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'm recording this episode in late December, and one of the things I'm doing right now is reviewing what went well, what didn't, and what I'd like to continue doing in 2026, and one of the things I'm most proud of is just how well my Inner Circle members have done. I sent an email to my email list about this, but I'd like to share it on the podcast as well. Here's a collection of results from my private notes, emails to me, LinkedIn messages, stories told in office hours, stories financial advisors have told me in person, and so on and so forth. I tried my best to recollect them as well as I could. [01:01.8]
But, first, a disclaimer—these examples are not guarantees. Results vary based on experience, effort, consistency, background and how the ideas are applied, as well as the market and market forces, and personal factors beyond anyone's control. So, here we go. Here are some of the things that I have shared that Inner Circle members have done in 2025.
I helped one Inner Circle member hit $50 million in assets under management despite being in his mid-20s, so I guess the “You're too young” objection didn't apply to him. He is absolutely crushing it and he's doing extremely well. He's doing a lot of stuff on LinkedIn specifically.
I helped another financial advisor in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, dominate the retirement niche and generate several booked deployments every single month—and, admittedly, it wasn't that difficult to do because it was ranked as the best place to retire by U.S. News & World Report, so all we had to do was run with that in a direct mail campaign. We told the story. We shared the source. We said, “Hey, why not work with me in the best place to retire and really enjoy your retirement? Are you getting the most out of your retirement? If you're living in the absolute best place, why settle for anything less than the best?” [02:08.3]
I helped another financial advisor in Naples, Florida. I've got a lot of Inner Circle members in Florida for some reason, but this guy, we did the same thing in the retirement niche. Naples is one of the hottest retiree markets in America. There's a lot more money there than in most cities and it's just a great market. I mean, Southwest Florida, in total, is a fantastic market. If you're a financial advisor and you're in southwest Florida, and you are not raking it in right now, you are doing something extremely, extremely wrong.
Another Inner Circle member got clearer on his niche and immediately increased his closing ratio with prospective clients. I'm not sure if it doubled exactly, but it was pretty darn close.
Another Inner Circle member created a lead magnet specifically for the Christian market, even turning it into a published book on Amazon. One of the office hours sessions had this lead magnet in it and he shared it, and we went through it and that was really cool. A lot of people thought that was pretty awesome. [02:59.8]
Another advisor grew his email list from less than 200 subscribers to more than 1,500 in a few months using simple Facebook ads. Again, this was a story that was shared in office hours, I believe. I think it was. We talked a lot about email marketing in a lot of office hours sessions, so I'm sure this is one from the office hours.
I've helped several Inner Circle members turn their in-person seminars into webinars that run automatically with no involvement from them—and at the time of this recording, I've got financial advisors in my email inbox right now asking about how to do this, and I'm helping them with the software and the tools, and what to do and what to say, and how to change the ending and how to follow up, and all that stuff. We are working on that right now. Two of them, I know, are going to take my advice because they've taken pretty much every piece of advice I've ever given them. Another financial advisor, I'm not so sure, hopefully he does, because he could make a ton of money doing it. [03:49.7]
Another Inner Circle member rewrote his website messaging and saw inbound inquiries jump from one every couple of months—can you believe that? Only one every couple of months—to multiple per week, all without paid traffic, simply because he made the most of the traffic he was already getting. He was getting a ton of traffic, but the traffic was not turning into leads, and he just had to change his messaging in order for the traffic to say, “Oh, this is exactly for me, and I should reach out to this financial advisor.” Not super hard stuff, but something that he needed help with.
Another advisor started commenting on LinkedIn. He was cold messaging and sending all the spray and pray, and using these stupid automated services that just absolutely wrecked his reputation. But he was rebuilding, and he started commenting on people in his market, and he added over 1,200 connections in six months, and he got nine new clients from LinkedIn. That was amazing. I love that one.
Another Inner Circle member committed to the same LinkedIn process 10 minutes a day and got six booked meetings in a month. He didn't use any ads. He didn't use any automation. He didn't use any cheesy outreach scripts. He didn't message a bunch of people. I'm sure he messaged a bunch of people, but what I'm saying is he did not just message and message and message every day. He actually engaged with people and had real conversations. [05:06.6]
Another one used a short reengagement email to a list of about 1,100 dormant subscribers and booked three meetings right away, including prospects who have been silent for years. I don't really recommend ever getting yourself into a situation where you have to do a reengagement email, but if you are, it is possible, but it's not ideal. I would not recommend it.
I helped a lot of advisors test direct mail campaigns. We talked about direct mail a lot in office hours. I'm not going to go on and on about that. I helped who knows how many financial advisors increase their fees and finally charge what they're worth? I hope they have raised their fees again by the time you listen to this in 2026. I hope they've done it again. [05:45.6]
I could keep going, but you get the idea, and what makes these stories so satisfying to me is that none of them required any gimmicks or viral tricks, or doing things that felt out of alignment with who these advisors were. In most cases, the work was very simple. It just wasn't obvious until I pointed it out. Again, it's not 2026 yet, but as I look forward to 2026, this is the kind of work I want to keep doing. I want to help good advisors clarify what makes them different. I want to help them communicate it better. I want them to build better businesses that don't depend on luck or this constant hustle.
Actually, that's a perfect segue into the topic I have for you today, which is how top financial advisors grow faster with less marketing. But let me be clear, a lot of the top advisors do a lot of stuff in the beginning. They do a lot of marketing. They try a lot of things. Then they trim it down to the things that work the best. They do not just pick two or three things and knock it out of the park on day one. [06:50.4]
With that said, there are ways to speed up the process, because growth doesn't come from doing more. I mean, it kind of sort of can, but in this case, it comes from doing more of what works. Financial advisors who are hitting record numbers and growing 20% or 30%, or 40% or more, understand this concept at a very deep level. They do not reinvent the wheel. They do not chase shiny objects. Instead, they learn what already works and do that, or they look at what they have done in the past that worked for them, and they just do more of that. They reuse their winners relentlessly.
I'll give you an example. I mentioned that I'm recording this episode in late December. Another thing I'm doing this week is planning out my LinkedIn and email content for 2026. I went through all of my 2025 LinkedIn content, and I can't remember how many posts I had, but it was 400-something. It was more than 400, like 454 or 464. Let's just say it was 400. I ended up taking the top 50 posts and scheduling them to go out throughout 2026. Those are 50 posts I don't even have to think about anymore, and they're already proven to work. [08:04.6]
That's what I mean by getting more with less. You have to do more in the beginning, but once you put the work in, you can reap the exponential rewards. It's no different than investing. You have to do the hard work of earning money and investing it, but if you can do that long enough, if you can earn enough money and put it away, eventually you can live off the dividends. That's what I've done with my marketing, and I encourage you to do the same thing.
Like I said, I also did the same thing with my email marketing content. Earlier this year, I analyzed almost 3,000 emails I've sent throughout the years. I took the top 10% of those emails and I put them into a document, and I gave them to Pollard AI, which is my custom-trained marketing coach that my Inner Circle members have access to, and I told Pollard AI to study them. I asked it to give me specific, concrete reasons why those 300 emails performed exponentially better than the other thousands of emails, literally thousands, that I sent to my email list over the years. [09:06.0]
Guess what? It gave me an extremely detailed response with breakdowns and formulas that I can use in my future emails. Now, I could take those 300 emails and just reuse them every year and practically never have to write an email ever again. But I like writing emails. I like communicating to financial advisors on my email list. I take a great deal of pride in doing that and writing. It's cathartic for me. I enjoy doing it.
So, I'm not going to reuse all 300. However, I'm going to keep it real with you and I'm going to tell you, I am going to use the top 30, because the top 30 is the top 1% and I would be a really bad business person if I didn't do at least that. [09:51.6]
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.
If you know the 80-20 rule, you know that 20% of my emails should generate 80% of my results, but the 80-20 rule is fractal, which means the top 4% should generate 64% of my results, and the top 1%—get this. How crazy is this? The top 1% of all of my emails—should generate 51% of all the results I've generated from my emails.
That means I can send a mere 30 emails and get more than half of all of the results—so, income and clients, and subscribers and all that stuff that I got from all of my emails. Remember, that's not half the results from a year. No, no, no, that's half of the results from nearly 3,000 emails. Why in the world would I turn that down? I can do literally 1% of the work and get 51% of the results so you bet your sweet booty, I'm doing that, absolutely. Are you kidding me? [11:54.0]
That's why I get so frustrated when financial advisors obsess over novelty for novelty’s sake. They're always asking questions, like, “Oh, what should I do next? Or should I do this? This advisor is doing this,” or “I saw this advisor on LinkedIn say that I should be doing this. Should I do that?” No, no, no. Take a chill pill and ask yourself, what has already worked? What can I model? What can I do again? I talk about this in the Inner Circle all the time.
Back in the December Inner Circle Newsletter issue, the one that went out on December 1, I did a little something called my Ads Extravaganza, where I shared a bunch of winning advertisements and headlines and stories. One of the concepts in one of those advertisements ran for decades, and I know for a fact that this company, it was an insurance company, hired some of the best copywriters in the world. Do you think that their advice was to continuously try new things instead of letting the winner run? Of course not.
Now, don't get it twisted. They definitely tested new things against the winner with the goal of beating the winner—in copywriting, it's called beating the control—but they did not stop running the winner. They kept doing it. I have advertisements that I have personally been running for years. Do you think I'm going to turn them off? No. Why would I? Don't be silly. [13:12.0]
I shared the success stories earlier and a handful of them were about direct mail. This morning, I got an email from an Inner Circle member asking me about that exact topic, direct mail. He has been mailing various lists in his market and it has been working extremely well for him, but now he's got that itch. He's got the itch that financial advisors get. He wants to just try something completely new and I told him, no, resist it. No, that's a bad financial advisor, bad. Don't do that.
If you want to test that's fine, that's cool, but please do not turn off your winner because you're tired of it, especially not with something like direct mail, because, let's say you work with farmers all across the country. You can mail 500 farmers in Oklahoma today, or 1,000 or 2,000, or however many are in Oklahoma. I mean, you could segment it by home ownership and wealth and income, and all this stuff. But then you can move to farmers in Nebraska, then farmers in Iowa, then farmers in Indiana, and you can keep that puppy running. Why would you ever turn it off, assuming that it's working? [14:14.8]
Now, I've noticed over the years—I've been doing this for more than 10 years now—the top financial advisors are playing a completely different game. They realize they don't need a hundred different marketing ideas. They need five to 10. That's it. Maybe 10, okay? Once they have them, the game becomes pouring fuel onto them instead of trying new things.
LinkedIn is a perfect example of this. If you are creating content and engaging with people in your market on LinkedIn, and that's working for you, then keep doing it, especially on something like LinkedIn, where the effects compound over time and you build familiarity, and all of that good stuff. Can this get boring? Yes, but would you rather have novelty or would rather have cash in the bank? [15:01.4]
I just confessed to you that I chose novelty with my emails, because if I was all about the cash, I would just take the 365 best performing emails and keep reusing them every year and go sip Mai Tais on the beach somewhere. It’s not always about the cash. We're not robots. We're human beings with feelings and emotions, and desires and all of that. But assuming that you're not super emotionally attached to any one marketing strategy like I am with my emails, then you're probably better off choosing the cash.
Here's something I wish more financial advisors knew. Marketing breakthroughs are rarely original. They're borrowed. If someone else has already spent thousands of dollars testing an ad or multiple years perfecting a LinkedIn strategy, why in the world would you start from zero? Why would you try to build everything yourself from scratch? [15:50.3]
That's the idea behind the entire Inner Circle, honestly, because I share the stuff that is working. Not theory, not speculation. Actual winners, because seeing what works gives financial advisors a shortcut. It shortens their learning curve. That's how they reverse-engineer success. They look at what works. They ask why it works, and then they adapt the psychology behind it. They may not copy it. In fact, I actually recommend that financial advisors do not copy. I want them to model success, but they're not reinventing the wheel.
When you analyze marketing strategies, you should not just copy the tactic. I don't care about the tactics themselves. I care more about stuff like the tone and the structure, and the promise and the emotional hook, and the pacing and the belief shifts, and all of the stuff that goes into good marketing. That gives you a massive, massive competitive advantage, because you're standing on proven ground and other people probably aren't. The best financial advisors are relentless students of what works, and they're smart enough to put their egos to the side and listen to someone else. [16:53.5]
This might be a little bit too deep for a free podcast episode, but here it goes. I'm going to try it anyway. Lots of financial advisors are unconsciously using their marketing as a form of self-expression. Let me say that again. Lots of advisors are unconsciously using their marketing as a form of self-expression.
My electric company has never asked me how expressive I was when I'm paying a bill. Back when I had a mortgage, my mortgage company never wanted to know if I did something original to earn the money. It never happened. But advisors want to feel creative and original. They want to feel like they're doing something new and expressing themselves. There's nothing wrong with that, assuming you're consciously doing it with a purpose, but it is a dangerous way to build a business if results actually matter to you.
Top advisors treat marketing as an engineering problem. If something produces qualified conversations, they do not question it. They don't overthink it. They don't abandon it because it feels repetitive or boring. They just let it work, and when it stops working, they don't panic because they already have the data. They already know what resonated before. It makes it so much easier to just iterate instead of guessing. [18:08.0]
It's also why they don't chase every new platform or trend. They pick a small number of channels that fit their strengths and their audiences, and they go deep instead of wide. Depth creates leverage. Depth creates familiarity. We talked about that in last week's podcast episode about the longer lead magnets. Depth creates, if you remember, trust, credibility, and rapport, and that's the part most people miss.
Familiarity is not built by—or, in fact, it cannot be built by—constantly changing your message. You have to say the same thing over a long period of time. The advisors who understand that end up sounding clear and confident, because their messages finally break through.
Let's try a little test. If you're a longtime listener to this podcast, you likely associate these messages with me. Here, how many of you think of James Pollard when you hear this? “Pick a niche market.” “Have multiple marketing strategies.” “Treat marketing like an investment.” ‘Let compounding work in marketing.” All of those things are things that I say repeatedly. I don't switch up my messages. I've been talking about them for years. [19:08.2]
When you consistently show up with the same strong ideas, prospects start doing the comparison for you. They notice that you're the one who keeps making sense, you're the one who keeps showing up, you're the one who sounds grounded, while everyone else is just experimenting, and that's how trust is built without trying to explicitly build trust.
So, if you're sitting there thinking that you need all of these ideas and strategies and tactics, you probably don't. You probably need fewer ideas and more commitment to the ones that already work. The bottom line is this, the advisors who grow the fastest are not the ones with the most ideas. They're the ones who recognize which ideas work and have the discipline to stick with them long enough for the results to compound—and, yes, that can feel boring. I keep saying this, yes, it can feel boring. It can feel repetitive. But boring marketing built on proven ideas beats exciting marketing that never compounds. [20:02.3]
So, if you take anything from this episode, let it be this. You probably do not need more marketing itself. You just need more leverage from the marketing that already works, and if you'd like to work with me directly to help you improve your marketing, I highly encourage you to check out the Inner Circle over at TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching. It's legitimately the best thing I offer, and if you can't get results with that, then you probably can't get results with anything else on the planet.
What an episode this week. I am so thankful to have you as a listener, and I will catch you next week. [20:38.3]
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