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: Hey, financial advisors, I hope you're doing well. This week, I want to chat about a few unusual things that get more clients and increase conversions, and get you better marketing results. I'm just going to rattle off some things that I've noticed throughout my marketing career that have either worked extremely well for me or for others, sometimes both.
I could have titled this episode “A Few Unusual Things That Increase Conversions,” but speaking as a marketer, the whole “get clients” appeal works better, and that's what ends up happening anyway. If you increase your conversions and your response rates, you get more clients as a financial advisor. [01:05.5]
I originally got this idea because I was a guest on a podcast episode where we talked about direct mail and I revealed that one of the most successful mailers I sent in 2025 was a mailer that made this joke that I was about to go out to dinner, and I put in parentheses that I was going to Texas Roadhouse and that I'm a fiend for their honey cinnamon butter rolls. I guess it's not a joke because I really am. I mean, you put those things in front of me. I hear Brooks & Dunn in my head and Garth Brooks, and all the Brooks, and I just gobble them down. I go straight up country on you.
I could have left that story out entirely or said that I was going out to dinner after mailing the letter, but instead, I added that little bit of specificity and it was something for financial advisors to latch onto. Now, did I mention my undying love for honey cinnamon butter rolls to get people to respond? Not necessarily. But did it make them feel like they were dealing with an actual human being instead of a faceless marketing piece? Absolutely, and that's the first unusual thing that gets more clients. [02:08.8]
A lot of marketing is scrubbed clean of anything personal, anything concrete or oddly specific. But the more specific you are, the more of a chance you have for somebody to mentally raise his or her hand and say, “That is me. I can relate to you. You are like me.”
Imagine I'm writing an email about a car I used to have or I mentioned something about a car I used to have. In my case, I mean, I haven't had that many cars because I buy them and ride them till the wheels fall off, but one of the ones that I had was a 2001 pewter Chevy Camaro. It was wonderful. I loved that car. Now, if I just said that I had a car and that's it, it wouldn't nearly be as relatable to someone reading that email who also, let's say, had a Camaro. [02:55.4]
Or imagine this. Imagine if someone on my email list also had that same exact 2001 Camaro. That would be really cool, wouldn't it? It wouldn't have built instant rapport with that person because that person would say, “Wow, I had the same specific car as James did,” and vice versa. I would build rapport with this person and that person would build rapport with me because I would say, “Wow, you and I both had the same car,” and I would feel closer to that person because we had shared experiences.
Dripping in little specifics, like your favorite restaurant, your hobbies, a story about your kid's soccer game, the fact that you can't drink coffee after 2 p.m. or you're up all night, stuff like that gives people velcro points in their brain where you just hook onto their memories and their minds. They might not remember your exact wording about tax loss harvesting, but they'll remember, oh, yeah, that's the advisor who loves Texas Roadhouse and works with pharmacists. [03:50.5]
Back to that Texas Roadhouse line. On paper, it doesn't belong in a direct mail piece about marketing for financial advisors. It's out of context. It is random, and that's exactly why it works. It's a pattern interrupt. Our brains are wired to filter out anything familiar, expected or boring, but when something breaks that pattern, like a weird little detail, an unexpected joke, a turn of phrase, just something coming out of left field, the brain wakes up.
For you, the financial advisor, that might look like starting an email about retirement planning with a story about your dog destroying your couch, something completely different out of left field. You might open a webinar that you're presenting with a confession about the worst financial decision you ever made. That's a tremendous pattern interrupt for financial advisors. I recommend that all the time because it makes you more relatable. It makes you more human. We're going to talk about that in a little bit, but that is an absolute powerhouse of a pattern interrupt when a financial advisor talks about his or her horrible financial decisions. [04:50.8]
Another thing that you could do as a pattern interrupt is putting a strange but true fact in the P.S. of your emails or your direct mail pieces that has nothing to do with money, but everything to do with you, very similar to that Texas Roadhouse line that I used in my direct mailer.
I want you to notice also that these things are not random for the sake of being random. Do not just say, “James said I have to put random things in my marketing.” No, they should be connected back to your overall marketing strategy, which involves being memorable and being relatable. The reason this is so important is that a lot of prospects think financial advisors are exactly the same, so when you show up differently, you instantly move to the top of the stack in their minds.
I like to think of these pattern interrupts as handles. You're giving people handles to grab onto. Many financial advisors try to be so polished and generic that they're just boring. They don't really have anything to remember. There's nothing to grab onto, but when you sprinkle in those tiny, vivid details, you suddenly become memorable. [05:51.2]
Now, a quick warning. When advisors hear this, some of them overcorrect and think, Cool, I'll just be wild and wacky all the time. No, I cannot stress this enough, you're not being random for the sake of being random. You're not auditioning for a reality show. You're not a stand-up comedian. You're still dealing with serious topics, people's money, people's security, their future.
There has to be this core of competence, calm and authority in everything that you do, because you are, at the end of the day, a financial advisor, a financial planner. You're dealing with people's money and their futures. The pattern interrupt here that I'm talking about is like the spice. It's not the entire meal. But I don't want to spend too much time on this one thing, so let's move on.
Here's another unusual thing that gets more clients for me and for financial advisors and lots of businesses out there. It's showing that you're not some perfectly polished, “never makes a mistake” robot. Most advisors are really scared of this. They think if I'm not a hundred percent professional and serious all of the time, then people won't trust me with their money, but here's what actually happens. [06:55.2]
When you admit a small flaw, or you share a story where you learn something the hard way, or you poke fun at yourself a little bit, people relax. They think, Okay, this person is real. If something goes wrong, I can actually talk to this person. I can relate to this person. This person won't judge me. This person makes mistakes, too, just like me—and that is huge.
So, here are some examples of that. Telling the story about the time you chased a hot stock or something and you got burned early in your career, and how that experience shaped your investment philosophy today. There's actually a very successful financial planning firm that I'm not going to mention by name, because I don't know if they want to get mentioned by name, but they have done millions and millions and millions of downloads for their content. They're making a tremendous amount of money, and they frequently talk about how they made a great investment. They bought options for a very popular tech company and did extremely well, and that persuaded them to continue trading options, and then it did not work out well for them, and that is a story that they tell over and over and over, and it works well for them. [08:01.0]
You could admit that you used to ignore your insurance coverage, maybe health insurance or disability insurance, long-term care, life insurance, whatever, because it was boring until you had a close call that woke you up, because a lot of times that's what people need, they need a kick in the pants in order to get moving on things like that. [08:17.7]
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You could share that you used to be terrible with organization and you had to build systems so nothing fell through the cracks with you in your personal life or in your business. You could share these things, because they make you more relatable. Lots of people struggle with organization, so if you say, “Hey, I used to struggle with organization,” they can see themselves in you.
These things are not necessarily weaknesses. I mean, I guess they're weaknesses if you never fix them. I would not come out and say, “Hey, I'm still terrible at organization.” I would not do that, but I would comfortably say, “I used to be terrible at organization, but now I'm really, really good at it, and that translates into a benefit for you, my client, because—” and then you could go from there. When you talk about stuff like that, you signal that you understand real life and that you have grown from it. [10:02.0]
Another thing, another really weird thing that increases conversions, is talking about how you've seen it all, because most prospective clients are walking around scared to death that their financial situation is unique, that it's uniquely messy, it's uniquely embarrassing, it's uniquely behind. Whatever it is, they are just terrified. You know this because you've seen hundreds of plans. You've seen hundreds of client scenarios and you know most people are more similar than they are different—but they don't know that. You know that. They don't.
To them, their situation is the only one that looks the way it does because people aren't going around saying, “Hey, I don't have any long-term care coverage. Do you? I don't have any life insurance. Do you? I don't have 401(k) in order. I have target-date funds because I don't know any better.” People don't say that. Those are not discussions that normal people have with their friends and family members, so they only know their situation. That's why saying something as simple as “I've seen people with nothing saved, people with seven figures saved, people still carrying student loan debt at age 50 and everything in between,” that instantly melts the intimidation. [11:07.8]
Back in late 2023 when I surveyed people who hadn't hired a financial advisor yet, nearly every reason boiled down to some flavor of “I'm embarrassed. I don't want to be judged. I don't want someone to tell me how stupid my decisions were.” One woman literally said something along the lines of “I don't want to sit in front of someone and confess that I still have student loans at 52 years old. I don't want them to think I'm irresponsible.”
When advisors started casually mentioning that they have helped plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s who still have student loans, appointment requests went up immediately, because it gives the air that you have seen it all. This is nothing new to you. This is not unique. You're not going to be shocked, okay? Because when prospects saw that in the marketing materials, they stopped thinking, I hope they don't judge me, and started thinking, Oh, okay, I'm not the only one. There are lots of people out there who are way worse off than I am who have completely screwed-up situations, just like me. I am nothing new to this financial advisor—and you cannot overestimate how powerful this shift is. [12:16.0]
Another technique that gets more clients is railing against your prospective clients’ enemies. Marketers call this the “us vs. them” principle. Most advisors do it timidly, which basically neutralizes the effect. If you're going to do it, you have to go all out. When you clearly identify what you stand against, you make what you stand for sharper, stronger, and more attractive.
I'll give you an example from my business. In my business, The Advisor Coach, the enemy is anything that wastes advisors’ time or holds them back. It's stuff like overthinking, inefficient marketing, analysis paralysis, shiny object chasing. Let's see, poor systems, reactive business models instead of proactive business models. All of those are enemies. They hold financial advisors back from living the life that they want to live. [13:02.2]
The moment I started openly calling these things out, people said, “Okay, finally, somebody gets it. James understands where I am.” When you do something similar, you create loyalty. When you draw that line in the sand, people say, “Okay, good. Finally, somebody understands me.”
For financial advisors and their clients, the enemy is rarely another financial advisor. It is not your, quote-unquote, “competition.” It's usually stuff like procrastination and fear and emotion, and avoidance and a lack of clarity. Those are your enemies. When you say stuff like, “Most people aren't behind because of the market. They're behind because they've avoided planning for years,” that tends to work because avoidance is the enemy. It's not somebody else. It's not, “Oh, the enemy is this financial advisor that I'm competing against.” No, that is not the case. When you really nail this, prospects lean in, because you're describing the villain in their story, and people only hire heroes who can defeat their villain. [14:01.7]
All right, I'll give you one more, and this is a powerful one. It is using the “Here's what I’d do if I were you” language. A lot of financial advisor marketing is written in such a way where it feels like it puts the prospective clients at arm's length, where they're really not relatable, they're not memorable, they're not all of the things that I've been talking about in this podcast episode so far.
When you say, “This is what I’d do if I were you,” it collapses the distance between you and your prospect. Now, of course, this does not mean giving tailored advice to an identifiable individual's personal facts. You avoid the compliance headache by framing everything as hypothetical, generalized, example-based and educational only.
You could say, “If I were in my 50s with student loan debt, here's something I would consider.” That gives you a way to not only call out your audience, but to relate to them as well. Compliance has no problem with that. Compliance has no problem with “If I were in the situation, I'd start understanding spending. Then I review my taxes. Then I'd look at a timeline of what to do with my financial planner.” That's not advice. That is process. [15:09.8]
Your thought process is always compliant. Personalized instructions are not, so miss me with all that compliance stuff. I have been in the game for more than a decade. This is nothing new to me. If your compliance department still whines about it, they are in the wrong. I am not in the wrong. The alphabet institutions literally allow all of those things. They allow hypothetical, educational, general, illustrative, and process-based stuff. They allow it.
But when you use the “Here's what I’d do if I were you” language, your marketing just becomes so much more, again, relatable. I keep bringing up this word, because that is what is what it is. That is what good marketing does. Imagine if I said something like this, and you're a financial advisor in your 40s, you're a solopreneur and you feel like you don't have enough time in the day. If I say, “If I were a solopreneur financial advisor in my 40s, who felt like there's not enough time in the day, here's what I would do,” you would perk up. You would immediately gravitate to whatever it is that I was about to say, simply because I called you out specifically, and stuff like that is the reason I have ads that are just crushing it with the hooks that they use and the click-through rates, and the cost per click. [16:18.2]
It's the reason my direct mail gets opened. It's the reason the emails that I write for financial advisors, the direct mail pieces that I've written for financial advisors, [get opened]. Those things work extremely well because they go directly to the audience. Okay? I want you to think about that.
I know this is a short podcast episode. I've given you a lot of stuff to think about, a lot of specific tactics you can use in your marketing to get better results. I hope this helps you. If you want to learn more about how I can help you even more, visit TheAdvisorCoach.com. That's my website. I've got a bunch of content on there that can pour gasoline on your fire.
Thank you so much for listening, and I will catch you next week. [16:56.8]
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