Ep 8: 8. Rethink: Paid vs Organic Digital Marketing

Episode 8 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (42:07)

Episode 8 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 set out to answer what an advisor should pay for in digital marketing and what to earn instead, starting from the observation that most advisors have never spent a cent on advertising and were never taught marketing in the first place. Notman offers a worked example from organic search: rather than competing for a broad term, his firm ranks first for a narrow phrase that describes how he actually practices, which requires only a small number of searchers for the position to be worth owning. Holt describes going through three agencies before finding one worth keeping, and suggests judging any agency by whether it educates you. The episode also covers organic social as participation rather than publishing, LinkedIn’s role as the background check prospects run, and how bulk emailing a purchased list can get a sending domain blacklisted outright.

What this episode covers

• The practical difference between paid and organic, and what each is realistically good for
• Long-tail search terms, and why a narrow phrase can be worth more than a broad one
• How to evaluate a marketing agency, including the test of whether they educate you
• Organic social treated as showing up and commenting rather than publishing daily
• Why emailing a purchased list can permanently damage a sending domain

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holtz. 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. Adam, in building your marketing brand, what should you pay for and what should you not pay for? Well, I don’t know. I don’t pay for anything. I don’t wanna pay for anything, frankly. You know, it’s funny because most of the advisors we talked to have never paid a cent for advertising.

We talked about this at the last. But we thought that this is not actually the question. And I’m glad you asked it this way because most of us in financial advice, as we’ve said before, learned prospecting. We learned how to network. We learned how to call our family. We learned how to ask our cousin for business and our neighbors and people we felt uncomfortable with. But we never really learned marketing one-on-one as well as what we now call digital marketing today. So I think we should talk about, we should really educate everybody because the marketplace has changed for marketing. It certainly has. So we’re almost taking a step back.

So advisors take a step back and listen, we’re gonna give you some really cool insights here into what actually digital marketing is. Let’s define that. And then we can figure out what the heck do we pay for and what don’t because yeah, it is super overwhelming to try to learn all this stuff, especially if we’re newer and we’re learning about what products and services and planning techniques we’re all focused on. I mean, that’s our job. We’re advisors, we’re not digital marketers, but digital marketing is extremely important to tell your story and acquire new clients. So we’re gonna drop in and just tell you how it is, man.

Here we go. Great stuff. Well, so one of the things that I learned at being a FinTech CEO is that I knew nothing about marketing. I thought that it was advertising. You buy some advertising or you pay an agency, they do a bunch of stuff and you got a cool logo. Next thing you know, there’s business in the door. That’s not the way it works today. And clearly for those people that are starting with a scrappier budget, right? They have no budget and they’re willing to do some work on their own. There’s some fantastic ways for you to generate what we would call organic interest.

That means it’s happening naturally because you’re doing the right kinds of things, but you really need to understand the space so you know what to pay for and what not to pay for. So this term of digital marketing is actually if you search it, it’s effectively it’s the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using a different medium than normal, right? The internet and other forms of digital communication, your phone, social, a whole bunch of other stuff. And what we found when we did this research to try to communicate this to you, how do we communicate this to you in 30 minutes? Well, there’s a couple of things you might wanna write down.

The first four that come up from most organizations that define this is, number one, search engine optimization, right? SEO, you’ve probably heard that term before. The second is search engine marketing, okay? Number two, probably these first two, you’re not gonna do too much. We’ll explain that in a second. The third is social media marketing. Now we probably can understand that. And the last is content marketing, all right? So we’re gonna explain these two, but it does also include some other elements, including email, marketing automation, and digital advertising. Now, okay, Adam, that was technical, more technical than we like to get, right Dirk? One of the things that I really took away from all that research that we did for this is that all of these include some form of call to action.

A CTA, this term you will hear a lot because CTA or call to action means you’re asking someone who’s engaging with whatever they’re doing in the marketing effort to do something, to take some action. And it’s important because a lot of us who learned how to ask for the business or ask for the appointment, that was the call to action. The moment when we ask somebody to take the next step and it has to be present in marketing for it to be effective. I love how you broke that down. And don’t worry folks, we’re not gonna get crazy technical on here. You just need to understand how these things are, what they are and how they work at a general level.

That’ll be enough for today. Yeah, that was it, bye, good night. So I hope you had a great day and I’ll see you. Hopefully that was helpful, yeah. Yeah, that was helpful, right guys? Okay. Well, this is good. So Derek, would you take us through SEO? Because search engine optimization is something we’ve all heard before. What does that mean? Yeah, so SEO is this technical thing where Google and other search engines have what are called bots and their algorithms that are looking for pipes of content. Now, the beautiful thing about Google and other search engines is they can be predictive and they know what people are looking for, okay?

So then what they’re gonna do is say, okay, well, everyone’s looking for retirement planning for police officers. Let’s just throw that out there as a whatever. It could be anything. All right, well, now Google searches the ether, right? The internet to find out, okay, well, who’s written about retirement planning for police officers? And lo and behold, Joe Advisor in Nebraska has a blog article about it. They didn’t pay a penny to get any type of results, but now they’re showing up on page one of Google. That is search engine optimization because Joe in Nebraska who wrote that blog post, if they did it correctly, either by themselves or with their team, knew that people were searching for that topic and then wrote their blog post in a way where Google would say, hey, this is exactly what people are looking for.

We’re gonna serve it to them now. It’s all organic, but it’s still competition, right? Because you’re competing with other people who are trying to do the same thing. So there are technical aspects here about that. Like retirement distribution plan is another thing that you could have for police officers. You could get really, really in the weeds on this. But at the end of the day, that’s what SEO is. It’s for content on your website to get indexed by Google and ranked by Google as a value add, as a key source of information that people are looking for, okay? And then they’re gonna find that. Google’s gonna find it and then it’s gonna serve it to people searching for that information.

And then eventually that starts them down that path. So it’s really interesting, but the thing about Google is three, you can go figure out what people are searching for and you can see how competitive that keyword is, a keyword it would be like. So keywords are certain things. Like when you go into Google and say, the best pizza shop near me, that’s a keyword phrase, right? So Google knows that. So when you put that into your blog post as a title, Google’s gonna index that and then serve that up to people that are looking for that thing. I don’t wanna go down the black hole here, Adam, but that’s essentially what SEO is.

How does it work? Explain how the algorithm, what is the code line on 423? Yeah, so the interesting thing I learned about this, we did wind up hiring actually a firm to explain this whole thing to us because we realized we didn’t know what we were doing on this topic. But there’s a couple of things I learned. Number one, as Derek already said, to summarize that, keywords matter. You can be intentional about the keywords you want your ideal customers to be searching and actually embed it throughout the content that you create, whether it’s your website, blogs, social, everything. Because remember, when you go to Google, it looks for everything.

It’s looking media articles, YouTube, it’s looking for everything that could be relevant. What actually the algorithm we understand is looking for actual reference support. In other words, if you just put a bunch of tag words like retirement planning in your content and you don’t have any backlinks that have credibility in the space, you’re not gonna be on page one. And the problem is that if you’re not on page one, who cares what page you’re on? Because page one would be of 100 million results. How do you own a keyword? In fact, it’s really difficult to own a generic keyword like financial planning or like investment advice.

It is very difficult. Because you’re competing against the mega machines that are gonna put out an enormous amount of content to control that organic. So we’re gonna get into paid in a second, but the key is you wanna be very specific if you’re gonna try to do SEO. And my argument is if this is important to you, you should pay a firm to do this for you. Don’t try to learn this. There are organizations that have figured out little nuances on the algorithm to make it work for you. If you wanna be in the top search organically this. So we’re gonna move on from this because many advisor Brian never gonna actually try to do this, but if you’re gonna do it, we think this is one of those moments where you pay for somebody to do it.

100%. Let’s talk about the second, which is all these, I love these acronyms. This is search engine marketing. Now this is actually a little bit different because this is how you can pay these search engines to put yourself at the top. You have any experience with this one? Just briefly, because honestly I don’t have a budget that can compete with the big brands out there that can throw tens of thousands, millions of dollars at these things. So yeah, it’s like when you do a Google search and you see the first four or five results, they say the little word add right to the left of them.

I’ve seen that. These are people that are paying, companies that are paying to get their visibility boosted on Google. Google serves that up. It charges them, they can do like a click, like they get charged per clicks or per views. And that way you can get further up there. But I don’t know about you, but whenever I go to a Google search, I skip all of the ads and I go straight down to organic. I don’t click on any of the ads at all. And I go straight to organic. Even like let’s say I was searching asset map and you had a Google strategy in place.

I wouldn’t click the Google ad for asset map. I’d go to the organic one. Thank you. Saved me like 10 cents. Well, there’s some altruism there, right? I’m trying to like help you out a little bit, brother, you know what I mean? Thank you. It all adds up. It all adds up. But so I mean, SEM can work. You can do okay by paying just to get like things up there, but I’m not a big fan of it, to be perfectly honest. If you’ve got a marketing budget that like a BlackRock or Fidelity does, like that works. They know they get some ROI there. But for a solo advisor shop or a smaller shop, it’s tough.

You know, as for example, I go back to the SEO thing. If you Google virtual certified financial planner, I am, my firm is the number one organic result. I own that. Is that, that’s because you’re specific to those terms. Say that term again. Virtual certified financial planner. Okay, so somebody would have to search that specifically for you to come up number one. Cause if you just certified financial planner, everyone’s got that out there, right? That’s a tough one to compete with. But part of my value add for my financial practice is that I’m virtual, right? So I throw that in there and boom. Now I don’t need tens of millions of people searching that.

I need a couple. So it just shows that SEM, it would be tough to do. I agree with you. And my conclusion on this one is that we did try this and we actually are the company that we hired to help us. Now we’ve gone through three companies until we found the company we liked. So pay attention to that. Sometimes you don’t always get the best relationship that’s least educating you and you know why you’re spending all this money. Cause you don’t always see results until six to 12 months out. And you’re wondering why you’re burning this money on this stuff. It’s interesting if you have a name or a brand in your firm, that is something generic like incentive financial or ascension financial.

Like we tend to put these very kind of strong adjectives in front of our brand names. But if someone were to search that there’s some other firm that would buy, they bought the word financial planning. So they’re gonna actually come up ahead of you. And that’s one of the reasons why we actually bought our own name. We buy Google Asset Map so that any other company that tries to do, you know, use Asset Map and beat us organically will always still be at the top for the people who are actually seeking us. And I thought that was an interesting strategy. But again, you have to have a budget for it.

And I don’t know for most advisors that that’s worth it. So I’m a big blah. I’m a meh on this one. I’m not really like, I don’t see it for most financial advisors. Unless, you know, you’re big and you want to be huge and you got to, you know, money to burn. I don’t see this one. I haven’t seen it work. How about that? So let’s talk about the one that we do like. Like this social media marketing has been something that both you and I have gotten into. Help us understand how do you, how do you kind of contextualize social media marketing? It’s big.

It’s a networking event that’s online. If you just want to sum it up. Yeah, I mean, that’s it. Yeah. Next hope. Hopefully that works. I don’t know what I’m doing in a networking event. I’m a wallflower. Yeah. That’s true. You could be a wallflower. You could be a wallflower. You could be that creepy guy or girl by the fake plant in the corner watching everybody. That doesn’t work out. Isn’t that the wallflower? Yeah, right. You know, they’ve got that drink. They’ve been nursing for four hours. Right. Holding on to their business cards in their left hand. Please come over here. Come talk to me. Oh, the social media marketing.

It’s really cool. It’s, there’s an art and a science to it. And it can be extremely powerful if you do it right. Cause you can do this wrong. For all of us that learned how to prospect in our early days as advisors or who are being told to prospect now and cold call people, don’t do that on social media. It doesn’t work. It’s really a beautiful place where you can grow a tribe of people that are like you that want to hear what you have to say and vice versa. And then you can create awareness around that education awareness calls to action to get people to come through your, I’m not going to call it a funnel anymore.

I’m going to call it like a sales or process cycle now. Okay. Nice. I like that. We have to have someone on here that is going to argue that the funnel is still there. Cause I don’t think it is. I think the funnel is dead. Anyway, so you can, it’s really an amazing thing, but the social media companies have recognized this or doubling down on content creation, especially but they’ve got these black box algorithms that we have to learn how to manipulate. Maybe manipulate is not the right word, but leverage let’s call it that. Take advantage of to be able to tell our story more because the challenge now is social media is that a lot of people are on it.

Gary V just said last month in a podcast that LinkedIn is in the golden era between 2017 and 2023. And that people are going to be crying if they don’t get involved now and looking back at it. Yeah, it is. But like LinkedIn is adding a new user every three seconds. It’s 28,800 new people on LinkedIn a day. Wow. So people are going to these places and that means we’ve got competition there, but that’s also, it’s like a double-edged sword because it also can work really well for you if you do it correctly. I could go on and on and on about this. I have questions for you.

I have questions for you. Jump in, give me some questions. It’s interesting you say that. Why do you, because there’s been this big question about whether our ideal prospects, because we’re still talking about marketing for financial advisors. Yes. How are our prospects on LinkedIn, on a Facebook, are they on Twitter, are they Instagram? Where are my ideal customers? All of the above. How do I focus? All of the above. Okay. So how do I know where my ideal customer is or what message to give them? Like when they’re going to Facebook, how do I know what I should be creating content wise for those people versus the LinkedIn people, Instagram?

You have to know who you’re talking to. We talked about this in a previous episode. If you don’t know who your ideal client is, who your identity is, remember, we’ve talked about this multiple angles already. If you don’t know that, then how are you going to know who you’re going to talk to or where to go? If you know who your ideal client is, then you’re able to figure out pretty quickly where they hang out online. Okay. If your ideal client is 22 year old influencers, they’re probably on TikTok or Instagram. They’re not hanging out on LinkedIn a whole lot and vice versa. So you got to know where your people, your tribe is hanging out.

And what do you say? Like, what do you say to them, Adam? You talk to them about like who you are. You resonate with them. You show them you understand them. Like, it’s just, don’t talk about whole life, please. All right? That can happen on a one-off conversation after they want to actually talk to you. Yeah, so that’s interesting. What we’ve learned over the years of using these different tools is how robust the data is that these companies have. Oh my gosh. They know what you’re looking for, what you’re searching for, what you connect to, who you’re connected to, who you like, who you comment on and what are their preferences.

And you can imagine this massive web of an algorithm that can kind of direct the right message to the specific party at scale. That’s the power, the scary power of the social media network. And if you’ve seen recent documentaries on it, I think they kind of will freak you out. The question is, how do you use this? Cause it’s here to stay. And as Derek said, it’s growing. For many years, the broker-dealer compliance in our space has been really restricted, we’ll call it authentic utilization of social media, right? You had to use pre-approved, canned, ghostwritten articles out of some of the major companies out there that had been vetted 10 times from FINRA, which basically means it connected with nobody and educated everybody, but didn’t necessarily get them to take action or associate any kind of real value to you other than the fact that you’ve just served it up to them and they saw your name.

So it was really a top of mind awareness campaign. Maybe I’m putting content in front of you that you care about. That being said, we were starting to see that change as I think compliance teams are getting more supportive of authentic content, podcasting by advisors is becoming more popular, especially in social media. But the whole key to this thing is number one, you got to figure out a way to start gaining a following, building that network. One of the things that is amazing that you’ve been able to do is just expand the number of followers and connections that you have in such a short time.

How did you do that? How did you actually expand your network from the… Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s a couple of things that’s being consistent. So I show up every day to this online networking party. I create content instead of just creeping and watching whatever the people are doing. I found my voice in a way, I just started talking. I think one of the big challenges with the compliance side is advisors are scared to do things because compliance won’t let them. And I would go back to you and be like, okay, if you send an email to a client or you’re in a meeting with a client and you’re talking about a concept or an event that happened in your life or something that you learned or you’re talking about something personal, are you asking compliance for approval for any of that stuff?

No, you’re not. You’re not asking compliance. You’re asking approval for like illustrations and products and marketing, like specific marketing pieces. That’s the recommendation. Yeah, that’s something that should be. So if you’re gonna do social media stuff about that, then darn right, your compliance is gonna have a say in it and view it. And they have a mandate from FINRA that they archive all of it anyways. But if you’re talking about just who you are as a person and your values and things you’ve learned and interesting topics and questions that are not product, service, investment related, then just go say those things as long as it’s archived.

That’s okay. Cause a lot of the BDs have done a good job at least of bringing tech on where they can automatically archive all content, which is what they’re supposed to do. And then they can review it and see if there’s any issues. So I think that that’s really, really important. I’m kind of going down the black hole here now, but. Yeah, well, let me summarize that because so you’re saying that your strategy has been to be authentic and be committed and to stick with it, right? So that’s how you’ve organically grown your following. You did it without necessarily paid components, right? You’re doing a lot of that work yourself.

Yeah, we’re doing some paid now, but for quite some time it was all organic. I showed up, I did a post, learned how some best practices for LinkedIn, especially and leverage those. And then just went from there and the thing has just grown exponentially. It’s amazing what can actually happen in a rather short amount of time too. I tend to agree with you. The authentic voice is really the best. The challenge most advisors have besides the compliance one is they just don’t have the time to keep creating the amount of content that normally it takes to kind of keep up or be relevant. I would, I’d kind of give yourself a little bit of a forgiveness here.

It’s not that you have to write every day. It’s not that you have to create content. It’s that you have to be involved at the party, right? Sometimes showing up to the party is 90% of it. That means you show up, you comment on somebody, you repost it, you say, you know what, I agree or I disagree with this and you start a conversation and that actually creates, actually lifts your awareness in the piece here. Remember that in many ways, the social media, the number one usage of your social profile and the activity that you create is it is your background check. That means when prospects are looking at you, they look at your website, then they immediately go to your social profile, typically LinkedIn, because it’s the business side of it.

And they start checking out, who do you know together? And then they start checking out what, where did you actually go to school and where did you work? And then they look at your activity and they see what you post and they see what you like and now they get your political flavor and they get your, right? So they’re getting a feel for what you care about too, the way that you would probably prospect them or at least figure out whether they’re the right candidate, they’re looking at. So sometimes it’s also just about building the resume you want people to see because it is public and it lives forever.

Again, my conclusion to that so we can move on is that there are some fantastic tools that you might wanna look up like creating an engagement pod amongst your community of peers, something that we’ve played with. Just Google that and what is an engagement pod? Something that you might wanna put together, fantastic way for multiplying content. There are also tools that allow you to write all your posts and then have them post throughout the week. So if you wanna spend the weekend writing your stuff because you can’t stop during the week, you don’t have to do this just point in time. There’s some really great tools out there that’ll let you automate a lot of the social posting and awareness and liking, but that’s the key.

Just be engaged. Yeah, be show up to the party. Let’s start there and then go from there. Show up to the party and participate, right? Like cheers everybody, say hi, and then also say goodbye, right? Don’t just disappear, right? So that they know to invite you the next time. That’s another thing, right? Sometimes this gets very social in its kind of roots. The fourth piece here is really, it’s content marketing. How do you create all of this content? And I know that in many ways, a lot of the content is around this idea of making you a subject matter expert, some authority on the content that you’re generating.

And I look at this, Derek, very much like magnets. These are magnets that are attracting your ideal customers who have these pain points to your content because you are an authority, they’re curious, they’re interested, whether it is a technical subject, like I wanna talk about estate planning and the taxes and how do you structure a life to reduce taxes, okay? Or it could also be interest-driven. How to have the most fun in retirement being a golfer in Florida, right? It can be that content that’s gonna really align with your prospects. What have you seen in terms of the more effective content that’s created out there?

Well, it’s interesting. I think before we even get to effectiveness, I think a lot of advisors have bought into like, yeah, okay, this stuff makes sense because most of us have downloaded an ebook or read a blog post and got some value out of it. But reading one or downloading one is a lot different than creating one. So you can have a lot of ROI here, but I’m not gonna like take your rose cover glasses off here because this is a lot of work. Social media posts, there we go, Adam, he took his glasses off. That’s awesome. Guys, I can see. Who are you? Social media posts is probably the easiest thing out of all of this, but blogs, eBooks, books, white papers, infographics, podcasting, all of that stuff takes a lot of work.

I would say, yes, you need to invest in this and first do not expect results overnight and know it’s gonna take some time. And what I tend to guide advisors on this strategy is you should probably do some of this stuff yourself first and spend the time on it because it’s gonna help you find your voice, your persona, your style of writing and communicating. And then at some point, once you’ve figured that out, then you can go hire some people to help you do these things, whether you’re collaborating or just completely outsourcing it because it is a super big time suck to do these things.

They’re extremely important. If you go back to search engine optimization, they look for stuff like this. They’re looking for constant content, content being uploaded to your site and all these things. So it’s there, gotta feed the beast, but it takes a ton of work. So do it, do some of it yourself first. And then when you find a firm that you like, be like, hey, here’s how I write a blog. Here’s how my social media posts look. Here’s how my eBooks look so far. Go replicate this. Otherwise, if you go and you’ve done none of it because you just don’t wanna be bothered, now any firm you hire is gonna white label it.

And now it’s not gonna be you anymore. It’s not gonna be your persona. And as you just said, Adam, people wanna work with subject matter experts that they know and trust that they can connect with on a human level. And if your content’s just plain vanilla, they’re gonna know that 18,000 other advisors have written the same blog posts and they’re not gonna get any value out of it, which means no lead, no business. Yeah, that’s a great point. And I think the real big question in content is are you gonna create it or are you gonna have someone else create it? I happen to think that the requirement, the need for creation of content is so high.

You probably have to, you can’t make this one your day job. There’s some interesting scrappy tools that I’ve used. I tend to use, I really like the audio model, right? So I come up with the ideas and I dictate them and I either dictate them into my system that transcribes the whole thing and then I send it to a copywriter and they write it and then I get to edit because it’s a lot easier to edit. And they’ll write it, they’ll think about the open, the close, the end, the call to action. The SEO, the keywords. Yes, they’ll do all that. And I just have to show up and fix a couple of language components or whatever.

And that’s great. And then they’ll get it out, right? It doesn’t make sense for Adam to do that. Although I did a lot of that. The other thing is that there’s plenty of media outlets. There’s such a demand for content today, original content. You can get many of the news media like NASDAQ, Forbes, Think Advisor, Investor Perspectives, Advisor Perspectives. These companies all want your content. You can actually become a ghostwriter for them and they’ll publish your articles if they’re good enough and they’re unique. And you now can create what seems like traditional media authority that’s not that you then socialize by posting in your social media.

I would tend to say that the easiest thing to do early is clearly the social posts. The things that we’re hearing are getting the most traction are lists still to this day. David Letterman did it great. He’s in top 10 lists, right? Top six reasons why people are here. Top six things you gotta do when you pass away or you’re gonna take social security. These topics, people love that because if you can bubble something complicated down to three steps, that’s what we try to do here in a way to how do we take a complicated topic and make it 1800 steps to make it easy for you.

But that’s the point is just think about what’s easy early. If you’re gonna do stuff like books and you’re gonna try to do infographics, you’re gonna want professionalism here. Don’t do scrappy there. Get some help, yeah, yeah, for sure. A lot of work to do it right. People have a high expectation for quality and they want it to all look like McKinsey made it. Ain’t gonna happen. That’s not easy to do on your own. So pay for this one. A quick call to action on this one just because it is overwhelming. Create some social posts around different topics that you think are interesting in it and not just about products or investments, please.

Whatever one does the best organically has the most engagement. Take that and further that by creating maybe an ebook or a graphic or a blog post around it where you can create even more value because you know people already like it. It’s that simple. Just go with that. Anyways, okay. Multiplication of content is huge. So if you’re gonna do something, choose something you can turn into a meme and a post and a podcast and right. That’s the key to leveraging this. Let’s kind of wrap this up with these last pieces. Email marketing is probably still the most effective communication vehicle out there and because not everybody has social media and at the same time it’s also the biggest junk mail bin we have because email is quote unquote free.

Now the key to this one we found is that when you’re doing email to your warm market make sure it’s personalized and authentic and you’re really updating them to the specific audience. Like I thought this was relevant to you and the 50 other people I’m sending it to, okay. Right, so in the cold market though you have to really think about how someone’s gonna receive that because junk mail is the predominance of what I get in my mail. I just commented I crossed 100,000 unopened emails, right. I know doesn’t that scare a lot of people? Why? Because most of it’s junk or at least looked like junk so I already pre decided, right.

If you’re gonna do this cold marketing via email, the digital email, make sure you find a way to make it personalized and relevant. You cut the images, don’t try to make it all fancy and look like a commercial, okay. And try to capture attention on the mobile phone where most of this email is being read first, right. So that means it’s gotta have a clear call to action in the subject that’s legible in the first four words, okay, because everything else gets cut off. So there’s some really interesting techniques I would think about. I wouldn’t ignore this email, digital email marketing still works really well.

Oh, it’s a great tool. I would add a few bits to that. One is make, try to do this inbound instead of outbound. What I mean by that is have people opt into your email instead of trying to, you know, don’t do it the other way around because then now you have people that are wanting to hear what you have to say. Also something to know about. So there’s, I wouldn’t call it SEO, but the internet service providers, whether you’re doing this through a CRM or manually are tracking your open rates. And if people are hitting spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, your email address, your service is actually gonna say, hey, this content’s really spammy, it’s not great.

We’re not gonna serve this email as much as they think we are. So there’s some really black box stuff going on there, but if you’re doing totally spammy stuff and just whatever, the internet service providers know this. Like, I don’t know about you, but like whenever I get a spam email in my Gmail, I hit spam. That gets marked back somewhere. And then that provider or the sender gets dinged on that, so just keep that in mind. It’s true. We have had that happen, by the way. Someone uploaded a list of 10,000 people and just blasted it out. Enough people did that, that literally every single email from that email account went nowhere, no open rates.

They literally basically, they blacklisted it. And that’s actually what happens. They can blacklist an email if too many people at spam and then that’s done. You can’t use that one. Years ago, that wasn’t the case, but they got smart and they figured it out because people hate spam unless you’re cooking it. So that’s the problem. I should be hitting spam more often, right? The other question I think we get a lot is this idea of marketing automation and where should you pay for this marketing animation? Derek said it great. The CRMs have great functionality here for workflows. We run into advisors all the time and they haven’t even set up these workflows for marketing automation.

In other words, a drip email that’s going out on an ongoing basis, or even better, when a client is in a certain lifestyle stage or cycle of the advice journey, they get an automated email. Like, oh, it’s six months to my next review. They get an automatic email. It says, hey, this is about time. You should be thinking about this. By the way, see our blog, follow our this, opt in for this content, little download this video. You’re giving, it’s your opportunity when you connect on an automatic basis to say, hey, here’s all this value we’re providing. Do you want it? Because sometimes our clients don’t necessarily know what to ask for, right?

So you have to serve it up in a way, say, hey, try this new mimosa cocktail I made. They weren’t gonna ask for a mimosa, but they’re like, wow, this is great. And then they refer their friend. They’re like, I know someone who loves mimosas. And then they forward that on. So every time we email them, we have to give more than the content of the email. The key here is that an automation system is really effective here. I know there’s some fantastic campaign management tools that are in our space with financial advisors. They’ll do the calendars and the posting and the campaigns. And one of the things that I’ve learned over this time is that if you, these modern platforms, and there’s several of them out there, I’m not gonna drop names, for campaign management in financial advice, they have the ability to actually follow the journey.

So they serve up an ad on social, that person interacted with it. Now they know which next ad to give them via email. And then they interact with that. And then they go into a highly likely you should reach out to them. Or no, let’s keep actually cultivating that by giving relevant ads. So think nurturing, thank you. That’s the right word. That’s it. But I think we should close this topic with this idea of digital advertising and should anybody be paying, right? So should advisors, Derek, be paying, spending money on advertising or should they be spending money in other ways? Yes and yes, and a little bit of no.

First, invest in your digital infrastructure. Get all your accounts set up. Then go pay either a, like a digital marketing team to create content for you, things of that nature, copywriters help get some of that outsourced. Invest in automation tools where you can. Those things are more important. I would say digital advertising should be last. Get everything else done first. And then, as a FinTech guy, I would argue maybe a little bit differently, but if I put my advisor hat on and I have a limited budget and limited time, do the other stuff first. And then I would start paying for things at the very end after I’ve done everything else to further amplify my message.

Got it. And I’ve been told this, if you pay for something and you invest in advertising and it gives you a rate of return, put a little bit more. See if you get the same rate of return. And you actually continue to do that until you start seeing diminishing marginal return, right? So that’s the key. Track that ROI. It could be, yeah, it could be, the key here is to do so. So let’s kind of do our takeaways and then we’ll go to our question and we’ll have fun. Wrap this puppy up here. Yeah. So takeaways, we’ve covered a ton here. As I just said this already, advisors, if you haven’t already, please just build your digital infrastructure first.

Get your social media profiles up and running. Get a clean website there. Get some type of email marketing in hand. Just get those things done first. A lot of that stuff’s free. It doesn’t take a ton of time. Usually set it up once. Pay for automation before advertising. Talked about that already. You can automate some of these things like email marketing, for example, is a great example. And for all of this stuff, know who you’re talking to because you are marketing to them. So make sure your ideal client is defined because then your posts, your pictures, your videos, your eBooks, all of the things that you’ll eventually do should be built around who you’re actually marketing to.

So those are my three takeaways. Oh, that’s great. What I took away from today is number one, you gotta know where your ideal prospects are playing. That means you have to, again, define them. That means you have to also understand what they care about down to the social interests and things they follow and are passionate about. Find people who are aligned with your own social interests because that’ll be more attractive long-term. Decide what you actually have time to invest in and what can you delegate, okay? Because the reality is is the authenticity is important here and it’s really attractive that you stay authentic, but we all know that you’re gonna run out of time.

So focus on something small. Don’t focus on the whole thing. So after you get that infrastructure done, relevant to where your prospects are, that’s when you start just one of these things, not all 15 that we talked about, okay? Oh, boy. Let’s jump to this, Derek. So this came into LinkedIn and it’s a complete change of topic from Steve in Minneapolis. And he said, Derek, what’s the deal with the best interest regulation? It seemed to be a big deal and now all of a sudden it’s off the media headlines. Would you guys rethink that topic for us as investors having thanks, having fun with the podcast?

So what do you think about this? Where is BIR? Yeah, it was a major flash in the pan for a while there. It’s hanging out with DOL, by the way, I think. Right, yeah, right. Yeah, and then all of a sudden it kind of just, it has not really been top of mind for a lot of people, but it needs to be, and we’re gonna jump into this on the next episode. I think this is a great conversation, but if consumers, so just so you guys know, Steve from Minneapolis is not an advisor. So that’s pretty cool. Like we actually have someone who’s not an advisor listening to this stuff.

But if this is on a consumer’s radar, then darn it all, it better be on the advisor’s radar. And we’re gonna dig into all of that and what that probably means for our industry in our next episode. I don’t know, what do you think, Adam? I used to think that DOL plus BIR is really CYA. And the interesting thing is that for most of us in the space, I’ve always believed that I’ve acted in my client’s best interest because I wanna have a job tomorrow, right? And no one’s gonna stay with me if I’m not acting in their best interest. That comes across over the long haul, doesn’t it?

Well, they can tell. So most of the people I know in their space, really they do right by their clients and make sacrifices all the time. And of course the big question has been compensation. I think really we got, there’s so many other topics in the news that are taking over, but I think there’s an underlying theme here that’s gonna pop out. And I’m glad we’re gonna spend some time talking about it because regulation and the unknown things lurking around the corner, good or bad, are gonna be things that we need to pay attention to. It’s probably gonna indicate that there’s new pressures on those affiliated with FINRA.

The question is whether RIAs are going to be regulated in a whole new way after having, we’ll call it, getting a little bit of the Wild West there. I think there’s some interesting things we need to rethink about this. But more importantly, since a non advisor is asking this question, you gotta wonder, the consumer is asking the profession, are these advisors acting in my best interest and how would I actually know? How do I know? Until 10 years from now, how am I gonna know? There’s a trust factor here and this is important because we’re still dealing with this as an industry because there’s question about whether people are on my team, same side.

So we have to do a better job in general as the industry to support this. So I look forward to talking about that one with you. Likewise. That’s a great, great, big conversation. Cool. Derek, it was a pleasure. And thank you, Steve. We’ll send you a T-shirt. Cool, cool. Well, all of you listening, send in questions. Thanks for listening. If you want mustache advice, hook me up with a DM. I can do that. I could do that for you. You should see it right now. I’m seeing it on video. It is impressive, my friend. It is impressive. And we’re almost in November. So you’ll be right in time.

You’re gonna grow one, aren’t you, Al? I don’t think so. You are very, very scary. Scary enough for a podcast. For a better cause, come on. Exactly. I’ll send money. Thank you, Derek. Have a great one. Best your family. And for all of us listening, thanks for being with us. We’ll see you at the next one. Likewise. 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.

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