embrace that niche. It was really successful for them. He was a great resource on that project. We’ve kept in touch over the years. Doug is going to help us today, to talk about his process and how he helps financial professionals to figure out who they should focus on. Welcome to the program, Doug.

Doug Rainbolt

Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

Claire Akin

Great.  Let’s start out with talking a little bit about what you’re most excited about personally this year? What’s going on in your life?

Doug Rainbolt

Good question. I think I’ll carve this in two pieces. First is the personal side. For the second part, I’ll share some thoughts or tips to marketing growth and marketing education, which I love doing.

On the personal side, the great news this year is my youngest graduates from high school. On top of that, he got a basketball offer to play college basketball in Seattle. In fact, signs his Letter of Intent today, so that’s really exciting, really pleased about that. I wish him the best going forward.

On the business side, I would say on the marketing front, a couple of things really have been on my mind this year, as far as learning, and the application of such. The first is this idea of, what we call advocacy marketing, the idea of being able to turn your customers into advocates, you know, post a sale. I think so much of the time, we as marketers are so focused on the acquiring of somebody, getting a lead in, working the lead, nurturing the lead, and that eventually closes. We don’t think about oftentimes, what happens post the transaction.

There’s a whole group of thought around how do we nurture people post the transaction to keep them focused, to keep them engaged. To have them be motivated to actually help in some ways as far as, for example, content creation, or word-of-mouth to different prospects. In doing so, the key thing is that it actually increases your referral count. As you know, Claire, referrals, as far as lead source, is like gold. It does shorten the sales cycle. It does help people, self-qualify themselves. The key to this process is to really get people engaged post-sales, so they can be your best advocate to increase your referral count. That’s been a top-of-mind thing for me, as I coach clients.

I’d say the second thing would be, I had a CMO peer who made the introduction to a guy named Patrick Renvoise, who wrote a book called “The Persuasion Code.” It deals with, in a nutshell, neuromarketing and the importance of you find balance between the logical side and the emotional side, the primal brain and its responses and its role as far as the buying process. The thing about that is when he helped me as far as how I think about messaging in a very authentic way, but being mindful of people’s emotional side as they engage, and as they work through their process of buying.

Claire Akin

That’s fantastic. Congratulations on your son’s scholarship, that’s awesome. And I agree. There’re so many opportunities from a marketing standpoint, and particularly for financial services, it’s all about referrals. It’s interesting to do that kind of work around, after you complete a transaction with somebody and they’re happy, how can you leverage them as a referral source?

That’s one thing that we do for our advisors is that we write client profiles. We’ll profile a client who maybe came to the advisor when they were starting their own business, and they didn’t know if they had enough money to go out on their own. Then they did, and their business was successful, and now their life is better. That’s a fantastic personal client profile that you can create and have on your website. It helps people understand what you do and how you help. It  humanizes the whole process. I think that’s great advice there.

Let’s talk a little bit about specialization in general. Of course, I have a very unique specialty and people sometimes when I talk on the phone with advisors, they can’t believe that this is all I do. I work with independent financial advisors who have a specialty. That’s pretty unique. People who have a specialty need custom content, and they need somebody familiar with our industry, familiar with compliance. It’s a very specific niche. There’s certainly a need for it, and there’s a higher willingness to pay. I encourage advisors to embrace a specialty so that they can command that higher willingness to pay. Charge a premium for their services, and make it easier to find their ideal clients, and solve the most pressing problems for their potential clients.

Walk us through why is it so important to choose a specialty, and how can advisors go about evaluating potential specialties?

Doug Rainbolt

Sure. First of all, let me just say as a premise here, as I walk through this, I’d like the listeners to understand, first and foremost, my conviction, my visceral belief is you’ve got to be passionate about people to start with. There’s nothing phony or make-believe about marketing, it’s about doing the right thing to help people, and help people solve problems. So you’ve got to have that, you’ve got to love people, which most of your listeners do, I assume. But you’ve got to have that as a foundational piece.

Let me read to you a problem statement I see when it comes to financial advisors, and the problems they solve. We all know that there’s a need out there. The need is immense for people who need support and guidance and tips to financial planning. Part of the problem I see, a foundational problem, is that when I look at messaging on websites, or listen to presentations, not yours obviously, others, they all sound the same to me. There’s no differentiation as far as the messaging. It’s logical. It all comes down to, I should say their approach seems logical. That the idea that people need this, and you’ve got a plan, and we build a plan, and the plan is bullet-proof, and we have all these methodologies to really test your plan, make sure it’s rock solid, and you have us as a, really, your trusted advisor.

The problem from a listener is that it all sounds the same. It all sounds the same, so therefore, it’s really hard to respond to something that’s so homogeneous. That’s the first part. The second part deals with this, and it ties back into this idea of neuromarketing, right? We think about why people do things. We think about why the approach. Let’s face it, oftentimes when an advisor says let’s meet, and it’s fairly soon in the sales process, you get this visceral no, I don’t want to do this. It’s almost this fear of response, even prospects can’t explain because the money piece is so emotional, it’s so deep. Yet what oftentimes happens is that people won’t respond unless there is that emotional response. We tend to almost genericize this messaging, and we’re not really hitting the key pain points around why they should meet, and what’s going on.

That idea about specialization really is to provide a unique messaging that really addresses a pain point. A pain point is bigger and deeper than perhaps this need for a financial plan. They all know that, but something deeper. The problem if you become very general, as far as even the messaging, and you reach out in a very general way, you get very mediocre response. You’re much better off finding your wheelhouse, the area that you’re really passionate about and unique in, where your superpower is exercised, to be able to really be pinpoint and accurate around trying to appeal to people’s emotional state, backed by logic. To motivate them to take to engage, and to keep the conversation going, to a point where they feel comfortable, based upon the merits, and your credibility to extend to a meeting and going forward.

It may be a longer sales cycle. You do it that way and do it right, with meaningful information around positioning, how you solve their problem. Then they move along the process and then if you do it right, you find a group of people who are so satisfied, post that, that they’re your greatest referral source. From there, it does begin to accelerate the sales process.

Specializations are about really pinpointing the right people, the right message to engage them. Then having them be your best advocate going forward to help you build more leads and bigger funnel, in a much more accelerated way.

Claire Akin

That’s great. That’s great advice. It’s so funny because this morning, before our recording, I was on the phone with an advisor who pretty much exclusively serves interior designers, which is pretty cool. He works with and gets a lot of his clients from a CPA who serves interior designers, and the CPA firm is called Interior Design CPA. It’s all over their website, they have a cool, hip logo, that I’m sure was created by one of their designer clients. That’s what they do. It’s interesting because in my conversation with this advisor, I said, what about rebranding to the design financial planner? He said, “No, no, no, no, no. I couldn’t do that. I don’t want to alienate anyone who isn’t a designer.”

Well, you just told me that everyone you’re working with is a designer, and everyone that you want to work with in the future is a designer. So, if you were the interior designer financial advisor, it would be a lot easier for people to remember you and to refer to you, and to feel at home with you. Yet he was really reticent to do that because the fear of alienating people that don’t belong to that group. And it’s interesting, because I’m not even sure if interior designers have specific needs when it comes to their CPA, that they need to be that familiar with the interior design business model. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. But maybe it’s just a memorable way to get new clients. “My CPA is the interior design CPA, you should go to him, he’s great.”

So it’s about both embracing a specialty because you serve them best, and also to make it easier to refer and more comfortable to refer. And so, I do always encourage advisors to really take a leap of faith and make the jump, and embrace your specialty, if it’s the people that you love working with, you won’t be disappointed.

Let’s talk a little bit about, as they’re evaluating, maybe of a generalist advisor that right now will take anybody with a heartbeat, or who casts a shadow, but they know they need to specialize. What are some ways that they can evaluate different specialties to figure out whether or not it will work?

Doug Rainbolt

That’s a good question. Let me just share an example, what I’ve done, and add some color to it. And much of this stuff I learned from my working in Silicon Valley where I worked for years and years and years, this idea of testing, testing value propositions, testing markets. I’ll start by saying that oftentimes, people just guess at something, go at it full blast, I think that’s wrong. You should do some testing upfront to make sure you’re in the right place. Oftentimes what I do with my clients, we’ll sit down and I’ll ask them, what are you passionate about? What really causes you to get up in the morning and just have great enthusiasm and passion for your work each day? What kind of people would you like to serve?

I’ve seen some businesses where people will serve clients who they’re less enthusiastic about, and maybe for good reason. I think it’s a recipe for disaster, or people’s lives not being enriched, being a provider of the service. Sit down and just think about what would you like to do? Who would you like to serve? It’s not just the who, but what kind of problems would resonate with that group? What we would do is put together a list of potentials and then applying some, what we call lean principles for startups. Begin to describe that group from a demographic and cyclographic standpoint. Who are these people? Begin to fill out a form and say this is what we think they are. This is what we think they do. This is what we think their problems are.

The important thing upfront is to recognize oftentimes, that these are what I call, without being too nerdy, hypotheses. We think about these. We think these things might be true. We weigh them and say gosh, given these different groups that we can market to, and given our hypotheses around who they might be and so on, and the problems they might have, how do we test this? We prioritize that list. And then the idea is to what we call “leave the building.” Oftentimes we tend to look behind our laptops and make phone calls, but we sometimes are reticent to go out and actually meet people and talk with them. I really encourage people to go out to those spaces and meet people.

The way I do it is, be really careful to present to these people that this is not a sales call, I’m trying to learn something. I’m trying to understand something about the market. I’m testing something. It may help that being the marketing person, and not as much the analyst, or the advisor, might help. But what was surprising to me in the financial sector, how many people, I should say the advising sector, how many people said yes, they would take a call with me. I would slot these calls for 30 minutes, and the first part was what I call the problem statement hypothesis, first meeting. I would say something like, “I know you work in this space, let me just read to you a narrative that describes what I think your life is like and where you’re at as far as your business and your personal life, even your finances,” which became quite personal.

By doing so, I put something on the wall. I put down an assumption that could be tested. And what they would say is, as far as recipient goes, “That’s not my problem. It’s not that, it’s this.” I was then able to really use that canvas to be able to uncover what the problems were and ask questions about what really was going on in their lives. It was surprising what kind of feedback I received. It was surprising as well, to uncover things I hadn’t thought about.

For example, I’ll share one area that really struck my heart cord was, in talking to people about financial services, there was one specialty that really stood out to me personally. It was families with disabled children, such as Down Syndrome, or something else going on, but which they just felt so isolated relative to support. Their financial plans were in shambles, or close to being, and needing help relative to getting through that. Getting help in some ways, was more than just the financial advisor, but an ecosystem of people around them, that the financial advisor be part of to really facilitate a plan that was well thought out and connected.

My point is that these interviews yield different things and ideas. You came into it, what you think might be true, is not true. What you thought might be, the ideas you had about where to target are different. So then you come back in the group, you say gosh, we learned all these great things, what do we think about this? Does this make sense? Are we missing something that we don’t understand? If that is the case, you go back and test some more. But you get to a point where you think gosh, given that focus, what would be the appropriate solution for that? Do we have that today, or do we need to make some adjustments?

Next, you do a pow-wow around that, and just come to terms with that, and then you go out again for a second series of interviews, and you test that with people. You say, gosh, we have again these hypotheses about these problems, and by this time, you have enough data by which, by and large, these people say yes, that’s true, that is my problem, that is real. Then you say, given that, we’re thinking about this solution to that problem. Next, they’ll tell you again, that’s on or that’s off. And so you do the same process again, refinement around that, to a point where you know where to target, because you have the data, and you know what solution is required.

Then it comes down to a process by which you say, we’re going to target these people based upon this messaging framework, that’s very pinpointed, around pain problems that guides them through this process in an incredible way. Make them aware, to educate them, to help them compare consideration, different offerings, as they investigate, even to a point where they feel comfortable asking for a meeting to engage in terms of sitting at a table, discussing it. So all that content is laid out. Then from there, being able to lay out the right acquisition channels and lead nourishing programs, everything else. It all follows. My point is, this clear, upfront research that’s based upon observation, iteration, and testing. It really does, like I said, deploy some Silicon Valley type processes. I think it’s equally applicable to financial services and many things.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. I agree. It’s interesting because a lot of times advisors don’t necessarily have a long-term view on their investment when they’re getting to know their target market, or they’re trying to paint the picture of their ideal client. That’s why I do my free 30-minute marketing brainstorm calls, is because I love to talk to advisors, hear what their pain points are, hear what they’ve tried, what’s a waste of money, what has worked in the past, what are they thinking about doing? That’s how I get my market intel. The same thing should be true for advisors listening.

It should be your hobby to learn more about your target market. You should be offering a free brainstorming session, or a free Q&A session, or a free sounding board workshop for your potential clients, where they can ask you questions. They can tell you about their frustrations, their goals, their fears. No one ever came to a financial advisor because they thought that their investments were paying too much in fees and not getting a high enough return. That may be what you think you do for them, but that’s not why they come to you. Understanding why they come to you, what they’re interested in solving in their lives, what’s going to help them sleep better at night, what are they excited about moving forward with you to address? That is the key to your marketing.

It does take work, and it takes listening. You may spend a lot of time on the phone and not make any money. It’s all an investment in your future and in honing your expertise, to grow your business. I really appreciate all of your insights Doug. Why don’t you close it out by telling me a little bit about the mistakes you see people making from a marketing perspective. If you could recommend them doing one thing, what would you recommend?

Doug Rainbolt

I think the mistakes I see, I’ll say there are probably three that come to mind. The first is, as I said before, generic messaging, about who and why. Being really focused is really important. Knowing your passion, knowing the problems out there and creating really custom messages that move people, that stand out, make you different.

The number two mistake I see quite a bit is people trying to accelerate their process, the sales process, the gates. As I said, too quickly saying let’s have a meeting. It just rocks people sometimes, like, I’m not ready to have a meeting. Oftentimes, you try to too prematurely, and the door’s closed, or people stop returning phone calls. Being patient, I think is really key. Having that really mindful, heartful approach to where people are, and nurturing them along. In some ways, helping them self-qualify themselves, and move through the process. Because that trust is really earned.

I think the third thing I would say is not asking good enough questions. We tend to already listen. We tend to give the pitch and we’re so eager to sometimes to say, here’s our pitch, as opposed to taking the time and taking three breaths, and saying hey, I have some questions for you. I always thought the idea of an ideal sales call early on is when the perspective client talks two-thirds the time. If you can do that and be discipline at that, you’ll learn so much more and able to really come back with a precise answer to help guide them through.

Those are the three things I see happening. My one advice for people as they go through this is to know your superpower. Know what you’re really good at, what you’re really passionate about. I was reading a book by Seth Godin, called “This is Marketing.” Maybe some of the listeners have read it. It really made an impact on me. The idea is that people, because people who want to hear your voice, they really want to hear what advisors have to say, believe me there are. But it’s almost like this, what we do in marketing is we change lives for the better, like we change lives for the better. And there are people out there, we have to believe that you could help change their lives in the area of financial planning, you can, right? The key is to find them.

What Seth says in his book is, if you don’t do that, you hold your voice back from helping somebody, that their life could change for the better. It’s equivalent to stealing. You have a duty and an obligation to support them. So if you do that, it really motivates people to, this is my duty to serve these people, how do we do that? So that’s my one advice to really help guild advisors in their prospecting and support efforts.

Claire Akin

I love that. I think it comes from a place of serving people. I love that idea of, not being afraid to serve people and to help people. I know all the advisors listening love to help people. But, what if you could put that into your marketing? I’ll give you an example, I work with a business coach that his onboarding process is, he does two free sessions. A lot of people do one free session. I do one free session for advisors on their marketing. My business coach does two free sessions because you can’t experience the positive impact of business coaching unless you actually have two sessions.

The first session, you set your goals, and the second session, he holds you accountable for achieving your goals. After your two free sessions, you’ve actually seen the results, you’ve accomplished something that you wouldn’t have otherwise accomplished in your business or in your life, as a result of his serving. I think that there’s a way that advisors can bring that into their marketing. Instead of offering one sounding board session, maybe you offer free recommendations that people can implement, and they can get a sense of the benefit that you are giving through your financial planning practice. They can feel better about their life, about their future, feel more confident about their financial plan as a result of your introductory process.

To give them a taste of what you offer, is often more powerful than any sales pitch in the world. I just encourage you guys to think about that, think about how you can incorporate it for your own practice. Don’t be afraid to give away 90% of what you know because when people understand how much you care, and how much you can help them, they will come back, and they will hire you.

Thank you so much, Doug, for being a part of the show. I hope it was really valuable for the advisors listening. We really appreciate your help.

Doug Rainbolt

My pleasure, thanks.

Claire Akin

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.

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: How to Become a Specialist Advisor with Doug Rainbolt (Listen Now) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

How to Invite Friends to ‘Like’ Your Facebook Page (Video)

Some of my advisor clients are incredibly successful on Facebook and for some it’s a waste of time. What’s the difference? Demographics. Facebook marketing is not for everyone. In fact, my own Facebook business page is not a core focus of my marketing efforts because most of my target prospects are more active on LinkedIn.

But for advisors with retired, predominantly female, or younger target audiences, Facebook can be the most cost-effective way to get in front of new prospects (often less than $1 per click). If your clients are under 50 or are mostly women, you should get serious about your Facebook strategy and focus on getting more likes for your business page. One first step is to invite relevant personal friends to like your page.

Should You Invite Personal Friends to Like Your Page?

There are a few key benefits of inviting personal Facebook friends to like your business page. First and foremost, people who like your page will see your updates and the content you share, so they’ll be more aware of what you do and how you can help. This could spell more referrals from them in the future.

Secondly, once someone has liked your page, Facebook will automatically recommend your page to their friends. This means that if a client likes your page, their friends will see that they have liked your page and be able to like it themselves.

Facebook also shows your posts to people who are demographically similar to those who have liked your page. This means that if 50 of your clients have liked your page, Facebook will use its magic to clone those clients and show your posts to people just like them, presumably your ideal future clients.

Finally, Facebook automatically creates an advertising audience for you comprised of “people who like your page and their friends.” You can use this audience to grow your network with paid ads in the future.

For these reasons, you’ll want to invite some of your personal Facebook friends to like your page. Which ones? Only people who represent your target demographic or who can refer you business.

Why You Shouldn’t Invite Everyone to Like Your Page

Don’t invite everyone you know to like your page. Why not? It will confuse the algorithm and dilute your demographic data.

Here’s what I mean. Say you live in Chicago but you went to school in Florida and have a lot of friends from college that live down south. Should you invite them? Not if they don’t represent your ideal client and they’re unlikely to refer you business.

This is because the Facebook algorithm heavily depends on showing your page to people similar to those who have liked it, so we don’t want to dilute your audience with people who don’t fit your target demographic.

Additionally, your content is likely to get low engagement from that audience, which can hurt your content in the long run. The more relevant your page audience is, the more valuable your content will be to your audience and the more engagement it will get.

How to Invite Your Facebook Friends to Like Your Business Page

Now that you understand why you should invite people to like your page and exactly who you should invite, here are the steps to invite your friends to like your business page.

 

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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.

The post How to Invite Friends to ‘Like’ Your Facebook Page (Video) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

My Story and Passion (Video)

You may have seen my blog posts or webinars in the past, but what makes me uniquely qualified to work with financial advisors on their marketing? Today, I’ll tell you my story and why it is my mission to help financial advisors reach more people with digital marketing. Watch the video below to learn more.

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The post My Story and Passion (Video) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

The Best Website Platforms For Financial Advisors in 2019

Financial advisors ask me all the time, “What is the best website platform?” The answer really depends on a few things:

What is your compliance relationship?
Do you want to update your website yourself or have someone to do it for you?
Would you rather pay more upfront to get lower monthly costs or pay higher fees each month?

If you are with one of the major broker-dealers that have a compliance integration with FMG Suite, I recommend that option since it makes submitting new content to compliance a breeze.

But if you are an RIA, then you have several other options. WordPress gives you the greatest functionality and the lowest monthly costs, but it’s not very intuitive to use. Twenty Over Ten builds beautiful websites and is easy to use, but comes with a higher monthly price tag.

To learn everything you ever wanted to know about websites for financial advisors, join us for a conversation with Brandon Brown, Vice President of Product Design & Creative at FMG Suite. We’ll review the best websites for financial advisors and how advisors should choose a website. Brandon and his team have built tens of thousands of websites for financial advisors and he’ll reveal:

What’s new in the website landscape
What are the biggest mistakes advisors make on their websites
How should advisors choose the best website platform for them?
What are the 3 things your website must have today?
How to build your site quickly without stressing

Best Websites for Financial Advisors Show notes:

To learn more about FMG Suite: fmgsuite.com

Is your site mobile friendly? https://search.google.com/test/mobile...

Is your site secure? https://indigomarketingagency.com/wha...

Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen on your commute!

Transcription

Claire Akin

Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode. Today we’re going to talk about websites for financial advisors, and we have a special guest, Brandon Brown from FMG Suite. He is the Vice President of Product Design and Creative with FMG Suite. If you don’t know, I used to work at FMG Suite and he was my boss. He is just a fantastic person. He taught me a lot about management, about design and about life, and I’m really happy to have him here. Thanks for joining us.

Brandon Brown

 Thank you Claire. It’s good to talk to you again.

Claire Akin

One of the interesting things about Brandon is he has a deep background, not only in website design and creative, but also he probably knows more than anybody in our industry about website design for financial advisors. He headed up designing the C2C tool, which is the big marketing platform for Cetera Advisors. And he has been on the team with FMG Suite for many, many years designing their platform and has built out and supervised the builds of thousands of financial advisors websites.

Brandon Brown

 I think that’s exactly what my Linkedin profile says too. It says many, many years.

Claire Akin

Exactly. I wasn’t ready to do the math yet this morning, but that’s okay. I believe he can speak Spanish as well. He’s an all around fantastic resource for us. Today we just want to walk through some things about websites and tell advisors what they should consider when they’re choosing a site. What are the options available, what do they need to be thinking about? Because we know that most financial advisors are busy running their business, talking to clients, doing financial planning, and web design is not necessarily their expertise. I just want to welcome Brandon and let’s touch base about, what are you most excited about personally this year? What’s going on in your life?

Brandon Brown

Besides the day to day life of my kids, which is exciting, I have this pile of wood in my garage. It’s a bunch of Cherry and a bunch of a Purple Heart wood, which is like this purple wood, and it’s been begging to be turned into a desk for a few months. I’ve let it acclimate to the humidity and climate of my house. I’m turning it into a desk for my wife, and I’ve been really looking forward to diving into building that.

I’ve been kind of hand designing it up to this point. I’ve got note pads and note pads of little sketches. And a huge Pinterest board. As you know Claire, I do a ton of woodworking, so I’ve been kind of putting it on hold for a few months. I’ve been really itching to dive back into a big project and so that desk will be one. It’ll be pretty nice.

Claire Akin

That is so cool. That’s such a neat hobby, and I know you’re probably strapped for time. Brandon has two little girls, like I have two little girls. My husband, right when our first baby was born, bought a 1970 Chevy pickup truck and put it in our garage because he was going to restore it. I don’t think anything has changed on that truck in quite a few years.

Brandon Brown

 That’s a 2020 goal for him.

Claire Akin

Right. What are you really looking forward to and where are the biggest opportunities that you see for financial advisors from a marketing perspective at this time?

Brandon Brown

I know that we’re focusing on websites today, and I definitely think there’s a ton of opportunities for financial advisors this year when it comes to websites. I think there are definitely also some huge opportunities for advisors in the email marketing arena. A lot of advisors haven’t dove into that and it’s a great communication tool and a great way to kind of steadily connect with their folks, and ideally drive traffic back to their website through them. But just to simply communicate.

The other thing that we’ve been talking a lot about around here a lot, is really just making advisors great at holding events. We know a lot of advisors and maybe some of the folks listening are really great at events, but some aren’t and haven’t kind of cracked that nut just yet. That’s something that I think is really important for advisors to focus on. As far as new opportunities, it’s kind of shoring up some of those classics.

Of course if they don’t have an incredible website that reflects on them really well, that’s a major opportunity as well. Just to kind of connect some of those dots, Claire. Some of the stuff that we’re working on over here is expanding the event kits that we provide advisors with. So basically giving them a kit to create, host, and promote an event. A lot of that ties back to using your website as a tool to do that.

Claire Akin

I totally agree. I was on the phone yesterday with an advisor who was interested in doing social media marketing and Facebook ads and webinars. I said, okay, cool. Where’s your website? Let me check out your site. And he says “oh, well, I don’t have a website.” I said “well are you doing any email marketing?” “No.” I said “okay, we need to go back to the basics here. Back to admissions.” Because it’s important to lay the foundation before you get more aggressive and get more advanced.

Brandon Brown

Totally agree.

Claire Akin

Why are websites so important? We always talk about it. It’s kind of the hub of an advisor’s marketing system. Why are they the most important foundational piece?

Brandon Brown

At the core, I think the most important role that a website plays for an advisor and really kind of any service professional, is people are going to use it to research you. When they Google you, they’re going to find your website, they’re going to visit it. And within a few seconds they’re going to pass some amount of judgment on the quality of your company based on the way that that site looks. The way it communicates, the messages that it’s presenting.

I think a lot of times when an advisor thinks about a website, they’re thinking 10 pages deep in that website. They’re really filling out a website, which can be important. What can get left on the shelf is that first impression. I think that’s the biggest value of a website, is that first impression. It either confirms what somebody thinks about you, or it shifts their mind to think about you a little bit differently. In either case, a good design and a good message that looks modern, and most importantly really professional, wins the day in either of those scenarios.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. It’s the two second test. When you jump on someone’s home page in two seconds, can you tell who they are and what they do? For a lot of advisors out there, you can’t. You know, you go to their website and there’s some kind of abstract language or photography that doesn’t necessarily have any relevancy to what they do. It’s really important to put front and center in that top real estate on your homepage, who do you serve, how do you help them, what do you do? I’m always encouraging advisors to embrace that.

Brandon Brown

That’s what I love about the way that you work with advisors … you have an advantage that I don’t have. Which is your spending day after day with them working onthe front lines of the execution of that stuff. So it’s good to hear what you’re saying there. It confirms a lot of what we at FMG Suite are building as an architecture to make things like that possible. A website building tools to make that possible.

There was always that anxiety of we build these tools. What happens next? I’m glad the people that are working with you are working with you. You can lead a horse to water, but if we’re not drinking it, nothing’s really happening there. Kudos to you on that.

Claire Akin

Thank you. I recommend FMG Suite all the time to the advisors that come to me and ask, who should I work with? There’s only a few big players in the website arena for independent advisors. I would say FMG Suite is probably the leader. One of the huge advantages, if you don’t know, is that FMG Suite has compliance integrations with all of the large independent broker dealers. What this means is that instead of submitting content to compliance and then having to make the changes, then having to upload it to your website, they actually have a dashboard.

You submit your compliance information through your website, and as soon as you make a change to your site, it automatically is sent to compliance. When compliance approves it, then it’s automatically live on your site. It’s such a time saver for us, and it’s so easy for advisors. If you’re with one of the larger broker dealers, I definitely recommend looking into seeing if there’s a compliance integration. Because if there is, there’s no need to look any further from a perspective of where to go with your site. I think FMG is definitely the best option for you.

Brandon Brown

 You know I can’t argue with that.

Claire Akin

What’s new and exciting in the website world? A lot of advisors haven’t been looking into different sites. Maybe they updated their site five years ago and they know it’s time for an update now. What’s changed? What’s different?

Brandon Brown

I’ll speak broadly, just a little bit outside of FMG Suite. One of the things that’s a major trend, and it didn’t use to be the standard, is that websites are easier to edit now. Most, not all, but most website providers inside and outside the industry have made it pretty easy to edit your website. There’s definitely some that are easier than others. For us that’s a major focus.

That’s a big trend for all the advisors out there listening, should be a confidence builder regardless of how you’re getting your website built. It doesn’t mean that it’s not a lot of work, and it is nice to delegate that. Generally speaking, it used to be that websites are really sort of inaccessible to anybody other than a developer. It allows you to jump in and make quick changes and stuff like that.

There’s the big the elephant in the room, and it depends if this is new to you or not, but mobile and tablet friendliness continues to be a major issue. Itt’s pretty much ubiquitous across the industry that any website built is going to be compatible in those spaces. That’s going to be key. For any advisors out there who have a website that’s maybe more than five, or certainly more than 10 years old, it probably is not mobile friendly. A new website, is pretty much guaranteed to have that today.

Claire Akin

There’s a couple of reasons for that. The most obvious reason is that when someone comes to your site from a tablet, we know that more than 50% of traffic comes to advisor sites from mobile devices. We want to provide a good experience for people who are coming to your site to consume information. The other reason is that Google gives preferential treatment to people with mobile responsive sites. So if your site is not mobile responsive, you’re not coming up as high in search results as you could be.

Brandon Brown

Exactly. The other thing is there’s the whole SSL security expectations from websites. This is really driven by companies like Google insisting that websites meet certain security requirements in order to rank well, but also to avoid getting labeled at the top of the browser as a not secure website. That’s something that we swept through all of our websites, I think at this point it is over a year ago, to make sure that they all had SSL certificates. That’s something you’re going to want to watch out for and maybe look at your own website to make sure that it’s marked as secure. Which is a nice little lock up in the address bar in your web browser, next to your website URL.

Claire Akin

If you haven’t done so already, go to your website, check out the upper left corner. If you’re getting a warning that says this site is not secure, you definitely need to make a change. Not only is it actually a low level security risk in that hackers could intercept information on your site if it’s not secure. It’s an incredibly bad credibility indicator, when somebody comes to a financial site and it says it’s not secure. It’s definitely … a quick fix. It’s something easy to update, but you’re definitely going to want to make a change and make your site secure.

Brandon Brown

I’ll add one more thing that’s kind of new, if I could toss in there. I mentioned the event kits and that sort of thing. That’s something that we’re focusing on, building tools on people’s websites to promote just general events and little templates for like a wine and cheese party. A nice landing page for that, or a bourbon tasting party and things like that.

The other stuff that’s new in our neck of the woods is the ability to feature things like eBooks and quizzes, which can be really nice lead generation tools. To be able to, with a single click, turn those on people’s websites. That’s something in our neck of the woods of financial advisors that’s new in the industry that’s pretty cool. However, most people don’t have access to it unless they’re an FMG Suite customer.

Claire Akin

That’s awesome. I get questions all the time from advisors, such as, what should I look for when selecting website platform? And I always tell them, it’s important to, first of all, think about your compliance relationship like we talked about. Second of all, make sure that you’re working with somebody who is familiar with our industry. For example, it’s required that advisors have a broker check button on their website. If you went with a local web designer that isn’t familiar with our industry, they may not know that. It’s critically important to work with people that are familiar with the industry. That build sites for advisors, that are experienced doing so. Now walk us through, when advisors are selecting a website, what should they consider today?

Brandon Brown

I think what you touched on, that’s huge. All those things are really important. To elaborate on that, I would encourage people to look at their website and think about it like their home. You’ve purchased a home, and what type of homeowner do you want to be? Do you want to be a homeowner that’s hosting people at your house all the time? Do you want to be the most handsome house on the block? Are you just trying to keep up with the other houses on the block so that you aren’t the black sheep on the street? Are you just looking for a place where when folks stop by it’s accommodating and it’s easy, but it’s nothing more than that to you? These are all different types of homeowners to be. In my book, they’re all okay, they all work.

Claire Akin

That’s a great analogy. I would add, are you somebody that’s going to do all your home repairs? Or are you going to have a gardener and a maid? That’s important to consider. How easy do you need your platform to be to make updates? Who is going to be making those updates?

Brandon Brown

That’s an interesting way to ask the question, and then from there, I think it becomes fairly straightforward in weighing website vendors and that sort of thing. I would actually encourage an advisor to do that mental exercise before talking to somebody, particularly a salesperson who’s going to be very educational but also very focused on the value of their product. To sit and either work with consult with a marketing professional or just do that exercise themselves.

Say, for example, you know what? I actually just want a website where I can promote my events. Or, I want a website where people can research all about me. Or, I want a website that just has my phone number and address, because this is my first website. Once you know that you want that, it’s okay to change your mind down the road. I think it helps you enter a conversation of, is this person that I’m talking to offering something that scratches that itch for me? The type of homeowner that I want to be, or website owner.

That’s the way I would approach it. There’s also the standards of, how high quality is the person you’re partnering with to build your website? Do they have a good reputation? Are other people having a good experience with them, or we kind of out on the wild west, as far as website providers or website builders? I would push people to move towards the middle and rely on the experience of people like yourself or FMG Suite to pull some of this off. Or a similar vendor.

Claire Akin

I love that advice. A few tips that I give advisors as well when I’m talking to them, and I’m trying to guide them in the right direction for their website is, don’t overthink it too much. Perfectionism is the enemy of getting your website launched. You really need to update your site every two to three years. I just updated my site last year and we’re probably going to update it again next year. It’s a living, breathing entity that will never be exactly perfect and it will never be finished.

I wouldn’t spend more than 30 days on a website. Get it to the point that you’re happy with it, then you launch it, and you can always update it later. Because I see so many advisors get stuck on these website design projects that are never going to make them any money. The quality of your website, it needs to meet a certain quality level, but it’s never going to make the sale for you.

The other thing I would say is to recognize that your website is just a place for people to learn about you, and should leave them wanting more. You don’t want a website that’s 75 pages deep where people get overwhelmed or tired or exhausted and never set an appointment. You want it just to pique their interest, and give them an easy way to get in touch with you and start the conversation. Simplifying your site and not overthinking it, I think it’s a good way to go about that.

Brandon Brown

Let me share something with you that’s kind of adjacent to that. We actually just rebuilt our own company website, fmgsuite.com. It really couples when we redesign it and kind of decide what information was going to be on there. I find myself trying to remind folks, hey, everybody that works with our company, at some point talks to a marketing specialist here. We don’t have to over-educate folks. This website is in the business of doing some light education, and really it’s not selling websites or marketing tools, it’s selling conversations with a marketing specialist. I think that that’s true for a financial advisor’s website.

Claire Akin

Next,  I want to switch to a harder question for you, Brandon. One of the concerns I get when I recommend FMG Suite to advisors who I think it would be a good fit for, is they say FMG Suite is one of the leaders right now, they have so many advisors on their platform. I don’t want a site like every other advisor. I don’t want a cookie cutter site. And what I say to them is – and you may have different answers – you want to think about the way that an average consumer experiences your website. You may be going to all the top financial advisor websites and comparing them, but an average consumer, or an average person that needs a financial advisor, is probably not going to visit more than one or two websites of advisors in their area.

Also, because there’s so many different themes with FMG Suite, the chances of another advisor in your area having the exact same website theme as you, is almost nonexistent. So think of it from the consumer’s perspective. If they go to a website that looks credible, trustworthy, looks professional, those are the nails that we need to hit. We don’t need to make your website look different from every other financial advisor on the planet or reinvent the wheel. I just want to get your thoughts on that question or that concern.

Brandon Brown

When we rolled into the industry eight years ago, we obviously had zero websites out there. At this point, we are number one in market share. At the same time, we are also number one in customer satisfaction. This is an independent study from Morningstar. Part of that growing from startup to front runner, has been trying to chase that dragon that you’re describing. Because there is the potential of a real problem there of if we weren’t on the ball about it, we could really set people up to have that experience. Fortunately chasing that dragon from day one has been a big priority for us. We’re ask ourselves, how do we make sure that the advisors have different looking websites, different experiences, so that we never put them in that pickle?

We do not get the feedback of I saw so-and-so’s website, or a customer of mine saw my website and they saw another, and then they knew that I was using a website provider. That’s just not something that really happens because of the exposure that you’re talking about. As much as we are the number one in market share, as true as that is, there are so many financial advisors out there. I would love to say that we were so successful that we could really create that problem.

There are so many types of advisors…the captive advisors out there at wirehouses and the independents out there, it’s a huge market. So it really just doesn’t happen in practice. We chase that with new designs, and have people on staff whose job is to make iterations every time they build a new website with that in mind.

Claire Akin

Just to give the advisors out there some idea of the customization that takes place, is first of all, you choose one of these different themes. There’s dozens of different themes that you could choose from. From there, we’re going to customize the site to your logo and your colors, then we’re going to choose photography for you. Then we’re going to choose to put your niche front and center. There’s almost no chance that a consumer could recognize your site as similar to another advisor site, once it’s polished and it’s finished and it’s customized for you.

If that’s a concern of yours, I recommend just taking a look at some of the sample sites out there on fmgsuite.com. I love all of the new themes that you guys have come out with. If you are an FMG Suite customer who has built their site years ago, I recommend taking a look at some of the newer themes. Because they make it really easy to upgrade, and to just kind of update the look and feel of your site. What are some of the biggest mistakes you’re seeing advisors making when it comes to their websites?

Brandon Brown

I love the point that you brought up earlier about aiming for perfection. I understand. We work with so many advisors who are coming in saying “it’s time to rebuild my website.” This is a big moment, so they want to get everything right. They want to rewrite every single page deep in the website, because I think in their mind they’re thinking, I’m not going to come back to this. I want to get this done, and then I want to come back in three years and revisit this. They may end up spending something like 60 days instead of your recommendation of 30.

They’re just stringing it along. The point that I brought up earlier about websites being easy to edit, and people like yourself or our service team members are available to help them iterate on the site a little bit at a time. Just getting a new website and a new home page out there, is only 25% of the work, but it’s 80% of the value.

If I could be heard in one aspect on this podcast, it would be that … don’t think you have to do it all at once. There’s a lot of wisdom in getting something out there and then iterating on it.

Claire Akin

I think that’s great advice. I would love to see if there’s data and maybe I’ll dig it up for a blog post on my own of what percentage of traffic goes to each page on an advisor site? Because I would think, as you said, the kind of the principle of 80% of your traffic is going to come to your homepage. Maybe a little bit of traffic is going to go to the page that describes you or your team, and then maybe there’s some straggler traffic on some of the other pages. That’s really probably where you should focus your effort and your time, is on the top most visited pages.

Brandon Brown

Agreed.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast, Brandon. It was great to speak with you. I hope the advisors listening got a lot of value, and if you have any questions, you can contact FMG Suite. You can reach out with the show notes below. Good luck with building your desk. I think that’s going to be a great project. I can’t wait to see pictures.

Brandon Brown

Thank you very much, Claire.

Claire Akin

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.

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 The Best Website Platforms For Financial Advisors in 2019 appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

Why Is Marketing So Hard For Financial Advisors? (Video)

I talk to financial advisors on the phone every day who are frustrated with their marketing or feel bad because they think they’re the only financial advisor not raking in new clients using Google or Facebook ads. The reality is that marketing for financial advisors is hard! Watch this video to learn why.

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The post Why Is Marketing So Hard For Financial Advisors? (Video) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

Podcast: What Makes Your Firm Different? With Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing (Listen Now)

Join us with Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing to unlock what makes your firm truly different. In order to get referrals and new clients today, advisory firms need to stand out from the crowd. But that’s not always easy. In this episode of financial advisor marketing podcast, Maribeth will give her exclusive tips to:

Figure out what truly makes your firm different
How to communicate to stand out from the crowd
Focusing on what clients truly care about
Using language that actually resonates with prospects
How to use video and social media to capture attention

Red Zone Marketing: https://www.redzonemarketing.com/

The Advisor Thought Leader Summit: https://www.advisorthoughtleadersummi...

Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen on your commute!

Check out the first four episodes of our financial advisor marketing podcast:

1: Introducing The Marketing Podcast for Financial Advisors

2: The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors

3: How to Stand Out From the Crowd with Marie Swift of Impact Communications

4: How to Get More Referrals with Bill Cates, The Referral Coach

Transcription

Claire Akin

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Marketing Podcast for Financial Advisors. Today I’m really excited to have one of my mentors, Maribeth Kuzmes with Red Zone Marketing on the program. I’m so excited to welcome Maribeth to the show because when I was a financial advisor about 10 years ago, I saw Maribeth speak at an LPL conference in San Diego. And I was so blown away by her branding and her marketing that I copied it, and I modeled my firm after hers. She is Red Zone Marketing and when she speaks at advisor conferences, she wears red and she’s so memorable. She talks about football analogy. She’s a Packers fan and she was wearing a bright red dress, and I completely remember that presentation. I think that’s so unique and so cool because how many conferences do we go to as advisors, and how many breakout sessions do we see and how many do we actually remember the presenter? That’s probably the only one in years of conferences I actually remember, and I created my firm Indigo Marketing. I always wear blue. There’s blue everywhere on my website and I hope that it’s memorable in the same vein. Maribeth, welcome to the program today. Thank you so much for being here.

Maribeth Kuzmeski

 Thank you for having me. I’m very excited.

Claire Akin

What Maribeth does so great, from a branding perspective, is help advisors to do for themselves. She works with large RIAs and advisory firms, and she helps them to be memorable and to stand out from the crowd because there is so much noise out there. To an average consumer or investor, all financial firms look alike, so it’s so critical to position yourself as something different so that people can refer you, because we know you know most of your new clients are going to come to you through referrals. That’s the number one way that people choose a financial advisor. If people can’t remember who you are or what your name is or what you do, how are they going to refer you when they come across someone that needs your help? So that’s really what Maribeth helps advisors do. She has a PhD in business. She has written seven books, including the bestseller “The Connectors.” She’s an international keynote speaker. You’ve probably seen her speak at conferences and she helps advisors all over the country to position themselves, communicate what makes them different and to stand out from the crowd. Maribeth –  I just wanted to welcome you and ask personally what are you excited about this year? What’s going on in your life?

Maribeth Kuzmeski

Well, thank you very much by the way, and what’s going on in my life? There are so many things going on in my life. I have started teaching at a university and it’s a sideline thing. It doesn’t really take away from anything that I’m doing, but it’s super exciting. I teach at Columbia University in the summer and then I teach at Oklahoma State University, which is where I got my PhD because they have a unique executive PhD program. They asked me to come and teach and pilot this whole new class on the principles of marketing, and it has been so exciting putting all of this stuff together. I’m thrilled because when we work with financial advisors it’s awesome and it’s very fulfilling in many, many ways. But to then be able to take what I’ve learned in marketing over my entire career and share it with young students, they have a different perspective on everything. It’s really awesome and I absolutely love it and I feel like we’re going to bring a lot of new, amazing marketing people into the world. So that’s what’s exciting to me.

Claire Akin

Congratulations. That’s awesome. Just talking about marketing, I know you and I are both so passionate about marketing and we both help advisors with their marketing, and we also have other ventures where we are just immersed in this marketing world. Tell me a little bit about where you see the biggest opportunities for financial advisors from a marketing perspective.

Maribeth Kuzmeski

I think that what has happened over, I don’t know, maybe the course of the past five years, compliance has changed a little bit and I’m not sure that the advisors necessarily have lock-in step changed as well as compliance has. Today it’s a lot easier to use social media even though advisors think it’s impossible. It’s not impossible. You know that Claire, you’ve built your business upon doing great things for advisors in social media. I think that lots of compliance has changed and it’s giving us the opportunity to really stand outside. I think we were so afraid of compliance before that we would just be very black and white or as I say, a gray suit against a gray wall and nobody could see it. They couldn’t find you when they really needed you, but that’s how we kept everything in line.

I think today, without going outside of compliance’s boundaries, we can actually find ways to stand out and be memorable. Just like you were talking about my brand and your brand, the idea is to be memorable because that’s what people are going to take away when they’re thinking about, “Boy, we really need a financial advisor. Ah, I did meet that one person that one time.” It stuck in their mind. And that is exactly what we need to do because a lot of things in marketing are not necessarily sending out direct mail and hoping that you’re going to find some new clients. It still is very referral-based so a lot of the marketing tools and strategies we use are to build upon referrals. I think it’s a better opportunity than it’s ever been before because of the slight loosening of compliance.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. I totally agree with that. It’s so funny because four years ago we could only work with some of the larger independent RIA firms, or the larger independent broker dealers. But now I’m even working with clients from big wire houses. Places like New York Life – where social media was a four letter word – and now they’re able to do social media marketing. They’re able to do content marketing, they’re on Facebook, they’re on LinkedIn, they’re on Twitter. Compliance has really gotten wise to the developments on social media. They’ve realized that it’s not dangerous, it’s easy to archive, it’s easy to supervise. We don’t need to be afraid of it anymore. I think that’s a great development that I’m excited about as well. Like you said, it’s a referral game and it’s not only referrals, but it’s also many, many touches between when somebody becomes aware of your firm, and when they actually call you to schedule an appointment. They’re not going to just see your website one time and call you up and make an appointment. They have to be exposed to your firm probably seven, eight, 10 times before they actually decide to make an appointment.

We’ve always known that, but what social media does differently is it allows you to stay in front of them in a cost effective, easy manner so that you can continue to build your relationship, and nurture those prospects and push them along the pipeline to the point that they’re ready to schedule an appointment. Which is awesome. One of the things I get a lot of questions from advisors about is how to really be different. There are so many, there’s about 300,000 advisors in the United States and a lot of them are the same. How do you help advisors to stand out from the crowd and to truly be different?

Maribeth Kuzmeski

The first thing that we have to do is figure out what really is different about your firm, because a lot of advisors will say, “Well, we provide really great service and that’s what’s different about us.” That might actually be very true, but it’s not necessarily something that is going to really help you stand out. The reason for that is, is because everybody’s saying the same thing, and if everyone saying the same thing, it really doesn’t allow you to stand out. So what we do is we focus on figuring out what is it about what you’re doing that really is different. It might be the people in the firm, or it might be the culture of the firm. We have a firm that we work with and they’re the smartest people that I’ve ever met, and how do you say that? “Well, we’re really smart and we like to help people.”

The whole goal is to find that uniqueness, and be able to really expose it and exploit it. I mean that in a really positive way because if people don’t know how great you are, how possibly can they make that decision to come in and see you, and we usually start with what that core is, what’s your core messaging? What’s your differentiator? Then we work it into the website next. Your website shouldn’t say we work with individuals, and families, and businesses helping them with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, because that just is a gray suit against a gray, “Well, everybody says that.” What you need to say is what really differentiates. We’d like to use words that clients actually use. We take the, I don’t know if you remember the old Verizon commercial and there was the guy who’s now on the sprint commercials, but he used to pop up out of manholes, and in the middle of the desert, and in all these crazy places, in the middle of the city and he would say on his phone, “Can you hear me now?” He was testing the Verizon network.

He was saying, “Can you hear me now?” Because that’s what we were all saying. We were all saying, “Oh my gosh, this phone doesn’t work. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” When we saw the commercial on TV, we go, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly me. I need to go to Verizon because I need someone to be able to hear me when I’m actually using my phone.” So we take two different tacts. The first is we need to use words that your clients are actually using. Clients do not talk about their “Assets.” They talk about their money and their savings, and they talk about things that are way different. We don’t talk about, “Well I’m really afraid I’m going to outlive my assets.” Nobody talks like that in the real world, so the key is how do we use the words that our clients are using, and our prospects are using, so when they come and find something that we’ve put out there on website or social, or someplace, an article we’ve written, they go, “Oh my gosh, that’s me.”

Part of it is figuring out what the want is and figuring out what that is that is going to actually connect with them. For instance, with business owners. Business owners don’t want 401ks. They need them, they don’t want them. If we go, “Well, we do 401ks for business owners.” It’s doldrums because they don’t actually want that. No, they need it and we can always give it to them later, but in order for good marketing to work, it’s got to be focused on the what. Every business owner wants revenue today and to eventually sell or transition that business in the future, so if you have any information on those two things, that’s really great and a lot of advisors help business owners get to that point where they’re ready to sell their business. And business succession planning for business owners, and valuation, and getting all of that ready and then being able to help them once they sell that $25 million business.

Instead of going in with the need, go in with the want. We’re actually giving them what they go, “Oh my gosh, that’s exactly what I want.” That’s what marketing is supposed to do. People don’t want financial plans. They want whatever it’s going to do for them, and the second thing that we do to really help to become memorable is not just using the words that our clients use, but using completely different words that typically financial advisors don’t use. When they get to your website they go, “Wait, this is different. Wait a minute.” You’re either going to get them because you’re speaking their language, or you’re going to get them because you’re stopping them in their tracks. There’s a financial advisor website that says, “Financial services is meticulous and beautiful.” And he’s like, “Are you kidding me? That is not how people typically talk about financial services.” Being able to either describe something that is totally different using different words, not regular financial services, comprehensive financial planning words, or you’ve got to reach them exactly where there are with the want. Those are the two things that we really work on going deep, and sometimes we do both and sometimes it’s just one with a firm.

Claire Akin

I love that. That is so great. One of the things that we do for our advisor clients is we run client surveys for them each year. This is so powerful because it gives us the words of their clients. Each year we do a survey that says, “How happy are you? What’s your favorite part about working with our firm? Why did you choose us instead of a competitor?” The answer to that question is key for their marketing. Why have you referred business to us or why haven’t you? So the answers to these questions are beautifully put in the client’s own words of why they work with an advisor. Do you know what I never hear as a response to those questions? Is that it is because the return on assets is higher than the advisor down the street or the fees are lower. Yet there’s so many advisors out there saying, “We have better investments.” Or, “We have lower fees.” Or, “We have better service.” Or, “We have a better way to plan your retirement income.” Clients just don’t care about that. What they care about is that they were referred by a trusted friend, or that the advisors seem to understand their unique circumstances or some other reason that has to do with them, not about their money, not about you, not about how your processes. That’s what we really want to focus on from a marketing perspective.

I think that’s so great that you help advisors to really pinpoint what makes them different then doesn’t have to be that they work with divorcees, or employees at a certain company. It could be who they serve and how they do it. I work with one advisor out of Omaha where they have fresh baked cookies in their lobby every single day, and they wear business casual kind of farmer dress, because that’s what their clients wear. Their clients wear button up shirts and jeans so that’s how they dress. They have warm cookies waiting in the lobby, which is what they do differently. I also worked with a firm that on our website, front and center, I was so proud of them because it said, “We work with nice people who saved money well.” That’s who they love to work with and God bless them. They identified that they want to work with nice, positive people that are good savers and that could be your niche. If that’s what you love to do and that’s who you love to serve, that could be the perfect niche for you. So it doesn’t need to be dramatic, it doesn’t need to be alienating people who don’t fit into that group. It just needs to be personal to you and it needs to be something that you are passionate about.

Maribeth Kuzmeski

Right. The other thing is that it seems like, and clients don’t always say it like this when they’re asked the question, ‘Why did you choose this advisor over this other advisor?” is “I just liked them.” They don’t typically say that, but we know that that’s such a big reason … “I just liked them.” I consider this a really big, huge factor because if you look at an advisor’s LinkedIn profile or their website they’re talking about how much money they manage, how many awards they won, how many years they’ve been in the business, and all of these kinds of things that is exactly what we expected. But there’s a little secret that the clients know that this person is super funny, or they’re likable, or they’re so friendly, or I go in there when I don’t even have an appointment to have a cup of coffee with them because I just loved them and the way that they’ve done all these meaningful things in my life. Yet none of that comes through in their marketing.

One of the ways that we can do that and truly be memorable and sometimes the only thing that differentiates us is our own personal story. My story is the only thing that differentiates me from someone else who does what I do, because it’s not all that much incredibly different. The difference is, is my story, and how I got here and how I’m going to move forward, and my “why,” right? The Simon Sinek, “What’s My Why?” And when we can pull that out of advisors all of a sudden you’re tipping your prospects off to something your clients already know. That, “Wow, you’re really likable and you’re different than the other advisors that I see online, or that I have met in the past.” Or whatever and those are the kinds of things that we have to get out there.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. I totally agree. My Dad is one of these advisors that struggled finding his niche and his specialty, and what made him different. What really makes him different is that he cares about his clients so much that he actually is a caretaker at heart and he goes to his client’s houses, and meets with them and helps them move furniture. He takes them to pick out their new cars. He just recently was taking a little old lady to the DMV. Yet it’s hard to communicate that through your marketing, right? He started with his sales and his referral process having his referral process be such that he took his existing clients out to breakfast, coffee, or lunch to meet their friends or somebody who they wanted to refer because he needed that transfer of trust. When people said, “Oh, he does a great job with our investments.” That’s not compelling to the prospect.

When they sit down with him for breakfast and the clients say, “Tom helped me to pick out my new car.” Or, “When my husband died, Tom helped plan the funeral.” Then people start to get it. “Oh wow, this advisor’s more than an advisor. This is what makes him different.” And that’s how my dad now gets his new clients. Is through that transfer of trust and that’s the way that he really imparts on his prospects what makes him truly different. Whatever it is for you, it’s important to find that out and build that into your sales process and your marketing process. Thank you for that insight. That is super helpful for advisors. I want to ask you kind of the big question out there, the elephant in the room, how can advisors use marketing today to get more clients?

Maribeth Kuzmeski

As we were just talking about a lot of new business comes from referrals. Now it’s not the same way as it used to be, where somebody says, “Hey, you need to go see my advisor.” And they would just walk in and see you. That’s just not how it works anymore. How it works is somebody says, “Hey, here’s some information about my advisor.” They talk about all the great things his advisor has done, and the first thing they’re going to do is Google search you. Your reputation is really important, but your online reputation actually supersedes your regular reputation, because they’re going to go online and see what they see and they’re checking you out. By the way, they’re not checking you out to figure out all the reasons that they should go in and see you. They’re trying to find any reason not to.

I say that with all due respect because we know, Claire, you and I know all the value that the advisors bring, but to change financial advisors sometimes, especially when you have significant assets is a real pain, and it’s painful on a lot of different levels. Let’s say you’ve never even seen a financial advisor before. Well, that’s also painful. Now I have got to pull these things together. I’m going to tell this advisor all the financial mistakes I’ve ever made in my life because I don’t care how wealthy you are, you’ve made a lot of mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes and now you’ve got to go share this with someone new, and you go into maybe a planning process, and you’ve got to pull all these statements out and talk about all these things.

You are kind of scared because maybe you don’t have enough money and people don’t actually want, desperately want to do it. If they’re in some kind of a life transition, they have to do it. Otherwise, it’s not like they’re just looking for a reason that they can put it off, and we cannot give them the reason to put it off when they get to our website or some online presence, your LinkedIn profile or whatever it is, those are the two most likely places. Then we need to get them to want to find out more. Like you said, it’s going to take several touches, but so they go to the website, they go, “Oh, okay, well maybe I should continue looking around here.”

Next, maybe they sign up through email newsletter, or maybe they just check you out online on social or whatever it is and then they decide to reach out to you. So that business is still coming from referrals, but it is a much longer path and that prospecting cycle is much longer. And in order to get new clients you’ve got to just hit him over the head with, “This is the right place. I can’t say no to this.” How do you get to that point? It’s not by just spending five minutes putting together your website messaging and your social media presence. You’ve got to spend some time thinking about all the things that you and I have just been talking about, Claire.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. Yeah, I love that. And one of the cool things that advisors I think sometimes don’t realize is that technology and social media marketing make it really easy to do that today. For example, for my firm, if you go to my website at indigomarketingagency.com you browse around, maybe you read an article, maybe you saw a post on there, maybe you get my emails. Then when you go to Facebook, there’s a pixel that has tracked your behavior on my website. Then when you’re on Facebook, you see an ad to watch my flagship Webinar, The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors. So you’ve already self-selected as somebody who may be interested in my services. I don’t have to do that. I know that you’re interested in my services because you’ve already visited my site, and then this ad will pop up on your Facebook feed to re-target you, and it’s just pennies on the dollar of what you would pay for a traditional Facebook ad.

It just shows my Webinar to people who may be interested in it. Once they watch my webinar and they spend 30 minutes with me, then they’re on my email list. They get my follow-up emails, they get my offers, they get my weekly blog posts, they get my monthly webinars. The average time between somebody first visiting my website and becoming a client is about one year, but that is the process that is common for advisors too. The average time between somebody becoming aware of your firm or first hearing about you, and actually transferring assets is going to be a year or more. It’s important to be nurturing these relationships, and social media makes it really easy to do that. To close out and I’ll let you impart your recommendations for these advisors listening. Can I just ask you, what is the one recommendation you would give to advisors listening about how to stand out from the crowd with their marketing, and how to grow their businesses into the future?

Maribeth Kuzmeski

I would say that your goal should be to try to be different, not to try to blend in. The thought is that “Well, I’ve got to do things like everybody else does. I’m going to go to X advisor number one in my firm, and I’m going to see what he’s doing or she’s doing and I’m just going to do the same thing.” That is the opposite. The other thing that I’ll say is that it’s trying to stand out and be different. Not trying to be the same by the use of our words. Words become the biggest mistake that we make in marketing. We do not message ourselves properly to the exact person that we really want to do business with, because we’re not talking their language, or we’re not talking about what they want, or we’re just not simply talking to them.

The words that we use are the reason for success in everything that we do in marketing, including your seminars, your website, your social media, your prospecting meetings, your phone calls, your webinars that you might do, or some advisors do podcasts and things like that. It’s the words that you’re using that are either attracting or repelling people, and if we want to really stand out and be different we’ve got to get better at our work. I would suggest that is the one thing. And by the way, that is so in our control. You don’t need to hire somebody to have better words. You need to think about it and really spend some time thinking about it. Now, of course you could hire somebody like Claire or myself to be able to do that, but ultimately you can do it yourself by just thinking through, “Am using the best words? Is my online reputation good?” It doesn’t take an MBA in marketing to be able to figure out how to do that better. It just takes some time and a little bit of focus.

Claire Akin

Absolutely. I love that and one of the recommendations I give advisors who are struggling with their value proposition or their sales process is try out some cold calling. Remember the old days when all advisors out there did cold calling. I started out, my first job out of college was with Northwestern Mutual. They sat me in a cubicle and they said, “Okay, call all your friends, all your family, all your distant relatives and try to sell them life insurance.” That’s what I did, and that’s what I do every week with advisors is I’m on the phone 10 hours a week talking to advisors. That is how I refined my sales process because when you’re on the phone was a potential client, you can hear when things click for them. You get the same questions over and over. So you realize the answer to that question needs to be built into your sales process.

You can hear when they start to trust you, you can hear when they start to think that you understand them. They start to give you that credibility. They start to loosen up a little. So cold calling or calling prospects on your old prospect list, and listen to the way that they respond to your words can really help the way that you present your firm, and your sales process, and your marketing language. That’s just one recommendation that I would give. Maribeth, I know you have a retreat coming up with Marie Swift who’s also a guest on this season’s podcast. It is The Advisor Thought Leader Summit. It’s in Kansas City. I want to invite all advisors out there to attend the event. It’s going to be an amazing time to learn about marketing, PR, to actually shoot video for your website. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that so the advisors listening can check it out?

Maribeth Kuzmeski

Absolutely. Marie Swift and I did this last year in Chicago and it was met with such excitement, and we really wanted to create an experience and we think we did with the feedback that we got from the first one. So we decided to do another one. Not in Chicago, but in Kansas City. It’s really about how to become a thought leader. That could be, maybe it’s through your use of video, maybe it’s through your use of the media. It takes some time to figure out, “Okay, what is my message and how am I going to present this to the world?” Today if you can’t use video to present things, you’re probably missing out on presenting things to the world. Advisors, because they hadn’t been able to use video for so long now can use it much more reliably than they could before.

Compliance departments are more used for dealing with video and how you would use it. It is one of the greatest tools. It’s like a seminar, somebody shows up at a seminar and they’re sitting in the back of the room because they wanted the rubber chicken, and then they realized, “Hey, this person’s pretty smart up there. Maybe I should go in and see.” It’s part of the process of them sitting in the back of the room and watching this person live talking, and sharing ideas and you go, “I like them. I think I want to come in and meet with them.” That’s what happens and that’s how seminars work is because you’re converting somebody live. That same idea can be done using video, but the problem is we don’t know how to use video very well so we have best practices. We have a woman who was coming in from PBS who is an amazing person in front of the camera, and shares best practices with us.

I’ll talk about messaging and messaging strategies for creating the best videos and the best media interviews. Marie Swift will talk about those kinds of things too.Then we do an actual video recording of each attendee. You’ll do an actual interview and we don’t do it in front of the whole group. We have a side place where we’ve learned a lot about how to do this stuff then we’d go and recreate it and we send it back to you. You put it through compliance and you can put it up on your website. It’s absolutely amazing because sometimes, I mean it might cost thousands of dollars to get a video recorded. We’re doing this for less than a thousand dollars. It’s a super great deal. It’s an amazing experience and we’ve got so many great videos and testimonials from the last time around. As I said before, that’s why we decided to do it again. So that’s what we’re doing and it’s amazing The Advisor Thought Leader Summit. advisorthoughtleadersummit.com and it is August 12th and 13th in Kansas City.

Claire Akin

Awesome.  I really recommend everyone check that out. Advisorthoughtleadersummit.com. If you want to learn more about Maribeth and Red Zone Marketing, go to redzonemarketing.com. Maribeth, I just want to thank you for being a part of the program and for sharing your knowledge with the advisors out there.

Maribeth Kuzmeski

 Thank you so much, Claire.

Claire Akin

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.

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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How To Communicate With Your Clients During Market Volatility

The U.S. stock markets had the worst day of the year on Monday, reacting to news of escalating trade issues with China and fears of an economic slowdown. After the Dow closed down 767 points, investors are understandably nervous. But as a financial advisor, how should you communicate with your clients about market volatility? And can you use the events to find opportunities to get new clients?

Never let a good crisis go to waste—or in this case, a dip in the stock market. Market volatility is a powerful marketing opportunity for two reasons. First, your campaign about volatility is likely to get twice as many views and shares as your other campaigns, as we can see in this example from back in 2016. Second, prospects have unprecedented urgency to act during an uncomfortable market dip.

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As a financial advisor, you know that market declines are a normal part of investing. But your clients are likely nervous about the recent market volatility and may want to hear from you. It’s your job to keep them calm and informed during volatility. But what’s the best way to communicate about the recent market events? And can you take advantage of the volatility as a marketing opportunity?

Why You Should Communicate During Volatility

Proactive communication is good client service. Your clients hire you to not only help plan for their financial future, but to educate them in good times and in bad. They are eager to hear from you to get an explanation of what’s going on and receive some guidance on what they should (or shouldn’t) do about it.

It’s your job to keep clients from selling when the market is down. We all know that behavior is an important component to long-term investment success, and when clients are feeling the urge to sell when the market is low, it’s your place to remind them of their long-term plan.

Staying in touch results in fewer phone calls and panicked clients. If you’re able to act quickly, clients are more likely to trust that you’re prepared for the volatility and they’ll feel they’re in good hands. This results in less time spent educating and calming individual skittish clients.

What You Should Say About Market Volatility

I think that most advisors wait too long to communicate during market swings because they know that each event is different and they’re waiting to fill in the specifics. And we know that the markets may correct after a big decline. But no matter the specific situation, your key messaging will be the same. You’ll want to communicate the following key points to clients:

This is expected. Explain that you have been anticipating volatility and that it’s a normal and healthy part of market cycles. Point to historical data that shows the frequency of similar events.

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Their portfolio is not down as much as the market. Remind your clients that while the S&P 500 may be down X% percent, their accounts are not invested in the index and have therefore declined less than the market. Urge them to call you if they have questions about their individual accounts.

Now is not the time to sell. Explain that no one can consistently predict the right time to get in or out of the market. It’s human nature to lose patience and sell at or near the bottom of a downturn. Even if you were able to get out early in a decline, you’d still have to guess when to get back into the market, and you’d likely guess wrong.

They have not realized any losses yet. It’s normal to feel uncomfortable when the market is down, especially if you’re approaching retirement. However, each time in history that the market has gone down, it has come back up again. Average downturns of 10% are likely to return to normal within about 115 days, based on historical data.

Stay focused on the long term. Remind clients that you’ve built their financial plan and investment strategy for the long term, with short-term volatility in mind. While a correction can be upsetting, there’s no reason to deviate from their long-term financial plan.

Call if they have questions. Encourage clients to get in touch if they are feeling nervous or want to review their accounts.

How to Use Volatility to Get New Clients

Now that you’ve proactively communicated with your existing clients, it’s time to use the market downturn as an opportunity. Downturns bring precious urgency that we don’t find at any other time. Prospects who have put off financial planning for most of their lives are not easily pushed into action when times are good. But when times are bad, things get very uncomfortable and they’re more willing to talk. Here’s how to go after referrals when times are bad:

Include a deal for your clients’ friends and family. Offer to provide a complimentary second opinion and recommendations to minimize losses.

Provide an easy action to take. Share a link to schedule a 15-minute investment review by phone. This way, even if prospects read your email after hours, they can take action when they’re feeling peak urgency and sleep better that night.

Remind clients that you are never too busy to help the people they care about. Reiterate that if they have friends, family, or coworkers who are nervous about the market volatility, you are here to help. Encourage them to forward your market update email to their network.

Bring up outside accounts. Make a point to mention to clients that while the accounts you manage are prepared for this correction, now is a good time to review old 401(k)s and other assets you do not currently manage to assess risk.

Get Your Free Customizable Template

If you need help creating a marketing campaign, download our free template here. Be sure to get it approved by compliance before sending.

About Claire

Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency, a marketing firm serving top independent financial advisors. 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. It’s her goal to help specialist advisors target their ideal prospects with content marketing.

The post How To Communicate With Your Clients During Market Volatility appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.

Podcast: How to Get More Referrals With Bill Cates, The Referral Coach (Listen Now)

Join us with Bill Cates, referral coach to top financial advisors, best-selling author, and Hall of Fame keynote speaker to discuss how to get more referrals without feeling uncomfortable. Bill will walk us through everything you need to know to acquire more clients you love working with, including:

1. Get more referrals without begging or pushing.

2. Turn your referrals into personal introductions.

3. Set more appointments that stick.

4. Convert prospects into clients at a higher rate.

5. Bill’s proven referral advantage system

Free Report: multiplyyourbestclients.com

Bill’s Coaching: referralcoach.com

Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen on your commute!

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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This Month’s Webinar: What We Do & How We Help (Watch Now)

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Join us for an exclusive webinar on how we help top independent financial advisors get more clients and grow their AUM.

We’ll review the truth about marketing for financial advisors and exactly what’s included in our total marketing package.

1. The truth about marketing for financial advisors

2. What works and what’s a waste of money

3. The only two ways advisors really get new clients

4. What’s included in our Total Marketing Package

5. How much money to budget for your marketing

6. How many new leads to expect

Be sure to stick around until the end to save $500 on your marketing and get your free custom marketing calendar.

The post This Month’s Webinar: What We Do & How We Help (Watch Now) appeared first on Indigo Marketing Agency.