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: Here's something I'm relatively well-known for, although I haven't discussed it on this podcast in a long time. It is the idea that educating, teaching and, quote-unquote, “giving value,” is a horrible marketing strategy. Now, is there a time and a place to use education in your overall marketing ecosystem? Yes, but I treat it kind of like a spice or a seasoning. It can add flavor to your dish, but too much of it makes it inedible. Unfortunately, too many financial advisors are coating their figurative food with seasoning, just slapping that stuff on, the whole thing, until it's nothing but seasoning, and that is bad, and not very tasty either. [01:13.2]
It's fairly common for me to encounter financial advisors who produce content like crazy. I don't know who convinced these financial advisors to be content creators. If it was me, I apologize. I should have never done that. But there are financial advisors who pour a ton of time into things like YouTube videos and LinkedIn posts and emails, and even podcast episodes like this. They'll try those things for a very long time and get frustrated when those things don't work for them, and then they'll say something like, “James, I'm teaching people how to invest and how to save for retirement, but nobody's reaching out,” and it's heartbreaking, because that's exactly what so many so-called marketing experts tell financial advisors to do. [01:56.4]
They say to educate and teach, and give value, but there's a hidden danger in that approach, because when you teach, you talk to the logical brain, and that's fine, it's okay to a point, but what you need to realize is people buy emotionally, and if you don't have that emotional component, you're not going to see any progress whatsoever.
If you've ever given away tons of free content and had prospects say things to you like, “Wow, that was really helpful,” but never actually do anything, never actually set an appointment or hire you, then you've fallen into this trap. You've seen it firsthand. I'm going to call it the teaching trap, and it's quietly killing more financial advisors’ businesses than almost anything else out there.
You see, the human brain doesn't take action because of information. In fact, I've built entire sections of my business, like the Inner Circle Newsletter, purposely to help advisors avoid information overload. They are paying me in part to give them as little information as possible. I don't need to give them a 240-page book when only 10 pages will do. I don't think people understand how difficult that is. [03:04.7]
There's this quote, “I would have written the shorter letter, but I didn't have the time.” I think that's mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain. I don't think Mark Twain said it, but I could be wrong. Basically, the idea here is, keeping things short is very difficult. The value is not in the information, at least, not for the high-level financial advisors I serve. They don't need another book. They don't need another three-, four-, five-, six-hour podcast episode. They don't need that. They need 15 to 20 pages of information delivered directly to their door telling them exactly what to do, how to do it, and what the next steps are, and if they're confused about anything in there or they don't understand it, or they don't know what to do, I'm not clear enough, that's my fault, I own it. Then they can come to the office hours or they can send me an email.
How fast is it to type out an email? “Hey, James, I don't understand what you talked about on Page 9 of this month's newsletter. Can you explain a little bit?” “Sure,” and I just tell you. It takes me a couple minutes. It takes you a couple minutes to write the email and to read my response, and you move on with your life. That is what you're paying for. You're not paying for information in bulk. [04:05.0]
Anyway, people already have enough information, and even if they feel like they don't have enough information, they're probably not coming to you for the information, at least, not first. They're not going to come to you first. They're going to go somewhere else, like a book or an encyclopedia, or someone else who is a more trusted resource, because I'm sorry, most of the time, even though the financial advisor has credibility and everything with financial advice, the financial advisor is usually not the first person people go to for money help.
So, what causes the human brain to take action? It takes action because of two things: emotion and contrast. Think about your favorite movies. They all start with tension and conflict. There's a problem that needs to be solved, and marketing works in the same way. If your content doesn't create that same tension, people will keep scrolling. They will tune you out. They won't consume the content. If your marketing doesn't create curiosity, people will forget about it. [05:06.4]
That's why educating people about Roth IRAs does not work. It's too forgettable. It doesn't invoke any tension or contrast, or emotion. But what if you started by saying this? What if you said, “The IRS quietly designed this retirement trap that increases your likelihood of paying more taxes later”? Ooh, that's a lot better. You've opened a curiosity loop. That's persuasion, and persuasion, not education, is what fills calendars, and once I understood that, my entire business changed.
A note about the Roth IRA. My home state is Delaware, and Senator Roth from Delaware actually was the senator that pushed forward the Roth IRA and Roth legislation, and I have begged financial advisors in Delaware who are either Inner Circle members or, a long time ago, paid me for consulting and coaching and whatnot, I have begged them to use the little-known Delaware loophole or the little-known Delaware move, or Delaware legislation from 1997, I believe, is what it was, just something like that, where you tie in that this guy was from Delaware and he represented for us. [06:20.1]
I have begged them to do some sort of angle or hook or headline, and no one has taken me up on it. So, if you're a financial advisor in Delaware, oh my goodness, this is your opportunity, again, to not educate, but to entertain and to add emotion and to add contrast. Like I said, my entire business changed when I understood this, when I actually started applying it to my marketing.
There are three marketing shifts I want you to make in your business that I think will get you better results, and Shift No.1 here is to stop adding value and start creating curiosity. We just talked about this a little bit, but I want to stress it here even more. A lot of marketing campaigns fail because they don't have enough curiosity. [07:06.4]
I'm recording this episode in late-October and I've been sending emails about the upcoming November Inner Circle Newsletter issue. By the time you listen to this, it'll be way too late to lock in your spot for the issue, because the deadline is Halloween night at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, but let me give you some of the email subject lines I've written for it, just to give you an idea of how to create curiosity.
Here's one email subject line. “This traffic source converts 23 times better than SEO.” That is pure curiosity. If you're a financial advisor who is interested in getting more traffic, you're probably going to open that email, and you're definitely going to open it if you're a financial advisor and you've spent a ton of money and time and energy on SEO, because you'll want to know how to get 23 times the results than what you have been doing. So, that is an awesome subject line. I'm going to pat myself on the back. Congratulations, James, congratulations for thinking of such an amazing subject line. [08:02.8]
Another one is “This ad gets 50.92% of all viewers to click it.” Again, this is a real subject line. I really sent this out. If you're on my email list, you know that this is true. You could just go to your mailbox and type in that subject line. You could read the actual email if you want, and it is pure curiosity again. You’re going to open that email in order to view the ad. That is what I want—and not to get off on a tangent or anything, but that advertisement, the 50.92% click-through rate one, oh, my goodness, it was wild.
It was a LinkedIn ad, and the average click-through rate on a LinkedIn ad is 0.6%, so half of 1% almost. That means the ad I did, it was crazy, but it was getting, what is that, 84 times the average click-through rate? That is insane. A good ad might get double the average click-through rate. A great ad might get three, four, or even five times the average. I don't even know what to call 84 times the average. Just think about that for a second. Half of all the people who saw that advertisement on LinkedIn ended up clicking on it. That's how powerful it was. [09:16.4]
One of the cool things I did with that email was I included a link to a video where I recorded myself inside my LinkedIn ads dashboard, where I refreshed my screen, I clicked around to prove that it was 100% legitimate because there are so many people out there who will fake screenshots and make up stories. When I shared that my ad was getting 84 times the average click-through rate, I provided video proof. What do you think that video proof does for trust building and credibility building?
Let's say a financial advisor was on my list and wasn't sure if I was the real deal or not. Then he gets an email from me with a video proving that my personal ads work well. That's a whole other level I didn't even mention. Lots of marketing people can run ads with other people's money. They can take their clients’ money and run ads and, yay, that's super great, they can just do whatever they want with their clients’ money I guess. [10:11.4]
It's easy to run ads when other people are footing the bill. This is my money coming directly from my bank account, so I'm practicing what I preach. My stuff has to work, okay? That it's a different ball game. It's a different worldview. The incentives are completely different. Anyway, that's the first shift—stop adding value and start creating curiosity. [10:31.4]
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.
The second shift is, sell conversations, not concepts. Every so often, I'll hear from a new Inner Circle member who is making this education mistake and he or she will ask me a marketing question about anything. It doesn't matter what it is, anything, in general, and I'll have the perfect opportunity to help him or her with whatever it is that that person's asking, and my first question is usually something like, “What are your goals? What do you want? What do you actually want? Forget about all the stuff that you've been told. Forget about what you think you're supposed to do. What do you actually want?” because if you take a step back and think about what it is that you want, you realize that you probably don't want to be the teacher in your space. [12:18.2]
You probably don't want to be an educator who just creates value or creates, quote-unquote, “value” content over and over and over again and no one reaches out to you. Your goal is not to teach your audience, or at least, it probably isn't. That's probably not what you want. What you probably want is to set appointments and get clients and make money. Therefore, if your goal is to get more clients, then why not do the things that will get more clients?
That seems so simple, yet a lot of people don't think that way, or they mistakenly believe that the “give value” approach is what gets clients, and it's not. Either way, they're making the wrong decision. When I say sell conversations, what I mean is you should make it clear to your audience that the real value comes from talking with you, from having the appointment, from having a conversation. [13:11.7]
I will also ask financial advisors, “Do you think that you can help someone more if that person is sitting with you at your desk instead of listening to one of your podcast episodes or watching one of your YouTube videos?” and 100% of the time so far, advisors have told me yes. They all believe, every single one where I've ever asked this question, every single advisor believes that he or she can help more people by having appointments with them, by having real conversations where they're really in the room, sitting across from each other, or on Zoom, whatever they do, their meetings.
So, why is that not the thing you're selling in your marketing? If you truly want to help people and you truly want to provide value to your market, then why not do the thing that is legitimately more valuable to your market? Why are you hiding the thing that can actually help people? It's weird. I never understood it. [14:03.6]
The nice thing about selling conversations is that they're not huge commitments, which means that if someone is really on the fence and is hyper-skeptical about having a 15 or 20 or 30 minute chat with you, then that is probably someone you don't want to do business with. This is great news, because it means that your initial conversation itself can be a qualification mechanism, kind of like how my Inner Circle is my business's biggest qualification mechanism, because if financial advisors can't invest $199 per month into themselves, then they are not good fits for me.
It doesn't mean they're bad people or that they're horrible business owners, or anything like that. It just means that they're not good fits, at least, 99.9% of the time. It's because it works out to be $6.55 per day, and if a financial advisor, someone who legitimately gives financial advice about investments and investing in your future and all that, if that financial advisor has heartburn about $6.55 per day, then that person likely isn't going to make it work with the stuff I share anyway. [15:10.4]
So, it comes from a good place—I am trying to prevent these people from wasting their time and their energy and their money, which is precious. They can't get their time back, so I don't want them to enter my world, waste their time, waste their money, waste their energy. I don't want that for them, so I create that qualification mechanism. That might seem kind of harsh, depending on your perspective, but it is what it is.
Working with you as a client is a much larger commitment than setting that initial appointment, so if someone can't bring himself or herself to set that appointment with you that is a red flag. Okay? It just is. If someone is hemming and hawing about setting that little appointment, it is a red flag. Fortunately, by optimizing for the appointment, you bypass all of those people, and that's incredible. It makes you so much more efficient, and you can take the time that you save and reinvest it back in your business, if you wish. So, that's Shift No. 2. [16:04.4]
Shift No.3 is, focus on the transformation, not the transaction. One of the biggest marketing mistakes financial advisors make is selling the thing instead of the result. They'll say stuff like, “We offer comprehensive financial planning.” Okay, that's the thing. Or “We provide portfolio management.” That's the thing. Or “Retirement income solution.” That is the thing. “We help people reduce taxes.” Tax reduction is the thing. All of that sounds professional, but it's basically invisible. It doesn't really mean anything, because most advisors say the same thing or some version of the same thing, and it's why consumers all view financial advisors, or most consumers view all financial advisors as the same.
No prospect has ever woken up in the middle of the night thinking, Oh my goodness, I really need someone to give me a comprehensive financial plan right now. They don't want a financial plan or they don't want that stuff. They want what the plan gives them. They want to go to bed without worrying about money. They want to know that they're doing the right things with their savings. They want reassurance. They want to feel like they're not missing something important that could cost them later. That's the transformation. [17:12.5]
Marketing that converts well doesn't sell tasks or deliverables, or things. It doesn't do any of that. It just focuses on the transformation, the outcome. So, instead of saying, “I help people plan for retirement,” you might say something like, “I help business owners finally stop wondering whether they're saving enough and start knowing they can retire comfortably.”
Or instead of saying, “I manage portfolios for professionals,” that's terrible, but I'm riffing here, you could say, “I help successful professionals stop feeling guilty about not paying enough attention to their money without forcing them to become financial experts.” That's what they want. They want to get a grip with their money, but they don't want to be the next financial expert. They don't want to go to school and get a CFP like you did. They don't want to do any of that. They just want to get a handle on their money without dedicating their life to it. [18:01.7]
So, do you notice what happened there? The message that I just gave you moved from transactional to transformational. I'm going to take a step back right now and talk about marketing in general, not just with financial advisors. So many sales are lost in the world because the people doing the selling leave their prospects in this zone of uncertainty.
There are lots of people out there, buyers, customers, prospects, whatever you want to call them, who know they have problems or desires, however they are uncertain about how to solve those problems or fulfill those desires. Marketing's job is to show them the solution and make them feel comfortable enough to take action or to do the thing or embrace the solution. Does that mean everyone will accept the solution when it is presented to them? Goodness gracious, no. I know that firsthand. There are some people who will never do business with you, no matter what, for reasons known only to them. But if someone is willing to accept the solution, it doesn't matter if that person doesn't know the solution exists. [19:10.7]
Picture a bridge from where they are right now to where they want to be. If your goal was to get someone to cross that bridge, what would you do? Would you talk about how awesome the bridge is, how well it's made, how awesome the construction process was, and how fun it is to cross, or would you tell the person about how awesome it is on the other side, how cool it is, how great it's going to be when the person gets to the other side? I know what I would do. I actually might stress how much pain they're in right now and contrast that to what it's like on the other side, because that's good marketing, going back to what I talked about earlier, that contrast.
I think financial advisors are so close to the things that they do that they can't see the forest for the trees. They see the benefits of investing. They see the benefits of dollar-cost averaging and asset allocation, but they cannot put themselves in their prospect’s shoes and visualize what they're actually buying. [20:09.9]
I'll give you a good example. One of my all-time favorite mentors is a guy named Gary Halbert. I've talked about him a ton. I consider him to be the greatest marketer of all time. He had this course called “How to Make Maximum Money in Minimum Time.” What's interesting is that this course was about his general marketing philosophy, but it really was like a hodgepodge of everything that he did in his businesses. It talked about things like direct mail and celebrity endorsements, and even how to put advertisements in the classified sections of newspapers. What's that? You probably don't even know what that is if you're listening to this podcast, you young buck, you.
Now, let me ask you a question. Do you think that this course would have sold as well as it did if he gave it a title like “Gary's Marketing Philosophy” or “How to Sell Stuff in Classified Ads,” or “How to Get Celebrity Endorsements”? Actually, those are not bad titles. Those are pretty good. But you get the idea. The whole hook of “How to Make Maximum Money in Minimum Time” got people to lean forward because it sold the outcome. That is the outcome. People wanted to make maximum money in minimum time. That is the transformation. [21:18.4]
He's not focused on the transaction. The transaction, the work you have to do. You have to do the direct mail. You have to get celebrity endorsements. He talked about, I think it was 976 numbers or 800 numbers, where people would call these numbers and you would get paid for that. He talked about all these little things that he would do in his business to make more money. But people don't care about that. People care about the outcome. The wrapper was the transformation. That is what he wrapped the transaction in.
He wrapped direct mail and classified ads in the “making maximum money in minimum time.” That title was a bat signal in the sky. It called out everyone with that particular desire. All good marketing is like that. Even this podcast episode's title is like that. It's calling out the financial advisors who are either currently or thinking about using education as a marketing strategy. [22:08.4]
Most advisors build their marketing strategies like their textbooks. They talk about comprehensive financial planning and 401(k) reviews. Those are the bridges. Nobody wants a better bridge? I mean, yes, people do, but people would rather get to the other side. That's what they want bridges for. They don't want bridges for the sake of bridges. They don't buy drills for drills. They buy drills to make holes. They want the results. They want the thing that you offer, the transformation.
I hope this week's episode gives you a lot to think about. It's one of the most valuable lessons I can share with you, this whole education thing. It's just a crock. It really is. When people say, “Oh, you need to educate and give value and teach,” they just legitimately have no idea what they're talking about.
I know lots of you won't take these lessons to heart. You will ignore me. You'll nod along. You'll keep doing the same old things you've been doing. But for those of you who will actually change based on what I'm saying here, I salute you. I appreciate you, and I'm glad you're here. [23:05.7]
If you want even more content from me, I encourage you to visit TheAdvisorCoach.com, get on the email list. Check out my other podcast appearances, do all the other cool things available to you there. Thank you so much, and I will catch you next week. [23:20.4]
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