You're listening to “Financial Advisor Marketing”—the best show on the planet for financial advisors who want to get more clients, without all the stress. You're about to get the real scoop on everything from lead generation to closing the deal.
James is the founder of TheAdvisorCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisors grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard.
James: In this week's podcast episode, I'm going to answer a question I get relatively frequently from financial advisors, and that's “How long does it take to get results with marketing?” The reason this is such a difficult question to answer directly is because you need to know at least two things. What do you consider results, and what do you consider marketing?
Asking me how long it takes to get results from marketing is like someone asking you how long it takes to reach financial independence. You need to know a little bit more about the situation, including where the person is now, where the person wants to be, and some information about that person's behavior at a minimum. [01:04.3]
Also, what is financial independence to that person? Some people believe that financial independence occurs immediately after your passive income exceeds your expenses. I personally believe it's when your passive income exceeds your expenses, plus a buffer second opinion you're protected in the future. That's financial independence to me. The term “results” can mean different things to different financial advisors.
There are also different levels of results. For instance, if I'm helping an Inner Circle member improve his online ads, a good result would be lowering his cost per click, which is a proxy for lowering his cost per appointment. I don't really focus on cost per click that much, but I will be straight up with you and I’ll say if all things are equal, then lowering the cost per click is a good thing. [01:47.0]
However, in the real world, practically speaking, simply lowering that might not be the right move, because it might impact some other thing in the marketing funnel and cause the cost per client to go up. That's the number I care about the most, how much does it cost a financial advisor to acquire a client, and how much is that relative to what the financial advisor makes, because if an advisor earns $3,000 profit from each client each year, then it will be a fantastic result, in my opinion, to acquire clients for anything less than $1,500 each.
But most advisors don't think like that. They don't think in terms of client acquisition and building the business that way. If you can spend $1 in your marketing campaigns and get $2 back, that is an amazing move, and you shouldn't really have a marketing budget in the sense that you limit how much you're spending profitably.
If I'm helping a financial advisor with his email marketing funnel, then a good result might be increasing the landing page conversion rate or increasing open rates, both of which would theoretically boost the number of appointments the advisor gets, all else being equal. So, you have to know what the term “results” means to you? [02:54.7]
If I'm going to speak generally here, which I kind of have to do since it's a podcast, then I will say that getting results means getting clients, and if that's the case, then the answer is it depends. It's pretty common for marketing coaches, consultants, gurus and lead gen companies to tell financial advisors that it takes a ton of time, it could take years to get results from their marketing, and call me cynical if you want, but I think part of the reason they do that is so they can squeeze as much money out of you as they possibly can.
Now, if you know me, you know that I am 100% in favor of investing money, if there is a return. I'm not saying you shouldn't give these people money, but you should only pay the price if you can get the promise and to be fair, there are some things that take a lot of time to see results. For example, if I'm trying to reach a specific person, and get that person to do a specific thing, then it can take years. I personally have deals that I’ve been working on for years that still have not gone through, and I'm still working on them. [03:52.5]
But let me try to give you a general idea of various marketing strategies and about how long it takes to get results. Let's start with a marketing strategy I believe is highly underrated, is something I try to push with my Inner Circle members and I’ve tried to get them to use this because it is so effective when done correctly, and that's direct mail.
I’ve had other people in the marketing space laugh at me because I suggest people try direct mail. But what's really funny is that these campaigns can consistently crank out thousands of dollars per mailing and you can roll them out as long as you have people on your list so you can laugh all the way to the bank.
I actually built two separate businesses using direct mail. It's so fun to me at least being able to put a stamp on something and know within a few days it will be in the recipients’ hands, and you get to choose exactly who you want to mail. You don't have to wait for someone to accept a friend request or accept a connection request. You don't have to be dependent on some software. You don't have to be dependent on an algorithm. You just stamp it, address it and put that thing into mail. You can say, “I want to send this to Joe Smith at this address,” and as long as you have the postage it will get delivered, or at least it should in theory. I know that post office employees UPS and FedEx, they sometimes go rogue, I get that, but, typically, it has a great delivery rate. [05:07.0]
Plus, direct mail has an extraordinarily high, quote-unquote, open rate, if you do it correctly, and let's face it, it makes you stand out because so few people are doing it. Very few people are doing direct mail, and even the ones who are doing it kind of suck at it and then, obviously, they don't get results in, they skew the averages down. If you see a statistic like the average ROI on direct mail is 98%, realize that most companies are terrible at direct mail, so if you get it right, the ROI is ridiculous, and it doesn't take six months or a year to do this.
Let's say you're going to start with a list of 1,000 people. I would send Mailing No. 1 to 500 of those people and Mailing No.2 to the second group of 500 people. I would use a different phone number on each of these mailings. My call to action would be to make a phone call or to text, or to connect with you on social media, basically something that the person can easily do from a cell phone. That's the takeaway that I want you to get. Your call to action in direct mail needs to be something where the person can pull his or her phone out of a pocket and immediately do it. [06:11.5]
You can boost your response rates. If it's a phone call, for example, you can say that you or your automated answering service will answer 24/7. That way, if the person is checking the mail after business hours, he or she can still feel comfortable calling because if it's 9:00 p.m. and that person is finally checking the mail and standing over the wastebasket, that person can see, Oh, it's nine o'clock. Should I call? Oh yeah, they're available 24/7.
But anyway, you should send two separate mailers and track which one got better results. If Mailer No. 1 got better results, then you should get rid of Mailer No. 2, and either roll out Mailer No. 1 to more people or do another test. I personally would do another test, because I'm always improving and I want to get better and better over time. [06:55.1]
But what I want you to realize is that if you're a financial advisor who works specifically with nurses and you get, let's just say, 20 phone calls from mailing 500 letters, then you can scale up as long as you're happy with those results. If you're thrilled with those 20 phone calls, then you can scale to another list of 500 nurses, then another one, then another one, and another one, and so on.
Another marketing strategy is email marketing that's been, in my experience, the most effective appointment-setting strategy for financial advisors, bar none. If you're able to implement the way I do email marketing, then you know it's pretty much like printing money. You get money hand over fist. If you currently have an email list and you can get, quote-unquote, results in as little as a day because all you have to do is tighten things up and mail the list, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to give you two real world examples from Inner Circle members that I’ve helped in the past few weeks. [07:46.8]
The first Inner Circle member, he had an email list of 419 people, but he hadn't sent them any emails in about a month. He tried to do the whole weekly email thing, which I do not recommend, by the way. I recommend daily emails but in an autoresponder sequence, so you really don't have to write any emails. He tried to write emails once per week and then he fell off track, because he was doing every Saturday morning, he was sending out this super-long email with all of these resources and tips and tricks, and it's just completely the wrong way to do email.
I gave him a specific email marketing script to use to reengage his list and he ended up getting six appointments that same day from an email list that was practically on life support. That's pretty darn good. I also explained to him that if he didn't want to fall off track in the future that he should do email marketing my way, which is by setting up an email autoresponder sequence and letting that sequence do the work for you, because as long as you have your sequence of emails, then you can kick back and let those get sent for you automatically, no matter what you're doing. The machine will literally never miss a day.
The second Inner Circle member actually did email marketing my way, so congratulations to him, but he didn't have a big enough list. He had a list, it was a tiny list, but for all intents and purposes, let's say that he was starting from scratch. [09:07.7]
Here's what he did. He created a lead magnet specifically for his niche. Second, he created an email autoresponder sequence just like I talked about. I don't know how many emails he had in there, but if he's following my recommendations, then there should be at least five, because the majority of appointments get set after five follow-up attempts.
Now, that does not necessarily mean email because you should follow up with direct mail, you should follow up with social media, you should follow up in other places, but the reason I want you to have at least five emails in your email autoresponder sequence is so that if the person only knows you from your emails, you can get to that magical five number. Then he created a landing page where people could subscribe to his email list and get that free lead magnet. Once people subscribed to his email list, they were immediately put into that email autoresponder sequence, which followed up for him on autopilot every single day until the sequence was finished. That is the whole idea. [10:02.7]
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 $1,000 worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren't available anywhere else. Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more.
I told him to start by posting his lead magnet on social media and nowhere else, no online ads, nothing. That way, he could be reasonably certain that the only place these subscribers came from was social media. Of course, I know he could have used tracking software. I use tracking software all the time because I want to know, if three months ago, if someone clicked on an ad and that person finally converted today, I want to know that person's entire journey. He didn't want to do that, because he didn't want to get too complex, so I kept it simple for him. He shared his lead magnet and the landing page on Facebook and LinkedIn, and he got 63 subscribers within a few days. Out of those 63 subscribers, 19 of them set appointments with him, 19. [11:09.0]
Now, to be clear, that is an exceptional result. I do not want you to get the impression that you will achieve a similar result, 19 for every 63, because you won't. I'm not even going to say you probably won't. You just will not. If you roll out over time, that number is not going to stay constant. You also need to realize that these subscribers are from his social media accounts, so they already know, like and trust him at least a little bit. That’s why the number is so high.
But now what I want him to do is I want him to roll his lead magnet and his landing page out with online ads, because you can get the results with online ads in as little as a day, and as long as you have a good market to message match, you can hit the ground running rather quickly.
If you don't have a good market to message match, then it could take forever to get results. You probably won't get them at all. I mean, how long does it take to sell telescopes to earthworms or steaks to vegans, or motor oil to people with electric cars? [12:02.8]
Yet, if you're a financial advisor who, again, let's go back to the nurse example, you work specifically with nurses and you have a lead magnet that's specific to nurses, and you run an online ad to your landing page to an audience of nurses, then you should not have that much difficulty in building your email list, assuming you have something people want.
Many financial advisors have it backward. They think that growing the email list is the hardest part of email marketing. It’s actually not. The hardest part is knowing what to say. The hardest part is knowing how to write emails that get great results, and I think one of the worst things that can happen to financial advisors is that they get good results with bad messaging. But email marketing is so effective that even the good results seem amazing compared to other things.
If someone has a terrible email marketing strategy and is still profitable, that person is going to be like, I must be doing something right, I'm a genius. They never realized that if someone like me came in and just made a couple tweaks, that I could 5x the results pretty much like breathing. [13:01.7]
Oh, and by the way, if you do share your landing page on social media, I want you to know that most people are lurkers. I shared a 53-minute video called the “CLIENT Method” on LinkedIn and only a handful of people engaged with it on there, but it ended up getting nearly 200 email subscribers for me in a day or two.
So, don't be discouraged if you're not getting a lot of likes and comments, because people are likely still paying attention to you and your material as long as you're showing up on social media. Plus, they can become a part of your world if you have an enticing offer and you give them a place to go.
And if you'd like to get that 53-minute video called the “CLIENT Method,” you can get it by going to TheAdvisorCoach.com/theClientMethod, T-H-E “the”, C-L-I-E-N-T “client”, “method” M-E-T-H-O-D, the CLIENT Method. That video is unlike anything else I’ve ever created because I’ve refined my entire client-getting process into six simple steps, which any financial advisor can follow. One more time, you can get that by going to TheAdvisorCoach.com/theClientMethod. [14:04.0]
Speaking of social media, I will say that social media is a strange beast when it comes to getting results, because on one hand, you can send people directly to your landing pages or websites like we just discussed and you can get results fairly quickly. You can also comment on people's posts and you can message them, and you can have a real conversation with them and you can end up at the point where they're asking how they can hire you.
Both of those are fast, but then you have the other people who are connected with you on social media. These are the people who sit on the sidelines and watch. These are the people who aren't ready yet. These are the ones who want to check you out and see if you're legit. They take a long time. Remember how I said I have deals that I'm working on and I have been working on them for years and they still haven't gone through yet? I'm connected with the people involved on social media. They see me. Everything I do builds trust, rapport and credibility with them. When they're ready, they will make the move, because they know I'm ready. [14:58.6]
I don't like the term “nurture” when it comes to marketing, but I do think social media is a great way for financial advisors to nurture connections, because if you're connected on social media, then people can see your post, they can see what you're doing, they can see what you're up to. Even if someone only sees one of your posts per week, you could be posting three times a week, five times a week, but let's just assume that someone only sees one per week, that can still add up to 52 posts per year.
Those are 52 touches where that person sees your beautiful face and your name and your personal brand gets stronger every time. If you're on LinkedIn, that person sees your headline. If your headline is “I help nurses plan for retirement” and you're getting in front of nurses, that is really powerful stuff. It also adds a tremendous sense of credibility, because people will see that you're serious about your business and you're serious about the people you serve. Otherwise, you wouldn't even be showing up that much.
I had another Inner Circle member tell me he was going to a conference to involve in his niche in Orlando, Florida and he was giving a list of influencers or sponsors or something who were part of this event, and he asked me how he should use that list. [16:05.8]
I told him to play the long game, because here's what's going to happen. Right after the event, everyone is going to reach out to these people and attempt to sell them stuff. They're going to hound them, annoy them and bother them. You don't want to be another face in the crowd.
What you want to do is introduce yourself at the event, if possible. That way, you can get some face time and you can shake hands. You can introduce yourself. You're right there. Then, after the event, wait a little bit and connect with them on social media.
The reason you want to connect on social media is because you can continue showing up, because let's say 100 people contact these influencers or celebrities, or sponsors or whatever, after the event. Eighty of them will likely only contact one time and be done, because let's be honest, that's what most people do. They just try once, one and done and give up. They give you the old prospecting version of wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am. Then most of the other 20 will drop off over time. Then my Inner Circle member, the top 1%, because he's connected on social media, will continue to build and develop that relationship over time. [17:10.6]
And guess what will happen? People in these influencers’ audiences will see him. The influencers will see him. People will get content ideas. They will see him as more credible. They might be willing to work with him on other projects. Does something like that happen quickly? Absolutely not. But is it worth it? Yes.
To wrap up this episode, let's circle back to the big question. How long does it take to get results from marketing? The answer, as I’ve already said and as you’ve probably gathered by now, is that it truly does depend. It depends on your goals, your strategies, and even your definition of what results actually mean to you. It depends on what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you've done in the past, who you're targeting, how credible you are, what assets you have, and so much more. All of these things influence how quickly you can get results from your marketing. [17:58.6]
If you're a financial advisor looking for quick wins, strategies like direct mail and targeted email marketing can yield results in a matter of days or weeks. So can online ads. But if you're playing the long game, building relationships through social media or content marketing, or building marketing assets, like I’ve talked about in many episodes on this podcast, that might take months or even years to see the fruits of your labor, and that's okay. The key is to understand what you're getting into and set your expectations accordingly.
Don't fall for the trap of thinking that marketing is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It's not. Don't fall for the trap that marketing can happen super-duper quickly or that it takes a super-duper long time, because, again, it depends. Your journey is unique to you and your results will be, too. So, whether you're an inner circle member or you're someone who just stumbled on this podcast, I encourage you to take a step back, evaluate your goals and choose the marketing strategies that align with them. [18:55.0]
If you found value in this episode, I'd appreciate it if you could leave a review or, even better, share it with someone who might benefit, and if you want to dive deeper into the world of financial advisor marketing, make sure you check out the paper-and-ink newsletter, the James Pollard Inner Circle, and that 53-minute video the CLIENT Method, which, again, you can get at TheAdvisorCoach.com/theClientMethod.
Thank you so much for tuning in, and until next time, keep pushing forward and making smart marketing moves that will propel your business to the next level. I'll catch you next week.
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