You're listening to Financial Advisor 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 TheAdvisorCoach.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: Welcome to another episode of Financial Advisor Marketing, I'm going to cut straight to the chase with this one. If you're a financial advisor and you want to get more clients, this episode is going to be all about how you can get three new clients in the next 30 days, because I'm going to outline a few strategies that can help you get there, help you get those results. Nothing I share in this episode is going to be rocket science, although it will take concerted effort on your part. Nothing is going to be easy. It is simple, but it's not easy. It's not just going to be push button where you just push a button and have the client's roll in. Nothing works unless you do. At this point, I've got more than a hundred blog episodes. I've got more than a hundred podcast episodes. I'm constantly putting out content. I've got the inner circle newsletter. I've got products. I've got all of these things and I've realized that the best way to get advisors to do business with the advisor coaches to get them results in advance, because when they see that the stuff works, they're more likely to give us more money in exchange for even more results. So, how's that for transparency? I'm just telling you exactly what my strategy is. I want to get you some results. I want to get you some more clients. I'm going to get you three in the next 30 days. And hopefully when you get those clients, you will come back to TheAdvisorCoach.com. You will become an inner circle member, you'll go through how to get clients with LinkedIn, you'll go through some of the other programs because you'll want more results. [01:52.7]
Now first, before you do anything, if you're not subscribed to my email list, make sure you subscribe. Because when you subscribe, you're going to get a PDF called 57 marketing tips for financial advisors, but don't sign up if you can't handle daily emails. I mean, I email every single day. I don't have time for whiners or complainers on my email list. Email is arguably the most effective marketing strategies, the most effective appointment setting strategy for financial advisors. It's arguably the most effective marketing strategy for financial advisors. It's one of the best marketing strategies I've ever discovered. And since I tell financial advisors to leverage email marketing, I'm merely practicing what I preach. This is my way to get you on my email list. When you subscribe, you're going to get that PDF download, it has information far beyond what I can cover in a single podcast episode. It's got more than 80 pages of content; you can go through that at your leisure. You can take notes, you can consume it however you want to consume it, but get that first. You can sign up by going to TheAdvisorCoach.com/57, that's the number five and the number seven. So, TheAdvisorCoach.com/57, or it's at bottom of any blog post over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/blog. Make sure you do that; it's going to have a lot more information. Like I said, that I can cover it any single podcast episode. [03:09.0]
So, let's get started about the whole getting clients thing. Well, a good place to start is to know how many clients are financial advisors getting in the first place and that is a great little piece of information to know. And the answer depends on which financial advisors you study. Now, according to a Broadridge study, titled, Driving Client Acquisition, 43% of growth focused financial advisors successfully acquired 20 or more clients in the past year, only 16% of other advisors onboarded at this rate. So, when you hear that stat, you may think to yourself, okay, well, what does growth focused mean? Because that's the exact term that Broadridge uses. And they defined a growth focused financial advisor, as someone who spends more than $5,000 per year on marketing to aggressively add new clients. They actually found that 23% of growth focused advisors are willing to spend $2,000 or more to acquire a client when only 11% of everyone else is willing to spend that amount or more. And to be even more specific to help you visualize what this looks like. The average cost per client acquisition for growth focused advisors is actually $1,451 compared to $895 other advisors. So, I'm going to, I know I just threw a lot of information at you, I just want to recap that. [04:32.0]
43% of growth focused advisors successfully acquired 20 or more clients in the past year. So, if you're growth focused, if you're spending a lot of money on marketing, if you're listening to the financial advisor marketing podcast, I mean, you're probably growth oriented. You should be acquiring 10, 15, 20 clients. If you're just a regular advisor and you're not really working on marketing, you don't really care about that, only 16% of you who are just regular advisors who are, are going to acquire 20 or more clients in a single year. So, if you take that stat, you know, that getting three in a single month, three in the next 30 days, and that is an aggressive goal and it's meant to be aggressive, it's meant be a jumpstart, a kickstart to your existing business. So, the next thing that I shared with you was actually that the average cost per client acquisition was $1,451 for growth focused advisors. This is not surprising at all because they're spending money on online advertising, they're spending on virtual assistants, they’re spending on software, on systems, on consultants, on products like I offer the inner circle newsletter would count as marketing spending. They are spending more because they need to get the information, they want to get their business in front of target prospects in front of prospective clients. They want to make sure that they are seen that they are heard. It is not surprising whatsoever. It's also not surprising that most advisors spend about $895, they're just not generating them much activity in the marketplace. So not surprising at all. [05:56.7]
The next thing I want to share with you is that the growth focused financial advisors are spending their money in four specifically areas. Number one, the website, number two in person events, and this could be webinars and just events where you get a group of target prospects and prospective clients in the same place at the same time, this is all about leverage. Number three is social media. This is obvious, Linkedin is one of the best places for financial advisors to go to get more clients. Facebook, some financial advisors are running Facebook ads, they're hanging out on Facebook. They have their own little groups or whatever. There are tons of different things you can do with social media. Some have YouTube channels, I mean, I could go on and on and on, but the cream of the crop is essentially going to be Linkedin without digging too deep into that. And then number four is their CRM. This is extremely important. We'll talk about this later. Your CRM is great for keeping track of what you've done, the outreaches you've made to your current clients or your current perspective clients, just keeping on top of things. Plus, if you have a good CRM, it's going to integrate with your other marketing software. Like your email marketing system is going to integrate with social media. So, you'll, you'll have a broad view of everything you're doing and how you're interacting with your current clients and perspective clients. It's a godsend. [07:06.7]
The growth focused advisors, they're also spending more totaled dollars. Yes, but they're also spending more as a percentage, not just total dollars I should say they're spending 7% or more. The 24% of growth focused advisors spend 7% or more compared to 9% of everyone else. So, I know I kind of jumbled that up. So, I'm going to be extra clear. 24% of growth focused advisors are spending 7% or more on revenue. 9% of everyone else is spending 7% or more on revenue. And depending on the study you read for advisors spend on marketing is typically about 1 or 2% is the average of all financial advisors. There are even some advisors who have bragged to me that they don't spend anything on marketing. I'm like, that's not exactly something you want to brag about. There are other advisors who were like, Oh, we get all our, our clients from referrals. And it's like, well, referrals are awesome, but you don't necessarily want to depend on them. Referral marketing is actually one of the strategies that we're going to use to jumpstart to three new clients in the next 30 days. We'll talk about that later in the episode but it will actually right now, but it's funny to me, people brag about not spending anything on marketing. [08:22.3]
Also realized that having a niche makes everything easier because it allows you to quickly and easily identify people in your target market. If you're a financial advisor who serves teachers, you're going to be able to find them more efficiently than someone who serves retirees. It's just much easier. Schwab's 2220 RIA benchmarking study found that firms with a documented client persona, aka a niche and a client value position. They attracted 28% more new clients in 2019 when compared everyone else. So, I'm just giving you these stats because I want to stack one on top of the other. You can start to see, okay, the top financial advisors are spending more marketing. Yeah. They're spending more with the website with social media. Okay. Got that. What else are they doing? They have a niche; they have a clear value proposition. Okay. Well, you can start to put the pieces together. And when you realize that they're doing all of these things, you can like Frankenstein your way into marketing success because you can say, okay, I'm going to have this, this, this. I’m gonna stack them all together. Anecdotally, I can tell you I've run split tests across various marketing mediums, like online ads and social media and the rest I found that calling out a niche in marketing messages almost always increases conversions. So, keep that in mind, keep those stats in mind, write them down and take notes, if you want to. You're just going to stack these on top of one another. [09:45.7]
The very first strategy that I'm going to run by you in order to get three new clients in the next 30 days. I know that's a bold claim, but you're going to see how not easy, but how simple it can be. The referral blitz is strategy number one, and this is going to be most effective, if you already have an existing business with clients. And in a previous episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, I referenced a study done by the Oxley Institute where they asked 403 investors with a minimum of $500,000, how they would begin looking for a financial advisor, and here's the breakdown. I don't want to get too deep into it, but I just tell you that the number one-way people over the age of 65 would begin looking for a financial advisor is by asking family or friends for a recommendation. 45% of them said that they would begin that way. 34% of respondents over age 65 said they would ask another professional for a recommendation. For respondents between age 45 and 65, 46% of them said they would ask family and friends, 21% of them said they would ask another professional. For recommendations for respondents under age 45, 39% of them said they would ask family or friends, 13% said they would ask another professional for recommendations. So, as you can see, most investors in the 45 and up category would ask for a referral. This isn't a surprise. This is why I created 51 referral marketing tips for financial advisors. It's why the first strategy you can use that we're talking about here to get three new clients in the next 30 days is the referral blitz. [11:15.3]
There are tons of referral marketing strategies floating around out there. Most of them revolve around lame advice, like ask early and ask often. And I won't insult your intelligence by telling you to do that. Instead, I'll present you with the actual research. So, Julie Littlechild, I love her stuff. Love her material. She was actually a guest on this show, if you want to search Julie Littlechild Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, it should come up. Or if you just search within the show, you should see the episode. She found that 58% of clients say they were motivated to refer to help a friend. So, she'll lead with that. It makes sense because that's the number one part of her finding is that the overwhelming majority of clients say they were motivated to help their friends, help the family. They do it because they're interested in helping people in their lives. But you can't ignore the next thing, which is that 38% of people said they wanted to help their advisor build the business. So, what's the lesson here. Take advantage of both. You want to do both. Take advantage of the clients who want to help their friends and family and the colleagues or coworkers, and take advantage of the ones who want to help you grow your business. If you can get both, you're statistically more likely to get clients in the next 30 days, which is the objective here. [12:31.6]
Little child also found that 40% of clients who provided a referral in the last 12 months said they were asked for a referral by the advisors. So, there is a little bit of credence to asking, not necessarily asking early and asking often, but asking, just running it by people saying I'm open for business. But 72% of clients who provided a referral again, these are real clients who are actually providing referrals, this is not theory. 72% who provided the referral. And the last 12 months said they were asked for feedback. So again, what is the lesson? Take advantage of both, make sure all your existing clients know you're taking on new clients. I mean, you would be amazed at how many times I've heard people tell me that they didn't think they were advisors open for business. So, the bottom line is if your clients don't think you're taking on new clients, they will not refer ever. Get in touch with your clients. Send them an email, send them a handwritten note, call them, do something, get in touch, let them know you're never too busy to help their friends and their family members keep track of your outreach in your CRM. Remember growth focused advisors are spending money on a CRM. So, keep track of it. If you have 50 clients, you put the 50 in your CRM, you put a category or something in there, however your CRM does it. Say, ask for a referral for literally every single one. And your goal is to check that box for every one of your clients, then ask for feedback while you reaching out while you're talking to them, ask for feedback. [13:58.8]
Now feedback comes in many forms. It could be online, it could be written, it could be formal, it could be informal and each form of feedback, it's beyond the scope of this podcast. Maybe I'll do another episode that's all about feedback. But all feedback, what it does is it, it creates a sense of partnership. You're working together, you care about each other, you're, you have a common goal, which is to help your clients have financial peace of mind, essentially. It demonstrates your commitment to the relationship, because if you're asking for feedback, the cue there is that you want to get better. You want to improve the way you do business. You want to improve the way that you help your clients. So that is strategy number one, strategy number one is the referral blitz. Ask every single one of your clients for referrals. Ask for feedback and put this in your CRMs and nobody falls through the cracks. [14:48.0]
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. [15:10.5]
Strategy number two, is what I like to call the LinkedIn jackpot. LinkedIn, it's just, it's so amazing. It is such a great tool for financial advisors. I've created how to get clients with LinkedIn. You can go to TheAdvisorCoach.com. It's one of the tabs that says get clients with LinkedIn. It's incredible, how well this is working for financial advisors, but unfortunately 99% of LinkedIn advice out there that you get from YouTube and other podcasts and things like that it's just total garbage. I hate to say that I hate to be really critical like that, but it's just true, it's just total garbage. Because not only do traditional LinkedIn approaches fail to get attention and peak interest, those are extremely important things to do. They're not tailored to financial advisors and that causes them to fall flat for you, guessed it, financial advisors. And one reason, most LinkedIn approaches don't work for advisors is because they fail to acknowledge these skepticisms that prospective clients have. And an online survey conducted by Harris Poll, on behalf of McAdam, it found that 71% of Americans say some aspect of talking with a financial advisor, scares them. So, if your LinkedIn strategy doesn't counteract this skepticism, it's going to fail, I promise you. If you're a financial advisor, you are not like a high-ticket consultant selling a course or a program or a product or whatever. You're not selling shoes. You're not selling clothes. You're not selling toilet paper products or food. You're not selling spices that you could put on baby back ribs. You're selling something that people are inherently, inherently skeptical of financial advice and things dealing with money. So, you have to get over that first. There are other programs out there. There's a lot of advice about LinkedIn that is amazing for other businesses and it works for other people, but financial advisors need a different approach. I'm dead serious, it blows my mind that financial advisors think they can go to a standard LinkedIn program and get the results that that they want can when compared to a program that is designed specifically for financial advisors and specifically to overcome that first big level of skepticism. [17:16.3]
So, what is a financial advisor to do? Well, the best way in my experience and my opinion is to build real relationships with real people. So financial advisors who see the most success with LinkedIn, they combine a mix of both inbound and outbound marketing strategies. So, I talk about that and how to get clients from LinkedIn. I can't cover all the material in a single podcast episode, nor do I want to, because it's probably proprietary information. But if you want to get three new clients in the next 30 days, you're going to have to go heavy on direct outreach. Yeah. Inbound marketing is awesome. It's cool to get clients, you create content, they reach out to you. You have a status update; they reach out to you because they like it. The inbound marketing is great. I love inbound marketing. But if the goal of this podcast episode is to show you ways to get three new clients in the next 30 days, direct outreach is the way to go. And the step two having successful direct outreach on LinkedIn is to know your numbers. Just as you would never create a budget or a savings plan without knowing certain numbers, you should never approach any marketing strategy without having a sense of how the numbers are going to work in your favor. So here are some important numbers to know. [18:23.5]
You want to know your connection acceptance rate. So, if you send 100 connection requests to people in your niche, how many of those people accept your request? Then you want to know your appointment setting rate. If you engage 100 people in your niche through a direct message or something like that, how many of them set appointments with you? Then you want to know your client conversion rate. So, if you set appointments with 100 people, how many them end up becoming clients? And once you know the answers to those questions, LinkedIn becomes a numbers game. I'm not fan of saying that marketing is a numbers game, or sales is a numbers game because you want to reach out to more people and you want to be better at what you do. But in this sense, do you, you can kind of reverse engineer everything and see exactly what you need to do in order to get three clients in the next 30 days, the only limit is how can and you're willing to be, but you don't even have to take it, take my word for it here. You don't have to believe James Pollard, even though like I've helped thousands of financial advisors with their LinkedIn marketing. [19:18.1]
According to Putnam social advisor survey, 94% of advisors seeing success use direct messaging capabilities on social platforms. Let me read that one more time. 94% of financial advisors who see success, basically getting clients on social media, they use direct messaging capabilities. Again, inbound marketing is awesome. I love posting content. I love it when people reach out because they see the content or whatever, but the numbers do not lie. According to Putnam, social advisor survey, nearly 100% of financial advisors are getting new clients because of direct outreach. And they do that on places like LinkedIn. So, so pay attention to what I'm telling you here, because the success of your direct outreach will be in direct proportion to how personalized you make it. This is the hard truth most people don't want to accept. They would rather automate everything or they would rather have some copy and paste secret. And again, I love automation. I've said it before. I'll say it again. I love automation. I have automated emails. I have automated webinars, workflows. It's a ton of automated stuff in The Advisor Coach as a business. But my conversions just speaking personally now, they started increasing when I included real touches in my marketing. Because if everyone is zigging, you should zag. This means you should look for connection points with people in your niche. That way you can sprinkle your messaging connection requests with things like this. Oh, we went to the same school, we used to at the same company or my dad worked at same company. My mom worked at the same company. My brother did this. We volunteer for the same organization. I see you engaged on a post about doctors without borders. I love doctors without borders. Do you, are you a member? Do you serve them in a certain way? It could go. I could go on and on and on with this. [21:04.5]
The personalized outreach will be far more effective than the other copy and paste scripts that are out there. So, here's a sample breakdown of what your numbers might look like. You might send connection requests to a 100 people in your niche, let's say 30 of them accept. I have testimonials where one person in particular said that she got a 44% acceptance requests, but I want to be conservative here. So, a 100 people, 30 accept, three agree to meet with you and one becomes a client. So, you rinse and repeat that three times, you're done. You don't even have to do the referral blitz. If you stack the referral blitz on top of the LinkedIn outreach, you're going to get more than three clients in the next 30 days. And if you want to make your direct outreach, even more effective, include a video in your messages. There are tons of video messaging services out there like BombBomb, Loom. I love loom, that's the one I use. They are two good ones. You basically install the Chrome extension or you use the app or you have the desk desktop software. You bring it up, you click record, you look at the camera, you smile, you wave. You show the person that you're on the person's LinkedIn profile, that way they know you're not just copying and pasting. They know you're not Bsing them. And you say what you want to say, you stop you copy and paste the link, you put it in there. It literally takes less than a minute aside from recording the video. So, if you want to make your direct outreach way more effective use video in it. So that is strategy number two. [22:30.0]
Strategy number three, the final strategy I'm going to give you for getting three new clients in the next 30 days as a financial advisor is the King. It's the email Bonanza strategy. Now I've said it many times in my newsletter. I've said it many times on this podcast. Email is by far the most effective appointments setting strategy I've ever seen for financial advisors. Again, you don't have to take my word it, check out these statistics. According to McKinsey and company email is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. According to Y-charts, clients for email over all other forms of communication and not even close. According to campaign monitor email average is a 4400% percent return on investment. According to Forrester, people are twice as likely to sign up through your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook. That blows a lot of people's minds, but it is true. And I take pride in giving you this data. I want to give you the information that you can verify on your own. Don't just take my word for it. Don't just be like, Oh, I heard this guy talk about email, but financial advisors, so I'm going to start email marketing. No, no, no. Don't do that. Look up the information, figure it out for yourself. Then come back, go through appointments on autopilot, figure out how you can make it work for you. Is you get more clients with email? [23:41.4]
Other people like giving you theories, I like giving you facts. So, whenever I bring up email marketing, one of the biggest objections to financial advisors have is the whole email list size objections. So, people will be like, Oh, well, don't you need a big email list? So, the answer is no, you don't need big list, especially if you have a niche. So let me explain why you don't need a big list. I'll use a story about credit cards, because again, when I've said this before, but when I step outside of the financial services or financial advisor industry, like financial planning, people tend to remove the biases. They're not so close and they're not so attached to the business. So let me use this story. [24:18.7]
As of 2019, there were 3.3 billion Visa cards and over 2 billion Master cards’ circulating out there in the wild, in different people's wallets. That's a lot of credit cards. That's five over 5 billion credit cards, but what about American express? They only had 114 million cards issued. So, if you do the math, you see that there were 29 visa cards for every American express. There were 17 MasterCard's for every American express. So, Visa and MasterCard must be dominating the credit card space, right? Hmm…No, because American Express crushes them in total revenue. Amex makes more money than Visa and MasterCard combined. Think about that. There are 29 visa cards for every one American Express. There are 17 MasterCards for every one American Express, but American Express still dominates in terms of total revenue. Because as a premium brand Amex, isn't concerned with how many cards are issued. They're not trying to cast a wide net. This is like having a big, huge, massive email list. Amex pays attention to how much money they make from each cardholder would that allows them to make a heck of a lot more money. And I think that's a good model for financial advisors to follow. Because instead of wasting a bunch of time, money and effort on trying to build this huge email list. And by the way, if you want to build a huge email list is fairly easy to do. I talk about that in appointments, on autopilot, anybody with a pulse, anybody with a credit card can build an email list online these days, but you don't need a big one. [25:51.7]
So, to illustrate which email list, do you think will lead to more clients? An email list with 1000 people from the general population or an email list with 500 dentists being targeted by a financial advisor who's serves dentists. Hmm. I hope that makes sense. So, let's run through some more numbers. Campaign Monitor reports that the average open rate for the financial services industry is 24.8%. The average click through rate, basically how many people click the links in the email is 2.7% This means if you have a list, an email list of 500 people, 124 of them will open your emails, that's the average, drop dead average email open rate and 3 of them will click through to your appointment page. So, you can quickly see how the math works in your favor. And this is every single email, by the way and it's not even like those same 124 people were open your emails. Of course, there'll be some overlap, but as you send another email and another one, different people will open different people will click your link because people open email at their leisure. And if you're, if you're sending emails frequently, it will bump to the top of their inbox. It will catch attention that way, but you can easily see how the math will work out. You got 120 for opening your emails, three click through to your appointment page. If your appointment page is even halfway decent, someone's going to set an appointment with you. [27:09.8]
So, here's how the process works. I'm going to be super-duper, extra clear with this, because this is an episode about getting three new clients in the next 30 days. And the whole idea here is that if I help you get results in advance, you'll be significantly more likely to come back and subscribe to something like the inner circle newsletter, because you want more results. I mean, this is just me transparent. So, this is what it looks like. You write a sequence of 5 to 10 emails, you can hire The Advisor Coach, if you want to want us to literally give you the emails, but you write 5 to 10. Most financial advisors will write those emails in one batch, and then they'll send the entire batch to compliance for approval. That way they don't have to go through compliance with one email and then they say yes or no. And then they go back to compliance with another email and yes or no, they just write the whole batch and send it to compliance. [27:56.7]
So, once it's approved, you take that sequence that you wrote, you upload an auto responder service like MailChimp, constant contact, drip, Infusionsoft, lead pilot. You're looking for an auto responder sequence or an auto responder service, I should say. And auto responder ensures that your emails are sent to people on your list in the predetermined sequence you choose. So, someone who subscribes today, we'll go through the exact same sequence in the exact same way as someone who subscribes next Tuesday, someone who subscribes to Wednesday after that, somebody who subscribes the, for Saturdays after that, this is critical. They all get the same messages and the same way at the same time. It's designed to convert. And this is critical because in the mere exposure effect, this is a psychological phenomenon by which people feel a preference for something merely because they're familiar with it. And this means by going through this sequence, your prospective clients will be psychologically wired to prefer you over everyone else. This is the science behind why email marketing is so incredibly effective. You can also see why it's effective in places like LinkedIn. People see you on LinkedIn again and again, and again and again, the mere exposure effect works. Something like this podcast, you hear my voice again and again, and again, you're more likely to, to like me, it's just science. This is why email marketing works really well. And I broke the numbers down for you. If you want to get three more clients, you can see exactly how this works. It’s just so gosh, darn effective. [29:21.6]
So, there you have it. Those are three strategies you can use to get three new clients in the next 30 days. You've got the, the LinkedIn strategy, you've got the referral strategy and you've got the email strategy. Complete with evidence, I've given you the numbers. I've given you the real data behind it. If you liked this episode and it helped you in some way, it would mean the world to me, if you left a review. It would mean the world to me if you shared it with someone who you think could benefit from it as well. And if you take the advice in this podcast episode, I want to hear from you. So, if you go through this and you say, I'm going to do the referral blitz, I'm going to put everybody in my CRM. I'm going to ask for feedback. I'm going to make sure everybody gets me asking for feedback. I'm going to do the LinkedIn outreach strategy. I'm going to use loom. I'm going to use BombBomb. I'm going to set up an autoresponder. If you do any, or all of these things, send me an email james@theadvisorcoach.com. I want to hear from you and I might share your story. I hope this has been helpful. I’ll catch you next week. [30:16.4]
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