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: One of my Inner Circle members asked me how I'd market a financial advisor with $100,000 in available capital. I thought it was such a good question that I wrote an email about it, and not one, but two financial advisors responded, saying they would love to see this fleshed out on a podcast episode, so here I am doing it. I live to serve and serve to live. [00:52.6]
To be clear, you don't need anywhere near that amount of money to successfully market your business, especially because many of the marketing strategies I recommend are either free or extremely low cost to implement. I tried to explore a wide variety of marketing strategies in the podcast and my emails, and the little bit that I do on social media and in the Inner Circle Newsletter. I understand that not everyone has a bunch of money laying around that they can use to experiment with in their businesses, I get it.
But if you have a lot of capital to deploy, then you can do some very interesting stuff. You can make some smart moves and one smart move you can do, shameless plug, is subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter. This episode is scheduled to air on November 4, 2024, so if you're listening to this on that day, there is less than two months left to lock in grandfather pricing to the Inner Circle Newsletter. It's currently $99 per month. I'm increasing the price to $199 per month on January 1, 2025. [01:53.1]
I plan on hammering this pretty hard for the rest of the year to make sure people know, because deadlines exist for a reason. If you know this far in advance of the deadline, you have plenty of time to lock in your spot at $99 per month. You have no excuses if you don't do it. If you lock in before the end of the year, you will continue to pay $99 per month for as long as you are subscribed. If you'd like to check it out, go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. That's “the advisor coach [dot] com [slash] coaching”.
Now, what are some of those smart moves you can make if you have $100,000 to invest in your marketing? For starters, you can hire a virtual assistant and start delegating the repetitive, systematized parts of your business. If you have $100,000 in available capital, then chances are you have at least some semblance of systems and repetitive tasks in your business. You should just get those off your plate as soon as you can. Let's say that you pay your virtual assistant $40 per hour all in. You don't need to have an assistant full time either. You could hire someone who works from home for 20 hours per week. That would be about $40,000 per year. [02:59.0]
I've heard from many financial advisors over the years who have told me how scary that first hire is, how nervous they are about giving up so much money to someone else when they might not even be making that much money themselves. I mean, if you're making $400,000 per year and crushing it as a solopreneur, that still represents 10% of your income throughout the course of a year.
But it shouldn't be viewed as an expense, or at least, I don't think so. It should be an investment, truly, because if you don't think that you can reinvest the time you save in a way that is profitable for you, then you shouldn't hire someone. But lots of advisors find that they can free up a lot of their time in their calendars and then refill the empty spaces with more productive tasks. That's where the magic happens. It isn't necessarily because of the virtual assistant that your business grows. It's because of the time you free up and how you replace it, because you are the engine of your business, not your assistant. The assistant merely allows you to work more efficiently and effectively. [03:54.3]
Another thing you could do with $100,000 is get a year's subscription to LinkedIn Premium. That wouldn't even be 1%, I don't think, of the $100,000. I think I pay $959 per year. Don't quote me on that, but I think that's what it is. You could use Sales Navigator to put together a list of leads in your industry. Sales Navigator is a powerful tool, and I love it.
I'm a little bit of a hypocrite, though, because I personally don't use Sales Navigator all the time. Actually, I haven't used it in months at this point, but I'm also in a little bit of a different place in my life, where I don't need to do any direct outreach whatsoever anymore. But for something like $1,000 a year, you can get Sales Navigator. You could do all sorts of cool searches and things, it's really nice. I think you get unlimited searches. You can filter like you wouldn't believe. The searches are far more advanced. You can get really targeted based on geography and if someone has posted in the past 30 days. You can exclude people you've already viewed. You can exclude people who are already in your leads list. It is amazing. [04:55.4]
You can even hire someone to go on LinkedIn and do this stuff for you. Again, I want to make it clear that. You are not delegating the thinking part of your business. I say this all the time on the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast. You should not delegate the creative thought, the independent-thinking part of your business. You are not getting someone to, quote-unquote, “do marketing” for you. That is dumb. You are putting the systems in place. You are getting someone to operate based on those systems that you have created. You are still in the driver's seat. Getting someone to do marketing for you is like you riding in the back seat of a pickup truck. Someone else is comfortable in the driver's seat. You are just bouncing all around in the back. You have no control. It is really important to understand that.
It's also really important to get a real human being to do this stuff, because automation is against LinkedIn’s terms of service. You need someone who will do that stuff and do stuff that an automated tool wouldn't do or wouldn't even be able to do, like click a bunch of different buttons and bounce around, and message people and interact, because you do not want to mess with automation. If you play with fire, you will get burned. Don't be surprised when you get burned. [06:03.8]
Another thing you could do with $100,000 in available capital is hire a professional designer, a ghost writer and a proofreader to create an amazing PDF lead magnet designed to build your email list. This should be a legitimately good resource. It will become a marketing asset that you can use again and again and again for years to come—and when I say it should be a good resource, I mean that. You should spend a lot of time on this.
For perspective, one of my lead magnets is 80-plus pages long. That's actually 57 Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors. You can get that at TheAdvisorCoach.com/57mt. The number 5, the number 7, the letter M for marketing, the letter T for tips, so TheAdvisorCoach.com/57mt. [06:53.4]
I feel like I say this a lot, but you cannot and should not just slap together a lead magnet. Financial advisors, please, don't treat this like an afterthought. You only get one chance to make a first impression and that comes from your lead magnet in many cases. The lead magnet also needs to be compelling enough to get your prospective clients to join your world. That is the point of it. It is called a lead magnet, because it is supposed to draw people to you like a magnet. A little cheat sheet or a checklist or something just simply isn't as compelling as something in-depth with a big promise.
I host monthly “office hours” exclusively for Inner Circle members. They're on the second Tuesday of each month from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. In one of those office hours, I talked with a financial advisor about how I would market to government employees. I think that's a fascinating niche. I really do.
I asked him to tell me about the things that government employees think about, what's on their minds when they interact with financial advisors. What do they think about? He told me that they believe mainstream financial advice doesn't apply to them, and I told him that's his marketing hook right there. [08:02.4]
Now, I think we were talking about webinars or presentations, but this could very easily be a lead magnet, too. He could put together a PDF or a video, or something to get people on his email list, and it could be titled “Three big ways mainstream financial advice fails government employees, and what to do instead.” That is an amazing title, and that's what I mean when I say it should be compelling, because that will be like reading your prospective clients’ minds, or at least in this guy's case, reading his prospective clients’ minds. Government employees already believe that mainstream financial advice doesn't apply to them, so if he comes in and he presents them with an alternative, they will be drawn to that like a cat to a warm laptop.
Now, how much would that cost? Maybe $10,000 on the high end, all in, for a lead magnet. I'm not talking about an actual book, 200-plus pages with a ton of work and research. I'm talking about a lead magnet, so $10,000. If you were to hire a ghostwriter for something bigger, then it would be a lot more than $10,000, but for a lead magnet, $10,000 is high-end. [09:02.8]
Can you get it done cheaper? Yeah, you can get a design for a couple hundred bucks from a place like 99designs. You can sketch out the content yourself—that way, the ghost writer doesn't have to work as hard—and you could get an artificial-intelligence tool like chat GPT to do the editing and proofreading for you. If that's the case, you could get it done for a few thousand bucks at most. At most.
I can't think of many other places in business that can yield a bigger return on investment, especially if it's a good lead magnet. I cannot stress that enough, because if it's good, then you can put it in front of people, and they will gladly enter your world—which brings me to the next thing you could do if you had a lot of capital to deploy. You could run online ads.
Now, I'm a little worried that financial advisors are beginning to view me as the online ads guy, even though online ads are a very, very small part of what I discuss on this podcast, in my emails and in the Inner Circle Newsletter, but a big chunk of the questions I received from Inner Circle members, because they get direct email access to me, are about online ads. I get a lot of questions about online ads, and to be fair, I love the topic. I think that ads are the next logical step, assuming you have something valuable to offer the marketplace. [10:09.3]
The mistake people make with online ads is they attempt to run online ads, or ads in general, any marketing, really, but especially Facebook ads, X ads, LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, they attempt to run them without a valuable offer. The marketplace doesn't want what they're offering, and if people don't want what you're offering, then no amount of marketing or advertising will fix that. You have to have a good offer first. That's why I say your lead magnet must be good. [10:39.1]
Listen up, financial advisors. This is something special I'm doing exclusively for people who listen to this podcast. If you subscribe to the Inner Circle Newsletter over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, I will send you a collection of seven copyright-free emails, personally written by me, that you can use right away to begin getting more clients.
I call these my “objection-busting” emails, because they are designed to overcome the biggest objections financial advisors face. All you have to do is send me an email letting me know you’ve subscribed and I will reply with a link where you can download them for free.
I originally offered these in the May 2024 Inner Circle Newsletter issue, and it was one of the most popular bonuses I've ever given away. Today, these seven objection-busting, copyright-free emails are only available to listeners of this podcast, because I'm not mentioning them anywhere else. Go to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to subscribe today. Now, back to the show.
Here's a cool online ad story, though. I am running an advertising campaign right now that has gotten 6,492 clicks in the past seven days for roughly four cents each. I wrote an entire email about this where I shared a screenshot and everything. I'm sending traffic to my Inner Circle Newsletter sign-up page, which is TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching, if you want to look at it. [12:00.0]
What's interesting is that this is a really dumb idea, because my Inner Circle Newsletter page has the lowest conversion rate of any page on my website, meaning, out of everything I offer, people are the least likely to act on that. If someone came to me, or if I came to myself and I kind of viewed myself as a third party, and I was interested in running ads to the newsletter page, I would say, “Absolutely do not do that. Don't do it. Don't do it. It's a dumb idea. Why would you ever send traffic to a page that has such a low conversion rate?” But I took a flier on it. I just wanted to see what happened, and it ended up working really well.
Now, the reason it has such a low conversion rate is because I put up a bunch of barriers. The page is 7,500-plus words long. I clearly say it's not for everyone. It's also relatively expensive and it'll be more expensive in 2025 when I more than double the price. I also have a strict no-refunds policy, and to make matters worse, you physically cannot complete your purchase, your order, your subscription, unless you agree to the terms and conditions stating that there are no refunds under any circumstances, ever. There's legitimately a checkbox that you have to check, and if you don't check that box, you cannot complete your order. [13:11.5]
So, that page isn't exactly frictionless, and it's certainly not designed to maximize conversions, because I don't want to maximize conversions. I don't want anyone and everyone subscribing to the newsletter. But something interesting is happening—1.9% of the people who click on those ads to the newsletter end up subscribing to my email list.
Hmm, very, very cool, because that means they click an ad, land on the Inner Circle Newsletter sign-up page, read it for a bit, and then think to themselves, Who the heck is this James Pollard guy? Let me check out more of his stuff. So, they bop around my website and eventually find a way to opt into my email list. That means I'm getting email subscribers for $2.22 each, and I'm not even sending them to an email opt-in page. [13:59.0]
Now, I am in no way suggesting that you will get results like these. These results are truly exceptional, top 0.001% of results. I share this with you merely to let you know what's possible when you have something fantastic to offer your market. People see how cool the newsletter is and they feel compelled to learn more about me, even when they don't subscribe right away.
If you had a bunch of money and you wanted to test online ads, you could easily test online ads until you found a winner, or several winners, actually. I mean, let's say that you test 100 ads each with a $100 budget. You should almost certainly be able to tell if an ad is good or not with a spend of $100. That would be a total of $10,000, because you're testing 100 advertisements at $100 each. That's $10,000.
Actually, that's not even like spending $10,000 again. It's an investment. You could and probably will recoup a decent chunk of that money, maybe half or maybe more, and maybe you would actually double your investment. Maybe you would get lucky right away. With 100 ads, I mean, anything is really possible. [15:04.7]
But according to the 80–20 rule, 20% or 20 of those ads should generate 80% of the results, and four of them should generate 64% of the results. This is not my theory. This is not my opinion. This is legitimately a principle developed by an economist. It is the Pareto principle, the 80–20 rule. You are investing the money now to figure out which of those ads generate more than half your results. Are you with me? Do you understand? I hope I'm being clear. Once you know which four ads generate 64% of your results, then you can scale those suckers to the moon.
You could also upgrade your entire marketing funnel. You could create different landing pages, scheduling pages and homepages, then test them to see which ones generate better results. Even a modest improvement could yield huge, astronomical returns over the long run. [15:58.0]
If you have two homepages and you send half of your traffic to one and half of your traffic to the other, and you find that your test is 10% better, then you do the same thing with your scheduler and you get 10% better. Then you do the same thing with your landing pages and you get 10% better. Just 10%. It could be 20%. It could be 30% or more. But if you just get a little bit better each time you test and you get information about what works and what doesn't, you will be unstoppable at the end of the year, two years, three years.
Another thing you could do with a bunch of capital, in this case, $100,000 as my newsletter subscriber asked, is rent a mailing list of people in your niche and send a sequence of direct mail pieces to get them to set appointments with you. It blows my mind that financial advisors will spend boatloads of money on terrible leads, but won't send direct mail pieces specifically to people in their target markets. [16:47.5]
Why in the world would you spend like $250 per lead—per lead. It's nuts—when you could send 250 targeted mailers to people in your market for $250? Assuming that each mailing cost you $1, assuming you already have a list. But if you had a bunch of money laying around, you could rent a list and you could have this work for you.
Let's get an idea of some real-world cost for a direct-mail campaign. Let's say that you rent a specific mailing list for $2 per person. If you work with police officers, you rent a list of police officers. If you work with corporate executives, you go to a list broker.
And, no, I'm not going to give a recommendation for a list broker. I get so many emails, “Who do you recommend for lists? Who do you recommend for lists? Who do you recommend for lists?” It actually depends on your market. You can believe me or not, but I'm just telling you the truth, it depends on your market, because there are list brokers usually for different niches. The broker that you use for someone, for corporate executives, is going to be different from healthcare professionals. It’s going to be different from government employees. It’s going to be different from some other niche, okay? I just want to make that clear. [17:52.1]
But let's say you rent for $2 per person. Then you send a sequence of three mailers that run you another $8 total. That sequence would look like this: it'd be one small letter, one larger package, like Media Mail or something, and one postcard. So, $8 for the sequence, $2 for each person on the list. That's $10 per person to mail the sequence. If you sent 1,000 of those, your cost would be $10,000.
If you want to make it safe to run, you could actually model the language from your winning online ads in your landing pages, your homepages and anywhere else that you know is already doing well. That way, you're working with what is called a proof of concept. If you know that certain phrases or words or hooks or angles are already proven to work, then you just put those in your direct-mail campaign. It is not that complicated, but it does take work.
Another thing you could do is pay a PR company to reach out to popular publications, YouTube channels, blogs, and podcasts in your niche. The goal would be to get featured in them and then use your features as credibility mechanisms within your business. [19:01.2]
Let’s say you work specifically with dentists. If you can say that you have been a guest on the most popular dental podcasts, then you will have an advantage that other advisors can't easily replicate. You would have instant credibility within that market, because you have been on the shows that they're listening to. You have been on the YouTube channels and the blogs and the magazines and everything that they are familiar with. You will have credibility in that specific niche. Is that easy to do? No. Is it worth it? Yes.
One more thing that you could do, I'm just going to keep it short and sweet, you could throw an amazing client-appreciation event for a few thousand dollars. I mean, $10,000 on the high end for a client-appreciation event. You could blow people away with this event designed to make your clients happy and facilitate referrals along the way. I love client-appreciation events. I love the ideas that financial advisors share with me. I hope we get a chance to discuss client-appreciation events on one of the Inner Circle office hours. That'd be really cool. [19:56.5]
You could do all of this stuff I just told you about and still have money left over. You could hire the virtual assistant. You could test online ads. You could do direct mail. You could hire a PR company. You could do all that stuff and still have money left over. But, again, you don't need a war chest to successfully market yourself as a financial advisor. I don't want to give you that impression. I am merely answering a question that I received from an Inner Circle member about how I’d market an advisor with 100k. I hope this helps you and I hope it gets you thinking about some ways that you can get more clients.
Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, and I will catch you next week. [20:35.1]
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