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: Financial advisors, welcome to another episode of Financial Advisor Marketing the podcast. It's a weekly podcast, obviously about marketing for financial advisors. And I do have a special treat for you today. It is a guest. I don't do guest episodes that often. I mean, I've had Samantha Russell in the past Bob Burg, coach, Joe Lucas was a good one. But I am, I'm really excited for the guests that I have today because she is someone and we talked about this before we came on the podcast like live, right, is she someone that's been around for years. And there are so many people in the financial advisor marketing space to just come and go and some are great, some are not so good. Some are phenomenal, but there's only a handful of people who have lasted for years and years and years, and who continue to help financial advisors in a major way. I'm talking about Jill Addison; you're going to see it in the podcast title, of course, financial advisors. She is the founder of FA Client Machine. Her website is faclientmachine. FA, obviously for financial advisors. And she is a video marketing expert, so obviously we're going to talk about video marketing. So Jill, thank you for being here. Thank you for taking the time to do this. I really appreciate you doing it. [01:37.4]
Jill: Yeah, absolutely. It's so good to talk to you and I'm always impressed with your savvy with working with online marketing and your expertise with financial advisors. So I'm really happy to be here. It's funny, cause I've been thinking about starting a podcast like this and then I'm like, Hmm, James’ podcast is great. I'll just be on, on James’s podcast.
James: Absolutely. So we actually have worked together in the past and I have done a webinar with you years ago. It was like 2017, 2018. And that thing is still running strong and it's still applicable. And this is the lesson for financial advisors who want to have marketing that just works for years and years and years. It is interesting because I was thinking about it this morning. We are due for a major snowstorm on Wednesday and the webinar I did with you, it was like the one day that year that snowed. And here we are talking again.
Jill: That’s funny.
James: And we are going to have, major snowstorm, no. You're like this snow person.
Jill: Yes. [02:35.7]
James: So I know you mentioned that you have a couple of statistics and stats about video marketing and why video marketing is so effective and I think that's important to lead with.
James: Yeah.
James: So can you share those with the financial advisors or any new and interesting findings in the road of video marketing?
Jill: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so let me just give you some statistics about video. So when video and text are both available on the same page, online, 72% of consumers prefer video to learn about a product or service. People just want to watch video. People don't want to read anymore. So it's really just the way that people prefer to be communicated with these days. And sometimes I'll hear people say, well, maybe for younger people, but I don't know about my audience. Well, listen to this statistic, 82% of baby boomers and seniors are on YouTube watching videos and 60% of them are on YouTube daily. So it's, if you're thinking that older people don't watch video online, you're mistaken. These, these stats prove that out 82% of baby boomers and seniors are on YouTube, 60% daily. [03:38.7]
Here's another interesting statistic about video, viewers retain 95% of a message after watching it in a video compared to 10% while reading it in text. It helps with comprehension so much and I know that that is the business of financial advisors is to educate and to help people understand. If you want to help people understand you need to be using video because it is the most effective tool for comprehension online. Here's another statistic, 75% of boomers say they've taken some kind of action after watching videos on YouTube. No, sometimes it's hard for advisors to get people, to actually take action on working with them and taking that next step. So if you want to be more compelling to help people take action to work with you use video. 75% of boomers say they've taken some kind of action after watching videos on YouTube. Now here's an interesting one. And maybe you as a financial advisor can understand how this is possible, but because I don't understand how this is possible as a statistic. [04:38.7]
But the statistic is the videos are shared 1200% more times than links and texts combined. That is a big number 1200% more. So people want to watch the video and it's what they want to share too. It's just much more engaging. And here's the last statistic. 95% of consumers believe a video should be less than two minutes long. And that's why we have oriented our entire video offering and around very short videos that match the attention span of people who are watching the video online these days. [05:11.3]
James: When you talked about the baby boomers, watching videos, that's like a running joke between my wife and I, because we have heard so many times like all the millennials are always on their phones and they're always watching videos and always doing this. We were coming back from Florida and we just recently took a flight back to well, Baltimore technically, but I'm coming back to the home state of Delaware. And we were walking through the, the, the boarding area. And there's a bunch of older people, baby boomers, you know, snowbirds for lack of a better term for Florida. And they were all on the phones and the younger people, the millennials, we, we, we looked and we noted this. They were reading books and they were talking with each other and they were eating. But the older people were the ones who were on their phones and were watching videos. That's just an anecdotal thing.
Jill: Yeah.
James: It's, it's nuts to us. We see them watching the videos.
Jill: Wow.
James: So you're completely and totally right.
Jill: That's shocking actually. And actually kind of encouraging the younger people are reading books and talking to each other. I'm really glad to hear that. [06:13.5]
James: Yeah. And so the videos that you do, and by the way, what is your YouTube channel? Is it FA Client Machine or is it Jill Addison what can they say?
Jill: It’s Jill Addison, yeah. If you go on YouTube, you just search for Jill Addison and then you'll see my face and my name and you just click on it. And then the first playlist, there is Financial Advisor Whiteboard Videos. If you click on that, you'll see all almost 90 videos in our turnkey video library.
James: That's really cool because financial advisors can see what you're doing, but what, what exactly is a whiteboard video? What does that mean?
Jill: So you've probably seen the style of video, you might just not know the name of it, but it's when you see a hand drawing images that look kind of like a cartoon or like a hand drawn image. And these videos are just real. They're always associated with learning and with educating someone about something and making it more simple to understand by drawing pictures and showing the relationships between the different themes and elements that you're talking about. [07:08.3]
James: Now, as defined, just to be clear, the financial advisors, not the person drawing these images, he or she is not standing there doing the work. This is done through like a software, correct.
Jill: That's right. That's right. Yeah. So we provide all the images in the video and everything. So that's one thing I love about whiteboard video for financial advisors is that it's so easy. You don't have to get on camera, but you can still get really engaging and entertaining videos that people prefer watching. We've had, one of my clients in particular said that his clients were telling him, you know, these videos make it so much easier to understand that if you were on camera, just because it adds that visual element that makes it so much easier. [07:44.8]
James: Well, that's one of the complaints or objections or challenges or whatever the financial advisors bring up. Now, I'm not known for video marketing, but I get so many different questions simply because the site has so much traffic, they'll say, well, I don't want to be on camera or I don't have a fancy camera. I mean, first of all, even if you want it to be on camera, you don't need a fancy camera. This is a Logitech C920. I don't know. It's, it's cheap. It's like 50 bucks on Amazon. I should probably get a better one. But the, the whiteboard videos personally speaking, I've found work really well. I told you in the past that I use them for Facebook ads or used to use them for Facebook ads. And they worked really, really well for me. I know that your process is like taking the whiteboard videos and you're putting them on financial advisor’s websites, their social, if they have an email list, they can send it out. So they're repurposing that whiteboard video in a lot of different ways, correct? [08:39.2]
Jill: That's right. And the great thing about that is that you invest in one asset, which is the video content. Then you can use it so many different ways and you can enhance what you're doing and all your other digital marketing by adding video to it. And we can talk a little bit more about how that, but it's, it's really exciting how much you can make your online presence pop with video across the board, just for one investment.
James: So are there any types of topics or things that financial advisors should talk about or have topics in the videos that tend to work better than others?
Jill: We hear that question a lot, but here's my take on that. The best topic for each advisor depends on that advisor, because the best topic for that advisor is the one that is most relevant to his audience that actually answers the questions that that advisors audience is, are asking. And if the advisor doesn't know that, then I think the best thing to do is to look inward and say, what are my, what's my expertise? What is my specialty? What kind of clients do I want to work with? And then create videos around those topics so that you can attract ideal clients. One of our clients that we worked with did that where his ideal client is teachers, his wife's a teacher and it was just a space he was familiar with. And so he decided to make that his niche. And so we created a series of custom videos all around the most frequently asked questions that teachers have about their retirement. [10:01.8]
And he started having people calling him from all over the nation, who were teachers who had found his content online when they did a Google search on questions that were in their mind about their own retirement. And when they found him online and saw these videos that were all about exactly the questions they were asking themselves, they can see that he had invested in his business about teachers, that this is his niche and his specialty, and he's the guy for them. So they picked up the phone and call him. Can you imagine that someone finding you on a Google search, picking up the phone and calling you and becoming your client, that's what this kind of marketing did for him, because it helped him position himself as an expert for his exact ideal client and be found online. [10:40.6]
James: So this morning I was actually reading a study. It was called advisor value propositions, and you just Google it advisor value propositions. And one of the things in there, it talks about the ways that investors search for financial advisors online. And I don't remember the statistics off the top of my head, but something like 40 something percent, maybe 41% of investors will use Google to search for a financial advisor, 27%, we use LinkedIn. And I think there's like 27% of investors say Google is the most important or way they search for financial advisors. And 12% say that LinkedIn is the most important way that they search for financial advisors. So what you're really doing here, and I like putting the pieces together for the listeners cause they may not get it right away. What you're doing is you're taking one of the most powerful marketing mediums video, and you're just putting it where people are searching. So when they're searching for a financial advisor, they're finding piece of content that they are already predisposed to consume and predisposed to enjoy. [11:40.5]
Jill: Yes, exactly. Yeah. There are so many advantages to it because for instance, if you take a video, if you load your videos on YouTube and then you take a the embed code from YouTube and put it on your website and you do that on a regular basis every week or whatever, you can assign it to a, an assistant, you can you can schedule this all out in advance if you have a large volume of video content. But as you put that content from YouTube embed codes on your website, Google is going to see that Google owns YouTube, and they're going to start ranking you higher and higher in search engines. And when people find that video on your website, they're going to watch longer. And that time on site is also going to help you rank higher with search engines. So video is kind of a secret bullet. It's like a silver bullet strategy to get ranked higher on Google. I remember when I started doing this on my own website, I started a upload, I had a whole bunch of video backlog of videos. And so I started uploading them once every three days. And then it just went onto my WordPress website and scheduled it out like a year in advance. And so I didn't even have to come back to it. I just set it and forget it. So I started dripping out all these videos on my website. And within two or three months, I had someone else say to me, Hey, I've been watching your site and it is coming way. It's coming up in Google searches. Like you're climbing really fast, what's going on over there? And it was just because I was uploading consistent video content from YouTube. So that's when pretty amazing little hack you can use on your website to get it to rank higher with search engines. And then it has that added benefit of when people would actually come to your website and watch your video, they stay longer, which also helps you rank higher with Google. [13:15.8]
James: I was hoping you were going to say that because, it is totally true financial advisors. And most, well not most important, but it is like mid-tier ranking factors when it comes to ranking in search engines like Google is time on page. [13:27.7]
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. [13:50.3]
James: So let's say that you're a financial advisor and you have an article five best 403 (b) tips for teachers. And let's say that your position seven or eight in Google, which is first page, or maybe you're on the second page. One of the ranking factors that you can control is time on page. So let's say that you have a video about those same exact tips, you're just repurposing it. Maybe you want to have different content. You take that video, put it in your article and it will increase the time on page. Exactly like Jill said, which will help you rank higher in the search engine. So that's like, that's actual amazing advice. So thank you for that.
Jill: Welcome.
James: So what is your, like your actual process? Let's say that someone reaches out and they say, okay, I'm kind of sold on video. I get it. Or maybe I want to try it. They reach out to you. What are some of the steps that you go through to help them? [14:42.4]
Jill: Okay. So what we've done is we've created a turnkey video system and we've created this library of almost 90 videos. They're pre-created for financial advisors and they're the perfect videos to use for content marketing because they're short and to the point they match the time, the, the attention span of these people. So they're like max 90 seconds long. Each one of them covers one frequently asked question that advisors get asked in their practice. So when we start working with a new client, we let them look through that library. They choose the videos in that library that are most aligned with their ideal client and with their specialization. Then we take that video and we brand it with their contact information. So wherever that video travels online, people have a way to reach back. It's the call to action, call us, or visit our website. That's always branded onto the, onto the videos. So they choose as many videos from their, our website as they would like from our library. And then if there are other videos that they'd like to, they don't find in our library, we can actually create those custom. [15:45.7]
James: Hmm.
Jill: Like for the advisor who worked with teachers, we created a series of custom videos. So the nice thing about this turnkey video system is that they can get videos from our library super-fast in turnkey, just pick the, pick the videos and your done, or we can create custom videos, which will make it really hyper targeted toward their exact ideal client. Or they can do a combination of those two approaches in whatever ratio works for them. So once we've created the videos, then we upload them to YouTube for our clients, and we do some YouTube magic on it. We optimize it for search. We put them in the playlist and then we'll send those to the client and then they'll be able to use them through putting them on their blog, like we talked about on their website. They can also send them out through email and they can upload them to social media. So one of the most special things about our turnkey video system is that the clients own the video content. It's not a subscription program or lose access to the video content if they stopped paying. So it's an asset that they invest in that they'll be able to use forever. [16:47.1]
And so we, we love doing that for advisors because it's so important to own your video content so that you don't end up in this embarrassing situation where you would advertise me, promoted all this video content all over the web, and then you stop using your subscription. And then all those are dead links. What a waste of energy and time. So we want to make sure that that never happens to our clients, which is why we actually changed this a couple of years ago to enable ownership part of the package. So like we talked about, about that, definitely important to put it on your website, to increase that time on-site and increase search engine, engine results. Email, I think is still one of the best ways to use online marketing and it's so easy. Most boomers and seniors are used to using video or used to using emails. So it's a great way to incorporate video. And what I recommend when you use, when you use email for video is that you put the words one minute video in the subject line. [17:41.5]
James: Yup.
Jill: I sent it to a networking group once and then this woman said, Hey, I got your email with your video and I wasn't going to watch it. But then I saw one minute video and I do have one minute. So it also, because people love watching videos. So you want to put that word video in that because it's such a high value asset to advertise. So put that in the subject line. And then in the email content itself, I'm a big fan of not bogging people down with a lot of words in your email. If you have a video, just make a one sentence email that says, Hey, thought you might enjoy this one minute video about whatever the topic is, and then link it back to your website. And what that does is it drives traffic to your website. When Google sees that there's more and more traffic coming into your website through these email links, that's another factor that is going to use to rank you higher in Google search. So it was really cool how the whole thing is symbiotic and all works together because you're using email to actually drive traffic back to your website that then helps your Google search results. [18:39.8]
And then the third way that we use videos and recommend that our clients use videos is through social media. And because you own the video content, you're actually receiving the actual MP4 video files, which means you can upload those directly to your social media. And we've, we've done some testing around this and your videos will get so many more views, if you upload them directly to Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever social media you're using. And that's because each of these social media platforms wants to keep people on their site. They don't want them to go off the site with a link. So if you enable the video to be played right on that site, and don't try to take them off the site, back to your website, they will show your video to so many more people. So that's a great way to get more views on your video content when you actually upload a file, which our turnkey video system enables you to do. [19:31.3]
James: Yeah. I mean, Microsoft who owns LinkedIn, they don't really want to send people to YouTube.
Jill: Right.
James: To Google, that makes sense. Or they don't want, Facebook doesn't want to send people to YouTube, but totally makes sense. And the ownership is really important.
Jill: Hmm.
James: And that's something that we're, this is going to be episode 106, 107. I'm not sure. So in the previous 100 plus podcast episodes, that's one of the things I keep hammering at home for financial advisors is that your marketing needs to be an asset that you control.
Jill: Yes.
James: And there are a lot of good subscription-based companies out there. I mean, Lead Pilot is a good one. I like the subscription based stuff, but, but when you stop paying with the good ones, you just don't get access to it anymore. The shady ones, the bad ones are the ones that give you stop and say, use this and they make this part of your machine. And then they just turn the faucet off and they're like, you can't use it anymore. There, there have been horror stories from the early two thousands. And even the 2010’s of like SEO companies who I used to do shady stuff. Like they would buy all these links for people and you can't really do it anymore. But back years ago, you buy links for people and rank them that way. And then as soon as you stop paying them, they would just de-link. They would remove all the links and you would just be left. [20:43.9]
Jill: Yeah.
James: With nothing. And that's a really shady too.
Jill: Yeah.
James: So it's important to own the material. And I'm glad that you made that change.
Jill: Yes. Absolutely.
James: So what about compliance though? I mean, does compliance give you any headaches of financial? I know financial advisors are thinking right now. Oh, I can't use video because compliance won't let me.
Jill: Yeah. We, we rarely have problems with compliance departments. Normally what happens is we'll, we'll create the videos, customize them with your contact information and then send you a link that you can send on to your compliance department. Normally, what will happen is that they'll say here's our disclosures. We want you to add these to the end of each video. We understand that that's part of the landscape of financial advisors, so our system is built to do that. So we add the disclaimers and the disclosures at the end of each video. And then usually we're good. So that's, that's typically what happens. I think that sometimes advisors make it harder in their minds than it actually is because it's really not that big of a deal. Now we have had a few instances where, where we had complaints departments who said, absolutely no. [21:48.7]
James: Hmm…hmm.
Jill: And if they said no to just a handful of videos and we say, okay, no problem, choose some other videos from our library. You know, that's an easy fix, but if they say, no, you're not even allowed to use video at all anywhere, then we say, okay, we're going to give you all your money back because that's ridiculous. If you can't use video, you're not gonna have to pay for it, we're just going to give you all your money back. But like I said, that's, that's a rare occurrence.
James: Yeah. I can probably think of the, the companies that would say that. But no, I'm glad you mentioned that the, you give the money back because that's one of the things that attracted me to your business. And that's one of the reasons we started working together years ago is.
Jill: Hmm. [22:24.7]
James: My personal belief, this is just me. Other people have different beliefs with different feelings about business is that if, if a product provider or a service provider cannot offer a money back guarantee, it is a huge red flag. Now this doesn't mean that, that the product provider or service provider has to have a money back guarantee on everything, but there should be at least some front end offer, maybe even the main offer where you have that guarantee. Cause it it's just a red flag. I mean, people get nervous.
Jill: Yeah.
James: I understand they should be skeptical, but you have, then let me get this right, because correct me if I'm wrong, you have a 200% ROI money back guarantee. That's nuts. Can you explain that? [23:05.4]
Jill: Yeah. Yeah. So of course with guaranty that good, there are caveats, but if you follow all of our seven steps to video marketing success, for a year and you do not get at least one new client or make your money back from your, from your investment, then we will give you all your money back. Now, the idea is, if someone is doing all seven steps to video marketing success, they're obviously super active. They're going to get results from our videos.
James: Yeah.
Jill: And that's the main thing, you have to use them. You can't just buy them and then let them sit on your computer. You have to use them. If you're using them, you're going to get results. So we're really safe in offering that kind of a guarantee because it's all around if you use the videos and don't get results, we'll give you your money back. But that won't happen. [23:47.7]
James: Well from a marketing perspective, you having that guarantee that I'm putting my marketing hat on, obviously, but it just, it makes it easier for someone to accept your offer. It makes it easier for people to get into your world. But from a business perspective, it's also pretty brilliant because is you get people to do the work and do you have a system in place? They say, Oh, I'm going to do these seven steps. I'm going to follow what she says, because it obviously works. Follow the recipe. Have you ever seen that? This may be a weird question, but have you ever seen the TV show, Nailed it? [24:19.1]
Jill: No.
James: So this is a show where people amateur bakers come on this show and they are given a prompt to bake like a cake or cookies or cake pops or whatever. And they're just beautiful pieces, but they don't follow the recipe. And the cakes look terrible. The cake pops look terrible.
Jill: Yeah.
James: And the joke is like, nailed it. It's like, no, you didn't nail it. You didn't follow the recipe.
Jill: Right.
James: So it's very, very important with anything, email, LinkedIn, social, it doesn't matter. But with video, especially in your process, like I'm sure sometimes if people don't follow the process in your head, you're like, please just do it cause it works. [25:00.8]
Jill: Right. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is we've had a handful of instances where somebody invested in our program and then like two weeks later had a death in the family or, you know, something just.
James: Hmm.
Jill: Really, and they were like, I cannot do this, right now. I need my money back. Of course, meet the criteria for getting your money back, their money back. But you know, we're a firm. We care about our clients. We gave them their money back. So, you know, we feel like it's, you know, it's just important to be so people can trust and you know, be passionate about things like that cause sometimes those things happen. [25:34.8]
James: Absolutely. So financial advisors, you've heard about video marketing. I actually have an article that showcases some of Jill's handiwork and some tips about video marketing that I'm going to link to in the show notes. If you want to check that out, be sure to click on it, but Jill, how can people get in touch with you if someone wants to reach out? How can they do that?
Jill: Yeah. So this is the link and hopefully you can put this in the show notes. It's bit.do/videojeff. That is how you can schedule a 15-minute digital marketing strategy session completely complimentary with our Director of Development. Jeff Merritt. So it's bit.do/videojeff with no spaces.
James: Video Jeff.
Jill: Jeff J E F F. [26:23.9]
James: Got it. Okay. So this has been wonderful. Again, financial advisers, if you're interested in video marketing, feel free to contact her, send an email to james@theadvisorcoach.com.Someone will get you pointed in the right direction or send you the article or whatever it takes for you to succeed. We are here all year, so I will catch you next week. I hope you use this. [26:42.6]
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