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: In today's episode, we're going to chat about one of my favorite topics—lead magnets. I define a lead magnet a little bit differently than most of the marketers out there. I define it as anything that gives someone a compelling reason to say, “Yes, I want to hear more from you in exchange for permission to stay in touch.” That definition is intentionally broad, and that's the whole point. [00:54.2]
Most people hear “lead magnet” and immediately think, PDF, checklist, e-book, free guide, stuff like that. Those things can work. I actually recommend PDFs for most financial advisors who want to create a lead magnet, but they're a narrow slice of what's possible, because once you loosen that definition, a lot of doors open for you.
A lead magnet can be an email course. I actually have an email course that financial advisors can go through. It can be a diagnostic that helps people realize that the problem is bigger or smaller or different than they assumed. It can be a recorded training, like a webinar or a VSL, a video sales letter. It can be a case study breakdown. It can be a teardown of a common mistake, a calculator, a worksheet, a decision guide, a swipe file, and so on and so forth. You have a lot of opportunities out there when you want to create a lead magnet. You just want to have someone stop and say, “Hmm, I want to learn more from this person. I want to hear from this person.” [01:51.0]
Even something like this podcast is a lead magnet. I'm not taking you and putting you on an email list, at least, not right away. I give you opportunities to join my email list, but it's a lead magnet in the sense that it gets financial advisors into my world—and you can do the same, because when someone listens to you for 20 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour, you're building familiarity. You're shaping how they think and letting them hear how you think and how you reason through problems, and that's where it begins to work in your favor.
A podcast with 350-plus episodes like this one does something that a podcast with 35 episodes simply cannot. It gives listeners the time to notice your consistency and time to feel like they know you before they ever talk to you. That accumulated exposure is doing the same job a traditional lead magnet does, just at a deeper level.
Someone can binge 10 episodes in a week. That's several hours of you in that person's ears. Compare that to a two-page PDF or something small like a checklist that they skim while half distracted and they forget about it five minutes later. One, the podcast creates a deep, lasting impression and builds a relationship, while the other one, the little skimpy checklist or guide, only creates a surface-level impression. [03:11.1]
That's why longer lead magnets often win, not because people want more work, but because the time spent with you reduces that uncertainty. It answers unspoken objections, like, “Do I like how this person thinks? Can I jive with this person? Does this person understand my world? Would I trust this person with something important?” and that’s only one of the many reasons, and we'll get to that.
For example, one of the main reasons why longer lead magnets work better is because they're harder to create. Anyone can crank out a five-page PDF over a weekend. Anyone can slap together a generic checklist, run it through Canva, and call it a lead magnet. Anybody can just go to ChatGPT and say, “Hey, create a little guide or a lead magnet or a checklist for me,” and that's why your prospects have already seen versions of the same thing a hundred times. [04:01.6]
Longer lead magnets demand something most of your competitors are unwilling to give, and that is effort. A deep podcast library, a substantial email series, a multi-part guide that actually walks someone through a decision instead of dancing around it. Those are things you want to create. Most advisors will simply not do that because it feels like too much work without an immediate payoff. They want the quick win. They want something they can point to and say that they, quote-unquote, “did marketing” this week or this quarter.
The irony here is that this exact resistance to do the work is what turns longer lead magnets into a filter, and that's just awesome. That's an amazing part of having longer lead magnets, because when you build something substantial, you are quietly eliminating your competitors. This is because you're creating an asset. We're going to talk about this, too. That asset compounds, while other financial advisors keep starting from scratch, or I guess they never start at all in a lot of cases. [05:03.4]
In case you can't tell already, the highest converting lead magnet nobody is using is a long one. Lots of people in marketing say the same thing. They say your marketing should be short and easily consumable. First, the fact that the majority of marketers are saying it should be all you need to know, because the majority is almost always wrong.
You should be able to look around and ask yourself, “Are most people doing this thing?” and if the answer is yes, you probably should not do that thing. But, second, that actually goes against nearly everything we know about how to build trust, credibility, and rapport, which means this advice is dead wrong for financial advisors, specifically because financial advisors need to build, you guessed it, trust, credibility, and rapport. [05:49.8]
In low-trust transactional industries, yeah, short lead magnets can perform well, I'll admit that, but financial advice is not like that. This is yet another example of why following generic marketing advice can completely backfire for financial advisors, because financial advisors are not selling impulse purchases. They're not selling little $50 widgets. They’re selling financial advice, which has a longer sales cycle and requires far more trust, credibility and rapport. That means your lead magnets must build those three things, and nothing builds them like length and depth.
I'll give you an example. If you're a longtime listener, you've likely heard me talk about this many times, but I have a lead magnet called “57 Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors.” It's a PDF download. It's more than 80 pages long. You can check it out for yourself over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/57mt—so, 57 marketing tips, “57”, the letter “M”, the letter “T”.
It converts like crazy. Why? Because length communicates all of the following: depth, expertise, effort, competence, seriousness, and, I guess, generosity, because I'm giving it away for free. All of those things are things that you want to communicate as a financial advisor. [07:06.7]
My personal best webinar that I've ever done—I've done a ton of them—it was over 90 minutes long. Yes, 90 minutes. Meanwhile, a lot of marketers say your webinar should be 45 minutes, or maybe an hour if you really want to push it, because “People won't watch more than that. You have to be careful. People won't stick around.” Yeah, I guess that's true when your content sucks, when it's shallow, but when the content is actually good and it solves problems, and again, goes back to the trust, credibility, and rapport thing, when it builds that, people stay.
They stay partly because of the length itself, but that's a little bit too advanced for this podcast episode. I'm not going to talk about that. A long presentation carries so many trust signals that a shorter one doesn't, and there are lots of other psychological reasons why longer lead magnets work better, too. One is the familiarity principle. Again, I'm not going to go too much into this, because I talked about it in the January Inner Circle Newsletter issue and I want to respect the Inner Circle members who paid for the information. I mean, I'm recording this in December, but it's going to come out in January. I'm already thinking about them. [08:08.2]
But if you've read any basic psychology 101 book, you already know that the familiarity principle says, the more time people spend with you, the more they trust you. Long content forces people to spend more time with you. I guess I shouldn't say forces. It gives them the opportunity to, and if they choose to spend time with you, they build familiarity. That time spent turns into, say it with me, trust, credibility, and rapport, yay. A one-page checklist cannot do that.
Now, of course, there's a lot more to it because the familiarity principle is one of the best ways for financial advisors to get financial advisors to get more clients, but I'm not going to reveal the paid information on a free podcast. I am sorry if that offends you, too bad. [08:51.4]
Another reason is that when people read a long guide or attend a long webinar, or any sort of long lead magnet I guess, they experience you as the expert. Let's go back to the podcast. I'll use myself as an example. I want you to just think about this logically here. I don't like calling myself an expert because I think it's kind of silly, and I make fun of the so-called experts all the time, but let's just be real, this is going to be something like Episode 368, something like that, maybe 367 or 369. Do you think anyone off the street can create 368 straight weekly episodes about financial advisor marketing, or do you think that only someone with a deep knowledge and a deep passion for the topic could do it? Obviously, it's the second one.
So, it’s not even a marketing tactic per se. It's just who you have to be in order to pull it off. You have to be the type of person who knows your stuff. You have to be the type of person who is committed enough to make the long lead magnet in the first place, so that is a qualification mechanism on the prospect’s end. The prospect is qualifying you. If you have a long lead magnet, you are at least a little bit more qualified than everyone else who at least could not have created a longer lead magnet, simply because they don't have the competence and the knowledge base and the passion in order to do it. [10:11.8]
Another psychological reason, I'm just piling them on here for you, why longer lead magnets work is because people value what they invest their time into. When people spend 30 minutes, an hour, or even several hours, consuming your content, something subtle but powerful happens. Their brains start justifying the time they've already spent. They don't consciously think this. They don't think, I've invested a lot of time. Therefore this must be good or valuable. But that's exactly what happens beneath the surface. Time investment creates perceived value.
If something were unimportant or disposable, or low quality or just not good, they wouldn't have stayed with it, so the very act of sticking around elevates how they view both the content itself and the person who created the content. This is why people feel more attached to books they finish rather than articles they skim. It's why they feel more connected to people they hear regularly than people they see maybe once or twice. Longer lead magnets create that effect naturally. [11:12.4]
Perhaps my favorite reason to create long lead magnets is that longer lead magnets generally repel the worst prospects for financial advisors. Again, this is something that works specifically for advisors. This is one of the reasons why advisors need to get their marketing help from somebody who kinda sorta knows what to do in advisor marketing. [11:32.5]
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.
The long lead magnets repel the bad prospects. These are the people who want shortcuts and the quickest way to get something done. These are the people who are casually curious. They're curious enough to download a little checklist, but they're not serious enough to read a book about the topic. They're never going to take action anyway, and repelling them is a feature of a long lead magnet. It is not a bug. [12:54.0]
Listen to me, my friend. You want people who read longer lead magnets. You want people who download them, who watch the longer videos, who listen to multiple episodes of your podcast, whatever you have, right? You want those people. You want people who are willing to engage and think, and reflect and stick with something. Those are the people who are going to become good clients. Long lead magnets attract those people while pushing everyone else away, and that is a good thing.
This is another reason advisors get tripped up when they chase maximum opt-ins instead of maximum quality. You might get more downloads with a shorter lead magnet, I'm not arguing that, but a longer lead magnet will improve your conversations. It will improve your back-end numbers. Not to go up on a tangent here, but I have seen so many scenarios where financial advisors will try to optimize their marketing based on front-end numbers while ignoring the back-end ones. They'll do it like they'll try to increase all of their open rates and then completely tank everything else, or they'll try to get as many clicks as possible on their ads while tanking everything else, and it is just backwards. [14:01.3]
One of the things that makes me different from a lot of the people in the “help financial advisor” space is I don't care about your open rates or your downloads, or your social media engagement or any of that stuff. I only care about dollars in vs. dollars out. If you're an Inner Circle member and you've been on an office hour session, you have probably gotten tired of me saying this, because it's my answer to a lot of questions when financial advisors say, “What should I get? What should be happening here?” Or “What can I expect?” It does not matter. It is about dollars in vs. dollars out.
What are you making? What are you spending? Are you profitable? Are you building wealth? That's all that matters. If your open rate rates are absolutely horrible, but you're building personal wealth faster than ever before, something is working. Okay? Would you rather have higher open rates or would you rather have more money in the bank? [14:51.2]
I bring that up here because you will probably get more downloads and therefore a lower cost per download with a shorter lead magnet, but if fewer of those people become clients, it'll probably be more expensive overall. Did you get that? You'll get more front-end numbers, but you'll have worse back-end numbers. But spending a little bit of extra money for the quality prospects who will spend time with a longer lead magnet will be less expensive overall, or at least should be, especially when you consider by the time someone reaches out after consuming a long-form newsletter or opt-in or guide, that person already feels aligned with you. That conversation itself starts at a higher level, because the groundwork has already been done.
So, when you hear advice like, “Make your lead magnet shorter so more people consume it,” you have to ask a better question. You have to ask yourself, “Hmm, more people for what purpose? I don't want more people.” I put a chatbot on my website once figuring I could have more conversations with financial advisors, and holy moly, was that a bad decision. I hated it. I definitely do not want more people. I want fewer better people. [16:12.0]
Personally, my life would be so much better if I could get that ratio down to 1:1, meaning, I want zero bad fits to enter my world. I don't even want them to bother at all. I don't want them to listen to this podcast. I don't want them to join my email list. I don't want them to go to my website. I don't want them to ever lay eyes on my marketing materials. I'd rather have a handful of diamonds instead of a truckload of coal.
I'll give you one more tip that will separate the top 1% of financial advisors from everyone else. Test multiple lead magnets. Not only am I telling you to do the extremely hard work of creating a long lead magnet, but I'm telling you to do it multiple times, but, again, this is what will separate you from everyone else. Are you willing to actually do the work or are you going to do what everyone else is doing and get the results that everyone results that everyone else is getting? [17:03.6]
Lots of financial advisors don't bother to test multiple lead magnets. They might. They might create one and hope it performs, but that's dangerous, because they're assuming they're going to nail it on the first try, which almost never happens. Even great marketers don't nail it on the first try, but great marketers will test things.
Now, I've seen lead magnets that I thought would do extremely well completely flop, and I've seen lead magnets that seem kind of weird and I wouldn't have bet the farm on absolutely explode. You can't always predict performance. There really isn't a way to know what will work extremely well. You can only test it, and the more thorough and thoughtful the lead magnet, the bigger the potential upside in most cases. Yes, it's hard, but, yes, it's worth it. [17:51.8]
That's why treating a lead magnet like a one-time project is such a mistake. Your first long lead magnet is rarely your best one. It's the one that teaches you what your audience actually responds to when you give them depth. It shows you where they lean in, where they skim what they like, what they don't like, what questions they have, and what makes them feel understood. Every additional lead magnet you create gets sharper and sharper, and better and better, because of this feedback loop.
This is also where a lot of financial advisors just give up, because creating one substantial asset feels heavy enough. Creating another one feels even harder or unnecessary, or excessive or indulgent, so they stop, and the moment they stop, they freeze their growth. The advisors who win think differently. They think about what their next move should be and how they can improve on what they've already built. One lead magnet might focus on retirees. Another one might speak directly to business owners. Another might tackle a single decision that keeps coming up in meetings, and that's really sharp. So, over time, you're not just testing performance. You're kind of mapping demand and you're discovering which conversations prospects are already desperate to have. You're just flowing right into that naturally. [19:08.2]
I don't want to get too far ahead of this because we don't have that much time left in the podcast, but if you're thinking that multiple lead magnets will cannibalize each other or that they'll compete with each other, they won't. They reinforce each other. A prospect might start with one and then discover another, and then listen to your podcast, and then, finally, raise his or her hand, and by the time the person does, you're not a stranger. You're familiar. You're trusted. Let's go through the three things again—you already have, say it with me, trust, credibility, and rapport. So, yeah, it's more work, but it's also a lot more leverage.
There's another way to think about all of this that I really want to land, especially if you think in terms of money investing in long-term wealth, which you probably should because you're a financial advisor, and it's this—a lead magnet is an asset. It is not a tactic. It is not even a campaign. It's not something you try for a month. It is an asset that sits on your balance sheet, even if you don't see it in QuickBooks, and wealth is built through assets, stuff like rental properties and businesses, and intellectual property or systems. [20:13.1]
A good lead magnet fits squarely in the asset category, because once it exists, it can keep attracting, warming up, and qualifying prospects without you having to recreate it every time, and this is where being a marketer gives you a massive advantage. Most professionals have to buy assets. They have to deploy capital first and then hope it performs. As a marketer, you can create assets with your time and with your energy and your effort. Then you can let them compound. That is a rare position to be in. Other people are absolutely jealous of that skill.
When you build a long high-quality lead magnet, you are manufacturing an income producing asset out of thin air. You put in the work once and it keeps introducing you to the right people over and over again, month after month, year after year. That's why it's such a mistake to judge lead magnets on their immediate results alone, because assets don't always pay off instantly, but when they do, they keep paying. [21:11.9]
When you build multiple lead magnets, you're building your portfolio. Some will perform better than others, just like investments. Over time, you double down on the investments, the assets that attract the best clients and then get rid of the ones that don't. It is so much deeper than marketing, because when you do this stuff, you do the stuff the way I talk about on this podcast, you're building wealth.
If there's one idea that I want you to walk away with, it's this. Lead magnets are not just freebies that you give away to your market. They are assets, and the advisors who win over the long term treat them that way. Little, cheap, gimmicky, short, disposable lead magnets really chase convenience. Advisors just want to create them and say that they did marketing. Long lead magnets build relationships and they have so many trust signals in there. They filter out the wrong people. They create that—again, let's do it, one more time. It is the last time, I promise, come on—trust, credibility, and rapport. They build all that before a single sales conversation ever happens. [22:13.6]
It is sales. Everything is sales, but it's really not even sales at that point. It's just a conversation where you lay out what you do, you lay out how you help, and you say, “Hey, does this sound like something you want to do?” and the person says yes or no. Yes, that requires a lot of work, which is exactly why so few financial advisors ever do this, but that difficulty is the opportunity.
You are in a profession with a long sales cycle with high stakes and with enormous trust requirements. That means your marketing has to do more than just grab attention and get someone to download something. It has to reduce uncertainty. It has to build credibility. I'm not going to say it, I promise. It has to let people know how you think before they ever decide to work with you, and length and depth do this better than anything else. [23:02.7]
When you create a long lead magnet and you test more than one, and you've got a little portfolio going, you are compounding over time, because you have assets that you own and they work while you sleep, and they make every future conversation easier. So, the question is not whether long lead magnets work. They do. I promise you, they do. I've been doing this for more than 10 years. Long lead magnets do work. The real question here is whether you specifically are willing to build them while everyone else keeps looking for shortcuts.
All right, that's it. That's enough for this week. If you want to learn more about how I can get you clients and grow your business, please visit TheAdvisorCoach.com. I would love to have you. Thank you for listening, and I will catch you next week. [23:49.3]
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