You're listening to Financial Advisor Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal. James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:32.0]
James: Welcome to the financial advisor marketing podcast. I've got another fantastic treat for you this week because I'm bringing on Samantha Russell. If you don't know who she is, she's the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at twentyoverten and if you don't know what twentyoverten is, you should, especially if you're listening to this podcast as a financial advisor because it's a company that designs websites specifically for advisors and they've got some other cool stuff that recently came out, which I'm sure she's going to share with us, and I've found that financial advisors really need this specialized help and twentyoverten it's a great company that can help them with their websites, among other things and help them stand out. I've watched this company grow over the years and they never cease to amaze me. When I found out that Samantha was one of the main players behind that growth, I knew I had to bring her on the show, so thank you so much for being here. [01:22.7]
Samantha: Thank you so much for having me and for that fantastic introduction.
James: I try to try my best with the intros. As you know, I, I really shouldn't do this the day of because it's puts a lot of pressure on people and just too short of a notice. But I basically announced online, hey, you're going to be on the show. Any questions? And we got two.
Samantha: Two! That’s better than none.
James: So I will… exactly. That's my philosophy and I'm going to read it and I'm going to give my answer and then hopefully you can share your answer as well and we can basically see what's going on?
Question number one is a long one, but it's basically how to get appointments set on the calendar. That's really broad. We don't want to chase, we want people who truly want the help and want to book an appointment with us. We know we can help them tremendously, but unfortunately they don't realize that. And you need a message and content to inspire them to book the appointment. The idea is we, we basically hear that all produce content over a 12 months or a year and you'll see results. But what can the person do in the short term? [02:24.2]
And my answer was that I, I personally don't try to convince or persuade or cajole anyone, whatever. I put the value out there. You can't put the blame on the client for not seeing the value in what you offer. You have to be the one to bring the heat to the table every single time. But if you do, assuming you do and you have great content and you really pushing it out there and it doesn't even have to be long term, assuming you do all that and they don't see the value in working with you, then you've got to move on and find someone who is. And I said other than that, an entertainment based email auto responder for specifically niche is legitimately the best thing I'm seeing right now. But I really want to hear what Samantha has to say about this. What can advisors do in the short term to kind of generate appointments online essentially? [03:10.3]
Samantha: Yeah, so it's a great question. I think the root of what he, when I read the question, the root of what he's getting at is that he wants quicker results and not having to wait to drip on people over time to prove, to prove that value. And I think, you know, to your point, number one, most of the stuff does take time because the day that someone finds you is often not the day that they have this need or they identify that they have a problem that they need solved. So like when we first become aware of a brand, often it's in the background, it's in our head, but we're not necessarily paying that much attention to it because it's not the day we need to use that product or service. So the awareness part happens and it can take a little bit of time for the problem to arise that will propel someone to actually make contact and you just have to be okay with that. You know, that's just part of the process. The whole idea of inbound marketing is really just that. It's flipping the script so that instead of being outbound instead of okay, hitting people over the head with your message, hoping that they'll pay attention and book a meeting with you, you're letting them come to you based upon value that you're providing and they're having a problem and they see you as the expert that will solve it. [04:26.9]
And so part of that is just being comfortable with the fact that it's going to be on their time table and not yours. Now of course when we say it's going to take time, how can you speed that up? Number one is just casting a wider net. So if you, you know, are posting on LinkedIn but you only have 200 followers, there's not that many people that are going to see that to begin with. So you need to be building an audience for your messaging and you can do that by making sure that you connect with every single client and invite them to connect with you. And then every day taking time to comment on your first degree connections, posts or other people in the industry that you follow or tagging or using hashtags on your posts. So you know, casting a wider net for your content is a big one. And then we'll talk more about SEO, but for the content that you are putting out, making sure you've optimized it so that people just going online and doing searches will stumble upon that content. [05:23.6]
James: Yeah, I couldn't have said it better. And I know you see this all the time with your business. It's not like advisors go to twentyoverten or see something that you put out and they're like, you know what, I'm going to book an appointment right away. I'm going to do business with them today. I'm sure some do.
Samantha: Exactly.
James: But I'm making an educated guess that the overwhelming majority kind of engaged with your little bed, stay in the background. They learn, they go to your blog like you know what I
Samantha: Right..Yeah. We do a webinar every month and we have, you know, anywhere from 400 to a 1000 advisors come on and just learn. And so many of them will say, I feel really guilty because I'm here every month learning from you, but I still don't use your service. And that's okay. You know, there's a lot of them who also say, oh, it took me a year, but I finally made this switch. Or you know, it took me a year, but now I'm moving over. And that's just the, the model really for doing business today. [06:13.9]
James: Yes, you got it. So question number two here is, right now I am in the process of creating a free eCourse as my main website premium. Good for you. It will be set up as a drip campaign through MailChimp once each week for six weeks. One would receive an email with a link to different modules and different pieces of content, essentially. What marketing strategy would you say works best for getting the word out to my niche? Did this eCourse even exist? So basically getting people to understand, hey, there's this opt in page, there's this landing page or lead magnet. How can you get people to it? And my answer was the best quality in my experience. Meeting people who are most likely to actually listen to you and take action is a mix of social and SEO. If you can advertise online, if that's possible for you. I know it's not possible at all. Companies always follow your company rules. Yes, you can advertise compliantly but certain companies won't let you do it. But if you can, it becomes a math game to figure out how much it costs you to buy a client. But the highest quality tends to be in my experience from social and SEO. How about you? [07:15.3]
Samantha: 100% the first thought I had was depending on your niche and how old they are and if you are allowed to advertise, I think Facebook advertising could be really great for something like this where you could maybe have like the slide show of different modules that are in the course that people could actually see the visuals of and then maybe a couple of quotes from people who've taken the course and the value they've had of it, highlighting what that value is to them and then boost that post on Facebook if that's the audience you're targeting. So you know, we see a lot of people that are in that pre-retiree, retiree age group have high adoption and high usage on Facebook. So I don't know what the niches, so it's hard for me to get more specific than that. But that would be one strategy that I would suggest. And then the other is when you do add it to your website, just make sure you build out an entire landing page that's optimized with the keywords and phrases that someone searching for this type of content would be likely to use in the search engine so that they'll find it. [08:10.6]
James: Yeah. Let me go back and see what the niche is, because I think he mentioned it. Yeah, my niche is early and mid-career healthcare professionals, yet Facebook is a gold mine for that.
Samantha: Yeah.
James: You know what, what you're talking about on Facebook, you can literally find healthcare professionals and you can narrow it down and advertise to them. Yeah, you hit the nail right on the head as well. This is, it's a no brainer.
Samantha: Yeah. And if it's 100% free, I mean even thinking outside the box, if it's all throughout the U S you know a lot of advisors that we've worked with, I've seen them do things where they get really, really involved in the local communities. So there's an advisor I know who's in Philly and he works with physicians in Philly and so he's built up relationships with the hospitals there and will provide free content and educational resources to residents that are all about, you know, how do you pay off debt, all saving for retirement. And if you're really not pitching anything and it's truly free, often you'll find that the hospitals will be open to sharing it on their social media channels or things like that. If it's a truly a free resource and it's good information for their own employees. [09:14.8]
James: Yeah, absolutely. When people are scrolling through, like the podcast feed is going to be like a year from now when people are going to go through financial advisor marketing, they're going to see your name and they're probably gonna recognize it from twentyoverten and one of the things that I love about what you guys do is that you have a showcase where you display different financial advisor websites. You're completely transparent. You're like, here's a website that we did. And you've even got the people, the clients commenting, like loved working with you and this is amazing and they love it so much. But are there any commonalities that you see amongst the most effective websites?
Samantha: Yes, absolutely. Great question. The number one is heavy on the visualization on the home page and less on the text. [09:57.5]
So it used to be, you know, a lot of these sites haven't been updated since 1996 or something when the internet first came out and they are very, very text heavy and people do not read the internet the way they read a book or a printed piece, they scroll and they scan until something catches their eye and then they stop. So you want to design your website to be very visually appealing. Our brains process imagery 60,000 times faster than text. So the images should be very high quality, great resolution that reinforce your message. And the more you can use graphics or sketches to quickly get your point across, the better. Right? I always like to say an image is worth a thousand words and that really is true. So that's number one. [10:45.0]
Number two is writing the copy that you do have to be problem solution based. So what is the main problem that most of your clients have? What do they have in common and what is the solution that you provide? Many advisers get overwhelmed thinking I have to have a niche; I have to have a niche. And I think reframing it this way, just to think about, okay, if you, if you don't feel like you have a niche, truly okay, but at least what is the problem that you know you're providing a solution to. When you write it in that way, it's so much more impactful and people when they're landing on your website, we want them to self-qualify. We want them to say, oh, this advisor works with people just like me. And writing the copy in that way is a surefire way to do that. And then my third tip is the best websites who generate the most leads, they have a calendar link to book a time to meet with them right on the homepage of their site.
James: Amen, yes
Samantha: And you cannot forget that crucial piece. [11:41.8]
James: Yes. I have been like hammering my inner circle members with this stuff. You are preaching to the choir here. I have, I've done so many different website reviews and everything that you say like they put it on there, it just skyrockets their conversions. I love your homepage. And back in December I redid mine and I was scared to death because I had a bunch of texts on mine just like you're talking about, you don't want to be text heavy. And I got rid of a bunch of texts. I basically made it like, here's the blog, here's the email list. But it's like, it's well done. And it has paid off in spades. And when I give advisors that particular model like you exactly like you said, problem-based, even if you don't serve like specifically physicians or specifically dentist or anything like that, you have a problem that you solve, then that's your niche.
Samantha: Yeah.
James: So you are just, you're bringing it today. [12:34.3]
Samantha: I mean, and just to clarify one thing that confuses a lot of people, and I get it, you know, advisors are not marketers. It’s that they will say, well you tell me to put out all this content, but then you say, my website, shouldn't it be content heavy? We're talking about two different things. So the static pages of your website, your homepage, the services page about, you know, get started. Those are static pages that should be very, very visually appealing and you don't want to overwhelm people with content, but then you should have a place for very in depth information. You can call it insights, a blog, whatever you want to word it as. That's a place where you want to put very value rich information that gets really granular on specific topics. You can do deep dives. We tell people 1800 to 2,400 words is you know what you really want to be aiming for to please the algorithm. And so that's a different kind of content. So the content on your blog section of your website should be very dense and heavy, but those static pages is where you want to think about paring down. [13:35.0]
James: Okay. I've got a question, and this is kind of selfish because this is more for me and I've been doing a lot of private tests with financial advisors specifically with the calendar links and the buttons like Acuity, Calendly, ScheduleOnce. The tests that we have been running, we have been running to see if changing the colors of the calendar to match the advisors “brand colors” if that increases conversions. It's so frustrating because sometimes it does like if the advisor's website is, is red and they got a lot of red everywhere I'm thinking of one person specifically where we changed the calendar to red and like blend in with the website there where it's skyrocketed conversions. But I've got another person, well we changed it to blue I think Calendly is naturally blue but Acuity's not or one of them. And we changed it to blue and it decreased the number of people who were sending appointments. Do you recommend that or have you seen any data or anything like that to suggest that changing the calendar to match the advisor's brand is a good thing or is there like a right way to do it? [14:35.4]
Samantha: Yeah, so I mean the one school of thought from the design background is always brand cohesiveness is best. And so in that regard, you know, just from a design perspective, yes, but most people could care less about design and they want to know what increases conversions to your point. And so the reason I think you're seeing those results is that another best design practice is that button should stand out. So it should be a complimentary color but not blend in too much. So I think the reason you're seeing mixed results in my opinion, would be that if the button matches the overall brand color, but it matches so well that your eye doesn't see it, it's not going to get as many clicks. So it should be an accent color to the brand and not the main brand colors.
James: Yeah, that, that makes sense to me. But it, it's just frustrating.
Samantha: I totally understand.
James: Yeah. And it's just, it makes sense when you say it like that because red does in my experience, increase conversions as well. And just this advisor may have gotten lucky by choosing red as his brand and we just make it work. [15:35.8]
But that is a, that's something that hopefully some advisors are listening and they've taken notes or like, yeah, let me try that. I remember when we first connected on LinkedIn, one of the things that caught my eye about you, was you shared a post where you talked about how the average financial advisor website only gets a few hundred visits per month and that's almost like, the number that you shared was so scary, and how similar it was to the like the private test we run rented the advisor coach. It's like it's literally, it was almost the same number. What strategies do you recommend for advisors who want to get more traffic?
Samantha: Yes, that's a great question. I think there are a couple of different things about that. Number one, before we go any further, I just want people to remember that more traffic does not necessarily equate to more qualified leads. So I would rather you get less traffic but have the number of quality leads contacting you be higher. [16:33.4]
So if you niche down a little bit and you have less traffic but a higher conversion rate and the people that are booking meetings are becoming clients, well that's great. So try not to get too focused on the traffic number and be more focused on how many calendar bookings are you really getting. That being said, if you're, you know, numbers are all over the place from month to month and you're not seeing a consistent increase and traffic and calendar bookings, then you know you definitely need a strategy overall.
And there's some simple things you can do. Number one is most advisors do still want to focus somewhat at least on the local area in which they are based. And that's an easy place to start because you're always going to have less competition in a smaller geographic location then competing for traffic across the country, right? So being focused on financial adviser in Pittsburgh and trying to get traffic in your Pittsburgh area is going to be easier for you. And so for that, there's a few things you can do. [17:31.7]
Number one, a mistake I see people making all of the time relates to something called nap data. So name, address and phone number. So your nap data should be on every single page of your website in a footer at twentyoverten we have a global footer, so you add it once and it gets added. Every time you add a blog, an article page, it just automatically gets added. A lot of website platforms. I like that today, but if yours isn't, you'll want to manually add it. So however you initially spell your name, address and phone number. So if it's Russell Wealth LLC, you know, 555 Oxford drive, suite 101, you wouldn't want to then go onto your Google My Business listing page or the chamber of commerce listing and just write Russell Wealth and eliminate the LLC. Or maybe you spelled out suite Sui T E on your footer, but then on those other listings you abbreviated it to STE period. That is a big No No.
James: Yes, I’ve seen that.
Samantha: And people make this mistake all the time. So your nap data, your name, address, phone number needs to be exactly the same everywhere online. Every social media channel, you have every business listing, every page of your website. [18:43.0]
Number two, I mentioned Google My Business. You want to go and claim your Google My Business profile. And this is a free service that Google offers and they use it very heavily with local results. So if somebody is in your local area searching for things related to financial advice and you have a very optimized listing, you're going to have a better shot of coming up in the results. So you will claim your profile and then you want to make sure that you go in and make it a robust listing. So you want to add at least six photos. You want to list the days and times you're open for business. You want to add a phone number and a website link for how people could contact you. And then this one's a little controversial but you want to get reviews. So the Investment Advisors Act of 1940 has scarred everyone into thinking they can never have a review. But actually with Google, anyone who has a business that you can find on Google maps can get a Google review and there's nothing any of us can do to stop those reviews from happening. [19:43.4]
So you can get a review. You just never want to ask for those reviews in writing.
James: Right.
Samantha: You never want to like or comment on any of the reviews and you never want to republish those reviews, but you will find that the advisers who have reviews on Google get way more local search traffic.
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James: Now I personally haven’t set up a Google My Business in several years. I haven't opened up any new businesses, new locations. Are they still sending out that little postcards or advisers when they start that they have to look for the postcard in the mail to register that code.
Samantha: I've actually heard that they must be testing on a new service. So in some cases I don't think you have to and then in others you do. So I think it just depends on the level of verification they can get out of the gate. So be prepared that you may need to do that. Yes.
James: Okay. Yeah cause I remember back in the day they're like how do I do this?
Samantha: Right.
James: And they're trying to do it the same day. I'm like no, you've got to wait for the card to come in the mail. I just didn't know if they still did that or not.
Samantha: Right. Yeah. So that's one that's, you know, starting with the local search traffic is, is a good way to do that. And then if you are very niche heavy and you can take clients from anywhere, then I suggest focusing on one long tail keyword that you really, really want to rank for and just scope out your competition. Who's got articles that are ranking high for that keyword? [21:43.0]
And what I mean by long tail is not just financial advice, but it would be something like retirement planning advice for ExxonMobil employees. That's a long tail keyword. So it's a whole phrase, a series of words strung together and you want to think about all the different questions that people who would be searching for those keywords would ask. Make a list of them, and then write a ton of content around those keywords so that your site is the one that they're being directed to when they're searching for those keywords.
James: There's also a tool called AnswerThePublic right is answerthepublic.com and you just type in the, the niche that you have and they can give you a bunch of different suggestions.
Samantha: And if you already have a client in the niche that you're serving, you know, I always suggest to people to, whenever you meet with them, don't just write down topic ideas of what they ask you in the meeting, but write down the exact language they used to ask the question. And it might be sort of piecemeal or phrase in a way that you wouldn't normally phrase it, but that's the way you should title your content because the way that they ask it is probably the way other people are gonna ask the search engine that same question. [22:51.5]
James: Yeah, it's how they're, it's how they're searching. But to your point, this may not get you a bunch of traffic so you shouldn't be focused on the wrong metric, but if you go long tail, you'll probably get much higher quality traffic.
Samantha: Right. And for advisors especially, right? Like they don't, most of the firms we work with, they're not looking to get, you know, a hundred new clients a year. They would be happy with five to 10 new clients a year. And so the tactics that ecommerce websites are using are not the same ones that you should be using?
James: No, no, not at all. Will you talk about making content is specifically long form content, 18 to 2,400 words; I believe is what you said. That's something that really impressed me about twentyoverten. I mean you produce a lot of content, like hundreds of blog articles. I mean, from what I see, I, I'm sure that some advisors when start to get involved with you, they get intimidated by all that content. Especially when you say, let's create some content and make sure that you're doing content marketing. [23:52.7]
They're intimidated by the hundreds and hundreds of articles. Is there a process you recommend to advisors who just want to get started? Like what, what do they do first?
Samantha: Yeah, and a little bit of background about that. So when we first started, we were publishing one blog post a week and we did an experiment where we said, all right, let's increase it to three a week and then for a week and then five week. And then we added a separate blog for a new product that we knew we were going to be launching Lead Pilot, which actually just launched five days ago. So it's very timely. And so now we have two blogs that each publish about five articles a week. So we worked our way up to that. We have a team in house here. Writers, it's not just you know, one person. And so people you know who are a solo advisor trying to do the same thing. You can't compare yourselves. You know, it's like comparing apples and oranges. But there are some easy things you can do to get started. [24:44.0]
So one of my favorite tips is, you know, we're all talking all the time about voice. You know, Alexa and everybody's got these voices, assistance, use voice to your advantage. So you know, you can dictate a blog post or an article to your phone and have it transcribe it for you. It's not going to be perfect. But a lot of times people are very comfortable educating people and talking about things, you know in a more conversational way, but they don't know how to turn that into an article. So start by just talking about some points, some key things that you would want to cover. And then once you have it all down, look for how you can bucket it into three to five main points and then go back and see are there supporting arguments that you could use to fill in the gaps for those three to five main points. And let's say you're talking about, you know, minimum required distributions. Maybe you can go and find an article that supports that point and link back to it or an IRS you know, post. [25:44.1]
So that's the way that I like to frame it is start by, you know, having that topic from a meeting you had with a client, a question that they asked you and just verbally talk it out and have your phone transcribe it for you. And then go in, clean it up, bucket the whole entire thing into three to five points and then fill in the the gaps by adding some, you know, points to back up the points that you covered. And if you start just do this once a month, you know, put a time on your calendar and make yourself do it once a month. And quality over quantity especially to start. And then as you get in the habit you can add more, but that would be my suggestion for how to get started.
James: Yeah, so advisers, if you're listening, don't be intimidated by the process. You've got to start somewhere. I would rather have a couple pieces of long form quality content that really is in depth like Samantha's talking about versus a hundred different 250 or 500 word articles that don't really answer any questions and don't really engage the prospect of client into what they're looking for. And I'll tell you one of the best experiences ever in the best feelings is when someone asks you a question. Let's say it is a prospect and you send an article that you've written about that exact topic. [26:56.0]
Samantha: Hmmm.
James: Oh man, that is great.
Samantha: Yes, we have. Our sales team actually is really great at. They'll say, Oh, someone asked us this question today. We should turn it into a blog post. And so that's how we get, you know, many, many of our posts ideas come from that. For those who are not familiar with twentyoverten one of the features we actually built into our platform because so many advisors do struggle with this is we have a content library, but I don't want people to think of it as like a library where you just pick an article and it gets put on everyone's website. It's filled with different pieces, but it's really meant to be a starting point for advisors to then take and turn into their own pieces. So everything you can hack it apart. You can, let's say there is a thing that there’s five tips for this. You can go in, remove three of the tips, add two more, add five more change of the title, add your own image. It's just meant to be a starting point because it's way easier to write an article. Someone gave you a first draft or an outline with five points than it is to start from scratch. [27:58.4]
And so we don't auto-post any content to anyone's websites. It's up to them to go into the library, choose a piece, and then edit it. But we see people doing really cool things. Like they'll take a post that we might have on, you know, 10 things to consider before giving your final notice of your retirement date and they'll record themselves talking about the points and turn it into a video post or they'll take five of the points and delete them and then change up the ones that are remaining to be specific to their niche. So it's a really great feature that comes with all the subscriptions to our website platform to get you started creating content.
James: Yeah. From advisors, I mean cause they just asked me so many questions cause I'm in that world, right. And I've got such, I've got an audience, they're like podcast and an email and you name it. They ask me about different services and I have heard nothing but good things about twentyoverten and I'm really impressed.
Samantha: Thank you. I love hearing that.
James: I have read the articles on the site and some of my favorite ones personally speaking, are they're about SEO. [28:58.3]
And as far as I can tell, you're one of the only places actually giving out real detailed information about SEO for financial advisors. But how important is it for an advisor and where does it fit into the overall marketing mix?
Samantha: I think a lot of people have stayed away from SEO because they don't understand it. But as an advisor, you can really use this to your advantage because many advisors are not capitalizing on SEO. So you know, for us at twentyoverten we're a marketing company. We're going up against a lot of other marketers and everybody understands SEO. So it's very competitive. Whereas within financial advisors, a lot of advisors, they don't understand SEO, they don't know how to use it. And so if you can just understand a few basic tenets of how Google ranks content and use that to your advantage, you can make, you know, such a difference in how you're ranking. [29:48.7]
So they're a great example is there's an advisor, Kyle Moore, who uses twentyoverten for his website. And when he was 32 years old, he went independent. So he was with a larger RIA and he broke free and he had only six clients that he took with him and he decided he really wanted to go all in on serving corporate executives. And so when we built the website with him, we had you know that niche in mind and we the keywords that he wanted to rank for into his page titles, his header tags, his alt tags. So these are all things where you can put the keywords on your website. But then he just focused on writing one really quality piece of content, “Can capital gains push me into a higher tax bracket?” And he wrote it and then as new questions would arise or clients would ask him questions, he would add to that article. So his niche was corporate execs in the Milwaukee area. [30:43.4]
And over time that it, to your point earlier, as people would ask him a question, he could send them to that blog post. And then friends would share that blog post with their other friends who were executives and say, oh here you got to check this out or you should work with Kyle. And just that one piece of content. He grew in two and a half years. His practice from six clients to over 50 in his niche, completely independent by using a content strategy like that, SEO can be really, really powerful. The key is finding those long tail keywords that you're qualified prospects specifically in your niche are searching for and then also making sure you work with a reputable website provider or consultant that will know best practices when it comes to, you know, setting up your page titles and making sure the site is mobile responsive and loading correctly. A lot of that technical stuff you shouldn't have to know. You just want to make sure you're working with somebody who will take care of that for you. [31:41.2]
James: Those are some amazing results and I see the stuff like that all the time and advisors share it with me, but I also get the people who say, oh, this won't work or this takes too long or I'm frustrated and I, I get it.
Samantha: Right.
James: You know? But you're giving an example here where 6 to 50 is, is incredible and he's getting a double hit or because you said he's updating the content and Google likes fresh updated content. That's actually an SEO strategy is to go back and update your best or like second page content to kind of give it a little boost. But man!
Samantha: Right. And I remember after he wrote that post, you know, we told him one of the key elements that most people are missing is backlinks. So a backlink for those of you that might not know is just, you know, a link from another person's domain to your website. So if you're quoted in the New York times and they link back to your website, that's a backlink. And many advisers are, they don't have any backlinks at all to their websites. So setting up social media is a great way to get backlinks from social media, but you can also earn backlinks by writing a really great piece of content and then asking other people that you know, it would benefit to share it. [32:48.0]
So in this case, because he was working with corporate execs, he had a couple of different people who were in different centers of influence, who worked with corporate executives in other capacities who republished it and they're like newsletter roundup or in their blog roundup. And this is why on twentyoverten you'll see every Monday we do a thing called ‘Five little things for your Monday’, where we feature five articles we think advisors should read and we link to them. And then the people that we're linking to often will include us in their roundups and link back to us. So creating those backlinks is a really big piece of the SEO pie that a lot of people forget. And so you really want to, you know, give as many shout outs to people as possible that hopefully you can build rapport with them and then they'll do the same for you. [33:36.2]
James: That is amazing, amazing advice. And for the advisors who don't have back links, that's a good thing. If the majority of people aren't doing it, that means you too, if you get off your butt and do it, you'll have an advantage. And you have, you've inspired me. I'm actually gonna do something that I don't really do and give some real, real, real gold. I was working with an advisor who specializes in a certain niche. I'm not, I don't want to give too much about his business, but the way he got backlinks was he went to Google and he typed in his niche and then he filtered for resource page. So he was looking for any resource pages that were in his niche. And he, he reached out one by one. Like yes, it did take a little bit of time. It was manual outreach and he said, I've got this blog, it's specifically for this niche. You've got a resource page recommending software and services and different things for that niche. Put me on that thing.
Samantha: Hmmm
James: And they did and he got a ton of backlinks from it. Cause you're just like a real person where we're really reaching out.
Samantha: Right.
James: He wasn't right and you're like, game the system or anything. He was building relationships. [34:43.6]
Samantha: And, and I think think to your point, you know, imagine if you serve a bunch of employees in a certain sector, like energy and you have a really fantastic piece of content that would be super helpful to anyone who is employed in that sector. And you reach out to somebody who does HR or outreach for employees of that company. They want to provide the best experience and valuable information to their employees. And so if your content really is just truly informational and it's not self-promotional at all, you'd be surprised how many of them would be inclined to share it. I mean even us, we'll put out content and we'll share it with our broker dealer partners who they might be recommending for different website platforms, but they will share our content with their audience all the time because we're not saying use us, use us, use us. We're just providing free information about SEO best practices for instance. And they know it's helpful. And so they're like, yeah, we absolutely want to share it. So that is a really smart strategy. [35:41.7]
James: And that's a powerful move too because these sites have, for lack of a better term, more than linked juice because they're bigger sites with more authority. And I'm not going to get too technical for people who don't, won't, don't or won't understand, but if if you get a link from like.edu or.gov comes to mind, but like these companies, these big companies like you're talking about, that's more impactful than just someone's blog that they started yesterday.
Samantha: Exactly.
James: It is just going to add more benefit to your site. So yeah, we're going to wrap this up here. This has been an amazing interview. If you want to talk a little bit about Lead Pilot, I don't know, it's completely up to you if you want to or not, about how advisors can benefit from it. I know it launched five days ago at the time of this recording.
Samantha: Yeah. So they go to leadpilot.io is the website and they can see more. I think the main thing I just want to reiterate is that Lead Pilot is really a standalone product. So it's website agnostic. You do not need to be using twentyoverten to use it. In fact, you don't even have to have a website to use it. [36:41.72]
And it really was developed to allow advisors to capitalize on this inbound marketing trend, which is where we know sales is going in the future. And actually probably has been for most industries for a while, right?
James: Yes.
Samantha: That people are sick of outbound messages, they're sick of cold calls, they're sick of trying to be rude over a dinner or a seminar. They instead want the content, they want to get the information when it's convenient for them, and then they want to, you know, be the one to ping you when they're ready. And so Lead Pilot helps you capitalize on inbound marketing to grow your business. So it's social media scheduling, email campaigns, and drip marketing intel on lists. So if you buy a list of leads and you upload it into Lead Pilot, you can actually unlock things like the person's name, where they live, how old they are, where they've worked, and then you can get scores on all your leads based on what they're opening, clicking and reading and recommendations on what to send them in your drip marketing based upon their interests. So it really packs a punch and you can either work with our team to help you utilize it. You can use it on your own without ever contacting our team. Or you could have a marketing consultant that helps you. It really runs the gamut. So yeah, leadpilot.io is where you would go to learn more. [37:54.3]
James: That's amazing about the list. Can you expand on that a little bit more? So if someone purchases, let's say they purchase a list, and I, I typically, when I paint with a broad brush, I say don't do that. But there are some cases where it makes sense. So if someone, let's say they purchase the list let's say they have one or two data points and they just go as cheap as possible, if they can use Lead Pilot to find out more about those people.
Samantha: Yeah, so it's never a guarantee. It depends what this person has made publicly available. But we scraped the internet. We have different algorithms that we've built and we'll pull in everything we can find affiliated with the data points they do have. So if you just have someone's email, everything we can find with that email. If you just have someone's name and date of birth, whatever it is that you have, you can upload. So you know, you might, if you, if you have a list with just emails, maybe only 60% of them will come back with some intel because some of them might be, you know, an email address. No one's ever used for anything. So it just sort of depends on what they've used. But yeah, there is a lot of times where people are shocked. [38:54.4]
There's a button that we have built in called profile insights. And when you click profile insights, it unlocks as much intel as we can find out about that person, which makes it so much easier to get started and emailing them and put figuring out what drip list to send them on. We also have this proprietary lead scoring where our system assigns a score to people based upon how engaged they are with your content. So if you had a list of 300 names and they're really like it's a cold list, you could upload it into lead pilot and send maybe a few generalized topics about retirement planning and then anybody who's lead score jumps above, let's say an 80 it's cause it's zero to a hundred with a hundred being the best, you could start doubling down your efforts and focus only on those people because you know they're the most engaged. [39:39.5]
James: Holy cow. That's amazing. I know that like I use drip from my email auto responder and I use tags and scoring and all that and I've tried in the past to help advisors with that and trying to explain it. Like if someone opens an email, give them this point and if they click on a link, give them five points and if they book a call with you, give them 25 like I've tried to set up systems and I, I do it for a living and I do it all the time. So it's natural to me and I, I use a very complex system, but you are filling a tremendous need because so many advisors just got burned out with it and didn't understand. And I, I eventually stopped helping with that. But lead scoring is so powerful and can dial up your business and it's a productivity tool more than anything else.
Samantha: Right?
James: Oh, its focusing your efforts.
Samantha: So in our, our mindset, the way of the future, yes, there is automation. So this would be the automated part of things. But what we found for a lot of advisers that they just had canned content that was being automatically sent to everyone, like a spray and pray and we know that you and you know that personalized hyper-personalized messaging is where you see ROI. [40:47.7]
So we wanted to build a platform that would combine the best of the automation. So it's getting things scheduled using lead scores to further segment list but allow for hyper-personalization. So yeah, it's the tool I wish I had five years ago, you know when we were starting twentyoverten.
James: Yeah. It sounds amazing. If advisors want to get in touch with you specifically, how can they do that?
Samantha: Sure. They can email me and my team at marketing@twentyoverten.com and reach out. Say you heard me on the podcast and they will funnel all your emails directly to me to be responded to. I also am on Twitter, my handle is
Samantha20 …20 all spelled out TWENTY or on LinkedIn at SamanthaC … as in cupcake..Russell.
James: Cupcake. Okay. Yeah, cupcake I have producer Jonathan who is a producer for the show and he's not here this week because you are, he calls his wife cupcake. [41:46.0]
So weird co-incidence.
Samantha: Oh...
James: So I don't know. I don't know if that was a like a subconscious thing,
Samantha: Shout out to him.
James: But yeah, that's pretty awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This has been one of my favorite interviews I can already tell. A lot of advisors are gonna love it.
Samantha: I love that. Thank you so much.
James: And if they want to work with twentyoverten I highly recommend it. Check out Lead Pilot. It's just, it's a game changer. It really is. So I will catch you next week. Financial advisors. Stay tuned. [42:10.3]
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