EverWebinar and Facebook Ads: I Wake Up in the Morning and Have 4 Appointments Already Scheduled

Editor’s note: In this edition of What’s Working Now, an AdvisorRADIO feature in which Horsesmouth members tell us about recent success they have had running and growing their businesses, we hear from advisor Jaimin Garabedian, who seized the shift to digital and learned to optimize WebinarJam and Facebook ads.

The following article includes edited excerpts of this conversation, or you can watch the full interview below.

I started with Merrill Lynch in 2011. I was with an IMO before that for a couple of years but I got licensed and all that in 2011. Then about three years ago I left Merrill Lynch. My dad was 20 years with Prudential, started his own thing. He was in Florida and Montana. And then finally I decided to call him on a day that it was minus 24 degrees in Montana and said, “Hey, do you want to move to Texas where it’s a little bit warmer and we can start this firm?” And so he did. We started this and it’s been going well since. This was February of last year.

Moving to the digital space

After everything happened in February of this year, it forced us to change our marketing plan. My father went from 35 years of nothing but real life seminars. We had been doing them together about two-and-a-half years, and then the pandemic hit and we had to change focus. We had to do something.

So I started digging into the digital marketing space, learning everything I could about webinars, the best way to put on a webinar. I decided our seminar works, the topic works. Let’s just take the entire thing and move it into the digital space and see what happens. And that’s what we did.

We’ve been running it now for six weeks, I believe. Five or six weeks today. And it’s done really well so far. Getting a lot of traction. Getting a lot of responses. Getting a lot of people watching it. A lot of appointments. And we’re doing it with probably, I would say, 10 times the appointments set for the same cost of one seminar.

Social Security and taxes go hand in hand

We present on Social Security for the most part. I would say that 70% of it is on Social Security and the other 30% is on taxes and retirement. And the two tie together and we focus on how all the different sources of income in retirement affect what you pay in taxes on Social Security. All the different sources of income all affect each other when it comes to taxes.

I think everybody out there has seen an advisor that’s doing, “Maximize Your Social Security” webinars and seminars. But we’ve found that the problem with that is the only true way of being able to maximize Social Security would be to know exactly when somebody’s going to die and to know their cost of living adjustments every year.

Both are impossible to know. So we decided to go with more of an optimization route that’s going to show you, with your specific sources of income and your specific investments, when’s the best time for you to take Social Security to minimize the taxes that you’re going to pay in retirement. It may be, “Wait Until 70,” or it may be, “Take It at 62.” I don’t know. Everybody’s different. And that’s what we’ve shown going through all these plans is that there are no two that are the same.

27 different variations of Facebook ads

When I started doing the advertisements on Facebook for the webinar, I actually started with 27 different variations. Some of them highlighted Social Security. Some of them highlighted Social Security and taxes. Some of them highlighted retirement planning dealing with Social Security. Again, there are 27 different variations and they’ve since been narrowed down but there is no one answer to what the title of our webinar is, just because each one of the advertisements was actually a little bit different.

I tried video, it was one of the 27. Didn’t get much response. And the way that I know picture versus video, what was working the best, was how many people actually visited the registration page. Not necessarily how many people registered, but was this picture or this video stopping people and getting their attention enough to get them to go to the registration page? And the video just wasn’t catching much attention.

It was a video that I had made up by a marketing company that was talking about Social Security and taxes in retirement. What you need to look out for, the seven main points that we talk about throughout the webinar. It was a voice-over with a generic video of retirees playing on a beach and looking at their Social Security statements and stuff like that. So it was a very generic video but the voice-over was based off of our actual presentation.

Cut out the third party when you learn yourself

I worked with a number of marketing groups to bring people to the Social Security webinar. I worked with about five different ones and they all did their own Facebook advertising to try to get people to seminars. I found that it typically cost us about $3,500, give or take. Some of them were up to $6,000 to get roughly 20–25 people to a seminar. I saw what they were doing, just learned from what they were doing and then once we started the webinars, I said, “Look, I’m going to cut out the third party,” and I started doing all the marketing and created all the advertisements and did all that.

Essentially what I did was take four pictures, four different versions of the copy…the actual advertisement, four different headlines and then did a combination of each one of them. I just did every combination, every variation of those that I could. We started at 27 and we’re down to about nine now.

Out of the nine of them, I’ve got one of the four pictures still left. I realized that the picture’s are what actually grabs people’s attention and stops them from scrolling. The headline, I think, in the first little blurb, is actually what get people’s attention to click the “learn more” button or whatever it is that expands the Facebook ad. Then once they actually read what the webinar is about, they go to the registration page. And I found that all four pictures are still up, so all four pictures are working for somebody.

Different types of ads for different people

I understand that if I get it down to just two advertisements or one advertisement, it’s not going to work for everybody. So the four different pictures are drawing attention from different types of people. The different ads, I think, are setting in with different types of people and between the nine of them there’s probably three that are on the top tier, and then the other six are about even. But I did want to narrow it down to just three.

The pictures are dramatically different. One of them is just an older couple sitting on a beach or sitting on some long chairs looking over a lake with their back to you. Just a very generic picture. One of them is a big question mark that says, “You should know this.” And then there is another that’s got a finger pointing at you, saying, “It’s your retirement.”

And then the one that I threw in there and surprisingly, it’s the number one picture, is a little monkey that’s scratching its head and has a blurb next to it that says, “Please tax 85% of my Social Security.” And then right under it, it says, “Said no one ever.” That humor, I guess, is what’s drawing people’s attention because it’s been the number one ad.

Learning takes time

I got involved with a Facebook group that has, I don’t know, 60 advisors or something like that, and it’s just a melting pot of ideas. Everybody shares what’s working for them, what’s not working for them. I took bits and pieces of what was working for them plus the idea that I wanted to move forward with and just melted it all together. I definitely got a lot of the push in the jump-off point from that group.

Learning took a lot longer than maybe it should have. I don’t know. But I realized, once I started digging into it, how much there was to actually learn and do. Anybody can throw up a webinar in a couple of days and go through and see what happens. My biggest concern was that I didn’t want any of the registrations or any of the attendees to fall through the cracks, so to speak. If they registered and didn’t attend, or if they attended and didn’t set an appointment. I didn’t want to just lose those as lost registrations or lost people.

Webinar system is entirely automated

So I set up a whole automation system behind the webinar so that from the second that somebody looks at one of our registration pages, they’ve now been, for lack of a better term, tagged. We will use that for remarketing for other webinars and other events and stuff down the road. But it’s an automated system now that I quite literally do nothing. All I do is look at my phone every morning or look at my calendar every morning and see, “Hey, I’ve got six more appointments today.” I just get the email saying that, “Hey, you’ve got another appointment. Hey, you’ve got another appointment.” I mean, that’s all I do now from the marketing aspect, is just run appointments.

I’m using a WebinarJam platform called EverWebinar. It’s a recorded webinar that in their terms “looks live.” So when people hit my registration page, they get four options. They can register for yesterday’s recorded webinar. They can register for the one that starts on the top of the hour, no matter what hour they look at it, or they can register for a Monday and Thursday one that both “look live.” Every Monday at 11 a.m. and every Thursday at 6 p.m.

WebinarJam and EverWebinar are actually two different pieces of software and they each have their own price. I think if I remember correctly, one of them is about $400 a year and the other one’s $300, $350 a year. WebinarJam is their live webinar service. So rather than using Zoom or GoToMeeting or anything like that to do a live webinar, WebinarJam is what they use. EverWebinar is their recorded version, which is what I’m using. You have to have WebinarJam to get EverWebinar, but it’s the recorded version that makes everything look live because you record it in the live version of WebinarJam, and then you just put the recording over in EverWebinar. It makes it easy when I wake up in the morning and see four new appointments.

Getting appointments all the time

The EverWebinar guys have their own training for advisors within that, and one of the things that they say is, you will most likely get most of your registrations for what they call “Just-in-time ones.” The ones that start at the top of the hour or for the prerecorded ones that say that they were recorded yesterday.

My results have been the exact opposite. I’ve gotten most of my registrations and attendees on the Monday morning ones. I don’t know why. The only thing I can think of is that people are looking at their Facebook pages all weekend long, and so they just schedule the one for Monday because they don’t want to stop their weekend to look at it, and that’s when they happen to see the ad.

So when I say that we’ve been doing this for six weeks, I recorded the webinar about seven weeks ago. Set up everything, all the advertisements, marketing, all that, and then clicked “go” six weeks ago. Since then, I haven’t done a webinar. I haven’t touched anything, because it was all recorded and it all looks live when people register.

How does it work?

I think we’ve spent about $3,600 as of today on Facebook advertisements. Facebook says that we have about 1,500 registrations. Their numbers are typically a little bit off, though. When I look on EverWebinar, the data shows the registrations and we have about 1,200. So $3,600 got about 1,200 registrations, about 700 to 750 of those people have actually attended the webinars. Out of those, we’re getting roughly a 10% return on appointments. So I think as of right now, we have 67 or 68 appointments that have been set from the webinars. Obviously I haven’t run all of them yet, because I think we’ve got 23 or 24 more appointments between the rest of this week and next week.

This is how it works. So, if you click on the registration at 11 o’clock at night, you wouldn’t have the choice for the top of the hour webinar. That only runs between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Whatever time you set up. You wouldn’t have that choice for that “Just-in-time one.” So you’d either watch the old recording or you’d sign up for one of the two on Monday or Thursday.

Let’s say you set up at 11 a.m. and so you watched the one at the top of the hour. All the recordings are the same.

Our special offer

Essentially I just get on there, I speak five minutes as an introduction to who I am, why anybody should even listen to anything I have to say, a little bit about the firm, and then I dig into the Social Security. I let people know at the beginning two things as part of the housekeeping. One is if they stay to the end, one of the offers that we’re going to have for them is a plan that we typically charge $1,500–$2,500 for. But we’re going to give it to them as a special gift and I’ll explain that special at the end of the webinar, as long as they stay.

The second piece of housekeeping is I tell them, “Go ahead, be interactive, chat, go through that.” Everybody that chats in there, it is confidential. So their questions or what they type is not going to be seen by anybody else. I tell everybody, “Look, you may ask questions at the beginning, I’m not going to answer them right away. Let me go through the whole presentation. I may answer a lot of your questions during the presentation. And then if we have time, I will come back and answer questions. For any questions that I don’t answer, I do get an email with those questions and I will email you back and let you know what the answer is to your question.”

And then at the end, after I’m done with that, it pushes right up against 57 minutes. And so I say, “Hey, look, we’re out of time. For everybody that asked questions, I see them, I’m going to get back to you.” And I get emails of all those questions and that’s what I do. And as I get the emails in, I turn around and send back out answers.

I go through the whole presentation, and at the end, do the offer. And the offer for us is two complimentary consultations, 55-minute appointments, but before we get into that a 15-minute phone call. The 15-minute phone call is just an overview. What is it you think we can help with? What is it that you’re looking for? What is it that we do?

2 consultations: analysis and income plan

The two consultations are for specific reasons each. The first one is an analysis of where they currently are. Show us what your current plan looks like, if you have one. We’ll show you the good, the bad and the ugly of that current plan. And then once we’re done with that meeting, I’ll have an idea of what they like, what they don’t like, what their comfort levels are.

And then the second meeting is to go over the actual detailed retirement plan with them. And that’s going to be where we make recommendations as far as when to take Social Security, when to do distributions, and from which accounts. Do Roth conversions make sense? What their investments look like versus their plan. Are their investments too aggressive for their plan, or they’re not aggressive enough, whatever it may be. That’s what the two meetings are—an analysis meeting and then an actual retirement plan meeting.

Creating lookalike audiences

One of the guys that’s in our Facebook group and I had a long conversation and he believes that the main reason that my workshops have been doing as well as they have is because of the target audience. Because inside Facebook, you can make it whatever you want. What I’ve done is, just like the 27 advertisements, I did, I don’t know, 18 or 19 audiences. First is anybody who’s ever attended a Social Security seminar of ours before. Those exact people, I invite them to come if they want. I also do a lookalike audience. So anybody who Facebook deems to look like those people, I invite them and target them. I also have a lookalike audience for all my clients. I want more that look like that.

Any people that I’ve met with and didn’t fit as a client for one reason or another, that we didn’t bring on as a client, I actually have what Facebook calls, a “not lookalike audience.” So it specifically stays away from people that look like that.

And so there’s a bunch of different factors that go into it. I had over 6,500 names just from my career of putting together prospect or client seminars and whatnot. And I just siphoned them out into different topics like that. Do we want those specific people invited? Do we want people that look like them to be invited or do we want people that look like them to not get invited? Because it’s actually cheaper on Facebook advertising if you siphon out people that you don’t want targeted. So that’s how I went through that whole process. I didn’t really put in an income level or an age bracket or anything like that. It was just based off of lookalike audiences.

Currently I’m spending about $100 per day on Facebook ads, seven days a week.

Challenge is getting people to share information

The challenge is meeting somebody for the first time virtually. There are a lot of people that are hesitant. There are a lot of people that the big hurdle is getting them to share their information that we need to put together the analysis. Which is completely understandable and makes sense. And so what I’ve realized is, I don’t know if it was intended or if it just fell in place, but there’s a lot of hurdles that people are meeting between when they first see the advertisement and after that first meeting. There’s a lot of hurdles put in place and a lot of reasons for people to back away. I found out that I’m fine with that, as we’re getting as much inflows as we have. I’m happy with all the hurdles now, because then I realized that the people that actually do send their information to me are very interested.

What I found is that we do have a handful of them that after the first meeting, they just say, “Hey, I don’t want to work with somebody virtually. I just had some questions, want to get questions answered.” That’s fine. I have other people that say that they want to work together and they want to do a plan and all this and then never send me their information. That happens.

Out of the, I would say 40 or so appointments that we’ve run so far, we’re working on 15 plans right now for. That means they are all at different stages of the process but they have sent me their information after that first 15-minute phone call and we’re starting with the analysis. We’ve got all the information we need. They’ve done the hard part. That’s the last hurdle in my eyes.

When we get off the call, I need more information for them to do an analysis. So I send them an information gathering form and it’s a place where they can upload their statements and all that stuff. If they’re willing to part with all that information and send that to me, then they’re pretty interested. And so throwing out the high end, throwing out the high and the low, as far as assets are concerned, we’re averaging right about a million dollars per person. Throwing out the low one that had $25,000 and the high one who was actually $17 million, the average is about a million bucks apiece.

We’ve got one, two, three of them closed, meaning paperwork’s in the process. Money is not over, but paperwork’s in the process. Those actually total up to be about six of the 12 million. And then I’ve got three close meetings between tomorrow and Friday, and then I’ve got two more next week.

If you do it, go full bore

My dad is impressed. I actually had a phone conversation with him yesterday. He finally broke down and was like, “OK, show me what I need to do. Teach me what I need to do.” Because at this point, I can do everything. It’s all digital. I just go through and when somebody comes in, I make the call and all that. But he wants to know now because he spent most of his career in estate planning and legacy planning and now he wants to create an estate planning seminar and do the same thing with the webinars. I think that’s our next step.

The best advice I could give is that if you’re going to do it, go full bore. You’ve got to, because you do have to dig into a lot of nuances and if you don’t want to learn it or you don’t have the time to learn it, there are firms out there that will do it for you. My idea was just to cut out the middleman, but I understand that the middleman has his place. So there’s plenty of advisors out there that want to do this but don’t want to learn it. Don’t want to take the time to build it. They’d rather do a plug and play. And if you do, you’re going to spend an extra $3,000, $4,000 a month doing it. But if you’re OK with that, by all means do.

Another by mistake great thing that happened is I didn’t click the button to keep the location in Texas or in Houston. So it started off nationally, and I realized after about a week that it was national because I started getting appointments from Tennessee and Alaska. At that point I was like, “Well, let’s see how this works. Let’s see how it runs. I mean, if I have to go get licensed and registered in all these other states, then so be it, but let’s see how this runs,” and I guess one way of putting it is I’ve been a little afraid to make any changes because it’s going so well and I don’t want to break something.

Hoping to get to 4 topics

We are in the process of hiring somebody to take on a lot of this for this campaign, to make sure that people don’t fall through the cracks, to answer these 15-minute phone calls and have these 15-minute conversations with people. So that I can just focus on the two meetings and building the plan and analysis. This has provided much more revenue right now, so that we can hire on some more people to help with it. The long-term goal, if you will, at some point is to have four of these webinars running 24/7.

The four of them would be Social Security and one that’s just strictly on taxes and retirement because of how in depth taxes can actually be. My dad wants the estate planning one, and then the fourth one would be built around retirement income and how to create lasting income. Those are the four topics we’re going to end up doing at some point. We’ll do all four webinars and have all four run 24 hours a day.

And if it’s not working for Dad, then we’ll probably do some real-life seminars again too, so he can go out and do those. But I think for people or for firms that have multiple offices around the country, if you’ve got a Social Security advisor that knows everything about Social Security and he’s in Houston and you’ve got an office in Chicago, you put on a live seminar in Chicago, get a bunch of people in a room and then he could do everything over the video screen. Absolutely. I could definitely see that happening.

It works

I would just say to anybody that wants to do this, it works. There’s a lot to it, though. There’s absolutely a lot to learn if you want to do it all yourself.