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: At the time I'm recording this, I've generated 3,386 leads so far from one of my marketing campaigns that I'm running on Facebook. I also decreased the average cost per lead from $9.38 to an absurd 93 cents per lead. In this episode, I'm going to share exactly what I did to achieve that result, but first I'm going to share some results I achieved from a campaign that didn't cost me anything except a little time. [00:59.7]
On the morning of January 30, I created a little 27-page PDF for financial advisors. That afternoon, I posted about it on LinkedIn, as I often do. If you're not following me or connected with me on LinkedIn, go to LinkedIn and search James Pollard, and I promise I don't bite, at least not intentionally. I wrote a few sentences about the thing that I created the 27 page PDF. I described it and I shared a video explaining why I thought it would be helpful to financial advisors, and within 48 hours, more than 500 financial advisors requested it through comments and messages and connection requests—and keep in mind, I did not have to cold message a single individual.
I didn't have to make a single phone call. I didn't have to do anything except let people know that I had the resource and tell them to raise their digital hands if they wanted it, so like, “Just message me if you want it. Comment if you want it. Send me a connection request if you want it.” That is what I did. Like I said. It was a simple little PDF that I created that morning, and it didn't even have a cover image. It just had text on the page. It didn't have a fancy cover or anything like that. It was all just text on a document. Yet, that didn't stop people from flooding my inbox. [02:11.1]
But what was it, you ask? It was something I called “The Discovery Meeting Playbook: Proven Scripts for Financial Advisors to Convert Prospects into Clients.” You can actually download that for yourself over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/discovery. One more time, that's TheAdvisorCoach.com/discovery, as in “Discovery Meeting Playbook.”
Now I have a question for you. How much would your business change if you were able to generate leads like this? You don't have to do a bunch of outbound prospecting, and, I mean, I know I sound like a little bit of a hypocrite right now because I'm doing a podcast, but you don't even have to do your little dance on a podcast or YouTube channel or anything like that. [02:52.5]
Sometimes I talk to financial advisors who are thinking about starting a podcast or a YouTube channel, or maybe they already have one, and they just feel like they've got to do their dance every week or however often they're posting. I’m just going to be a hundred percent transparent with you, sometimes I feel like I'm coming on here to do my little song and dance. I'm not going to tell you I feel like I'm phoning it in, because I absolutely give it my all every single week and want to build a genuine connection with you. I want to tell you stuff that matters to me and should matter to you, and things that I'm hearing in the marketplace and things that I'm hearing from financial advisors, so I bring you my A-level best with this podcast.
However, honestly, if I really just wanted to turn TheAdvisorCoach.com into a cash grab, I would shut down the podcast and I would just run ads. That would be all I would do. I would spend a couple minutes per day checking my online ads account and just watch the money flow into my bank account. But at this point, I mean, I have hundreds and hundreds of episodes of the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast. It is so much more than the money to me at this point. [03:52.2]
I mean, it's actually always been about more than just the money since day one of the Advisor Coach, but at this point, it is even more not just about the money, if that makes sense, because it's just a lot of fun helping financial advisors and meeting them and meeting awesome, successful people and helping people who are not so successful become more successful. But I'm going on a tangent here. I digress.
Of course, I am not saying you will get results like that, where you would generate hundreds of leads with virtually no effort, absolutely not, because, truthfully, I've been marketing a long time. I am a top 1% marketer, probably top 0.1%, the chances of you getting 500-plus leads in a few days from that exact strategy or about the same as a do-it-yourself investor’s odds of beating the market over his or her lifetime. But I've discovered that for many financial advisors, even getting just 1/10th of the results that I get is usually more than enough to justify paying me even 1/100th of the results in many cases. [04:51.8]
Once I saw that hundreds of financial advisors were downloading the Discovery Meeting Playbook, I decided to turn it into a Facebook ads campaign. Let's get back to the Facebook ads campaign, where I decreased my average cost per lead from $9.38 to 93 cents. How did I achieve that result? Here's how: I did lots and lots and lots of testing.
The most common mistake I see financial advisors making with online ads is simply not trying enough stuff. Actually, that's true with lots of marketing strategies. It's true with LinkedIn marketing, webinar marketing, direct mail marketing, email marketing and so much more. But it's especially true with online advertising, where the marketplace is the ultimate judge and you're competing with thousands of other advertisers, because online ads, networks like X or LinkedIn, or Facebook or TikTok, or wherever, Google Ads, these are all based on auction models. You are bidding against other people who want to advertise just as much as you do. Your ads have to be good enough to capture attention and inspire action, and I'd estimate that fewer than 0.1% of financial advisors advertising online try anywhere near enough stuff. [06:06.8]
To give you an idea, in the marketing campaign I'm talking about, where I decreased the average cost per lead to 93 cents, I'm getting thousands of leads and all that, I probably tested 20 different headlines, 20 different images and 20 different posts, the body copy, the text. On Facebook, you can turn on something called “dynamic creative,” which means that Facebook will automatically mix and match those headlines, images and posts to find the best-performing combinations. It is a game changer, because you can quickly figure out which combinations work the best.
Of course, this only works if you actually have multiple variations for Facebook to test. If you have just one or two images, one or two headlines, and so on, there's not much to rotate through, and if the market doesn't respond well to those limited options, then you're done. But if you feed Facebook a bunch of different headlines, images and posts to play with, you're giving yourself hundreds or even thousands of opportunities to find that golden ad combo that reels and leads for pennies on the dollar. [07:05.5]
Let's do some math. I just want to illustrate what I'm talking about and how powerful this is—20 headlines multiplied by 20 images multiplied by 20 posts is 8,000 potential combinations. Let’s compare that to someone who's just testing two of each. Two headlines multiplied by two images multiplied by two posts is eight potential combinations. That's literally a 1,000-fold difference. If I did 20 of each, I’d have 8,000 potential combinations. If you did two of each, you’d have eight potential combinations.
You might be thinking, But, James, this sounds like a lot of work. I guess it depends on what you consider to be a lot of work. Honestly, I don't think it's that much work to come up with 20 different headlines or 20 different pictures, because all you have to do is just go around and take pictures. It is not really back-breaking manual labor. It might be the most work to come up with 20 different posts, but you don't have to do it all at once. You can come up with one new ad every single business day, and by the end of the month, you will have 20 of each. Then let them all run and see what the magic combination is. I guess the hardest work really is trying to do marketing that doesn't work and doesn't get clients and doesn't get results, so I would think about that, too. [08:19.7]
Also, you might want to shift your thinking on what a lot of work is, because to me, a lot of work means spending months or years doing stuff that you don't have to do or don't want to do. It means getting one client every month when you could have gotten three in a month.
Financial advisors don't think a lot about opportunity costs, and, goodness gracious, I try to tell them all the time. I'm like, Look, if you were just in the Inner Circle like I talked about this three months ago or I talked about this one year ago, you would have gotten the results by now and you would have been well on your way. But sometimes these financial advisors just sit on their hands and twiddle their thumbs and just sit on the fence, whatever metaphor you want to use. They just sit there and don't do it and they rack up enormous opportunity costs. I can't tell you how many times I've seen financial advisors where I just thought to myself, Dude/Ma'am, if you just did the stuff we talked about, then you would have hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions of extra dollars. But again, again, again, I digress. [09:14.2]
The hard work really means living below your potential for longer than absolutely necessary. I like to go fast. I like to figure out what works as quickly as possible, so I hammer out those combinations. I test out as much as I can to find the winner, because I want to move on with my life. I don't want my life to be made up of just creating advertisements. I don't want to do that. I have a life to live. I've got family to spend time with. I've got places to go, people to hang out with, things to see. I've got stuff to do. Marketing is important to me. It is my life. I think about financial advisor marketing all the time, obviously, but I've got other stuff, too. I like to move fast.
Again, the difference was $9.38 per lead, and by the way, per lead in my case means an email subscriber to 93 cents per lead. That is enormous. That type of difference will have a humongous effect on your ability to get more clients and grow your business. [10:09.4]
Another stumbling block financial advisors have with this sort of thing is they get too attached to whatever it is they're doing. They might spend hours on a thing, like a single ad, and they think, I must use this image, or I must use this body text, or I must use this headline, and they try to get it perfect. They try to go through it line by line and they can't stand the thought of scrapping it if it doesn't convert. But the marketplace is the ultimate judge, and if it means you have to scrap something you spent hours on, so be it.
We're marketers, not artists. This is about getting results, not building a shrine to our own brilliance. The only thing that matters is what converts. Would you rather be right or would you rather be rich? If you'd rather be right, then get in line because there are thousands of financial advisors who think like that. They would rather have their ego stroked than have their bank account full. So, I am ruthless with testing. If something isn't pulling its weight, it's out. It is gone and it's replaced by something new that may or may not get better results. Hopefully it does, but if it doesn't, then I'm going to get rid of it and I'm going to put something else in its place. [11:17.5]
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 another important factor. You have to trust the process enough to let your ads run. Hit publish, let them run. Close your eyes, close your browser, close your laptop, whatever you're using, and walk away. Go do something else. Spend time with your children. Spend time with your spouse. Go watch a movie, even though sometimes I clown on people who watch hours and hours of TV every single day, but go watch a movie. Go take a walk in the park. Do not look at your ads dashboard. Let the suckers run. [12:46.0]
Too many financial advisors panic if they spend a bunch of money and get no leads in the first few days. Then they shut down the ads prematurely. They never get to the point where Facebook's algorithm optimizes for conversions. Sometimes, ads need-- actually not sometimes, most of the time, ads need a little runway. If you're rotating all of these creative elements and you're just turning it on and turning it off, and turning it on and turning it off, you're never going to get to a point where Facebook has enough data, so the algorithm never is able to find the best combination for you. If you back out too soon, then you're never going to see the campaign at its best. You're just guaranteeing that you're never going to get the results you could have gotten. [13:22.4]
Speaking of Facebook's algorithm, some people love it, some people hate it. I happen to love it most of the time because it saves me and my clients an enormous amount of time. When you feed all of those different creative elements to it, it essentially does the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to be a math wizard. You don't have to be a marketing wizard. You just give it the stuff and let it run.
Of course, you still have to come back and watch it. After you're done watching your movie, or taking a hike or spending time with your children, you come back to the ads dashboard and you look at it and you say, “Hmm, is this good? Is this not?” because sometimes it will glitch. I'm just going to be honest with you, sometimes it will glitch. Sometimes things get weird, and if that's the case, you just got to go back to the drawing board. You have to restart the thing. But with patience and good management, it can work wonders. [14:11.3]
But please understand, this episode, what I'm telling you about now, is not just about Facebook ads or even online advertising in general for that matter. It is about a way of thinking that will make you a superior business person. It's about embracing a mindset of constant experimentation, letting the numbers dictate your actions, and understanding that success often hinges on your willingness to iterate, just do stuff, and you have to do it rapidly. You have to do it without mercy for your own ego.
Stop letting your ego get in the way. No, you don't have to have your logo on everything you put out. No, you don't need fancy team photos on your website where everyone stands outside of your office where they would literally never stand in real life, unless your market has told you that your market wants these things. Your market says, “Actually, you know what? I would like your team to stand outside in front of the sign.” If your market says that your market responds to that image, then listen to your market. [15:07.4]
It's extra bad because there's an industry full of so-called marketing coaches, consultants, experts and gurus who have entire business models designed around telling you what you want to hear instead of what your market wants. It is literally self-selection. That is what it is.
A financial advisor thinks, Oh, boy, I should probably do SEO, and then goes out and hires an SEO person or SEO company, or reads an SEO blog or starts trying to do it himself or herself. That is self-selection. You are selecting it yourself. That is literally what it is. Or you think that just because so and so has a slide show on his home page, that you need a slide show, too, so you select into that. You want market selection, not self-selection.
Market selection means your audience, not you, dictates what matters. They decide what resonates. They decide what prompts them to say, “Yes, I want that. Yes, I want to download that lead magnet you're offering. Yes, I want to book an appointment with you.” Your job is to listen. Listen, Linda, listen. Then you once you listen, you adapt, you deliver. [16:10.3]
So, if your market wants a minimalist website with zero headshots, then guess what? You get rid of the headshots and you keep it minimal. If your market loves checklist and hates long videos, then guess what? You double down on giving them more checklists. Even though I personally don't like checklists, I rarely see them work as lead magnets, but if your market wants it, then ignore what I say and listen to them.
This is why you'll frequently hear me rail against complacency. If you're not gathering data from your market through testing and surveys, direct feedback and indirect feedback, and things like ads where we just talked about, you are flying blind. You do not know what you're doing, and if you're not analyzing data to refine your approach, you are willfully choosing ignorance. [16:57.3]
If you're ignoring what the data says, if you're ignoring what your market says because it hurts your ego or it's not what you wanted to hear, you are only hurting yourself. You're not hurting me. You're not hurting another financial advisor. You're not getting one over on somebody else. You're only hurting yourself.
Would you rather have your ego appeased or would you rather have a successful business? That's the question you need to answer for yourself, because if you want success, you have to be open to the idea that you might be wrong about what your market wants. In the words of the professor in one of the best movies of all time, The Waterboy, Mama's wrong again and you might be Mama. You might love a particular style or a method of marketing, but if it's not converting your preference, what you want is irrelevant. Mama's wrong again. Ego doesn't pay the bills. Your clients do.
At the heart of all this is a simple little concept called data over drama. You can have personal preferences. It's a free country. You're entitled to your opinion. You can want whatever you want, and your marketing guru can have his or her own opinion, your little coach or consultant or mastermind, or course or anything that you buy might espouse a pet strategy—but if the data says otherwise, then you have to pivot. [18:11.4]
Your job is to gather the data by testing. Then you want to refine on what you learned. Then you want to go back for more. It is an ongoing cycle. You're never going to be done because the market is constantly shifting and you've got to shift with it. This approach is not glamorous. You may have to abandon what you thought was a genius idea. You may have to kill a beautiful ad that took you hours to redesign that ended up working and now, for some reason, it doesn't work anymore.
You could dump a webinar series that you poured your heart into, but that's what real marketers and real business owners do. They make decisions based on the marketplace, not personal preference or expert opinions with no data to back them up. If the expert is telling you something and you test it out, and it works, awesome, stick with that expert. Lots of financial advisors view me as that guy, like, James said to do this, so I'm going to try this first. [19:00.0]
That's kind of what I want, actually. That is where I want to be and I'm happy with that, so if financial advisors come to me as the guy who could help them shorten their learning curves, where they don't have to test as much, then that's awesome. I guess instead of testing 100 things, they only test 10 things because I help them. I just look at them and I say, “Look, those 90, I can just tell you from experience, they're probably not going to work. They're almost certainly not going to work for you. So, just test these things, these 10 things,” and then financial advisors will test those 10 things and it'll be a lot better. They make a lot more money that way. They spare themselves a lot of expense that way. That is kind of what I do and I'm happy to do that.
To continue, I'll give you a specific example from the Facebook ad campaign I ran. I actually included some videos, too, not just images, and generally speaking, vertical videos shot on your phone tend to do really well in Facebook ads, meaning, you whip out your phone, put it on video mode and start recording. [19:57.4]
If I had to decide on one way for financial advisors to do video marketing, that would be it. Just take out your phone, put it in selfie mode, record yourself. Look at yourself in the camera. Make sure you're not out of frame or anything, and just record the video on your phone. It doesn't have to be fancy. It doesn't have to be pretty.
However, in this specific case, the vertical phone video was not the winner in this campaign. In this specific campaign, the winner was actually a recording of my computer screen where, I mean, I was on the screen, but it was my entire computer monitor. It was my screen. It was completely different than the phone video and it did much better, too.
If I had an egotistical attachment to my idea of using phone videos or if I stubbornly believed that that was the way to go, no matter what, I would have cost myself thousands of dollars, so I'm very thankful that I tested. That's one specific example. Obviously, there are more, because I tried all sorts of headlines, images and body text. In Facebook, they call it primary text, but it's just the post. I should just say it's the post. [20:59.0]
I hope this message gets through to some of you, especially because, guess what? This episode is scheduled to air on May 12 and the very next day, May 13, is the second Tuesday of the month, and on the second Tuesday of the month, I host office hours exclusively for Inner Circle members.
I have to tell you, I love these office hours selfishly, because they've lightened my inbox significantly. Financial advisors are choosing to attend office hours instead of emailing me with their questions, which is awesome. It also makes things better for them, and it's easier for them and faster for them, because they can get help right then and there on the spot, so that's pretty cool.
I also talk a lot about my marketing materials being like a giant meat cleaver cutting through the sea of humanity, and man, the office hours are yet another example of that, because there are some financial advisors out there who will purposefully choose to try to figure everything out themselves. They will deliberately refuse to accept help, not just from me, but from their peers. They will intentionally stay in their comfort zones and it's these very same financial advisors who will turn around and look for someone else or something else to blame. [22:06.0]
They'll blame external circumstances. They'll blame their area. They'll blame their upbringing. They'll blame prospective clients. They will blame everyone else except themselves. They will never look in the mirror and say to themselves, I am a hundred percent responsible for what has happened to me. I purposely, deliberately and intentionally chose the results I am getting now.
It's like walking around and complaining about how thirsty you are when you could easily reach out and grab a glass of water. I guess that's why they say you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink, huh? If you're one of those people walking around parched but refusing a drink, don't be surprised when you don't see results. It's not about external circumstances. It's not about some magic marketing pill. It's about whether or not you choose to grab that metaphorical glass of water—and here's the thing, the water is right there. It's always been there. [22:54.2]
If you're an inner circle member, the opportunity to get your questions answered and solve your business problems is staring you in the face every second Tuesday of the month, not to mention you get the newsletter, the bonuses, the resources. It's all there for you. But I can't force you to drink. Nobody can. It's a personal decision.
I have to remind myself that not everyone wants to take responsibility, even when it's practically gift-wrapped. It's on a metaphorical silver platter. Some people will deliberately opt for the harder, lonelier road. They'll prefer frustration, blame and inertia over solutions and progress. It defies logic. It's not logical. It is not intelligent, but I've seen it so many times.
I can only do so much. I can send you the newsletter. I can provide resources. I can host office hours. I can even show up in your earbuds through this podcast. But ultimately, you must decide to step up and take advantage or stay stuck in place, pointing fingers and everything else. The universe doesn't care what path you choose. Your business results will reflect the decisions you make, plain and simple. Your business is a reflection of you. [23:54.7]
So, if this resonates with you, consider it a wake-up call. Grab that metaphorical glass of water. Show up. Ask questions. Engage with people who have been in your shoes and figured out how to move forward. Nobody's going to do your push-ups for you, but if you surround yourself with the right people, the journey gets a whole lot easier—and trust me, it feels infinitely better to just take the glass of water, in other words, to take initiative, test your marketing ideas and apply proven strategies, than to wander around complaining about how parched you are.
All right, that is it for this week's episode. Office hours or tomorrow, if you're listening to this on the first day it drops. If you're an Inner Circle member who wants to swing by, I look forward to seeing you there. If you're not an Inner Circle member yet, you can subscribe over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. In any case, I will catch you next week. [24:43.3]
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