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: I have a feeling this is going to be a fun episode. I will probably ruffle a few feathers. What else is new? That’s okay, because, as you'll see pretty soon, those people deserve to have their feathers ruffled. I'm going to talk about why using artificial intelligence for your marketing is really, really, really dumb—and, look, I'm not naive. I am not a technophobe. I know AI is a tool, like a tractor or an impact driver, or a dishwasher. [01:00.0]
I don't wash all my dishes by hand. I use a tool, the dishwasher, to help me get it done more effectively and more efficiently. But, see, that is the difference. I don't expect the dishwasher to cook the meal, set the table and serve my guest. I expect it to do one thing, clean dishes, and even then, I check to make sure it did the job correctly. It's not like I don't know anything about clean dishes. It's not like I don't know what clean dishes look like. I don't just blindly put the dishes and the silverware back in my cabinets. I check. I check its work. I check to see if there are any spots. Did anything go wrong? Is anything still dirty? Do I need to fix anything?
But that's not how most people treat artificial intelligence when it comes to their marketing. They treat it like some magic genie that they can just rub the lamp, have the genie come out and have their emails written, their content created, their social media handled, and basically have the genie do all the work while they sit back and rake in the money. That is the delusion. That's where things go off the rails. [01:58.7]
The “something for nothing” desire has been around since the beginning of time. One of my favorite books of all time is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill and he explicitly warns against this desire. If you have this desire of something for nothing, or a lot of results for very little work, in other words, then you are going to be disappointed.
Earl Nightingale once said, and this is a direct quote, “If you don't have a good model for success, just look at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite.” I've been thinking a lot about that quote in the age of AI, because if everyone else is just using ChatGPT and Perplexity and Claude for everything, you can gain a huge advantage by not using it, and I've actually seen this play out several times before in the financial advisor marketing world. [02:48.0]
For example, back in 2020, financial advisors could practically print money with LinkedIn. Why? Because so many people were hopping on the LinkedIn bandwagon and 99% of them were horrible at it. They were using canned content. They were blindly connecting with anyone and everyone. They were sending these long, horrible, obviously copied and pasted messages, so anyone who didn't do those things stood out like a sore thumb, in a good way. A sore thumb is kind of bad, but you get it, a sore thumb in a good way. Such is the contrast effect at work. It’s a psychological principle where something appears more impressive, more valuable or more appealing because it's being compared to something worse.
Advisors who wrote original content, who connected with people thoughtfully and genuinely, and sent personalized messages to people, seemed more trustworthy, and they got the clients, not because their marketing was objectively excellent or anything like that, but because they stood out against the sea of garbage. The same thing is happening right now. So many people are using artificial intelligence for their “marketing,” and I'm putting “marketing” in air quotes, because if you can't even really call it marketing. The advisors who don't use artificial intelligence are going to stand out even more. [04:03.7]
I don't think people fully understand the magnitude of this opportunity either. It means you could be a terrible marketer and still get more clients than everyone else because of the contrast effect. It is going to be absolutely phenomenal for the financial advisors who listen to what I'm saying here and reap the rewards as a result.
It's kind of weird to me how people treat being different, they treat the contrast effect and all of that as this new-fangled, fancy marketing idea when it's not. It's just the contrast effect. Philosopher John Locke wrote about it in the 17th century, so in the 1600s, hundreds of years ago, but I guess if you're a coach, consultant, guru, a lead-gen agency with no original ideas whatsoever, then you have to put a sexy new spin on something old, I guess. [04:52.4]
The contrast effect is one of my favorite ways to help financial advisors get more clients. It's one of the reasons why daily email works so well. It's one of the reasons why straightforward direct mail works extremely well. It's one of the reasons why telling personal stories in marketing works well—because all of those things stand out compared to what everyone else is doing. They stand out in stark contrast to Joe from down the street and Sally and Mary and Jane and Bill and Bob and Steve, who are all doing these horrible just run-of-the-mill, phoning-it-in, no-effort marketing.
Selfishly, I have a confession to make. I love seeing financial advisors depend on artificial intelligence for their marketing because it signals to me that they take shortcuts. They seek out the easy path. It's like a giant neon sign that says, “I cut corners when I can. Hey, me over here. Look at me. Look at me. I cut corners.”
Never before have your competitors and your potential competitors so readily revealed their hands. They are handing you a gift on a silver platter, because if they take shortcuts, then you can easily defeat them by mastering the fundamentals. It's like showing up to a boxing match and having the other guy insist on wearing oven mitts instead of gloves. You practically win by default, because they are showing you what they do. They're showing you their dependency on this thing. [06:18.2]
We are living in strange times because people are publicly showing their weaknesses. When you see someone cranking out AI-generated blog posts, posting ChatGPT content to LinkedIn or using canned email content, then you know it's easy to beat that person, because all you have to do is master the basics. That person is, again, I want to make sure you get this, it is seriously like that neon sign that says, “I take shortcuts” or “I cut corners when I can.” That is what it is. These people are just raising their hands and they're telling you, “Look at me. Look at me. You can beat me.”
I'm also not one of those marketers who is blindly anti-AI, either. I've got a couple friends in my friend group who just will never use AI, or at least they say they won't, and they don't know anything about it, though, so it's weird that they're judging something that they don't know anything about. I'm not in that camp either. [07:10.7]
I have tried artificial intelligence for emails and for online ads, and for social media posts and other marketing assets. I then compared the results of AI against content that I created from scratch, and the content I created myself absolutely dominated, and not just by a little either, not by 5% not by 10% but sometimes by double and triple and quadruple. I got significantly more conversions with the content I wrote myself.
That means even the argument that artificial intelligence can somehow do things better than you is out the window—unless you're horrible, because I want to point out that tools like ChatGPT, they're trained on the aggregate of information on the web. And do you know what that is? By definition, it's average. It is the most average thing you can get. [08:01.5]
That's why I think there's a lot of wisdom in that Earl Nightingale quote applied to today, because why in the world would you want to be average? Yet so many people are hitching their wagons to the most average star they can find. It is just odd. It's odd to me. I don't think a lot of financial advisors have ever taken a step back and thought about it in that way.
The main advantage that artificial intelligence has, just giving it credit where credit is due, is speed. It gets things done fast, but if you're optimizing for speed, then you can do an absolutely horrible job as long as it's done quickly, because as long as it's done quickly, you have technically achieved your goal. If you're optimizing for speed, then doing stuff fast is accomplishing that, right? Of course, it is. So, you can crank out an email in a minute or two—but how good is it? Wouldn't you rather optimize for quality? [08:57.3]
Oh, and if that's not enough, AI is making people dumber. Get this, this is crazy. MIT recently completed its first brain scan study of ChatGPT users and found some extremely terrifying things—83.3% of ChatGPT users could not quote from essays they wrote minutes earlier. Let that sink in. You write something, hit save, or, I guess, exit the ChatGPT prompt, and your brain has already forgotten about it, because ChatGPT did the thinking. [09:34.6]
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The brain scans also revealed a 47%-decrease in neural connectivity. If your computer or your phone lost 47% of its processing power, then you would be furious. If you woke up tomorrow morning and your iPhone was 47% slower and opened apps 47% slower and did all this stuff slower than normal, you would go to the Apple store in a heartbeat. You would go to your cell phone company and try to get it fixed and try to get it figured out. [11:00.2]
But that's what's happening to people's brains when they depend on ChatGPT, and somehow that's hunky dory—it's hunky dory for average marketers who are willing to settle for average results. This would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Imagine sacrificing half of your brain's processing power just so you can get straight up average results. What in the world is wrong with you if you're doing this?
But, wait, there's more, because researchers forced ChatGPT users to write without AI and those people performed worse than people who never used AI at all, which means it's literally cognitive atrophy. It's like a muscle that has withered away. If you stop using your arm, then the muscles in your arm will waste away. That is what's happening to people's brains. This is not my opinion. This is not some theory that I'm putting out there. This is actual research from MIT. They did brain scans on 54 people for four months. [12:01.0]
They tracked alpha waves, beta waves and neural connectivity patterns. What that means is they tracked cognitive or creative processing. They tracked active thinking, and they covered their bases that way, because they can't really be criticized for only tracking alpha waves or they only tracking beta waves. No, no, no, they tracked active thinking and they tracked the creative side of your brain. This is measurable brain damage from using ChatGPT. Yes, it may make you faster at getting stuff done and getting average results, but you are trading long-term brain capacity for short-term speed.
I have preached for years, long before artificial intelligence tools were readily available to the masses, that independent thinking is one of the most important skills you can develop if you want to become a top 1% financial advisor, and depending on artificial intelligence is a surefire way to kill your independent thinking skills. [13:00.0]
Listen to me if your goal is to become a top 1% financial advisor, or if you're already a top one-percenter and you want to stay a top one-percenter, you cannot do this. It's like you telling me you want to become a professional basketball player and your first step toward that goal is cutting off your legs. If you need independent thinking skills, which you do, then you shouldn't do anything to destroy those independent thinking skills.
I'll give you another example of why depending on artificial intelligence for your marketing is really dumb, and this comes from me. I have been posting regularly on LinkedIn for several years now. I've done pretty well there, despite not spending that much time there and not doing as much as I otherwise could, because I have competing priorities. I have other things to do. By the way, a huge percentage of my audience, financial advisors, they are lurkers, which means they aren't likely to comment and engage with my posts. That's one of the interesting quirks about financial advisors that they don't engage as much as other audiences, so something that to keep in mind. [14:03.8]
As you know, since you're listening to this podcast, I am the financial advisor marketing guy. I eat, sleep and breathe financial advisor marketing. I've done it for 10 years now. I've generated millions of dollars for myself and others. But here's the interesting part—when I post about financial advisor marketing on LinkedIn, I get a handful of inbound leads, one to five every time, pretty much every time. Sometimes I'll get 10. There's a rare case here and there where I'll get zero, and that's not bad. I’ve built a great business that way.
However, a few months ago, I converted an unfinished room in my house into a makeshift gym. I've got some pretty cool things in there. I've got a power rack. I've got a treadmill. I've got the adjustable dumbbells, I've got the landmine attachment. It's pretty neat. It's coming together. I started posting photos of the gym, including new equipment I was adding, the workouts I was doing, stuff like that, and my inbound leads spiked. I started getting dozens of inbound leads per post, instead of just a couple. Financial advisors, began messaging me, “Hey, James, can I ask you a marketing question?” “James, do you think you can help me with this?” “I've been following you a while. I want to learn more about you now.” [15:12.8]
Now, here’s the question I want to pose to you, the listener. Do you think artificial intelligence would have ever suggested this idea to me? Do you think it would have said, “Hey, James, you should post about the adjustable dumbbells you just got”? No, not a chance. It would have told me to stick to financial advisor marketing topics, and of course, it would have told me that, because that's the obvious answer any AI or generic content strategy would spit out for me, and it would have missed the crazy results I've been getting with the weird post. It's just something to think about. I'm just putting it out there. I want you to just ponder this for a second.
Artificial Intelligence would never in a million years have told me to do something so strange and so seemingly out of left field and so seemingly unrelated to financial advisor marketing. Yet it's working ridiculously well for me, and it's attracting a much higher quality financial advisor. The types of people who reach out to me because of my gym post are just so much better, it's not even funny. [16:12.4]
I've had a few of my inner circle members chime in with their thoughts about this, and nearly all of them had have said something along the lines of this—being in the gym requires discipline. When you share things that show how disciplined you are, the right financial advisors seek you out. Like attracts like. Birds of a feather flock together, and if someone is disciplined, that person recognizes discipline. Game attracts game, or game recognizes game—just stuff like that.
I think that has a lot to do with it, but I don't think that explains everything, because here's a marketing truth that a lot of coaches, consultants, gurus, experts and lead-gen agencies find very difficult to accept—sometimes it's impossible to predict what will work the best for you. Heck, even I would have never predicted this. Honestly, if someone told me that posting stories and photos about my workouts would make me more money than nearly all of the marketing and business building posts that I put on LinkedIn, I would have called that person crazy. I would have said, “Hey, hey, Looney, you need to go back to the looney bin.” But here I am posting bench videos. [17:15.5]
I did one of me, benching 275 for reps, putting squat videos on LinkedIn. I did one squatting 315 lbs. for reps, and financial advisors message me. As a result, they're practically begging to work with me. I wish I could tell you that I knew the exact, precise, formulaic reason why these posts work so well, but I can't. I honestly have no idea, but I know AI wouldn't know either.
I think showing discipline, like my Inner Circle members said, has a lot to do with it. I think displaying shared values also helps, because financially successful financial advisors are usually more likely to prioritize their health, and financially successful financial advisors are the ones who want to give me a ton of money. I also think that showing that I'm a real person with real hobbies and a life also helps, because a lot of these people out there don't seem to have lives. Nonetheless, I can't pinpoint exactly what it is. I cannot tell you, “Hey, do this exact thing and you'll get a flood of clients overnight,” because marketing doesn't work that way. [18:13.4]
Sure, there are principles. There are frameworks. There are strategies. I teach plenty of those. I've got 300-plus episodes talking about those. But the reality is, sometimes the stuff that works best is the stuff you would never expect, and most advisors never find out what that is for them, because they never try. They stick to the safe stuff. They recycle the same market updates. They write stiff corporate captions that sound like an HR department wrote them, and then they wonder why nobody engages with them. They wonder why their marketing doesn't work. They wonder why they blend in. There is no contrast there.
So, stop being perfectly predictable. Start showing people you. It doesn't have to be the gym. In fact, it probably shouldn't be the gym because it probably won't work well for you. It probably just works really well for me for some reason. People want to hire humans they trust, not robots in suits, not AI behind the scenes to just feel so disingenuous. [19:04.7]
So, test things. Experiment. Share what makes you “you,” and whatever you do, don't give up your independent thinking skills in order to get mediocre marketing results. That is a horrible trade. I think Ben Franklin once said, those who give up independent thinking skills to get better marketing results, deserve neither independent thinking skills nor better marketing results, so listen to Ben Franklin if you're not going to listen to me.
Thank you so much for listening, and I will catch you next week. [19:34.0]
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