You're listening to Financial Adviser Marketing, the best show on the planet for financial advisers 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 TheAdviserCoach.com, where you can find an entire suite of products designed to help financial advisers grow their businesses more rapidly than ever before. Now, here is your host, James Pollard. [00:31.7]
James: Hey Financial advisors, this is a special episode is just me talking with you. There's no producer Jonathan here in no interview going on. I'm just talking with you; this is like a public service announcement. It's not part of the regular Monday episode and it's going to be about LinkedIn. So, if you're active on LinkedIn or you want to be active on LinkedIn, this is going to help you. So one of the most popular topics I talk about on this show, the financial advisor marketing podcast is LinkedIn marketing, and it turns out a lot of financial advisors are interested in LinkedIn as they should be because it's a gold mine and it's very easy to get clients with LinkedIn, if you do it correctly. And it has been like I said, a gold mine for many advisors. So, I have been helping financial advisors get more clients with LinkedIn since 2015. And in 2017, I officially published my, how to get clients with LinkedIn product. And I say all that to let you know, I've been helping advisors for quite some time. And that I've been on top of the changes with LinkedIn over the years, because I mean, I had to be because I have the inner circle newsletter and people constantly ask me questions about LinkedIn. And I had to answer their questions and stay on top of my game in order to help them and get results because we would just help each other and give them our clients to set appointments and just do well. [01:46.7]
So, LinkedIn changed a lot in 2020, like a lot. That's an understatement like understatement of the year, right? And the most effective approach that used to work was essentially boosting your own credibility and authority through your content and then directly messaging that content to other people like in your niche of course. For example, if you're a financial advisor who worked with Sumo wrestlers, you would create some content about Sumo wrestlers and then send that content directly to you guessed it Sumo wrestlers, and you would begin a conversation that way. And the whole idea behind this approach was that if Sumo wrestlers were even kind of sorta interested, they would check out your content. They would be so; they'd be amazed by that content. They would want to form a relationship with you, and they would set an appointment with you. [02:33.9]
And up until the early part of 2020, that approach was working really well, like better than all the other stuff that was out in the market. And of course there was a very specific way you had to do it, which I talked about in the program, how to get clients from LinkedIn, but it was basically all about making sure you were connected first that the person was in your niche, etc, but it really was working well. You had to have the sequence, right? That was like the magic. A lot of other programs in gurus and trainers would give you like spray and pray method. They would say, Hey, just get a premium account. And you're allowed to message people with the premium and they have open profiles and you just send message after message, after message, after message. Well, that's not the best way to do things. At least not what we've found like with actual data and actual appointments set. Now sure. You may get more message responses that way, where if you're sending a hundred messages to people with your LinkedIn premium account and you're spending your $90 a month, you may get responses and people may tell you like, sure, I love it. I love it. Check it out. I'd love to do this. Just watched your webinar, watched your video, watched your content, like you would get responses, but I'm not really interested in responses just for the sake of responses. [03:41.5]
I'm interested in actual appointments, actual clients. And unfortunately the approach that not just that approach with the other trainers and gurus or whatever would talk about, but the actual approach that I have and the old program, it doesn't work as well anymore, as sure it's still setting appointments, but at a, a far lower rate than what was occurring. And this is because there are so many financial advisors out there, all trying to hop on the LinkedIn bandwagon. They're all trying to get clients. They're all messaging people. And it's, there's just a flurry of activity. There's more going on on LinkedIn than ever before. And with any type of gold rush type phenomenon where people rush to the same location, they're interested in, like their greed glands are going crazy and they try to get more clients that they just rush there, the effect gets diminished. And the early people get all the gold and the latest adopters, get all the scraps, they get all the little tiny itty-bitty nuggets, right. [04:34.3]
And what's scary is that there are people out there who are still teaching methods that worked in 2017, 2018, 2019, but they're acting like they still are today. They don't. And honestly, these people should be ashamed of themselves for not keeping their material updated. Because like I said, LinkedIn changes all the time. You can't just create a LinkedIn product one time and expect it to stay the same forever. In fact, a lot of financial advisors have asked me to create a Facebook product. They're like, Hey James, you do a lot on Facebook, I see your ads all the time. You know, your video ads and your image ads and you talk a lot in your inner circle newsletter about advertising on Facebook. Why don't you just create a Facebook product, you know, just make a video and sell it and got it to your suite of products. I've said no every single time, because Facebook changes a lot more than LinkedIn and truth be told, I just don't want to be bothered with updating the Facebook content again and again and again and again, every single time Facebook makes a change, but with LinkedIn, I have I've officially revamped the how to get clients with LinkedIn product. [05:37.2]
And if you don't have that yet, make sure you go over to TheAdviserCoach.com, click the get clients with LinkedIn tab and you'll see it there. If you purchased it in the past, all you need to do is go to any invoice you have from us. It could be the LinkedIn product. It could be something else you purchased. It could be an inner circle, newsletter, invoice, and literally any invoice, cause they're all under the same account assuming you use the same email, click the access, your purchase button, like I said, and all we've done is swapped out the link. So if you click that button, it would take you directly to it. Now, as a warning, we have had a few people run into trouble with this button. For some reason, I guess things are wonky or weird, or maybe they got the LinkedIn product as part of a limited time offer or something like that. And when that happens, the page is truly gone forever. Like when I do limited time offers a truly disappear. It's not just a marketing gimmick. So if that's you and you click the access, your purchases button, and you have trouble seriously, just send me an email to james@theadvisorcoach.com. Someone's watching that inbox all the time, you may get a response in five minutes, you may get a response in five hours, but you should get a response within a day, depending on how quickly you're sending an email to james@theadvisorcoach.com. [06:46.5]
After this podcast episode comes out, it may take a little bit longer to get back to you because we'll probably have a bunch of people emailing. But other than that, we haven't had many problems. Now, since this is the Financial Advisor Marketing podcast, I do want to help you with your marketing. I want to give you something that you can use to improve your business. So, I'm going to give you a takeaway here. [07:05.4]
Hey, financial advisors – if you’d like even more help building your business, I invite you to subscribe to James’ monthly paper-and-ink newsletter, The James Pollard Inner Circle.
When you join today, you’ll get more than one thousand dollars’ worth of bonuses, including exclusive interviews that aren’t available anywhere else.
Head on over to TheAdvisorCoach.com/coaching to learn more. [07:28.0]
Perhaps the biggest mistake people are going to make on LinkedIn going forward is they're going to build too much on LinkedIn. And that may be a little shocking coming from someone who's trying to help you get clients with LinkedIn, but it's true. And if there's one thing we learned about LinkedIn from 2020, it's that things change. People flock to certain social networks, and then they leave others. Behaviors change. The most important thing you can focus on is getting people away from LinkedIn and onto media you own and control. So, I see so many different people like experts and they tell people that they want to stay on LinkedIn, and they want to do nothing but build on LinkedIn. This is a grave mistake, and I'm not just telling you that to sound cool. I'm not telling you that to sound contrarian or to like ruffle feathers or whatever. I eat my own cooking. I will take my LinkedIn post and I will direct people to my website. I would direct people to my podcast. I'll take this podcast and direct people to my website, direct them to LinkedIn. I'm constantly, cross-pollinating different marketing strategies because I want to build them all, because let's think about it this way. [08:33.6]
What happens if you spend all your time building on LinkedIn and then something happens and it's not as effective for you anymore. Remember when video didn't work well on LinkedIn and then it started working really well. Videos became hot. And then now they're back to normal kind of articles were hot for years. They were pushing the publishing feature and then now they don't work as well. I mean, all this stuff changes that there's an ebb and flow to the marketing world and it's w…it's everywhere. It's with email, email has been amazing for the past few years and it's going to be even more amazing in the next few years for Financial Advisers. LinkedIn has, the different ways approach LinkedIn has changed, but LinkedIn is still a gold mine. I mean, Facebook changes all the time. Direct mail, a lot of people are sleeping on direct mail. There's just an ebb and flow within the marketing world and with the LinkedIn changes, I mean, I've talked about this in previous podcast episodes, including one I published not too long ago, the title of that episode, if you want to listen to it, I encourage you to, to listen to it. The title is, ‘Is LinkedIn Still Working For Financial Advisors?’ where I talk about how LinkedIn is a business. Microsoft owns LinkedIn. They're trying to make money. It is a profit center for them. They do make money from ads. [09:44.1]
So, they're, they're gonna prioritize ads over organic content, especially moving forward. And I talk a little bit more about how things have shifted. So, I really mean it go back and listen to that episode. But ever since 2017, I have been trying to beat the approach that I had in the original, ‘How to get clients with LinkedIn product’ and I, I couldn't beat it. And it was frustrating. I mean, it was cool because created a product. It was super awesome, and it was working for financial advisors and like better than anything else in the market. So, that was kind of cool, but not, we'll beat it as a marketer, I'm constantly split testing them. Constantly trying to make things better, like that's how my brain works. So, I'm like if I have this approach on LinkedIn and I, I want to make a better one, can I do it? And it was like confidence thing or like, Hey, if I beat my own, of course, that's going to be awesome. Like I have improved as a human being or like as a marketer, right? I don't want to get deep in my psychology, but you, you just got low sneak peek. [10:36.6]
So, I was trying to beat this darn thing and I couldn't do it. I mean, at least I thought I couldn't do it that it just, it worked so well. It was a mixture of direct outreach in such a way where it positioned you for relationship building as long as you followed the sequence. But when I went back into my analytics, I saw a specific direct outreach method that did beat it. And it's been working ever since. It's pretty incredible and I've found that the best way to use LinkedIn going forward is to truly focus on the relationship building part of the platform, not shameless promotion, not pushing a ton of “ content,” even though content can help and I’ll show you how it can help in the new version. It's just pure networking and relationship building. So, when you do your content marketing, you're going to do it through a relationship building lens. And it's pretty crazy because a lot of so-called content marketers, they're behind the eight ball here. You may see these people getting a bunch of likes and comments and whatnot, and think they're having huge success. But I can tell you because I've seen behind the, the accounts they're most of them aren't, some are, but most of them aren't because the likes and comments don't translate into a business relationship. [11:45.3]
There are no appointments being set. So, if you're going to start publishing more content on LinkedIn, the best advice I can give you is to make sure that that content builds a relationship. This could be by getting someone to comment and getting somebody to message you, getting somebody to go to your website. There are tons of ways do it, but you want to open the door for a relationship. I feel like in 2021 and beyond a lot of people, people are gonna come out and focus on content marketing for content marketing sake, which is weird because I did an entire podcast episode about that too. You can find them one by searching ‘3 Awesome Content Marketing Tips For Financial Advisors.’ And it's not like I have a crystal ball or anything, it's just that I'm on top of these trends. I pay attention. And it helps because I have inner circle members who talked to me about this stuff. We share ideas together. We ask, they ask me questions. I sometimes, I ask them questions. We all work together to get better results, so I get to see what works. I get to see what doesn't work. [12:40.3]
I mean, I have advisors email me every single day, talking about different marketing strategies and it's really amazing. But be very careful that you don't fall into any sort of marketing dogma, because dogmas are very dangerous and I kind of mean content marketing is awesome, but that's not all there is. Direct Outreach is awesome, but that's not all there is. You want to have a multifaceted approach. And like I said, we, we have officially revamped the how to get clients with LinkedIn product. It's live now, if you don't have it, go to TheAdviserCoach.com and click on the, Get Clients with LinkedIn tab, you will see it. If you already have a go to any invoice, go to the bottom and click on the access, your purchases button. And like, like I said, the old version was the 90-minute video and I talk about a lot of different tips, tricks, and strategies to help you get clients with LinkedIn. The new one version actually has five separate videos or more than 140 minutes of content and it's broken down into different categories. [13:35.4]
So, the first video is all about my LinkedIn Marketing Framework. And when you go to the web page, you will see all this stuff, but it's my LinkedIn Marketing Framework. Video two is the proven direct outreach method. Video three is personal branding on LinkedIn video. Four is how financial advisors can create content that works. And video five is the multiplier, which is all about using LinkedIn to strengthen your other marketing. So, if you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, or if you've been an inner circle member, you know, the number one thing I preach, and I stress is to have multiple marketing strategies. So, we've added video five, which is the multiplier because using other marketing strategies, in addition to LinkedIn is really what's going to fuel your business and get it to take off nothing else. That's another mistake that a lot of programs make is they focus on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, LinkedIn, and they do nothing, but LinkedIn and they ignore the big picture view of what you're actually trying to do is build your business. You're not just trying to build your LinkedIn account. Maybe you are, I guess I don't want to make that assumption, but I am going to assume that you want to build your business, not just your LinkedIn account. [14:38.2]
So, when you have LinkedIn and you plug it into your other marketing strategies, that's where things get really powerful. So, I wanted to record this episode as a special announcement, let you know about that as well as to you some insight into what is working for LinkedIn moving forward. So, thank you so much for listening. I truly appreciate you and I'll be back soon with the regular Monday episodes. [15:00.8]
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