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.
James: Hello and welcome, financial advisors, all aboard the Financial Advisor Marketing train. This episode is going to be a good one. I feel like I say that a lot, like oh, every single episode is going to be a good one. But whatever. They're all good. This one is going to be especially good because I'm revealing my number one secret to getting more clients. This is the thing that has been more powerful than anything else, but first, I'm going to start things off with a completely unrelated story just because I feel like telling it, and this is my podcast and it's one of the perks of having your own podcast - you get to talk about whatever the heck you want. [0:01:09.2]
Besides, this is what makes the show so special. It's entertaining. It's not just a lecture. It's not just an interview with someone else where the audio quality sucks and it sounds like they're talking in a tin can in the toilet. So, I'm not hating on any other shows, but I love the shows and I listen to a lot of them, but it's just that I wanted something different. I just wanted something a little bit more casual, a little bit more entertaining. I'm not just vomiting different facts and figures and statistics, even though I sprinkle a couple in there. So many people listen to podcasts expecting to get like value or something and then they freak out and throw a tantrum if they don’t get any "value" that they were expecting from a podcast. Well, let me keep it real with you. Virtually 100% of the people who listen to nothing but free podcasts and try to extract value are broke. It is just the truth. You can whine. You can complain. You can get triggered but it's true. All the broke people get together and they listen to their free podcasts and they say stuff like, Oh yeah, tons of value in this podcast. [0:02:11.3]
Jonathan: Value bombs.
James: Tons of value jam packed in here, and then they go back to their crappy lives and they never do anything. So, in this podcast, I like to entertain the people. Whether or not this is entertaining, I don't know, but I thought it was cringe worthy.
Jonathan: You know, all I hear you saying is no value for you.
James: Yeah. No tiki, no laundry. That's from Eric Bischoff. If you're a WCW fan, you get the reference. 83 weeks podcast, little plug there, love that guy. Anyway, cringe worthy. I recently saw a story online about this guy who went straight from a kickboxing class to a date with this girl and he was at the dinner table and he coughed. He coughed and a tooth came out and it was a tooth that got knocked loose during his kickboxing class. [0:03:01.5]
Well, blood started coming out from his mouth and his date actually had a blood phobia, so she passed out and broke her own tooth on the edge of the table. What? How crazy is that? This guy lost a tooth, the girl passed out, she loses a tooth - they're made for each other, Jonathan. If that's not a match made in heaven, I don't know what is.
Jonathan: You've got too much spare time.
James: Well, you're talking about in a podcast episode. I work like 20-25 hours a week and I'm super focused. The rest of my free time, I just sit around and I Google cringe worthy stories to share on my podcast. That's all I do. It's a great first date, I suppose, I mean, depending on how you look at it. Hopefully, they're still together. The moral of that story is to prepare for the unexpected, also have good dental insurance.
Jonathan: Of course. [0:03:59.3]
James: Now, it's time for me to discuss my number one secret for getting more clients as a financial advisor. This is something that's more important than perhaps anything else I've discussed. I won't have time to cover it in depth with one podcast episode, and in fact, I haven’t even scratched the surface with my Inner Circle newsletter, and that goes out every single month. Now here it is.
Number one client getting strategy, technique, tactic, secret, whatever you want to call it. It's multiple marketing strategies.
Jonathan: Ta-da!
James: Ta-da, drum roll please, big announcement. It's so, so effective. Yes, this is the holy grail. It changes everything for financial advisors. Now let's talk about some of the reasons why people may resist the idea of multiple marketing strategies. First, they may have been told to focus on their strengths. If there's one particular marketing strategy that they're really good at, they'll focus on that, and that's good. I'm all about playing to your strengths, but you want multiple strengths. [0:05:03.8]
That's what people don’t realize. It's like, yeah, you want to get good at stuff and you want to build your strengths, but you want to have multiple ones. You want to get good at a lot of things. If you're not constantly trying to get better and improve your skills, that's a self-management problem and we talked about self-management in the last episode. It's one of the shortest episodes or the shortest episode we ever did, but very valuable. Now either way, you don’t have to be a master at any of your marketing strategies. You really don’t. I know a lot of people, they bash the idea of being a jack of all trades and master of none, but it still works. Results, they matter more than people's opinions or their cute little phrases because most financial advisors are such terrible marketers that you just have to be marginally better than your competition and you'll crush it. I have seen it time and time again. Another reason they might resist is because they don’t believe that they can reach them all, their market in multiple ways. For example, I had a guy tell me that doing online marketing wouldn't work if his target market was retirees. [0:06:07.8]
Wrong. Lots of retirees are on LinkedIn because they're still building. They're still maintaining their network. A lot of these wealthy retirees, they tend to be the ones who do volunteer work, or they sit on boards and they do stuff like that. They're letting all that stuff be known on LinkedIn. They connect with charity opportunities and they promote the charity and their board and the stuff that they're doing. They do that on LinkedIn. I also did a quick Google search and I found a bunch of blogs and a bunch of forums dedicated specifically to retirees. You want to look for this stuff and you want to research your market and you want to do it in multiple ways because it breeds familiarity. People start thinking of you more often. If they see you on multiple places, it skyrockets the likelihood of them doing business with you. With the retiree thing, a lot of people don’t realize this, but the AARP magazine is literally the best-selling magazine like in terms of numbers, like just straight up sales, in the country. [0:07:07.7]
Like retirees are reading that day. So if you aren’t studying their copy, if you're not studying their headlines, if you're not studying the products they're talking about and the issues they're talking about and your market is retirees or people who are planning for retirement or people in that age group, you are way behind because they're doing something. It's magical and it's working. People are getting that magazine. It's flying off the shelves and people consume it. It's one of the most highly consumed, like actually read according to surveys, one of the most highly consumed magazines ever. So AARP magazine, if you get nothing else from this podcast and that's your market, seriously - pick up a copy of that magazine. A final reason people may resist this idea is they think it's too complicated. Now for example, most financial advisors, even today, they still don’t include their website or an online call to action in their direct mail pieces.
Jonathan: Really?
James: They resist it. They resist it completely. [0:08:06.7]
Hey financial advisors, are you ready to take your business to the next level and get more clients with less stress? I invite you to join the James Pollard Inner Circle, a paper and ink newsletter that gets delivered directly to your door every month. When you join now you'll also get a 90-minute instant download called, "Five Keys to Success for Financial Advisors", a $97 value for absolutely free. All you have to do is head over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/newsletter and join today.
James: This is a prime opportunity to leverage your website and to use multiple marketing methods. If you have a website, start using it. It's a missed opportunity for a lot of advisors. I know you're involved in the direct mail world, Jonathan. Including a URL, a very short one like xyzfinancial.com/appointment or whatever, that can work especially if you send it to a very targeted market. I mean, you've seen direct mail pieces all over and Ben Settle or DobermanDan, a lot of these people, they espouse direct mail. Correct? [0:09:14.9]
Jonathan: Yeah. Direct mail, call to action, phone call or go to the website and buy, but you know, there's got to be a connection point.
James: Yeah. If your market is there and especially if you have a niche and you create a direct mail piece that's targeted to a niche, it becomes really effective. I mean, imagine someone getting home at 6 o'clock at night and checking the mail and they see a letter from you. That person probably isn't going to call your office, not at 6 p.m. I mean, they could. If that's a call to action, yes it works, and if you deliver it in the right way. Now even if did happen, even if they did call you at 6 p.m., you're probably closed anyway. But if there's a URL there, going back to your website, all the person has to do is type it in. They can pull the phone out of their pocket, put it in their browser and see it right away. There's a lot less friction there. [0:10:06.3]
What you're doing is you're giving yourself multiple opportunities for the person to interact with you. If they get the direct mail piece, like I'm skeptical, who is this person, what does this financial advisor do, I've never heard of him or her before - they could type in your URL in their phone and they could go to your about me page. They could read about what you do. They could read about your process and all of the sudden, they're engaging with you at a higher level than just that one simple direct mail piece. If you didn't include your website or you didn't include any other way for them to learn about you or to read about you, then you will be gambling that they would do a Google search on your name, rather than having the URL directly in front of their face. Hopefully that makes sense and it helps people. So that's like how you can Frankenstein these two things together - take your website and put it together with your direct mail piece. There are a bunch of ways to do it. A big reason why multiple marketing strategies is so freakishly effective is because it takes advantage of underutilized assets the advisor may have. For example, if you're getting traffic to your website but you aren’t building an email list, your website isn't living up to its full potential - plain and simple. The idea is that by using those multiple marketing strategies, you're putting yourself out there again and again and again. You're building familiarity. You're building rapport. You're working the system. [0:11:27.7]
Jonathan: You know, James - what that reminds me of is I'm sure anybody who studied even a little bit of marketing has heard that seven touches principle and what you describe there as they take step by step, you're getting multiple touches in one flow. So you can convince and convert people quicker.
James: Yeah. And one of the reasons email is so powerful is because you can set up an auto-responder sequence, which can give the people seven touches, literally in a week and it's one of the most effective marketing strategies I've ever seen. [0:12:00.7]
An email, when you plug it in there, it's phenomenal but the step above that is multiple marketing strategies where you integrate email with your website. You integrate email with your social media and with your direct mail and then you put them all together. You're cold calling and people are not interested, you leave a voice mail with your website or maybe you leave a voicemail with, you know, sort of find me on LinkedIn - I'm connected with you - just search my name. There are a lot of different ways that you can do this. Think about it this way - if you cold call a prospect and that person doesn’t pick up the phone and that prospect doesn’t pick up on the second or third time, do you think it's a good idea to keep calling that prospect? No, but you still want to follow up and by having a lot of different tools in your toolbox, you have different ways to follow up. You can switch up your medium and message. You can call. You can email. You can get on social. You can send them a note. You can find someone to give a referral. So on. It's just absolutely unbelievable how great this is. Multiple marketing strategies is the goat - the greatest of all time for building a financial advisor practice, building the business. [0:13:07.0]
Having multiple marketing strategies is a great way for you to rapidly and sustainably, it's very important you can do things fast but is it sustainable - this is rapid and sustainable. It's a great way to just grow your business. And the cool thing about multiple marketing strategies is that you can lay out everything, just like producer Jonathan said, you could put it in a system. The seven touches system. I'm not talking specifically about seven touches or 10 touches or five because it's up to you. You are the captain of your own ship. You decide what you want to do. You could call someone today, then email that person, then connect on social media. You'll start to develop a certain level of omnipresence. I know you don’t like that word, Jonathan.
Jonathan: You'll be unforgettable. You'll be unforgettable.
James: Unforgettable - yeah. Yes, thank you. I was trying to think of what a better word would be. Yeah. You will start to be unforgettable with your niche because you'll be in different places. [0:14:08.2]
They'll see you and see you and see you and all of this compounds together and it makes everything else stronger. One of my Inner Circle members has fully embraced this idea with teachers. Like he's gone all in. His online presence is about teachers, educators. He networks with them. He reads books about them. He's all about teachers and since he's so heavily involved in this niche, it's easy for him to see various opportunities when they present themselves, where a generalist wouldn’t see it because he's so heavily involved in that niche and he eats, sleeps and breathes teachers. Like he knows different opportunities and different ways to reach them and different words to say with them. He's just all in. Teaching, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong, but I believe it's the profession with the second highest number of millionaires in the United States. [0:15:00.1]
I think managers are number one and teachers are number two. Again, I could be wrong. I know someone is going to fact check me but a lot of people don’t realize it but specializing in teachers can be a lucrative niche for financial advisors. This Inner Circle member that I'm talking about, he started popping up in all these areas where teachers hang out and his business just grew like a weed, especially the referral part of his business. Why? Because teachers know other teachers. They network with each other. They spend time with each other, which means when he asks one teacher for a referral to another, the process is smooth and frictionless. He almost always got a warm introduction. He's also a fairly young guy, which means he has a lot of years left to apply this information, to continue to dominate with multiple marketing strategies. So that is the episode for the week. Really soak it in. Embrace this idea. Look for ways that you can put more marketing strategy together with another one and reinforce it. [0:16:03.0]
There's an old story of there's a father and his sons and he took one branch and broke the branch over his leg. He's like this is you as an individual essentially. I'm paraphrasing here, but he broke the branch and it was very weak. It just broke no problem. Then he took four branches, put them together, tied them and tried to break it and he couldn't. Those branches together were very, very, very hard to break, where one branch you could snap like a twig because it is - it's a twig, like literally snap like a twig because it is. Putting them together made it very strong. The same is true in business. One marketing strategy may be okay but it could snap like the twig that it is. When you put them together, you compound the strength, you make yourself not omnipresent, but unforgettable. That's it for this week.
Jonathan: Keep jabbing with that. What do you have coming up next time, James? [0:17:00.8]
James: In the next episode, I'm going to talk about one of my favorite marketing strategies. It's not the greatest, but it is darn effective. It is email marketing and I know that's a shocker. Well email is such an effective marketing strategy for financial advisors because it allows them to build trust very quickly and build a relationship with the prospects, which leads them to setting appointments and those people becoming clients. You do not want to miss this next episode.
Jonathan: I cannot wait. I'm a fan of email marketing, as you know. So, looking forward to that. Another Financial Advisor Marketing is in the can. We'll be back with you next time. Thanks for tuning in.
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