Ep 7: 7. Rethink: Marketing Vs. Prospecting

Episode 7 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (42:05)

Episode 7 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 argue about whether prospecting or marketing produces more business, and Notman, who was trained in prospecting, makes the case that marketing has overtaken it. Their central evidence is the age of the model most advisors still use. Purchase funnel theory was coined in 1898 and last meaningfully revised in 1924, and the hosts point to research from Deloitte and McKinsey sampling roughly 20,000 people which found that buyers do not move through it the way the diagram implies. The rest of the episode is about how buyers actually find an advisor now, which is by searching and then vetting. Holt notes how few people ever reach the second page of search results, which makes the specificity of what you are known for the entire game. The closing argument favors narrow niche positioning over broad availability.

What this episode covers

• Why the purchase funnel, coined in 1898 and last revised in 1924, no longer describes how buyers behave
• What search behavior implies about being found, and why the second page is effectively invisible
• Social profiles as the background check prospects run before the first conversation
• The doctor versus oncologist framing for choosing a niche
• Why the hosts believe defined niches produce the most valuable practices

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, as a financial advisor, what do you think is more effective? Is it prospecting or marketing? Dude, that is such a big question. Can you handle it? I’m gonna try. I’m gonna try. So I was brought up initially in the prospecting world.

We’re gonna totally get into this here and we’re probably gonna argue about it. But I would argue that now 2021 and beyond probably actually for the last five, 10 years even that marketing is much more effective than prospecting. Interesting. Let me give you some context on that, all right? Because just because Derek says, although what I say is pretty amazing. I mean, my wife at least likes it some of the time. Only if she listens to this podcast would we know that. Well, I know we’ve got one listener and it’s my wife. No, no, two, because your mom listens to this. Thank you. My mother listens.

Hi mom. So shout out to Adam’s mom. Thank you. So prospecting versus marketing. Why do I think marketing is more effective? Well, let’s go back a little bit. So the original, we’ve all heard of this sales marketing funnel, right? A prospecting funnel, whatever you wanna call it. The original theory, which is called purchase funnel theory. Okay, I’m totally nerding out here. Was originally coined back in 1898, right? It’s been around for a while. When do you think it was last revised, Adam? Probably last time the funnel was revised or used actually. Has anybody used the funnel, a real funnel? Yeah. You use funnels? All the time on my Mustang.

Ah, see, okay. That’s the only funnel I actually use. So the last time this theoretical funnel, and we’ve all seen beautiful pictures of this. Marketers love to show funnels, right? The last time it was revised was 1924. We’re almost at a hundred years, okay? And what has been argued, and there was a study done approximately 15 years ago, give or take you’d have to go look it up by Deloitte and McKinsey. They sampled 20,000 people and took them through this. I don’t know the specifics of the funnel, but basically they say like, is this purchase funnel theory still valid today in the world that we live in?

And every step of the funnel, they basically said, nope, that’s dead. Really interesting, okay? So when you asked me if prospecting is more effective, I think prospecting used to be extremely effective back in the day, like earlier on, like pre-2000 especially, because it was all built around this original purchase funnel theory. But what I think has happened and is happening faster and faster as the world realizes is marketing is becoming a much more effective way to attract clients, to grow our businesses and all those types of things. So fundamentally, yes, I think marketing is much more effective than prospecting. Now, but so why do you think that is?

What’s changed for the consumer that has caused marketing to be more effective or certainly more talked about these days? Because most of us who grew up in financial services were taught from day one to be a prospector. We totally were. It’s funny, so access to information, we talked about this before, I think has played a part in it. As a consumer, if I needed some help with my money or my insurance or whatever, in 1985, I looked in the yellow pages, I asked my neighbor, I asked my uncle, right? Or a lot of the times, I was simply, I received a piece of mail or I got a cold call and the person on the phone was really awesome.

And yeah, just like I agreed to do what I needed to do to work with them, right? But that’s all changed where the things have been flipped now where people have access to all this information and education. And now they’re like, well, wait a minute, I don’t like how prospecting feels. Like these people keep spamming me and I don’t like it. It almost feels like a used car sales situation sometimes where marketing feels good. Like, I’m a buyer, let me know. Like, let me get to know you and learn. I’m a buyer, so it just feels better. I mean, that’s my hypothesis, at least. I think that’s why it’s more effective and why there’s been this shift.

So what I heard from you, you said it’s access to information. Certainly from the ways that we’re traditionally communicated with for those that are in the prospecting side, we have great ways of screening people unlike ever before. When we talked about that in the luxuries versus necessity of how technology is literally, when we were able to block our phone, then we were able to call our ID, then we could screen our phone calls, then we can have somebody else screen our phone calls, then we can push the emails now to spam. So we’re not, you know, all the prospecting effort. Gosh, I think even you look at LinkedIn, how many people are reaching out to you unsolicited in LinkedIn every single day?

I mean, I’m getting 10 a day and no offense if that’s one of you on the, you know, who’s actually trying to reach out. I don’t have the bandwidth to entertain all the inbound. I just showed, I don’t know if you saw this, I just showed my cell phone. I have 106,000 unread emails on my email on my phone. 106,000 because they’re all junk in my opinion, right? I’ve scanned them. I’m not gonna even bother opening cause I’m gonna get pushed into some automated marketing funnel. So I think you’re right. In many ways, consumers don’t want to be sold anymore, right? What do we say?

They wanna purchase when they’re ready to purchase and they tend to be looking for solutions either by, you know, Google, or they’re asking their family, so forth. But I don’t know that prospecting is dead and that’s I think really the kind of question for most of us. So in the financial world, I know when I jumped in, we went to the first kind of early days of your employment and you brought your list of a hundred, right? What was that? It was your list of a hundred people you knew in your network that you could pick up the phone. They would take your call and you can ask them for an engagement or a meeting or some, you know, you could bring in somebody to hopefully convince them that you had enough credibility to actually deliver on some value.

The interesting thing I think about that I don’t wanna say in the past because it’s still probably true today that a lot of people are underserved. They need help, they want financial help, they want guidance, but they haven’t done the work to go and get it yet. So the reason why prospecting still even works today is because there are a lot of people that are procrastinating taking care of basic things like saving, funding education, buying the insurance. And literally it’s the moment that somebody happens to call them and say, listen, you want me to help you take care of this? They’re like, yes, will you just take care of it?

That’s why I think prospecting generally still works. However- Yeah, I agree. I mean, a blind squirrel finds a nut, right? Like eventually, like if you just do a sheer numbers thing like, yeah, you’ll convert some of these people and you will find some people at the right time to get it done. I agree. Here’s a question. What if everybody just stopped prospecting and started marketing? That’s a good question. There probably would be still a lot of underserved people. I think there probably would, but I wonder if there would be an, the theory and the hypothesis is like, if we all start marketing and going where people are and being more of a resource instead of a sale, will more people be inclined to convert over to becoming clients and seeking our services versus being turned off from our industry because they’ve been cold pitched too many times.

That’s an interesting question because I generally think the problem has been every time we talk about marketing to financial advisors, they have gotten by in many cases if they’ve created an established firm, very often with very little marketing, budget, awareness, intent. In other words, they have a website and they still get most of their referrals, sorry, their business from referrals or affinity communities where they’re involved in an employer group or they do their benefits. And so they’ve got a steady source or they work generationally up and down the families. They generally don’t, they don’t actually spend a lot of time prospecting once you’ve created an established book because you can grow organically if you will, from those referrals as well as growth of let’s say assets under management if you’re in that game.

People have needs of course over time and they just keep buying from you because they have relationship. And that’s satisfied a lot of advisors for many years. So they haven’t had to market. They weren’t trained how to market. They don’t understand digital marketing. They don’t understand social because they never had to do it training wise. Some people have gotten really involved in it, advisors I should say and have fantastic profiles. I think actually if everybody started marketing, Derek, it would actually create even more confusion. In other words, the people who are taking advantage of digital marketing today have an edge over those that are not doing it, right?

Because they’re able to stand out. The 10% of the population or so that’s actually doing marketing, well, that 10% is getting seen. The rest are just growing organically. And as long as that works, it might work for you. Maybe you’re also layering prospecting. But I know a lot of advisors that want to get out of the prospecting game because they just can’t stand out with either rejection mentality or the- Yeah. Or like that’s a tough one. It’s the first thing you want to drop when you’re an advisor is, oh, I don’t want to pick up the phone, right? All reluctance, yes. Yeah, I think that’s probably one.

I mean, and that’s driven because the consumer doesn’t like it, right? Because the consumer is hanging up on you. They’re not opening the door when you knock. They’re calling you nasty names when you call them unsolicited, right? And then like that takes its pound to flesh. And like the advisor is just waiting to get out of that prospecting game. I don’t know if I agree with you though on if everyone markets, it’s a bigger problem because, well, you tell me, but if people start marketing, but they don’t do a shotgun approach, but they go focus like, here’s my niche. That’s it. Here’s the vibe. Like here’s the people I want to serve.

Like now all of a sudden, like we can all be on our own island, attracting our own tribes. And so what? We’re all marketing in the same space, but we’re marketing to different people. And competition is a healthy thing, right? Like I think there’s some competition has to be there. Yeah, that’s why I’m saying it’s almost harder in the marketing game. I mean, the great example is for Google, right? We all spend a certain amount of our lives on Google now, right? Because we’re searching for the thing that we want in this moment, whether it’s how to spell a word or where’s the local restaurant?

What are the hours? Or I’m looking for an oncologist because I just got a horrible call, right? You know, there’s reasons why we all use these search methods. And what do we know that comes up to the top? Very few people, it turns out, actually go to the second page of results, even though we all know there’s 100 million results. So the question is how do you get to that top 10 result? If you wanna buy the position, you can buy it, but you’re bidding against other people if it’s highly coveted, right? So we all know it’s not easy actually, or inexpensive to be at the top of the list on the ad side, or you’re gonna see the most popular links that people have chosen, right?

That’s really what I think tends to be at the top of that list. How do you get to that position when everybody’s marketing? The only way to do it is to own a niche, is to own something unique, right? And I think that’s really the key for both of these. When I think about prospecting, I think of this as you’re making an intentional effort to go and seek an ideal candidate for your services. You’ve come up with a persona, you’re going out. That’s my opinion, by the way. And I would be prospecting, not cold, because we think cold prospecting is a dying art, okay? There will always be a place for it, but for those that really wanna build an intentional, let’s call it higher end practice, cold prospecting is not an efficient model anymore, because people are gonna block you.

That being said, I think, and we’ve seen it even in our own practice, having a hunter-gatherer type of mentality of basically being very intentional with your hyper niche. I’m going after business owners with this net worth, who have real estate and have family in the business. And those are specifically who I work with because I have expertise around that. And I literally go after that. Now that in a way is marketing, isn’t it? I think so, that’s where I would argue. I’m like, I don’t think that’s called prospecting. If I define prospecting, it’s I’ve gone through my friends and family lists. So I got the yellow pages.

I paid for a list of leads, whatever. I’m gonna go pick a neighborhood and knock on doors. That’s how I define prospecting with what you just shared. You have a very defined process. You have a defined person you’re trying to attract that you almost know better than themselves. Maybe there’s prospecting tendencies in there, like essence day prospecting, I don’t know. That’s a good question. So maybe there’s some parts of it there, but I think prospecting the way at least I was taught is like friends and family, we call it a project 200. Don’t do that. We had 100. Yeah, I burned through that pretty quick because my project 200 was like 117.

And then- They still hired you, I guess they had a quota. They had a quota for sure. And half the people on my list were people I didn’t actually even know. So they took a gamble and lucked out on me. But then I was like, literally, I got like my wife worked at a school at the time. I literally got the list of every employee at the school and started calling them. That’s prospecting. So I just, cause I needed to pay the bills. I think a lot of younger advisors do, like you’re coming out of college, you’ve got college debt, you need to pay the bills.

You just signed onto this job that you’re like, oh crap, this is a hundred percent commission. Okay, well, I gotta sell something. I can’t pay my rent. So I think that there’s some issues that come from that, but it doesn’t feel good and it’s not what the consumer wants. But hunters and gatherers did hunting and gathering because they needed to eat today too, right? And the marketing is really like farming your planting seeds for the future. So maybe one of the lessons that our listeners, our younger advisor listeners can take away is, hey, like I need to do some hunting and gathering today, but I should probably plant, start a farm here at the same time.

Right? Right, so we’re associating this. And I think that’s the clarity that we need in this discussion. Prospecting is an activity, right? It’s a function of going and getting new business. Prospecting is an outbound effort, physical effort to go get leads. Either you’re doing it cold or you’re doing it warm. As I said, do it more intentionally, be a rifle, not a shotgun. Marketing in general is creating a brand that draws people in because they have brand awareness that you solve a problem they may have. So that when they’re looking for that solution, they find you. Or that it comes across their desk, not because you prospected them intentionally, but because you’re generally out there in the ecosystem and people will find you.

It’s like, I tend to think about- Google search, right? Yeah, that’s the farming aspect of it. You’re planting seeds and some of them will sprout. Some of them will fly across into someone else’s yard and they’ll plant over there. That’s great. That’s how you expand. You’re like a spore, actually. There you go. You’re a spore. Spreading spores. Spore farming. That’s pretty funny. You’re a bacteria. No, I’m just kidding. I am not an anti-marketer, but I have to tell you, Derek, I was never really trained in this. Neither was I. So we’re getting so many advisors that are saying, how do I attack the new marketing world, right?

How does digital marketing work? What am I supposed to be doing? Does it work? I mean, you’re doing a good amount of this these days. Well, I mean, it does work. I get inbound leads almost daily. So I know it works, but planting a spore farm, as you’ve- Spore farm. You know, getting a farm going. Marketing spore farm. I’m gonna buy that URL. That’s a lot more work than prospecting. How many tools do I need to be a hunter-gatherer, right? I need a phone. I need a car if I’m gonna walk around, feet. You know, it’s like a walk around and knock on doors. I don’t need a whole lot.

Marketing- LinkedIn, you need LinkedIn. You gotta send connections out. Send connections out. So you can do it, but like a farm, a spore farm especially, requires a ton of extra infrastructure. You need support. You need time. You need to cultivate. You need all of those other things. And it does take time, but I mean, if I was an advisor starting off today and I had no money in the bank, I had a small natural market and I had student loans I had to pay and I had like a half room apartment, I would prospect because I need to pay the bills, but I would also start marketing right away.

And actually, if some of the advice I’ve given to students who are getting their CFP in their undergrad is I’m like, go get your thought leadership started now. Start building your tribe and your personal brand now before you even need it. So you can start tapping into that when you’re ready. That’s actually a great point. It’s funny, I think we forget half the stuff that we did to get where we are. Oh my gosh. When my own, you know, in the early experience, cause we do know a lot of, there’s a lot of younger advisors coming into the marketplace and it’s super exciting because there’s such an opportunity for you, especially for those of us that we’ll call veterans that have been in the business.

We’re looking for the next generation to succeed our practices and we need youth. We need that energy and technology skills and new ways of thinking of things. We need diversity. And so coming into this business is a fantastic opportunity these days, but again, it can be intimidating, especially cause you don’t know how you’re gonna generate revenue unless somebody’s giving you a book. The challenge that I always found as a young person is that I always felt either my own lack of credibility because I figured nobody would take me seriously as a young person. So I just needed to gain smart. So I use the accreditations as my way to promote my quote unquote intelligence.

I’m not as sure today that that’s enough because there are so many credentialed advisors out there. It’s good definitely to see this. I think it’s really important. One of the veteran advisors who advised me really early on, he said, don’t just get the accreditation for the accreditation sake, actually learn the material, right? That most people just do it for the CE. And then there they got, okay, I put it on my business card and they don’t learn anything. They still have to ask questions of seniors. So be a resource to your clients and so forth. I think today, the way that you mechanize this is you literally start the thought leadership.

You start becoming a subject matter expert, what we call an SME. And you start putting it out there by creating content that people might come across to build the awareness of yourself. You’re starting to marketing yourself, brand yourself. 100%, I think that’s a great analogy and a great example of how to do it. And you can start that whenever, just get going. It’s gonna take some time, but go, just do it. And what’s interesting is it doesn’t have to be digital. You can do some of that thought leadership in networking events and guest speaking at live events. And even by publishing like a Dear Abby column, right?

There’s ways you can do that. I would argue that you’re probably still gonna have a better reach and conversion through digital channels, but you can still do some of the stuff on older school mediums. But prospect, you can’t put an ad in like you used to be able to really expect to get a whole lot now out of processing. Hey, we do retirement rollovers, call us. Unless you spend the money to put it out to enough people, right? Well, yeah, I mean, if you blast it out. Yeah, of course, I mean, if you can assume a half percent conversion of whatever you get in front of, sure, you’ll make a little bit of money, but it doesn’t feel right.

You know, there’s so many other different marketing techniques that are out there associated with the kind of long game farming. In addition to being the SME, there’s obviously you could do social presence. Social presence seems obvious, but it’s amazing to me still, there are a good number of people, prospects we would say, people that potentially would want your services that may not be using social media in the way that you think they do, right? So we tend to get kind of isolated in this bubble where there are people that are hyperactive on social media, they know what’s going on, and then there’s kind of everybody else.

So don’t forget, as Derek said, there’s clearly, you can get PR and be in the news media. This is effectively marketing, right? Getting yourself written up in a place where your potential ideal customer is gonna be reading. There is clearly advertisement, I think we’re gonna talk more about that in the future, but there’s no, I think in both of these aspects, and personally, this is what I think, you can’t get away today without establishing your identity as we talked about in our earlier podcasts, and that really comes down to building a brand. That brand has to be able to be communicated, whether you’re outreaching to people or whether they’re finding you.

That means your website has to be top notch, you have to have a social presence because people are using these methods to actually vet you. So when you first meet them, whether you actually reached out to them and they’re checking you out live while you’re on the, however you’re communicating with them, they’re looking you up right now to see, is this person really legitimately credible? Do I like their website? Do they, look, they scrapped it together with some like toothpicks, right? Do they actually, wait, have they written about the topic? Are they really a subject matter? So the irony behind this is that people are vetting your intentional marketing, whether you realize it or not, right?

Oh, they totally are. They are doing it. They are looking at all of it. If they’re going to talk to you about something as personal as their money, you’d be darn right, they’re going to do it. I think another interesting aspect of this, just to wrap this part up, is prospecting is not as scalable as marketing. That’s true. Prospecting tends to be a one-to-one or maybe one-to-many really cold through like a mailer or something like that. It’s just not as scalable. Marketing could be exponentially multiplied and grown. I’ll give you an example. I published an article on my connector site. So it’s two advisors, not two consumers, but the theory works no matter what.

And I got an unsolicited offer today for them, through another association actually, to take this article and republish it both in print and online, right? So I’m getting, you know, it’s exponential growth and access for what? Nothing almost, right? So it’s amazing what you can do. But if I had just done prospecting, I wouldn’t have that type of opportunity. So it’s amazing what can happen if you actually plant that farm and let those spores grow. Now we’re going to live this down to spores, right? That’s really true. So yeah, so digital marketing has this interesting evergreen effect, right? It lives on by the way. That’s why you want to be intentional about it because just like the photograph that somebody took a few years ago, put it up on Google, someone will find that when they search for images of you 20 years from now.

So that’s one of the interesting things about having an intentional brand versus one that’s haphazard because people will find both of it. The ones of you drinking in college and the ones of you pretending to wear a suit look really professional. They’re going to see both. Whether you want that is another question. And I say that because even content that you create as Derek said can be reused, it can be repurposed. And so an investment in marketing is a long, long-term investment. The plants can continue to grow more seeds and reap more harvest. Whereas you said prospecting is you really need to cultivate that one, right?

If it’s the hundred you need to like, you need to use the pelt and you need to use the horns and you need to use the bones. You got to really get all the, what is it? The juice out of that lemon. I’m going to switch analogies because the other, the hunting analogy, just I think I realized I don’t know what I’m talking about. I have never. Is there not a lot of hunting in Philly? No, I mean, I guess so, but not for maybe, depends if you look at the police reports are pretty bad. Yeah, that’s unfortunate. But I think to that analogy, that’s the point.

And we know some fantastic prospectors. They just really know how to do it right. They also have a great brand awareness and they’re intentionally putting that forward but they can’t today ignore the fact that they need to have a digital presence as well. And that’s going to take some commitment to marketing. Now you said, this is a great opportunity for us to kind of point out our takeaways. Because the last thing you said was that you need infrastructure for marketing. What did you mean by that? You have to have a website. The infrastructure for prospecting was your phone, your car, being able to knock on doors.

So you have to have that digital infrastructure to do the same thing. You can’t say what you want to say on social media if you don’t have a social media account. And I know this sounds really elementary but these are really important table stakes now that you’ve got to have in place and don’t just sign up and just not have anything there. Like you’ve got to make these things look amazing. So I think that’s some of that basic infrastructure that’s really super important. You know what? And what’s interesting is for some of the maybe more veteran advisors, you’re like, eh, now this is going to get into one of my takeaways here for you in a moment.

Do I really want to bother with this? Maybe you don’t, but if you’re looking to sell your practice, I would argue most newer advisors really want to be digital marketers and inbound versus prospectors. So there is an opportunity during this succession planning to consider digital marketing as something like that. Like, you know, one, do I have digital assets that a successor can leverage? And two, is the successor coming on board know how to do this whole digital marketing thing? Cause I think there’s some inherent value there as well. But anyways, so should we jump into these takeaways, Adam? Yeah, so what can you take away from this?

What can people decide to do research, delegate or do themselves today? Well, for all advisors, I think the first question is like, do you want more clients? Like if you’re sitting at, you know, at a nice income AUM level, whatever renewal level and you’re like, eh, I’m pretty good, I’m comfortable. Then you don’t really have to do a whole lot to be honest. Like there’s that argument for succession plan I just brought up, but like, maybe you’re fine with just that toothpick website, right? Whatever, cause you’re comfortable, you’re making ends meet. So if you don’t want more clients and you can kind of just like, we’ll stop here, go have a beer, go onto the golf course.

But if you do want more clients, like, how many do you want? How are you going to acquire them? So that’s something you’re going to have to ask yourself. Like where are you at in your business? What stage are you like hyper growth? Are you sun setting? Like, what are you doing? And let that kind of dictate which direction you want to go. And then I’m gonna say, if you are looking for new clients, like what are you doing right now? Are you prospecting 100% of the time? Are you marketing? Are you somewhere in the middle? And just get clear with where you are today cause then that’s going to help you figure out where to go on it.

I would argue that part of that is, is if you start marketing, if you plant that farm, can you live for X amount of time, knowing you’re not going to be doing these more transactional prospecting sales to pay the bills? Like how long can you go? So you got to take like, it’s a personal finance situations there. Cause really it’s going to be a transition. It’s not going to be something that happens overnight. And then how do you feel about it? What are you more comfortable doing? Are you, do you like prospecting? Like if you’re really good at cold calling and you like it and you get a thrill and you don’t care about rejection, then maybe you do that, but you start to add on a digital presence, right?

I don’t know. It just depends how you feel. So I think it’s, so there’s some reflection or introspection, if that’s the word that like you got to, you got to pay attention here to really assess where you are to figure out what do you actually really want to do. Yeah, I agree with you. And there was some things that kind of came to mind when you said that, which was, you know, this question of if you’re not growing, you’re dying, right? So there are many practices that are fine. They’re just there on autopilot and they’re growing with the market value and that’s good enough and that’s totally fine.

But I have to say that we tend to take, I have seen, especially with the US markets doing as well as they have over the last, let’s call it even 10 years, that advisors, I don’t want to say they’ve gotten lazy, but they’ve got comfortable in terms of how they actually grow their business. And please remember that for many of the clients that in the boomer generation are older and have a lot of the wealth, we have to be marketing to their next generation or you’re going to lose those assets. And that means, what do you mean I have to love them? Well, you might actually have to prospect those next, next generation and get them in there to show why you still deserve to be in charge after the parents are gone.

Or you have to market to them all the services that you’ve already prepared for them. And that means you need to be delivering more services and tell them about them. That’s really my takeaway for this is, people don’t necessarily know what you do unless you tell them. And the way you tell them is by marketing and you make them aware. You let your clients and your prospects know what you do specifically. You have to keep reminding them what value proposition you bring. And that’s why I think it’s really incredible. It’s really important rather, for us all to market to our existing clientele just as well.

So they can be our champions and tell the story we want them to tell as opposed to the story they think that you do. All right, I think that guy sells me insurance. Like, no, actually I set up your whole family to avoid taxes. I don’t just sell you insurance. People don’t know what you do unless you tell them. And that’s what marketing is really all about. So you have to be intentional about the message, whether you’re doing an outbound prospecting so that it’s consistent, or you’re doing kind of inbound marketing. My focus here, I think, and you’ve probably heard it a hundred times is you got to focus on a niche.

I was at a program once where Michael Kitz has said that when you go to Google, you think you’re going to solve a specific problem. It’s the analogy of saying, well, am I looking for a doctor or am I looking for an oncologist or am I looking for a rare cancer disorder specialist? And if you just put in doctor, you’re going to get a million results. You’re not going to stand out there. But if you are a specialist in a very specific area, you can create even demand for yourself, even and create actual almost exclusivity if you work in a specific area or challenge associated with financial advice.

And that would be, we’ve seen the highest earners, the most valuable practices tend to be around. Those have defined a very specific niche. You might say, well, I don’t want to cut off all these other opportunities. That is the whole point of decision, right? It’s to cut off the distractions and really focus and be credible. And that’s the difference between, we always joke about golfers, right? The number one golfer in the world makes $30 million a year. The number two golfer makes like 2 million. And the number three golfer, who’s that? We don’t even know who that is. But their difference of scores are literally we’re talking a shot.

And that’s kind of the approach here. The people at the top of their game have decided what their brand is. So that’s my point to you to just decide that hopefully that beat that one in. And either way, you got to allocate this like a business these days. Marketing should have a budget line item on your balance sheet or your budget for the year. Most advisors are spending, as you said in your most recent survey, what less than how much on marketing? 70, was it 76% are spending less than 500 bucks a month. And it was like 70, it was still above 70% are spending less than 250 a month.

That’s crazy. That is crazy. And most of our in the technology world on our sales side, right? Marketing could be 20% of our whole budget, right? We’re talking, why? Because we got to get awareness out there so that people know that we exist. I’m not saying that people should spend that much on it, but you don’t have to spend it on only advertising. You could spend it on presence and brand and website. And you can hire people to write your content. Yeah, content creation, right? So there’s lots of services out there that can support that. So let’s jump into this. This is a time for our community question.

As many of you know, we actually ask for you to write us questions and we get these occasionally on social. When they’re great, we actually read them out and we try to answer them at the highest level. You want to read this one? Yeah, I’ll ask it all. I mean, it’s to both of us, but I’ll ask it to you to start the conversation. So this comes from Cindy in California. I don’t know where, but hey, thanks Cindy. Appreciate it. Yeah, I’m out here. So, okay, Derek and Adam, I’ve been entertaining prioritizing marketing in my financial advice practice. My partners and I debate whether we should do paid advertising or just social posts.

We go back and forth and are not sure if the digital marketing actually works to generate new relationships seeking financial guidance. Where should we start? How should we decide on budget? Thanks in advance. It’s a huge question from Cindy. Well, it’s a very long question. Thank you, Cindy. We appreciate it. We’ll send you a T-shirt so you can rethink whether you should have asked this question. Why did I ask this question? All I got was this crazy T-shirt. I wanted the answer. This is a good question. I think this is starting to hit more financial advisors because you can do this really effectively. Now, what am I talking about?

The digital marketing basically means that you’re creating a presence in the digital space and you’re using tools like automation of emails that are going out to prospects, right? That’s kind of the outbound prospect. And you’re also creating content that’s driving inbound interest. You’re creating infographics maybe. You’re using, you’re creating white papers. You’re creating credibility. You’re using your website to write a blog on topics that are gonna be important to the prospects or ideal candidates for your practice. These are all around the idea of digital marketing. Paid advertising on top of this is typically these days done through the social media programs like Facebook. You can actually pay Facebook to run the ads effectively that get inserted in your ideal persona target profile.

And then all of a sudden after they’d see their uncle and their cousin and their friends doing all cool stuff that you haven’t done, next thing you know you see financial advice ad because Facebook knows how to serve this up in front of them effectively. We know that this works really well in some cases. When you have a, I think a good offer for the prospect to or for your candidate or persona to actually engage with that content, like lists work really well. Top 10 lists of people who are pre-retirement that need to check out this in Montana, right? Very specific to the audience. And they’re like, well, that’s curious.

They get engaged and then they go into a marketing funnel. Sorry, Derek, they go into an antique funnel. Purchase cycle, purchase cycle. So that’s how we typically say it. I think it can work, but you gotta decide, recognize that these are long-term plays, right? It’s three, six months or more before you even see kind of any real impact. So you gotta decide what your budget is for the year and really commit. Failures early on happen when you don’t put enough money into the project or you don’t put enough time. And so you don’t see the ROI. I don’t know, Derek, that was a long answer.

Yeah, I’m conflicted on this and my opinion on it has changed over time. I’m still of the opinion that before you even bother with paid, you should have good organic social, like have awesome social media profiles, have a great website, have a great blog, have your email stuff set up, things of that nature. Like get all those parts and pieces moving and working together first, have your brand throughout, consistent messaging and all that stuff. So I would start there. If you don’t have that, that comes first in my opinion. But when it comes to paid, so paid can be done and it can be like pouring gas on the fire if you’ve already got, but you gotta have the fire started, right?

So, and that’s where all that other stuff I just said comes into play. What I have seen from personal experience with this and I’m from other, you know, thought leaders and things I’m reading is that paid is actually not working as well as it used to. So the old funnel from 1898 and whatever basically said in short, like 50% or so of your budget should be on simply just marketing all your stuff, right? Just market, market, market, pay for paid ads, get it out there. And what seems to be happening is that through this new purchase cycle instead of a funnel is that the paid ad is actually going down as part of a revenue line item.

It’s still there. It’s still useful and it can still work really well. But what appears to be happening is that it’s going down and the focus on all that content you were just talking about, I’m like creating this really awesome content and being more organic and having the thought leadership is becoming more and more important. Because like, if you go on Facebook or LinkedIn or Google or wherever, you get served up all these ads and we’re bombarded by so many ads these days that we’re kind of numb to it now. But if I have a brand awareness and loyalty and it’s helping me solve a problem, I’m gonna be more of a buyer, I think.

So Cindy, that’s a long question. I think we’re actually gonna use this, I think, to unpack in an actual podcast episode next for you. So where do you start? I would start with the basic foundation, make sure you got all that stuff in place, get it all there. Budget, it’s really gonna be a function of what’s your revenue. Maybe start off somewhere like anywhere from like one to 5% of your annual revenues, start low and see how that works. And that’s the beautiful thing about paid though is you can test it pretty quick and know like, okay, I know what it’s costing me per click or per view or per ebook download or whatever.

Do I wanna scale this up? Am I getting sales? That type of thing. There’s a lot there. Yeah, hyper-niche really matters. For sure. You have to define your persona, your ideal candidate for your services. And that’s easy when you’re really niched because it’s very specific. And once you get very specific, we find that this gets more and more effective. If you generically blast the marketplace and try to say, oh, people thinking about retirement, then you’re really using it as a top of mind awareness project, right? You’d be prepared to spend a lot of money to get your name out there. They’re gonna have to see it seven to 10 times before they actually take action.

And they’ll have to be a pain point usually behind it. Like, oh no, someone just died in my family. I need to call someone. Oh, I’ll call the person who I’ve seen 10 of their ads. Maybe, maybe, or maybe not. Maybe, we just don’t know. Anyway, let’s make sure we talk about this actually in our next podcast so that you can follow on this one back to back. Derek, a pleasure always doing this with you. Yeah, man, I love these chats. I love debating. I love getting this information out there. For all of you listening, thanks a ton. We appreciate it. Shout out to Adam’s mom and my wife.

Nice. That’s always respected. Yeah, man. And like send us questions that you want us to open and debate on here. And the edgier, the better. So throw them out there. Send us a DM, send us an email, whatever you wanna do. Awesome. Have a great day, man. You too, Adam. Thanks, buddy. We’ll see you later. Bye. 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.