Ep 13: 13. Rethink: Attracting Ideal Clients as a Thought Leader

Episode 13 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (41:24)

Episode 13 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Adam Holt and Derek Notman make the case that being a recognized subject matter expert is the most reliable way to attract the clients you actually want, then get specific about how that recognition gets built. Their framing borrows from medicine. When the cost of being wrong is high, people stop looking for a generalist and start looking for the person who handles their exact problem. The mechanics discussed include coordinated engagement on LinkedIn, which the hosts note the platform does not publicly endorse and which they caution against overusing, and blog writing that links out heavily to credible third-party research, a practice they attribute to Michael Kitces and connect directly to search ranking. The most forward-looking section covers voice search, and the observation that asking a smart speaker for a local expert returns a name rather than a list of options.

What this episode covers

• Why buyers seek out specialists when the cost of being wrong is high
• Coordinated LinkedIn engagement, how it works and where it stops working
• Why outbound links to credible research raise a blog’s authority and its ranking
• Keyword consistency, and writing for one identifiable reader rather than everyone
• Voice search as an underused channel, and what it means to return a name rather than a list

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, how do I attract the ideal clients? Hey, my man. Well, I think that’s probably a pretty good question considering most advisors want ideal clients. So do you, yeah, let’s talk about it. I’m not gonna say unpack this because I always say I’m gonna unpack this, but I just said it twice.

What’s the answer, man? How do you attract? It’s gotta be an easy answer, right? Everybody knows the answer, right? No, no, they don’t. That’s what we’re gonna talk about it. Fine. So I’ll answer it because if you’re asking me directly, because I think that’s what you did, is I attract clients by being what can be known as like what’s a thought leader or a subject matter expert. That’s how I attract clients. Well, we’ve heard this a lot recently and it’s been intimidating to many advisors, this idea of being a thought leader. I mean, that sounds like a big deal. So what is a subject matter expert?

Why is it important? They’re experts in a particular topic area, type of person that they serve, whatever, right? It’s people that are, if you’re looking for a problem, let’s use like health medicine as an example. If you’re looking for someone to help because you have an ailment that you need an expert for, like your general practitioner says, yeah, I can’t help you with that rash. You’re gonna have to go see somebody else. Okay, expose on this podcast. That’s a different podcast, but yeah. So you want to find the best person for you to solve those problems. We even talked about this with Michael Kitsis and there’s one quote about, you know, clients looking for the best advisor for them to solve their problems, right?

So subject matter experts know how to solve the problems of a particular type of client better than anybody else. Right, at least that’s the perception that we all have, which is that when I have a real, real difficult decision to make, which is either plan of care, as you mentioned, should I do the surgery? Should I not do the surgery? Should I get the chemo? Should I not? Right, when we’re making very big decisions where there’s a high cost of being wrong, where there’s complexity, we all seek the advice of a human who’s lived through it before. This is literally in our bones from the precision process, whether it’s financial decisions or otherwise.

So yeah, so subject matter experts clearly have a perceived awareness. I say perceived because some people are such good marketers that they’ve created the appearance of being a subject matter expert when really they’re a fantastic marketer. And the reason why I know that this is really important for all of us in this space is because we continue to see more democratization of financial services, more commoditization of this process that we have owned for a long time. And we know that humans are gonna continue to search on Google for who can solve my problem, right? They’re looking through these technical terms or tools to find the experts, not the generalists, not the generalists.

What do you think that’s gonna mean? Well, it’s gonna mean a massive opportunity for those that become thought leaders, subject matter experts, right? It’s gonna be massive because now they’re gonna be able to capture those people looking for help. And like, their reputation will precede them. Someone will search up, they’ll find them, be like, oh man, this person knows exactly who I am is gonna easily be able to help me solve my problems. Where if I come across a generalist that does retirement planning, education planning, corporate benefits, blah, blah, blah, blah. They’re like, well, this is a generalist. I don’t think they can help me.

I’m just not gonna talk to them. So it’s a double-edged sword for those generalists that wanna stay generalists. That’s not a path I would wanna be on because it’s gonna be harder and harder to grow your business if that’s what you wanna do. Yeah, I know we tend to talk about these things and ideas of where the market’s going and try to figure out if we can predict the future. But I think one thing is pretty obvious, at least I’ll speak for myself. One thing is that technology is making it a lot easier to get stuff, right? Whether it’s the solutions that typically advisors have sold or charge a fee to manage, it’s just getting easier and more convenient to execute right off one’s phone today or right off their laptop.

They can just buy it now. What that means is that, as we’ve been talking about leading with advice, advice has to have context to the person who has the challenge, right? Whether it’s income distribution planning or it’s estate planning or I’ve got to sell my business. I don’t wanna understand the tax implications and I could mess it up. So I don’t wanna, let me go to an expert. I’m willing to pay for it. What I think is gonna happen in the next two to three years, and it’s interesting because McKenzie did a survey on this which we shared a little while ago. It said by 2030, there was gonna be a consolidation in the advice delivery market.

And what was gonna happen is that the bigger players were gonna start winning more market share from those that were generalists, right? Because if the technology continues to expand the way it is, and by the way, we’re almost perpetrators of this, right? Because we’re both technologists, also advisors by design, but we already see what’s happening. And that’s the general easy problems, right? Managing money for retirement, the accumulation funding, this is kind of getting table stakes. And we think that technology is gonna eat this marketplace up. You’re not gonna differentiate here, all right? Where you’re gonna differentiate is in this, this we’ll call it complex, high cost of being wrong marketplace, which is really where subject matter experts are going to be sought out, right?

So that’s the real key is that within the next three years, you gotta decide that you’re gonna be a thought leader, subject matter expert that people can seek out and look to verify the credibility of your ability to deliver advice and services. You’re certainly gonna have to, but what’s interesting is like, you say in the next three years, you’re gonna have to decide, well, the decision can be done. Yeah, like, okay, like a light switch. Yep, I’m doing it. But you don’t become a thought leader or subject matter expert overnight, like a light switch, right? Like, this is gonna take time to build up social credibility, to build up this awareness of who you are, to have others saying, hey, Adam’s really good at this.

You should probably go talk to him. And that takes time because people are, they’re kind of waiting in the wings a little bit. Even like, so new advisors, right? Like, you know, they’re in six months, their friends and family are kind of watching from the side, like, eh, I don’t know if Joe is gonna make it, so I’m not gonna invest my money with them just yet, right? Very true. And so the same thing is gonna happen as a thought leader. Like, are you a thought leader flashing the pan or are you making the whole Thanksgiving dinner? You know, what is it? It’s true. Being a thought leader happens over a long period of time, all of a sudden.

That’s what happens. That’s great. Yeah, it’s great. I mean, it takes a long-term investment. And so I think to round this out, because we can’t just leave you with this, oh, doom and gloom, I’m not a thought leader. I’m not known as a thought leader. What do I do? What do I do? Gosh, we’re actually gonna share with you, actually. I think it’s as many. We’ve written out all the different ways and we’re gonna share that with you on this podcast. And we’re gonna also give you our guidance of what we did and what we learned and what you can actually go implement. So hopefully you’ve got your pencil or you’re gonna remember the notes or you’re gonna listen to this four or five times or you’re gonna delegate it even better, right?

You’re gonna offload it. Hopefully you’ll be able to take some things here. I wanna kind of leave you before we go into that is that this is really all about intentionality again. Here we talked about in our prior podcast, intentionally creating an identity. Knitching is gonna be really important in becoming a subject matter expert because as already you said, Derek, you can’t become a thought leader expert in everything. Okay, that will take you forever. Okay, that’s kind of silly. It’s not credible. It’s not believable in many cases. And I think given the fact that people are going online and searching Yelp and looking for a five-star rating, you can’t be a five-star rating generalist.

I mean, doesn’t work. No, it doesn’t really work, no. So that’s really important. But I think that we have to broadcast this and recognize the new environment that everybody’s using, right? Everybody’s using search to verify and to validate, even for existing customers, they’re looking for that kind of credentialing. And so I think those are gonna be also important parts of this, okay? So let’s talk about some tools to help build thought leadership and subject matter expert. What do we call it? Yeah, these are tactics. These are strategies. These are things you can write down and go do. We’re gonna throw a whole bunch at you here.

Just get them down. And then we’ll have some strategy or suggestions moving forward here. But you got some old school ones, like referrals from clients, from other COIs type of stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think that you can still do that and that can work, but heck, you can even digitize that to an extent. How do you do that? What do you mean? How do you take a client referral and make it digitized? Maybe not so much on a client side, but think about this from a COI side. As simple as even creating an engagement pod in LinkedIn, for example, don’t create one with other advisors.

Create one with an accountant, an attorney, or multiple of those people that all serve this, have the same ideal client niche specialty, right? That you all compliment each other and now you’re all helping each other. So that’s the way you can, instead of going to those BNI networking events once a month, right? Just jump in a pod, right? So I told an advisor about that this morning. Like, hey, why don’t you go start this as a value add, right? This is a simple thing that can take you three minutes to set up. It’s so easy. It’s funny how you went right to social media. That’s interesting.

I mean, you spend so much time there. I could see why. And you know how effective that is, but I’m not sure everybody in the audience knows what an engagement pod is. So do you wanna share that? Yeah, it’s as simple folks as, you know, you have like little chats, the DMs you can have with other people in LinkedIn with your connections. You literally start a new chat and invite people that you wanna have in there. It’s that simple. You can name it whatever you want, right? And now what you literally do is with the five, 10 people, whoever you have in there, you literally drop links to your posts.

So all of them are aware of it. And then you help engage with each other’s posts, which helps drive the algorithm. It helps get stuff out there. Don’t abuse it, because LinkedIn’s not a big fan of it. They don’t publicly condone it, but it can work really well if you use it correctly. So that’s what it is. So that’s a way to get intentional likes and resharing of your social postings so that hopefully your voice and your messaging, if you’re doing social posting, by the way, is getting to an expanded audience, right? So more people are hearing your voice and it’s getting credible support from people they already follow or believe in, right?

So that’s kind of the idea. Well, yeah, think about it. If you do a post and then an expert attorney who also helps the same type of people comments on your post, that’s boosting your social credit and vice versa. That’s right. That’s right. So that is definitely a long game, but it is a multiplier effect for any kind of social posting. The reason that I threw client referrals and professional referrals is because that’s what we’ve been taught forever, right? Is to go backwards. Whenever you wanna grow your business, you go to the people who already trust you, the people who I obviously are representing an ideal client, and you try to replicate them.

So the challenge is, of course, that’s really tough to scale and it’s hard to get other of your clients to go out there and promote you, right? They’re not like writing letters or blogs about you. They’re not going to their friends and saying, hey, do you need a financial advisor, right? That’s awkward. Now, granted, when they hear their friends saying, listen, I’m really, I’m dealing with this estate issue or this very niche problem, who should I talk to? You hope that your clients and the professionals you’re networked in actually will say, oh, go and talk to Derek, right? And maybe they’ll even introduce you. We hope that’s the case, but the reason I put it as the following, we all know if you’ve been in the business for any length of time, if you don’t intentionally tell your clients that you’re seeking new business and you want them to think of this, it goes in the back of their brain and they forget about it, okay?

Clients are not great marketers. They’re not asking to be marketers unless you continue to promote that they help you. And we all know this is really effective, but quite honestly, most advisors just don’t do it. So I put it here to remind you that it is a way for you to grow your preeminence within the ideal clients that you want. But what are some other ways for you to expand that and scale it, right? How do we get five or 10 coming in a week instead of once every blue week? Real quick on the client piece, here’s another thought that I’ve never done this, but you could try this, is literally go connect with all of your ideal clients you already have on social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, whatever, and then create a ton of content on there.

They’re gonna engage with it. They’re probably friends with other people like them, right? So it’s another way to get that out there. So just another thought. Now that’s really smart. And that’s easy to do, right? Oh, so easy to do, right? Yeah, it’s a nice way for you to stay top of mind and in front of your clients too, which makes them feel they’re more connected to you than maybe they are. Yeah, but I mean, so many other tools, like, so there’s some great public recognition, awards that maybe you could get, or even like getting like a specialty certification for working with a certain type of person.

Like there’s like some special exit planning certifications you can get for business owner, type of situation. So stuff like that can be really helpful. That’s right. I mean, we’ve all heard the word blog. It almost feels like it’s like been beat to death, but man, it is so powerful. It is so powerful if you do it right, cause people will consume content and educational stuff all day long. And the thing is, well, I mean, we’ll keep going here. You can add to this list. I’m gonna add on before you like run through the whole list and I can’t wait. I can’t open it, there’s so much.

There is a lot to go through here. But I think if you don’t mind, the awards thing is an interesting thing. If you are getting awards, you need to socialize this. I think let’s get this out of the way. There’s probably no better tool today than what Derek and I have been using to communicate to an audience that wasn’t asked to be communicated with, but open to it other than LinkedIn and Facebook. The reality is that for the non-business stuff, the real personal stuff, Facebook has been fantastic. The authenticity is great there. It’s starting to become very authentic on LinkedIn. We’re starting to see that kind of permeate the business side.

We know we have a lot of B2B relationships that are constantly on LinkedIn all day long. We have whole relationships we’ve built this way. We promote these things and then other people celebrate that with us and it magnifies it. So if you are winning awards, if you’ve earned credentialing, if you have a certified divorce specialist, if you’re a, I work with senior advisors and I’m gonna niche that environment, then you need to tell people and really talk about it and get that out there. So there’s almost all of these have a social theme to them because it’s been the biggest megaphone we’ve found of success.

So making sure that you’re telling people that you have skill in this area is critical to this whole concept of becoming a thought leader. Yeah, and do it in a way where, cause some of you might be like, oh, I don’t wanna like push it on people. I don’t wanna feel like I’m being cheesy or just all about me and I’ve got an ego. Celebrate something when you get an award. Celebrate that you just got your CFP certificate. Celebrate these things in a way where you’re really proud of your achievement. And oh, by the way, people are like, oh, Jane is a certified divorce specialist, huh?

I’m going through a divorce, right? Was that anecdotal or is it? Did you just? No, no. Sorry, I was trying to trap you there. Yeah, no, my wife, she’s around here somewhere. I just saw her open the door, just kidding. Hello, you still have your ring on? Yeah, right. That’s too funny. Thanks for, see, by the way, you’re doing one of the lessons that we wanted to tell everybody, which is authenticity, right? Yeah. Authenticity has been, we’ve been hearing this again and again. What’s your take on this one? Hey, you just gotta be you. I think one of the biggest stumbling blocks that I personally had to break through, and I see a lot of others when it comes to creating content and social, all that is just, they think they have to almost be somebody else when they’re gonna go market themselves and do all the things we’re talking about, we’ll talk about.

And the breakthrough for me was like, you know what? I just need to be me, man. I need to be authentic. I need to just, because people, let’s face it, folks, you can tell a mile away if someone’s just blowing smoke up your hoo-ha here, you know, it’s a, we know. Maybe you can tell, I guess. That’s true, yeah, no, I agree. But we know, right? So just be you. Just be you and get comfortable with that and you will attract a tribe of people that appreciate and like that. Yeah, I think we talk about this way too much, which is that nobody wants to be marketed to, but the reality is that we have to market to them.

But we wanna market our authentic self, which is people wanna work with other humans, they’re fallible, they know we have foibles and we might not agree on everything. But I think that humanity is really connecting strangely, believe it or not, it’s worked for a thousand years. We need to make that more and more transparent. I think it’s really interesting to see how fast our society is really adopting that, which is cool. What’s the point of that? The point is stay authentic. Don’t get me wrong. We should stay professional. Oh, yeah. As appropriate as it is, we should stay conscientious of other people’s needs and so forth.

But I think the true authentic voice has to come across because you’re gonna attract people that are like you. And as we tend to talk about it, your ideal clients are gonna have some commonality to you, either through voice or opinion or ideals or values. And you wanna find that commonality fast. So whether you’re doing blogs, and we put this in order, we might wanna actually just kind of throw out a couple of these things. And then maybe what we’ll do is we’ll say where we’ve had some successes or where we think there’s some opportunity, right? Yeah, let’s do it. All right, so one of the things that we, so clearly blogs has some opportunity.

Video blogs are also really interesting today if you’re still writing this list. Social posting we’ve already mentioned is really critical. Of those three, Derek, what’s the takeaway if someone’s gonna commit to creating a blog to become a thought leader? Well, you gotta get people to find the blog. All right, so this is where your social posting is directly related to your blog content. They actually can feed each other. Blogs are long form, right? Really long form, right? To help answer specific questions and drive awareness and provide a ton of value. And that builds up that credibility, that authenticity we talked about, but people have to find it.

Now there is some organic stuff. So if you get super specific, like ask or solving a problem for a very, very specific situation, whatever, you can get some good SEO on that, but you may or may not. So social posting is another way to drive that stuff over there. But what’s also cool is that if you know what worked, if you had a post on social do really well, go write a blog about it and just expand on it. And we’ve actually been doing that a little bit. It’s another thing you can call like skyscraper. It’s called skyscraper. Where you take one bit of content that did well, and then you can do all of these other sub pieces because of it.

Video, posts, blogs, on and on and on and on, because you already know what worked really well. That sounds like a full-time job. I mean, that’s the thing. I have a team for that. I have a team for that, right? Got it. Well, there you go. That’s right. So generating content, I think what we should kind of, what’s the point of the blog? The blog is effectively like your newsletter of old. But it’s also your opportunity to talk about a topic and hopefully you’re talking consistently about the same topics that are driving your perceived thought leadership or subject matter expertise. And that’s the whole point, right?

Is that your blog should support that premise, okay? So theoretically, a good number of your blogs, if they’re not just rants, should be helpful to somebody who’s got a problem. Because if the blog is written correctly and you’ve done your back linking, which means that you’ve put a relevant, credible support or research links. And one of the things I think Kitsis does really well, if you look at his blog, it’s got like 50 links to other content. Well, Google knows that that’s really valuable because well, wow, it’s linking back to all these other credible sources. So it increases the, we’ll call it, what’s the word I’m looking for?

The credibility of that piece, therefore it ranks higher in the search engine optimization. Yeah, that’s exactly it. This is valuable. There’s valuable information here, right? It’s all related. So if you’re gonna write the blogs, one of the things that we thought about from a tips is you really gotta pay attention to keyword consistency and basically, and also knowing who you’re talking to and making sure that it’s really relevant and useful. And there’s a call to action, which means that there’s another way to follow up or to take another, oh, I wanna read more. Oh, I like this content. What I think is happening actually through blogs is that people have created their own channels of quote unquote, fake news.

Why fake news? It’s because the news that they’re reading that they’re consuming in place of reading, let’s say the newspaper, is the information that they want to read about from the perspective that you as the author have. And so that you become very important as an ongoing voice in their ear, if you will, if you’ve got certain subject matter expert roles, but that takes a long time, right? So you gotta be consistent about doing a blog. It can’t just be once in a blue moon. Yeah, I mean, I try on my connector blog, we tried to put out one to two posts a week, right?

You know, we’re just constantly cranking them out. And you know that, well, I mean, it got us ranked number 37 out of 100 of top advisor websites. That’s fantastic. Right? Just because you did fake news. But it took two years. Two years of fake news, man. Jeez, man, that’s right. Well, there you go. So yeah, but that’s where you say consistency about that authenticity, knowing your markets, your audience, all that good stuff. That’s true. Well, some of the interesting things that have come in, you know, vlogs was something that was, I think was going to be more important, but vlogs is a video blog, okay?

And these are fantastic for authenticity because people actually get to see you, hear from you. It’s almost like having a small television program that you’re producing on an ongoing basis. We’ve seen some really great ones. Other advisors like Jay Coulter has done a great job of creating video libraries. You can watch hours of his content. We’ve tried to do that to some degree at AssetMap because we think that- A lot of work. It is a lot of work. And you have the right setup or else it doesn’t look like you’re really an expert. tv? I think so. I am really looking forward to that because he’s going to be disseminating a whole bunch of content.

An effort, no doubt, to do that and to do it consistently, but you can really create some amazing thought leadership if you can focus on a specific niche to your consumers and do that. So that’s some good. You know, there’s some other ones that we wrote down here. Obviously the newsletters still affect that we work. They just don’t have the same kind of scale that I think some of the social posts and blogs can have. Newsletters don’t tend to get cataloged on Google unless you’re actually posting them intentionally and you’re kind of getting that out there. So we tend to think that the most effective thing to write is a blog and get your existing customers to follow it, post on it, create discussions, create interactions because that multiplies the web of how it gets spread out there.

So if you’re kind of wondering how do these things go viral? Well, you write something that’s got some real good merit and people forward it to their friends and they post it and then they send it out. Next thing you know, you have something that’s seen by 10,000 people, right? That’s where you start to start building the start of your thought leadership. And the thing is you’re never gonna know what piece will go viral. You just don’t know. And that’s why you have to keep creating it because it could happen by complete accident. You just don’t know. And that’s okay. But if it does, like, okay, why did that work?

You gotta look at it. Have you seen much success in kind of the PR side of it for advisors? I think it can actually work. I think initially it’s really tough to stand out because there are so many of us. But I know personally I’ve had some things more recently start to develop because I’ve just been so consistently creating content where now I’m being asked to be quoted in this or to do that and so forth. So it can work, but that’s like the super long game because you gotta prove yourself with all the other stuff first and then people will come back to you.

Because if you’re gonna get an editor, whether it’s LinkedIn or CNBC or Investopedia or whatever, if they’re gonna cite you, like they’re kind of putting their own name on the line. So they’re gonna wanna look to people who have all got amazing credibility and influence already. Yeah. Well, for years we had PR agencies and we worked with several of them. There’s some fantastic ones that have been in the space for financial advisors. Marie Swift comes to mind, FICOM, Gregory FCA is also another really well-known organizations that people have used for a PR for financial advisors. And the reality is that you’re either paying to get ahead and get into the traditional media through a PR agency who’s telling their contacts at the Forbes and at Newsweek that you’re a relevant expert.

But I will tell you, it’s a long game again. And you’ve created that thought leadership as well as we have, I think over the past couple years that we’re getting asked to now do that. Why, for those of you that are wondering, wait a minute, why is this really so important? We gotta remind you, especially if you’re jumping into the middle of this podcast. Why is this important? You have to remember also that not only are new prospects and new individuals that might wanna work with you as ideal customers are really looking into your social and public domain reputation before they even talk to you.

They’re vetting you. Oh yeah. So are your own clients though. I mean, even if a client gave a referral to their friend who knows, like if let’s say you said, well, I need an estate planner and you asked me, you were talking about it. I said, oh, you know what? I’ve got a great estate planner. Derek, you gotta talk to Mary. She’s in Chicago, right? Before you pick up the phone and call Mary, you’re gonna start doing your own research. Now you might Google her. You’re gonna check on LinkedIn. You might check Yelp. You just see what comes up because you want a vet to get that confidence up front.

And so the question is, and that we’re addressing here is do you have an intentionality around proving that there is public record support that you are in fact legit? You are a subject matter expert, right? That’s like the whole point, I think. It totally is. And if there’s a void there, uh-oh. Yeah, maybe they’re not really that good. Yeah. And if a potential client is having that internal dialogue before they ever talk to you, that’s bad. It stalls out. Well, they’re gonna still call another friend and they’ll be like, who do you use? And maybe they get a response. By the end of the time, if they’re really desperate, they might just go on Google and they’ll find the vault lighter expert who actually got themselves on the first 10 results of Google because they’re trying to solve a pain point that might be immediate.

And when they need to solve the pain and they have the time to focus on it, they’re gonna go solve it, whether you’re present or not. And you can imagine what happens when the big companies get in there and start really owning the first page of Google and saying that they’re the expert and you have no presence on page 85 of Google, you’re not getting that business. You’re gonna find it very hard to fight for that. What’s interesting, what you’re saying here though is that a lot of the big companies pay to be at the top, right? Yeah. Here’s how you fight against your competition.

Here’s how you fight against the big ad spend budgets. You become a thought leader. That’s how you do it, right? Because organically, people are gonna come across your stuff. That’s what’s so cool. Well, true. But by the way, if you do get a referral or you do do some other form of, somebody finds you, they’re just gonna Google your name, which hopefully you own that, right? You’re gonna own that through organic, right? So if I typed in Derek Notman, I mean, you will probably come up first. So I don’t have to, I won’t get lost looking for you. And that’s one of the bigger problems is, right?

So there’s an Adam Holt, like there’s a musician named Adam Holt. There’s a whole bunch of other Adam Holt, right? I don’t know. I thought I never met another in my life, but supposedly when you Google this, but I do, because I have so much content out there, people don’t get lost when they’re looking for me, right? And by the way, what happens when they get lost? They wind up at a different restaurant. I was gonna go to get sushi, but I saw this great hot dog stand. I’m just gonna stop here. I’m tired of looking. The kids are complaining. Yeah. Yeah, whatever. Exactly. And that’s really, I mean, yes, we’re literally at that level of convenience.

Let’s round out a couple more of these things and then let’s give them our tips and our takeaways. One of the things I thought was really kind of interesting, podcast has been an interesting model, especially for us. Clearly, you know that we’ve been doing this. We actually, this is one of those tougher things for most financial advisors to get involved in, usually because of the compliance aspects, but there have been really great innovations here. Proud Mouth is who we actually went to. They’ve been supporting our growth in the podcast. There are outlets that understand the financial advisor voice. And if this is something you really have to commit to, clearly we know this well now.

Even when it’s difficult, you’ve got a travel schedule. You’re trying to do a podcast. It’s something you got to have a passion for and your voice, I think that was important. But we’ve also gotten introduced recently to the Alexa space and basically the whole in your house speaker response system. And we’ve been recently connected with WealthVoice. We’re gonna be using them actually to create Alexa snippets. Another way for you to get your voice out there and preeminence where it’s a real blue ocean. I don’t know if you have any feeling on this stuff, but- I think it’s fascinating. We have three Alexas in our house, I think, and we do use them for all types of random questions.

So if I’m doing that, or if my son is asking what’s some cool old school rap to listen to, then we know other people are asking all sorts of stuff, right? Well, by the way, with 120 million people in the States using Alexa or some kind of voice enable, how many of you think of asking Alexa, who is an expert in, let’s say, retirement distribution planning in my area? What do you think it’s gonna do? It’s gonna give them a name. Is it your name? Totally, right? And you can own that space, just like you can own that blog. You can own a blog, right?

It’s true. But that only happens if you’re intentional. But think about how easy. There’s only 120 million people that might actually have that question. There’s probably 1,000 people ask that question, right? Are they finding you? I don’t know. Maybe not. Let’s talk about some tips here, and then let’s jump to our pieces here. So I think number one is consistency. What do you think? Totally a commitment to be consistent, right? That’s what it is. You have to show up every day to keep doing this. Don’t try it one or two times, not get a whole lot of results and then give up. Even if you go back to the cold calling days or knocking on doors, if you stopped picking up the phone or knocking on doors, it just didn’t work, right?

It’s the same thing here. It’s true. Consistency is really important. And it’s a commitment. And what specifically is a commitment? It’s a commitment to go and create a persona for yourself that you are a thought leader in a specific area. And that’s why it’s really critical. You’re gonna have to be authentic about it, but to build a credible voice, you gotta know who you’re talking to. That means who is the audience you’re trying to connect to? Again, not everybody, okay? Not generalists. Who specifically am I a subject matter expert to? As you mentioned it before, I do retirement distribution planning for Philadelphia police officers, right?

Very specific, yeah. I work with business owners, family-owned businesses that have kids in the business and a significant amount of real estate or whatever, okay? You gotta come up with that. And then your content generation is about that consistently so that there is so much credibility when someone’s seeking you, they find not one article, they find 10 articles. And they’re like, wow, this person knows their stuff. I’m not reading all this. I’m just gonna call them and set up a meeting. Yeah, here’s my problem, fix it. Exactly. By the way, the people who will always solve their own problems will always solve their own problems.

They’re not gonna call an advisor. That’s okay to help the masses, all right? It’s for the people who say, you know what? I’m not doing this on my own, okay? Exactly, yeah. They’re the ones that are gonna wanna pay you anyway. So those are the ones they’re just gonna use your information. It’s okay to give to the public domain content and ideas, but that’s how you build this credibility. Yeah, because one of the people that’s a DIYer that reads it might not want your help, but their brother might need your help. Be like, hey, go talk to this guy. I’m doing it myself because that’s what I do, but you don’t, so go use them, right?

Well, or eventually they get in a pickle and then they’re like, okay, I pushed, I tried to do this too much. It’s like putting together Ikea furniture. Like eventually I’m like, can I call somebody? Oh my God. Well, maybe not Ikea, they have good directions, but you get the idea. Sometimes I try to do too much myself and then I’m like, okay, call the plumber. I kinda overdid this one. You know, look, we mentioned a couple of things here. News jacking came up in our brainstorm on this one. News jacking, like your, what did you call it? The sky tower, what’d you call it? Oh yeah, skyscraper type of thing.

What’s news jacking? Go where there’s something already trending, right? So even in LinkedIn, it’s got that one thing on the kind of the right-hand side when you’re on your feed and it says what’s trending. Try creating content around that. If you have an opinion and good content that you can that still speaks to your audience, but now more and more people will get picked up on that. So it’s, and sometimes like you’ll be featured. I’ve been getting featured on stuff like that on LinkedIn lately, especially. And so it can really work well. You just have to be kind of aware and present of what’s going on.

So I love that. I mean, that might be a little bit more like if you’re not even doing social media posts don’t worry about news jacking yet. Just know that it’s coming. Yeah. Well, let’s wrap this up. So what did Derek, do people need to decide to do research, delegate to take away from this? Yeah, I mean, we talked about a ton there and we could talk about a lot more. So don’t get overwhelmed folks. Pick one or two things and places that you can just go start creating content to be that thought leader, that subject matter expert and then use that skyscraper approach as you go out.

Maybe you had a great post on LinkedIn. We’ll go write a blog post about it now or do a video, right? Create an ebook around it, whatever. So you can go like that, but just start in one or two places and start, be consistent. It’s gonna take time, but anything we’re doing does take time. That’s just how it is. So don’t show up once and give up. Keep going and going and going. And there’s gonna be some pretty cool opportunities that are kind of come up that you’re never even gonna realize are there until they happen. So just have an open mind. And sometimes you might have to pivot with the type of client you’re gonna work on or work towards working with or what type of content you’re creating.

So those are my three tidbits. Adam, what would you say is some advisors should be thinking about here? Well, I think you hear all this stuff and you get it. And I agree, it is overwhelming. I think the first thing is to decide that it’s either important to be a subject matter expert or it’s not. Sometimes there is some actual attraction to mystery, which means nobody can figure out what you do. And you reserve it and it’s like a secret society. And that can work in a very, very niche exclusive crowd. And we did that in our practice for many years. I call that the non-marketing marketing, right?

Which is nobody’s gonna know what we do until we meet them and shake their hand and then we’re gonna tell them and maybe we’ll allow them to come in. And that really worked at the ultra high net worth because they didn’t want you working with the general public. That being said, that only works in a certain, very specific market. I think the key here is that you just gotta remember here that preeminence is not neutral. In other words, you’re either preeminent or you’re not preeminent, okay? There’s nothing in between. And my coach told me that years ago and it stuck with me. And why it’s important is that if you don’t create preeminence, then nobody knows that you’re not preeminent.

Okay, they just assume that there is no preeminence. You’re not a subject matter expert unless you go out there and prove it or the media is asking for your opinion about every single thing, but how do they find out about you? You had to start somewhere. So how do you create that credibility? You gotta create it. You gotta do your niche, know your niche, find out what their real wounds are and then talk about their pain points all the time. Talk about the pain, okay? People do more to solve the problem than they will to fix it. They are really kind of focused on, does this advisor really understand my pain?

And again, you can do it consistently, even if it’s quarterly, just get in the habit of doing it or delegate it. And that’s one of the things. So hopefully that’s valuable to you. As our tradition has been for the past several episodes, we’ve always taken a question from the audience. This one came in from Randy in Chicago via email. He said, Derek and Adam, will you talk about retirement income certainty and how that market is evolving on your next podcast? Yes. Yes, we will. Randy, thank you. We will send you a shirt just for that. Just for that. Yeah, I think this is interesting. We’ll probably wanna rope in an expert on this one.

Yeah, we’ll do that. But it’s definitely top of mind given how many people are retiring. But again, we’re gonna rethink this even. We’re gonna come at it from a sideways angle. Yeah, that’s the way to come at it. Why not make it more complicated? So with that, I think let’s close this podcast and let’s thank everybody for participating and listening. Hopefully you learned something that you can take away. Maybe you need to go listen to this one again, or you need to reach out to us on LinkedIn and through the different ways you can get us and start a conversation, ask questions. Maybe start your own thought leadership if you have an opinion about this stuff.

And just- Here’s a fun call to action. Go. Go write a post on LinkedIn and tag us in it. There you go. It’s simple, it’s easy. It’s a great way to get started. We’ll help you push your message out. There it is. See, look at that. You’re already winning. Thank you, Derek. I will see and hear you on the next podcast. Sounds good, Adam. All the best to you, my man. Cheers, brother. Cheers. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector.

The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.