You're listening to Financial Adviser Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers 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 TheAdviserCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]
James: Hey, financial advisors I want to do something different this week. No producer, Jonathan, no gases just going to be me and you. We're going to be hanging out. I'm going to be talking with you about one of my favorite financial advisor marketing tools. And if you've been listening to the show, this is obviously called the ‘Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast’, we talk about everything from seminars to webinars, to email marketing, which is arguably the best marketing strategy for financial advisors to social media, to basically all inbound marketing and it can get overwhelming, I know how you feel. If there's a, there's a bunch of different tools out there. There's a bunch of different options, different choices, it just can be overwhelming. [01:08.1]
So I want to talk to you today about a tool that I highly recommend called Lead Pilot. And full transparency, I am an affiliate of Lead Pilot. I am, I have a partnership with them. I do get a commission, if you end up using lead pilot through my affiliate link, which I will put in the show notes, I'll put a link to a review that I did on TheAdviserCoach.com. I put a link to the coupon code that you can use and just get it out of the way right now. The coupon code is ADVISOR COACH10percentOFF and it's advisor coach one zero, the word percent off. So ADVISOR COACH10PERCENTOFF. So if you want to use that coupon code and get 10% off, if you're interested, go ahead and do it. Otherwise, if you have any type of objection to me making money on Lead Pilot, I don't know why you would, but if you do then seriously, just Google it or go to their website and get it yourself. You don't have to get a discount from me. It legitimately is a good product. So you have that. If you're interested, you can always check out my written review in the show notes and use the coupon code that is in the show notes. If you have any questions or you run into any trouble, send me an email to james@theadvisorcoach.com or contact the Lead Pilot team say, Hey James Pollard of the Financial Advisor Marketing show sent me here, give me that discount. [02:20.2]
So Lead Pilot is essentially, it's an online marketing powerhouse, essentially for financial advisors. It puts everything under one roof. You've got your content, you've got social, you've got email. You put it all in one place, you can have one login, you can go in and check everything out. And inbound marketing in case you don't know, it is technically defined by Wikipedia as a technique for drawing customers to products and services through content marketing, social media, marketing, search engine optimization and branding. There's a whole bunch of definitions and a whole bunch of things that you could do that could be considered inbound marketing. But at the end of the day, inbound marketing for financial advisors is essentially getting clients to come to you. Inbound marketing provides potential clients with relevant, helpful content and information, and that guides them towards doing business with you. [03:14.0]
It is like a magnet, it brings them towards you. For example, people who are interested in learning more about financial planning, they often begin by searching online and then they come across a piece of content. If it's published by your company, they might seek out more information about your company about you. They might even reach out to schedule an appointment. Will this all happen overnight? Probably not, I mean it could, but inbound marketing; it just slowly brings them towards you. And this type of marketing is more important now than ever before, because skepticism and mistrust of financial advisors that's higher than ever before too. There was actually a survey done by hearts and wallets and you can Google it, this is all verifiable information. It was actually called trust-building practices, updated empirical analysis of what drives trust. So they did the survey and they found that only one in five investors reported actually trusting the financial advisor. Isn't that crazy? Think about that one in five investors, trust a financial advisor, that's terrible and it's scary, but it's the reality of the situation. And it's what you're dealing with. [04:17.8]
Inbound marketing solves this problem because it allows financial advisors to build trust, credibility, and rapport with potential clients and even better strategies like content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, it can all be automated. So it can work for you. You can have your machine running, whether you're working, sleeping on vacation and it's completely possible with Lead Pilot. And again, just to be candid with you, it is possible if you've got Lead pages and then you've got Drip or Constant Contact or MailChimp, and you've got Buffer over here, you got Hootsuite. If using hoot suite, it's over here, here, you've got another tool. You can do it with different tools. It's completely possible, but Lead Pilot brings them all under one roof. It costs less money altogether. And the cool thing that I've found is that when financial advisors have all the tools in one place, they tend to use them, right? You may have a landing page software like OptinMonster or Lead pages right now, but you don't use social media automation. [05:17.4]
You don't have buffer or Hootsuite or any of those tools, or you may use email marketing, but you have, you just use your email marketing software as lead, lead magnet and landing page. And it's just kind of crappy, right? It's not built specifically for that. So you don't have access to the good landing pages and your business is crippled as a result and it just, it's not a good situation. But having them all together means you're more likely to use them, you're more likely to get results because you're using them. And the numbers don't lie either. You want to do inbound marketing. According to HubSpot businesses, that blog just as an example, blogging here, they generate 126% more leads than those that don't blog. And HubSpot also found that inbound leads, they call 61% less than leads from outbound marketing methods. That means not only can financial advisors generate more leads, but those leads will likely be cheaper. [06:11.9]
I mean, in any, any scenario, when you go up to a financial buyer and say, Hey, would you want more leads if you're paying the same amount? Like, do you want more of them? They'd probably be, probably be like, yeah. Or if you've got leads, you're like, hey, would you like the same amount? But at a lower cost, they'd probably be like, yeah, give them to me. Inbound marketing gets you both, but there's a big problem with inbound marketing. It's intimidating. Most financial advisors are not natural marketers nor do they have the time to learn all of the intricacies involved with inbound marketing and set up all the different things and get in like the nitty gritty. Now I help you with that. I talk to you about inbound marketing and outbound marketing. I talk with you about all these different strategies that give you the data. I try my best to help you and be there for you and be your champion, but it is still intimidating. I get it! Well, Lead Pilot is looking to solve the problem because it makes inbound marketing so much easier. It has, like I said, it has a collection of features that can't be found anywhere else. Like in this particular combination done this particular way. [07:09.6]
One of my favorites is actually they have something called lead scoring. Now this has been around for quite some time with like Drip and Infusionsoft and these complicated software out there that has lead scoring and has had it for years and only advanced marketers have had access to it. But now it is made much simpler, much easier to use with Lead Pilot. Now, what is lead scoring? Lead scoring is a way to quantify your leads, to see which leads are the most engaged and most likely to be responsive. For example, someone who opens your emails and reads all your blog posts and engage with you will have a higher lead score than somebody who doesn't engage whatsoever, doesn't open your emails. And this is a godsend because it allows you to see exactly who is receptive to certain marketing messages. You can see who's responding to certain marketing messages and certain pieces, so you can keep it going. You can reach out to them again and say, hey, you know, I noticed you read X, Y, Z, would you like to set an appointment? [08:09.2]
You can also see who has the low lead score. So, you know, you can try something different. If you know that these people aren't responding to email marketing, you can take them and you can try something new just for them. My number one piece of marketing advice for financial advisors is to have multiple marketing strategies and leads going. It allows you to take this advice to the next level, because if someone isn't responding to a certain strategy, you can change gears. You can flip on a dime essentially. And lead scoring, it helps financial advisors become more productive because it allows them to focus on the leads with the highest scores you can see exactly who is responding exactly who is receptive to certain messages. And with this type of technology, right at your fingertips literally, financial advisor prospecting, it would never be the same again. That lead scoring is only up to this point. Lead scoring has really only been available to advanced marketers who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars every single month to have this type of software or this type of technology. [09:08.0]
Now to, I've had it for years. I've used lead scoring in the past, in my own business. It is awesome. But to have that available to just regular financial advisors who are paying just a couple of hundred bucks a month, it's a game changer. They also have a content library, and I've been an advocate of content marketing for years and content marketing can deliver tremendous results. I've got some stats here in front of me that I want to share with you. Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing costs, 62% less. Again, you're getting more leads. You're getting them at a lower cost. Content marketing costs 41% less on average than paid search. And in my experience, content marketing costs even less than that for financial advisors, because finance related terms, they tend to be super expensive on Google paid ads on the different search engines. I mean, have you ever looked at how much it costs to pay for, to be number one in Google? As far as ads are concerned for retirement planning or for Roth IRAs or for 401ks or for financial advisor near me, it costs a bunch of money. [10:12.7]
And then according to Aberdeen, conversion rates are nearly six times higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters. But here's the thing, again, financial advisors don't have the time nor do they have the inclination to sit around creating content all day, but Lead Pilot has this content library. They've got a bunch of stuff that you can choose from. They have categories, they've got personas like athletes, business owners HENRYs, which is High Earner, Not Rich Yet. If you can pick whoever you want to target, let's say you want to create a piece of content for the athletes in your list or in your business then you basically say, Hey, Lead Pilot, give me the content for athletes. I'm going to pick the piece and I'm going to put it into my social media automation queue, or I'm going to put it into my email marketing system. This again, I know I said that leads’ going is a game changer. This is game changer too, with the caveat that you can also create your own content. They give you like the skeleton, the, this system that you can actually use, meaning you can upload whatever you want. You can use your own content. [11:13.6]
And when it comes to email marketing, I mean, I've got appointments on autopilot, the program where I show you exactly what to say in your emails to set appointments. If you take that, where I show you what to say, and you create your own content, and you put that in an email automation system, like Lead Pilot, it's going to blow your socks off. Because now the content library that they have, it is great. I love it. It's better than nothing. But if you can make your own content or at least follow the stuff that I teach, because it just works like gangbusters. So they spoon-feed you to content that that's an option if you want it. But I would much rather have you create your own content. And I've got a bunch of financial advisors in my inner circle who have created their own content, and they're seeing tremendous results with it. But if you truly, honestly, don't want to do it, or you have some, I guess some objection to creating content, they've got it there for you. [12:08.8]
They also have a social media scheduler. This is just another great tool to have because not only can you choose which content you want to use, if you're not creating your own, you can schedule it right there from Lead Pilot, you can set a specific time and day. You don't need to worry about being on social media in real time. You don't need to just sit around like, Oh my goodness; did I post a LinkedIn today? Or what am I going to post to Facebook today? It's all scheduled out for you. You could have an assistant do this. You could have, you could have someone else in your business do this; they could schedule everything out in advance. And I know a lot of financial advisors use other scheduling tools. I personally use Buffer and I like it. But I mean, if given the opportunity to have everything again, like I said, under one roof, you really, really want to at least consider it. At least check it out. [12:54.9]
Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.
When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.
Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [13:17.4]
The other thing the lead pilot has is analytics. I mean, one of the things I love about them, the people behind the company, they are really in analytics. They give you tons of statistics, they give you tons of information. And I mean, in their marketing, like if you read their blogs, they just give you the information. They're not fluffy with it, they're not like vague or abstract. Now there is a place to be abstract. There is a place to give high level information, but their specialty is analytics. They give it to you. They're upfront about what is working and what isn't. And inside your Lead Pilot account, you've got access to analytics on top of analytics, really? So you can see how your marketing strategies are performing. There's no guessing whatsoever. Everything is laid out there for you to see. You can see social media reports because you, I mean, you can get data about what is working on LinkedIn, if you're posting the LinkedIn, you can get data about what's not working. You got lead reporting. It allows you to track every detail of your contacts. You can better tailor your messaging. Like there, the possibilities are pretty much infinite. [14:20.5]
They've also got email campaign reporting. So you can see email delivery clicks, open rates, just a pretty standard stuff with email, but it's important for financial advisors to have. And speaking of email campaigns, Lead Pilot also has my favorite email marketing. And honestly, I would recommend Lead Pilot for this one feature alone. Remember check the show notes for my official review. Check the show notes for the coupon code, if you want to check it out because Lead Pilot is one of the only services out there tailored specifically for financial advisors with topics like compliance in mind. And the cold hard truth is this. If you're a financial advisor right now, and you aren't using email marketing, you are falling behind it is that simple. It is by far the most effective conversion strategy we're seeing right now for financial advisors. Nothing else comes close because email allows you to follow up. It allows you to build a relationship with the people on your email list, and I could go on and on and on about the different stats. If you've listened to the show in the past, you've heard me talk about all the different stats. [15:21.8]
Email is 40 times more effective and Facebook and Twitter. According to Y-charts clients are begging financial advisors to use email. According to campaign monitor, email produces on average, a 4400% return on investment. I could go on and on. Email is just hands down the King of all marketing strategies, especially for financial advisors. And one of the biggest parts of my business is actually showing financial advisors like I said, exactly what to say in emails to convert people into booked appointments. And before Lead Pilot, I was recommending services like MailChimp and Constant Contact. But now with the compliance features and with all the other stuff that you get, I mean, they can't even hold a candle to Lead Pilot. Now, if you don't want to use Lead Pilot, if you have some again, some weird objection or you just like, I don't know, I don't know what to tell you. But you can still use MailChimp. You can still use content, constant contact, they're great on their own, but when you combine it with all the other stuff just doesn't come close. [16:17.0]
And then finally, one thing I love about Lead Pilot is the landing pages. And when I found out that Lee pilot offered unlimited custom landing pages, my heart started beating a little faster. You know, as a marketer that kind of got me a little excited. My mind has started racing with different possibilities because here's what this means. I know if you're not a marketer, this may not be exciting to you, but if you got to get good at marketing, if you want to grow your business. This means financial advisors can make as many landing pages as they want and get this, they have their own branding. And if you don't know what a landing page is, it's basically a page designed to get a visitor, to take a specific action. This could be to register for a webinar. This could be to set an appointment, to sign up for your email list, whatever action you want. And Lead Pilot makes it easy to create these landing pages. You don't need to be tech savvy. You don't need to be a developer a couple of years ago, you would need to hire someone from like a freelancer or someone that can to build your landing pages. And then you've got Lead pages which came out and then you've got OptinMonster, which also collects email addresses. These are all great services, but they're just not built for financial advisors. It is that simple. [17:24.8]
And speaking of being built for financial advisors, Lead Pilot allows you to integrate with a bunch of tools that are made for financial advisors. They can integrate with risk allies. They can integrate with wealth box, red tail, all this stuff, you can just automate it. You can sync it, you can integrate with it. And I imagine they're going to add even more integrations in the future, because with something like this, it only gets better as time goes on. Now I know you be thinking, you're probably thinking, okay, Lead Pilot's got a bunch of cool stuff. I get it. How much does it cost? Well, let me let you in on a little secret. I love it when companies are transparent with what they charge, I hate, I hate going on a website and it's like, contact us for enterprise pricing, right? Like, dude, just show me the price, right? How much is it like, Oh, contact us for more info, information. No, show me the freaking price. And Lead Pilot does as out of the time of this recording, Lead Pilot is either 299 per month or to 2,988 per year, which actually works out to be $249 per month. [18:27.3]
That's how much it “costs.” And I want to say cost in quotation marks because if you use it, it really shouldn't cost you anything. If nothing else using Lead Pilot is like handing money to your business. Because look at it this way, let's say that your financial advisor and your personal income is $150,000 per year, Okay? Now stick with me because I'm going to do some math. I know financial advisors tend to be numbers people, but I don't want to lose you. So $150,000 per year, this works out to be $75 per hour assuming you're working a 40 hour work week. All Lead Pilot needs to do, if you do the math here, all it needs to do is save you 3.32 hours per month, and it pays for itself. And honestly you could easily save twice that much just through the content library and just through the social media scheduling alone. And that doesn't even factor all the money you'll save by having all of your inbound marketing tools in one place. I mean, HubSpot, if you were to use HubSpot for your lead scoring, that's $40 a month by itself. If you were to use Lead Pages, that's $48 a month by itself. Those are the cheap plans. MailChimp has like $50 a month for up to 2,500 people on your email list, so that's another 50 bucks a month. Hootsuite is like $30 a month, so that's another 30. [19:39.2]
And if you were to hire a ghost writer, someone to create the content for you and basically put it all together, that could be well over a thousand dollars a month easily. And if you were to hire an assistant to manage these, the, the contacts and to integrate everything and to stay on top of it, that could be another thousand dollars per month, easily, easily. So if you were to get all the other stuff separately on the website, Lead Pilot says that it would cost you about $1,200 a month, I think that's being way, way, way too conservative. Like as somebody who actually does this and somebody who actually puts this stuff together for people and who has used multiple tools in the past, you ain't get nowhere unless you're whipping out two grand a month. Like you're not even getting close. I know Lead Pilot wants to be conservative, they want to make, you know, make everything nice. I'm going to tell it to you like it is you. You won't even get close, if you were to do this by yourself, without whipping out at least at least $2,000 a month. [20:31.1]
So if you're hesitant about investing a few hundred bucks into Lead Pilot, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you shouldn't be giving financial advice and you really shouldn't be nervous about it because they don't charge anything to have their onboarding session. They have a free trial, right? I did. I don't know if I mentioned that I have been talking a lot about their features or whatever. I haven't even mentioned that they have a free trial, but they do. And all Lead Pilot users, they actually have a free 30 minute onboarding session to basically make sure that they're set up properly, make sure that they can adequately use the site. You don't just create an account and then try to figure everything out yourself. There's actual real people that walk you through and make sure you know what you're doing. Because I mean, honestly, and it makes sense because if you don't know what you're doing and you get confused and you don't make the most of the features, you're probably not going to pay them every month. You're probably going to get frustrated and you're going to leave. So it's in their best interest to make sure you know how to use it. [21:25.4]
So they give you that onboarding session it's completely free. They don't charge you anything extra for it. Honestly, you might, you might learn something and that's a lot less than what a lot of people charge for coaching and consulting. I know it's a lot less than what I charge. I wouldn't even get on the phone for that amount or get out of bed essentially for that much money. But they do it because they want you to stay. They want you to pay the 250 or the 249 or the 299 every single month, like clockwork. So they're willing to do the work for you. It's in their best interest. So if, and if you need anything, you can just email them, you can start a conversation with them within the app. They also do these different webinars; they do workshops with all these topics related to financial advisors. And you won't find that type of information anywhere else, because the other tools like, like Buffer, like Hootsuite, like MailChimp, they aren't tailored specifically to financial advisors. When you work with a company like Lead Pilot there, their dedication is helping financial advisors. And in addition to that, they've got a help center, right? I know I'm going on and on and on, but I kind of want to like solidify this in your brain. [22:28.5]
They got to help center where you can see how to set up your account, how to share content. If it's like 1:00 AM and for some reason you're doing all this stuff, you can go to the help center, you can figure it out. And, but if you really want to get in touch with a person, they have that option too. I mean, finally, they're just nice people. I had a chance to talk with Samantha Russell, who is Lead Pilot’s, Chief Marketing Officer in an episode on this very podcast a couple of months ago, and she was one of my favorite guests. And if you're interested in listening to that episode, it's called ‘Practical Inbound Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business.’ I mean, she's talking about inbound marketing shocker, right? So inbound marketing is something that financial advisors should be doing and Lead pilot specializes in inbound marketing for financial advisors so it just makes sense. [23:14.9]
And if you've followed me for any length of time, you know that I almost never recommend you any, any type of tool is very, very rare. But I wholeheartedly recommend using Lead Pilot today, if you want to save time, you want to save money and you want to get more clients. And they are so confident that you'll be blown away. They have a free trial, which you can try at leapilot.io. If you want to use ADVISORCOACH10PERCENTOFF, that's the coupon code. It's going to be in the show notes, again, the link to my review is going to be in the show notes. So you can check that out. If the coupon code doesn't work for you, then reach out to them and say, Hey, I'm trying to use the James Paul or the advisor coach coupon code. Please apply that. I'm sure they'll do it right. I'm not, they're not going to be jerks about it and saying, Oh, heck no. Right? So, but they, and they also have the ability to schedule a one-on-one demo, which is nice because you'll get the opportunity to basically have someone walk you through the software, answer any questions you have. So if you have any questions after reading the website, you know, browsing around, I suggest scheduling a demo with them. [24:18.8]
And because I'm an affiliate with Lead Pilot, I have the ability to give you that 10% off. So like I said, it's the coupon code. You can check it out in the show notes. It is advisor coach one zero, the word percent off. So all together ADVISORCOACH10PERCENTOFF. And when you sign up, you use that coupon code and it will show up. It'll basically say, great, You'll get James Pollard, the advisor coach 10% off. And if you select the annual plan, if you go through everything and they explained this stuff to you and they get you set up and you're blown away and you want to sign up for a year, that coupon code will save you almost $300. [24:57.2]
So that's not bad for listening to a podcast, at least check it out. And if, if you like it, then cool, you know, use that coupon code and save 300 bucks. You just made 300 bucks, by listening to a podcast episode. But if you try it out and you don't like it, that's cool too, but you have absolutely nothing to lose because they have that free trial. So that is one of my favorite marketing tools for financial advisors. It's Lead Pilot again, please check out the review in the show notes, use the coupon code that's in the show notes. If you have any trouble contact them or contact me, james@theadvisorcoach.com. It is awesome. And I will catch you next time. [25:32.3]
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