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: Financial Advisors, I'm going to say thank you for listening to the show. I appreciate you. I'm glad you're here. If this show helps you share with a friend, leave a review, find another financial advisor who can use this, let him or her know about it. Sharing is caring and it means the world to me. I don't want to mention the name of the podcast, so please don't mention it at all. But yesterday, Jonathan, I sent you a little message and I shared that my, this podcast, Financial Advisor Marketing is getting better download numbers, getting in front of more people than one of the biggest podcasts out there and the game for financial advisors. [01:10.1]
Jonathan: Yeah man. And I am proud of you, number one. It, it shows that this is working and number two, who hasn't heard about this in the financial advisor marketing space.
James: Now, just because I don't know, I got to tread very carefully because I don't want to give any hints as to what the show is, but financial advisors, if you're listening, there's a show out there that has a pretty big backing, pretty a big horsepower, pretty big everything that they could use to promote the show and market the show since this is about marketing. And isn't it interesting that the person who is helping financial advisors with marketing is able to market his own show. I don't have as many episodes as the other show either. That's not really a hint because there are a lot of shows out there that have more episodes than me. I don't have as as many episodes. So, I have achieved this growth faster than they have, and they have a way bigger engine behind them. So, I'll leave it at that. [02:13.9]
It is very, very, very interesting because a lot of people try to flex in certain ways and like, oh, I've got this podcast. Oh, great. Do you have a blog? Oh no. I don't have a blog. I’d shoot a podcast or I've got this blog. It's like, oh great. You've got a blog. Do you have a podcast? No. I just write and do content marketing. Interesting. And you've got people who are like, oh, I have this big YouTube channel. Great. Do you do anything else? Nope. So, at The Advisor Coach, we're running a business where we have written content, we have email, we've got the newsletter, we've got information products, we got the podcasts. We like cranking. And to know that, I mean, for years, our blog is doing better than 99% of the financial advisor blogs out there. And to now know that the podcast is also doing better, and we knew that the email marketing and the email lists, we had a bigger email list. I think we had the biggest email list for financial advisors on planet earth. I cleaned it out a lot. A lot of people would brag Oh, I've got 50,000 email subscribers. Oh yeah, dude. That's awesome. But you haven't deleted anybody for 15 years. We're deleting everybody or not everybody. We are deleting people. [03:19.7]
Jonathan: You’re gone.
James: Every 30 days. And our email list is literally bigger. I don't want to say it's the biggest on the planet because we are cutting people out. If they, if they act funny, we unsubscribing right away. So, we're pretty harsh for that kind of stuff. But if we didn't delete anyone, we'd be by far not even close to the biggest email list on the world. It's, it's just, I'm so honored. Like it's crazy. It's mind blowing. I had no idea that I would even be here, well, I had a little bit of an idea. I don't want to say I had no idea, but it's it's surreal knowing that the other show they've got such, they got more infrastructure. You know what I mean? I don't want to give too much away, but you know what I'm talking about? [03:57.5]
Jonathan: I feel you, James.
James: We’ll see what's going on.
Jonathan: I feel you, James.
James: So, this week I want to discuss what I think is the most neglected marketing strategy financial advisors can use. It's not sexy. It's not trendy. And in fact, it's pretty much the opposite of sexy and trendy, but I'm gonna leave you hanging. I'm gonna tickle your curiosity glance. And I want to ask, since we're talking about podcasting, you have the Results Leader podcast, Jonathan and I like it. It's one of the few shows that I actually listened to you because you have people on there who share the results, who are real business, people who are actually making a lot of money and sharing what they're doing to make a lot of money. So, since you were the host of that show, I figured you'd be the best person to ask. So far after talking to all these business owners, all these entrepreneurs, all these incredible people, what are a few lessons that have stuck out so far? [04:49.9]
Jonathan: Gosh well thank you for, for plugging the show and thank you for being a guest on the show. By the time this is out, your episode should be out there, so go listen to that. But I think I'm not, I don't really feel like I'm the host of the show as much as the shepherd of the conversation and I'm just trying to get the most out of our guests and what I've learned and what I really like and the feedback I'm getting from the team and from people that listen to the show is that we, the people we have on the show, we bet them, you know, that. We make sure that they're doing what they say they're doing before they get on the show. But we all care about the people we serve and we're there to serve. And what I like is that there is no right way. Like I get up crack of dawn, you get up in the afternoon, but we're both obsessed with getting results for our clients. And that's, that's really, what's fun about it. It's like people with different ideas, people coming from, and we have, dude, we have people, blue collar, we have white collar, we have tech people, all kinds of people. All different ways to get results. We're all obsessed with getting results in serving, but there isn't a one size fits all answer. I think that's the biggest lesson I've gotten today. [06:08.8]
James: Well, there are just so many winners who have been on that show. And like within The Podcast Factory, I mean, I've been honored to learn from Todd Caponi, learned from Joe Ferraro. I was on that call. He got a chance to ask him a questions and ask him stuff specific to the podcast and become a better human being within five minutes. I mean, ask him, Hey, I have a problem. He responds, here's the solution to your problem. That's.
Jonathan: Magic.
James: That's super valuable.
Jonathan: Yeah. Good times, man. Thank you for the plug. I appreciate that.
James: You are welcome. So financial advisors, the title of the show is The Most Neglected, Yet Profitable Marketing Strategy for you, Financial Advisors. And here's what it is. I'm going to tell you right now; it's having real touches in your marketing. Everybody's trying to automate these days and don't get it twisted. Automation is awesome. I love automation. I have a ton of automated responses, processes, systems, that sort of thing in my business. Automated email is awesome. Automated webinars are awesome. But when I started adding real touches to these, my conversions went up. This is probably going to be one of the most valuable podcast episodes ever. I hope people don't sleep on this. Cause I really mean this. I've seen behind the scenes of financial advisors and not just advisors, but other business owners. And you've got my business and this is been a game changer across the board. [07:32.2]
So whenever inner circle members will email me and ask about automation, I would respond back and I would give my suggestions, but I would tell them to make sure they include a human touch or something that people can tell isn't automated. Because there have been marketers who they pride themselves on automating things and making them look real. So, webinars it’s a big one where they try to make it feel like a live webinar, even though it's not live. They're like, Hey, come to my webinars and ask questions. And they've got their software out there. Like every webinar or webinar jam is the company that has every webinar , you've got a lot of different softwares that will allow you to auto-populate questions in the chat that are just completely fraudulent. They're not real. The people don't exist. And there are marketers out there who use this technology to make it appear live, but people can see through the BS. They know that that's not the case. [08:32.3]
If you're on my email list, you know that the very first email you received from me, I acknowledged the fact that it's an automated email. And I say, even though this is an automated email, I would appreciate you responding back to me. So that's like a little bit of a real touch. It's not the whole thing. It's not the real real touch, but I acknowledged that it's automated. I have found that when you go out your way, instead of having something automated and going out of your way to make it look real, if you just have something real and take that effort and make it real, it changes everything. So, I asked to inner circle members to follow up with their results. So, I gave them some advice as, Hey, puts a couple real touches in there. And this is what got me started on this track where I started thinking about this. [09:19.6]
Several people told me there was improved, and this means it's something that's been proven to work. So, I've shared this with other business owners. I have I've implemented in my business before I sold the inner circle members, but I've implemented it even more sense and it has been incredible. So, what I'd like to do with this podcast episode is give examples of things that people are trying to automate and lay out some ways I would zag while everyone else is zigging. I think that's the saying, you gotta zag when everyone else eggs or you've got to Zig while everyone else zags or something like that. So, the first one obviously is going to be email marketing. I love email marketing because it can be automated. That's like the crux of appointments on autopilot. I've talked many times about how financial advisors can create a sequence of 5 to 10 emails, insert them into an autoresponder and use those to quite literally set appointments on autopilot, that's where the title comes from. The trick, however, is knowing what to say in those emails. So, if you want help with that, reach out to us over the james@theadvisorcoach.com, we will point you in the direction of the program that I've created that shows you exactly what to say. [10:25.4]
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. [10:48.0]
James: So, email can be automated. It's awesome when it's automated, because it means people can join your email list and they can receive your follow-up without any additional effort from you. You could be on a beach somewhere, you could be working, you could be sleeping, it doesn't matter. Someone who signs up today is going to go through the same sequence as someone who signed up two weeks ago, and someone who signs up two weeks from now is going to go through the same sequence. However, you want to make sure people know they can respond to your emails and you actually read them and you actually respond to those emails. People appreciate knowing that there's a real human being on the other end of those emails. Honestly, a lot of big companies could improve their emails with this one thing alone. A lot of consumers don't interact with marketing emails because they don't believe that they'll be read by people. [11:37.4]
I mean, have you ever received an email from a company and it was a no reply email or like a do not reply. That's one of the worst things they can do because it kills engagement. And it's one of the worst things you can do. If you've got like info@yourwebsite.com or something that you don't want to do, that you want to do the opposite of that. And you want to encourage engagement, be super clear, say something like I read and respond to emails and I want to hear it from you. Even if you put that in your signature, if you put that in your footer, you can say, Hey, I want you to know that I read and respond to every email. Please feel free to respond back with your thoughts with questions. Then when someone emails you respond, it's not rocket science say thank you for the email. You could ask a question. If they have provided something to you, you could add to the conversation in some way, because then your email subscribers will know you're not just another financial advisor who has a list and everything's just going out. And you're never going to read the email. They're on your email list. And you are the one who cares enough to actually respond. There's a huge difference. [12:45.1]
So, I want that to sink in for financial advisors. The next thing that people try to automate is social media. I do want to mention with the webinar thing. So, if you go to theadvisorcoach.com/webinar and sign up for that webinar, it's about email marketing and it will go in depth in some of the most effective strategies I've ever found for email marketing. And in that email or the webinar, what we use to do, it used to be automated and we used to have a time sensitive offer. Yes, I offer you something on that webinar. I run a business, that's kind of short of what I have to do, but it used to be, Hey, here's a deadline timer. You go to this, this page, there's a deadline timer on the page. When the time runs out, it's over. What we changed it to was we have someone monitoring the attendees and we made an offer. We say, if you sign up to that webinar, there's an offer that we make you that is good for 24 hours. Rather than having a timer and automating it and making it impersonal. What we do is when people take advantage of that offer, someone, either me, if it's late at night, I'll be the one to do it. If it's like the weekend, I'll be the one to do it. If it's during the weekday, somebody from my team will check that out. They will actually log into the webinar software. They will make sure that you attended in the last 24 hours. A real human being is checking us. And then a real human being will send you the email with the additional stuff that comes with the offer, if you take advantage of it in the first 24 hours, that was a huge success compared to automating it. And it's just nothing for example, what you could do in your business. And I talk about Metta value and one or two podcast episodes ago. And this is an example of meta value, cause even if you're a financial advisor who isn't using webinars, I want you to understand that it's not the tactic of webinars is the strategy of adding a real human touch. So, moving on, the next thing people try to automate is social media. [14:43.5]
I want to stress again. Automating can be a good thing. I do recommend automating social media. However, what I’m seeing here is that you want to stock real human activity on top of your social media automation. You don't want to get rid of your social media automation. It saves you time, it’s incredible. I love it. But you want to stack something real on top with social media, this is as easy as logging into your accounts and seeing who has liked and commented on your stuff. You could engage with other people's stuff. And at the time of this recording, you can see your feed with a tool like buffer or Hootsuite, which means that you can see when people in your niche post content, because if you're on your feed and you're trying to follow some influencers and engage with them, that sort of thing, you can see it through these tools. So, if you follow a social media philosophy, like I teach, you will want to engage with people in your niche. [15:35.1]
So having too much automation and depending on these tools, just them, it prevents you from engaging in the way that you should. It's that simple. When you automate your social media and you never look at it directly, you're making the conscious decision to not engage with other people on that platform. All you're doing is treating it like a megaphone. You're blasting out your message to the world, but places like LinkedIn, they're called social networking sites, networking sites, for a reason. A big part of their effectiveness comes from networking and building a network plus. And this is just anecdotal evidence. This is just me. I've noticed that my reach tends to be higher when I post directly on LinkedIn. Now I'm not going to log in every single time and post every single status update directly on LinkedIn, but I have noticed is, it's not as true for text updates or status updates with a photo, but it's really true for articles. [16:28.1]
So, an article I share through buffer, it might get 200 clicks, 300 clicks. It's just not that much, right? But the same article I shared directly with my LinkedIn network might get 500, 800 a 1000, 2000 collects. That's a big difference. And me taking the time to post directly on social media, with articles and stuff like that, it can add up to thousands of extra clicks over the course of a month. And that's that's as good as money in the bank if you've got your marketing machine tight. So, think about that. Think about putting a real human touch on your social media. Put the app on your phone. Don't use it during the day, but at nighttime or when you're waiting somewhere, when you're hanging out, when you're chilling, watching TV, a commercial way comes on, log in to LinkedIn, reach out to people, engage with them. It's just something you got to do. [17:13.8]
Finally, I want to talk about CRMs. We've talked a lot about CRMs in the last episode, because it's failing to track your activity is one of the biggest inbound marketing mistakes financial advisors make. But I want to talk about them in this episode because many people, especially those who follow sales trainers, they had this dream of having a completely hands-off CRM. And you can do it, if you really want to. A lot of CRMs, these days will integrate with other tools. That's what we talked about. For example, you can integrate your CRM with your email list, it will automatically log whenever you reach out to a prospective client. You can integrate your CRM with your social media accounts, it will log when you message someone online. It's a beautiful thing. You can even install your CRM on your phone. You can put the app on there. A lot stuff, not everywhere, but some places have it. When you put the app on your phone, it will keep track of your phone calls and messages automatically, you don't have to input anything manually. That is incredible. However, one of the most valuable reasons why you want to have a CRM as a financial advisor is so you can take notes on your clients and prospective clients. And as far as I know, this has not been automated and it cannot be automated at least not anytime in the near future. Let's say you have a phone call with a prospective client and he says that his son is really into soccer. That part of the conversation, isn't something you can automate. Still, you can take that tidbit of information and you can put it into your CRM as a note. Then if you feel like doing something nice for that person, you can send him a soccer related gift for his son or the next time you have a conversation with him, you can just follow up about the soccer thing. You can go into your CRM; you can be reminded. You will not forget. [18:57.7]
Believe me, clients notice these things. I do too. Me! Like I notice it. I perk up. When I'm dealing with professionals and they bring up something that we talked about in our last conversation or they pay attention, typically I mean, it's something small, but it's cool when they bring it up. For example, I was talking with a painter about painting some of the rooms in the house and he heard some noises in the background and it was a firewood holder being delivered. And he asked me where the noise was. He was like, Hey, are you okay with that noise? I was just say, Hey, it's the firewood, holdher a holder for outside. But then the next time I talk with him, what did he ask? He asked if I got the firewood holdher set up. And I was like, dude, wow. Yes, I did. I did get to set it up. I was super impressed. You want to replicate that same experience for your clients. Because I know that he paid attention and meant a lot to me. He wasn't just waiting to respond. He was actually genuinely listening. So, to recap, you want to add real human touches to the following: email, social media and your CRM. And that's a wrap for this week. [20:02.9]
Jonathan: Ooh, Shorty there. What do you have coming up for us next time, James?
James: We're going to talk about skeptical clients or skeptical potential clients to episodes can be titled How To Get Prospective Clients Off The Fence?
Jonathan: That will work really well with your CRM. All right, awesome. Thank you, fam, for tuning into another episode and we of course will be back as we always are every Monday in your earbuds. See you, then. [20:31.0]
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