From Seminar to Webinar: Great Ideas for a Whole New Marketing Stream

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 Matthew Donaghue, who has pulled in $10 million through financial education in his first year of business and is quickly pivoting to webinars.

The following article includes edited excerpts of this conversation, or you can watch and listen to the interview on video below.

Beginnings

I started as an advisor back in March of 2000 with IDS Insurance Services, which is now known as Ameriprise. My career took me onto the corporate side for a long time, and just over a year ago I had the opportunity to go back out into the field as an advisor. I jumped at the chance. I’d done a lot of practice management work over the years, so I started off right away with a pretty strong marketing and prospecting mindset.

I’ve always been a big believer in consultative or educational approaches, so I started off with a lot of prospecting seminars. I used Horsesmouth content exclusively. Over the course of six months, last summer through the end of January this year, we moved about $10 million in assets and wrote about $20 thousand of life insurance.

Good internal procedures are key

I went the dinner seminar route. I’ve seen it work for advisors I’ve worked with over the years and the key is partnering with a good seminar marketing firm, like a White Glove or an RME, which is now Leading Response. I do virtually all my group marketing with Leading Response.

You’ve also got to have strong internal procedures and be good on the phones, believe it or not, if you want to do seminars. You do have to call people prior to the seminar and then of course after the seminar. We found that we drove almost a 90% attendance rate by making just a couple of confirmation phone calls prior to each seminar. Afterwards, everybody gets called three times and if we just get voicemail three times in a row with you, then you go into a regular marketing campaign.

What’s really interesting is we’ve started in the last month reaching out proactively to a couple of the people who attended last year’s events. If we make a hundred dials to people who attended events with us last year, we’re getting, at a minimum, 10 who say they want to meet with us.

So not only do we agree with the idea of education and a consultative approach, dinner seminars and all that, but strong follow-up and not forgetting about them, because a lot of advisors will do that. They’ll just kind of end up on the back burner and then they get forgotten about.

A series of seminars

We put on a series of seminars. The first round is Women and Social Security, and we target women in our mailing list. We started sending out 7,000 mailers mid-July last year, and found we were getting a 2.7% response rate to the mailers. We added Facebook ads and social media, which brought another 10% response rate. We had a really strong response. It was so strong, in fact, that we thought we were going to do one or two seminars per topic, but we actually did four Social Security workshops off of one mailer. We did two one week and two the following.

The topic was a natural evolution for me. Most of my career on the corporate side was built around the idea of retirement income planning, which takes into account things like Social Security, guaranteed income streams that you can get from pensions or annuities and so on, investment planning, but then also risk management from a health insurance/life insurance/long-term care perspective. Holding yourself out there as someone who’s going to educate them as about the fundamentals of retirement really gets people.

So we ran those first four Social Security workshops. Then about a month later, we ran two Medicare workshops. We took the attendees of the first four and made sure they all knew they were invited back for Medicare. We had about a 50% acceptance rate, so you have 100 people show up for Social Security, you’ll get 50 to show up for Medicare.

Then about a month after that, we ran the IRA seminar and we saw the exact same ratio. It dropped down to 50% again, but of the 25 people who showed up at the IRA seminar, five to seven are already clients and five to seven are serious about becoming clients. as for the rest, even if they’re not serious you’ve still got a hook in them. You might not get their business today, but there’s a long tail on these events. Some of the people who come to all three proactively reach out to us later on to say, “Hey, I have a question,” or, “I actually want to do something.”

We find a lot of women will come to the first workshop because they see “women” in the title. At the most, we’ve seen maybe half the audience is guys. But then when you get into Medicare and IRA, the women bring their spouses or the important men in their lives that they want to have there as well. I would say between two-thirds and three-quarters of the women who attend are the decision makers in the family, or they’re making the most money. Either way, they’ve got very strong influence in terms of financial decisions.

Workshops are auditions

When it comes to these workshops you are auditioning. When you think about the audition process, whether you’re interviewing for a job or interviewing a client or trying to get interviewed by a client, what you’re looking at is getting them to set an appointment and have that hour with you. But most of them won’t set that first appointment. So maybe you get some of them to come back for a second view of you, which is on a different topic, and then you bring them back for the third one as well.

If I think back to that July series, I think we had four people who became clients after the IRA seminar. They heard it was a series, they wanted to come to all three. They saw that I did the presentation for all three events. I personally called all of them to thank them for showing up after all three events. I tried to set an appointment with them each time, of course, but for those four or five people, three “auditions” is what it took to get them to say, “Yeah, I want Matt to be my advisor.”

Direct mail details

When we send the direct mailers, we narrow the list by looking at zip codes. No matter who you’re working with, they’re going to give you some data about how to figure out where these people are coming from. What we looked at was their survey information. If a zip code is heavily weighted in the mass affluent market—my personal definition of mass market affluent is half a million or more in assets—then we’re going to send a mailer to the entire zip code. We don’t care if there are people with fewer assets on the list. The whole zip code gets it.

But if you flip that around and the majority of the zip code is on the lower end of assets, the $0–$250,000 range, then we’ll be much more selective and say, “We’re just going to take half a million or higher out of these zip codes.”

We learned that the hard way. We were very aggressive with the first mailer and we did get some people in the room who literally had no assets. You want to help them, but there’s nothing you can do and there’s nothing profitable there for you either.

We used the hard postcard invite. You’ll definitely see it when it comes into your mail. We tried to keep the mailing costs under $1 a mailer, which we were able to do pretty easily. If we were doing something more specialized, let’s say generational planning, we would probably go down the road of wedding-style invitations, and spend more money. But I can promise you, there wouldn’t be a household with less than $1 million of investible assets getting that invitation.

A local upscale American restaurant

In terms of the restaurant we use, we’re lucky. We have a great local chain here called Stone Werks that I would call upscale American. Each Stone Werks restaurant has a private conference room or banquet room that can seat up to a hundred people. When I say it’s private, it literally is shut off from the rest of the restaurant, so you’re never going to hear somebody singing “Happy Birthday” right outside.

They’re going to get your typical dinner that you’d expect out of one of these events, maybe a filet or some kind of chicken or fish or whatever. It’s a nice enough setting and they’re all newer facilities, so people feel good the second they walk in. They know that we didn’t go low brow on the whole thing. I’ve never been afraid of spending money to make money. I realize this will vary depending on where you are in the country, but we always try to keep our budget between $25 and $30 a place. A perfect word for it is enticement. It’s a freebie to get in the door. You’re going to have dinner.

I just take it for granted that you’re going to have anywhere from 5%–10% of the turnout be people who are just there for the free dinner and that’s OK. We put ourselves out there and some people are going to try to game the system. When you think about society in general, that’s just what happens.

They’re pretty easy to spot in the crowd, especially if you’re a confident public speaker where you know your materials and you’re watching the crowd. It’s pretty easy to tell who those two or three couples might be and then taking two minutes to talk to them after the event. You don’t have to be rude or anything like that, but you can just tell how awkward they are. And you never see them again. It’s the easy let down. You’ve got to accept the fact that some people are going to be like that. Most people aren’t.

Never present while they are eating

I get hangry when I get hungry. I’m one of those people that when I got to eat, I got to eat. So what I do is try to always make sure they get the salad or soup first. We get the staff to clear those plates and make sure they’ve got the drink orders in—drinks are just iced tea and stuff like that. Then we serve the meal afterwards.

Personally, I would never serve the meal and then present while they’re eating. You’re not going to have their attention. They’re going to be more focused on the food or passing the whatever and you’re not going to really be able to connect with them. We don’t want them to be super hungry during the event, so we give them the appetizer, give them the presentation, and then let them eat.

We’ve found it’s really easy to go around and talk to them while they’re eating, because you’ve got them there. They want the meal. They’re not going to rush out the door at that moment. We were debating back in January before COVID-19 hit whether we should serve dessert, because we noticed that if we serve a dessert, there’s that group of people that will always order a cup of coffee and stick around for a while. Sometimes those four to five couples that like to do that are your best prospects. You get a chance to sit down with them, maybe you grab a cup of coffee and the next thing you know, you’re still there at 9:30 at night because you’re just having a great conversation.

Adjust on the fly

One of my more memorable experiences happened late last summer. As a guy who grew up in Minnesota, the two months of the year you don’t want to be outside are January and February. Living in South Texas, the two months of the year you really don’t want to be outside are August and September. We were doing an event in late July, early August, and I get to the venue and there’s no air conditioning in the room. It’s not that it wasn’t working, that room just wasn’t air conditioned. It had to have been 90 degrees.

I went to the restaurant manager and said, “Is there someplace else in the restaurant we can do it? I don’t want to take up the dining room, but is there somewhere else?” They said, “Well, we’ve got our bar.”

They took us over to the bar, where it was 70 degrees. I said, “Okay, we’re moving into the bar.” We put the projector on the bar, propping up the screen in front of the liquor bottles. I stood behind the bar and actually presented “Women and Social Security” from behind the bar. Although that wasn’t the most professional environment we’ve ever had, we did find that was one of the most receptive crowds we ever had because (A) they really appreciated we got them out of the heat and (B) I think they appreciated the fact that we were able to adjust on the fly.

The client is the star

I’m pretty good at crowd control, so from a question-and-answer standpoint, I’m OK if I get a couple of questions during the presentation, but if it gets to the point where it’s starting to slow the presentation down, I ask them to hold questions until the end. Then I’ll make a point of coming over and talking to them. They always seem pleasantly surprised when I actually walk over and talk to them.

Some of the biggest feedback we’ve heard from clients regarding how other advisors conduct seminars is that the advisor runs the seminar and then leaves. They don’t stick around and talk to people. They paid the mailing service or Internet service to put people in the room, and did all the work to get ready to present to them, and then just walk out the door without talking to them while they were there. We get that feedback a lot, and we think it’s the biggest mistake you can make. From my perspective, the client is the star, and you’re catering to them from the moment they walk in the door.

The goal is to get requests for information

We use what we call a “request for information” (RFI). I think mindset really helps when you’re the person leading this, or trying to generate the business. The goal at the seminar is to get everybody to fill out an RFI. That’s what we really want to have happen at that seminar. If we get 74%, we’re happy, and if we get more than that we’re thrilled.

On the back of the RFI we have a calendar and we tell them to circle two dates that would work for them, and then we call to confirm the date. If we get 50 RFIs, we’re probably going to set 30 appointments. Of the 30 appointments, we’re probably going to keep 20. Then of those 20, you’ve probably got four or five clients in there.

At the end of the seminar, I’ll walk up to someone in the front row and ask them to hand me the folder that they got when they came in. I pull the RFI out of the folder and hold it up in front of the whole meeting room. I ask everybody to reach into the folder and hold up the form. I stand there with my hand up in the air until everybody’s got theirs out. Then I say, “If you look on the front page, here’s the different sections. Make sure you fill that out. Give that to me or any of the other people who are here with me tonight and we will follow up with you to confirm the details.”

Consultations and clients

Our lead for the free consultation is the Social Security Analysis&v=weko4advojiwffjapyq22vpw produced by the Horsesmouth calculators. We tell them right up front, “It’ll take maybe 45 minutes to an hour of your time. We will do two things during that time. One, you will definitely get your Social Security analysis out of this. We’ll send you home with a copy of it.

Two, we’re going to show you how Social Security fits into retirement income planning.” We take them through what we’ve identified as four buckets, if you will, which is income, investments, insurance and then legacy. We show them how Social Security fits into the income bucket, creates a stable income in retirement, your investments make up the rest, you do the right insurance, you’re going to leave a great legacy.

We’ve been in business less than a year. We ran our first seminar on July 15 of 2019, and through today we’ve brought in a total of $10 million in assets. On top of that, late yesterday I picked up a $13,000 annual premium check from a client who attended one of last July’s seminars. So it works. It’s just a matter of following up and sticking with it.

Shifting to webinars

Starting in April we shifted to webinars. I’m fortunate that in my corporate years, for a while I was a national training manager for a large life insurance company. I would run three webinars a day for about two years for advisors and agents in different time zones across the country. So the webinar format doesn’t scare me or off-put me at all. I’m very comfortable with it, but I also know I’m in the vast minority. A lot of people have never run a webinar before.

There are three things you need to have in your practice if you’re going to do any kind of webinars, whether they are for prospecting or for your existing clients and prospects. First, you’ve got to have, and more importantly use, your contact management system, because there’s no way you’re going to keep it organized if you don’t.

The second thing is you need to have a website. If you do not have your own website, you should be taking advantage of COVID to get your website set up. Do it compliantly, of course. Follow your firm’s rules and all that, but get a website set up that will support an Event tab where anybody in the public can go on your website and maybe register for one of these webinars that you’re going to host.

The third thing you need is some kind of automated marketing system in your practice. At Cetera Investors, we use FMG Suite. There are a lot of different services out there that do a great job. That’s just the one we have.

If you’re not using (A) your CRM, (B) a website and (C) some kind of automated marketing, then you’re going to have underwhelming responses to webinars.

You’ve got to get comfortable with whatever tool you’re going to use, whether it’s Zoom or GoToMeeting or something else. Doesn’t matter. We’re using Zoom; it’s very easy to use. It’s very easy for the client. GoToMeeting works great, too. We happen to be using Zoom.

How often should you do webinars?

But the thing you really need to decide, though, is how often you want to do webinars. If you’re someone who wants to get 50–100 people in a room, or on a call, and that feels like success to you, then you don’t want to run them very often. Maybe one a month. Maybe two a quarter. Something like that.

If you’re like me and you’re thinking, “Wait a second. I’ve got the automated invitation system. I can promote webinars. Maybe I do one a week. Maybe I do one every other week.” I’m not going to get 50 people to show up, but I’m going to get 10–20 to show up. It’s a nice regular flow at that point.

We’ve had our snafus just like everybody else will with this. We started just with existing clients and existing prospects we knew about, who had already seen us at a seminar and have an idea who we are. That way if we do have a mix-up, it is not so awful: like we had one where we didn’t pay attention to a.m. or p.m. and the webinar was supposed to start at 4 a.m.! Little mistakes like that are going to happen. Those people you already know are going to be more forgiving than maybe the people who have never seen or heard of you at any point in their life.

I prefer the one-a-week approach, and so I used April through the end of May to practice on my existing clients and prospects. I started off with “Women and Social Security,” then I did Medicare, then I did IRA and then “How Tax Planning Changes in the Four Stages of Retirement.”&v=weko4advojiwffjapyq22vpw

Then starting today I am doing the whole series over again, and we’re going to run that through the middle of June. Starting in July, we’ve developed a quarterly schedule that we’re going to run and the goal is to just do 12 webinars a quarter. We’re OK with 10 or 15 people a webinar. Do the math on that. If you get 10 people on each webinar, you’re presenting to 120 people a quarter.

From our perspective, it’s worth the half-hour that your webinar’s going to take, once you learn how to actually administer and run it. The first two or three months are going to be rough because it’s a new process, new system and all that. Lots of moving parts. But once you got it, you got it. And at that point it’s just hey, every Monday at 6:30 p.m., I’m running a webinar.

Marketing for webinars

Leading Response pivoted a day faster than we did. They rolled out really quickly a webinar prospecting model based mostly on social media advertising. They’re saying they’ll put up to 40 people in a room and it’s up to you to run the webinar. Attendees register on the Leading Response website just like they would if they got a mailer to go to a seminar. It’s up to us to monitor the website and then ensure that we get their data put into our CRM, and that we get them registered on Zoom and make sure they get the automated webinar reminders and all that.

Leading Response could fully register people on their webinar service, but our compliance department won’t allow them to capture that much information. So the process is that people see a Facebook ad with all of our branding, and when they click on the ad it takes them to a landing page where it’s got me and my partner Kenneth Hamilton. It’s got my bio, and his is more of a “why work with a financial advisor” piece.

They see us, register there, and it just asks for basic information at that point. Then it’s up to us to register them from there, which is what we’d have to do anyways if it was a seminar. We just look at it as a different venue.

We’ll see how it works because it is a different venue, but initially we’re planning on just as much phone pre-work and post-work as what we did with regular seminars. We’re going to call you a couple times the week before the webinar, we’re going to call you the day of the webinar just to remind you that it’s going on, and then we’ll aggressively follow up on the back end.

I did a little research on email lists and for what $75 an attendee costs me versus spending maybe $5 or $10,000 on a big enough list to make it worthwhile, I’d rather have the manageable, predictable flow than do it scattershot.

The whole prospecting system, including Facebook ads, is in our compliance department now and we expect to have approval back today or tomorrow, and then we’re live. We’re going to hold two webinars in June, one on the 15^th and one on the 29^th. After Memorial Day, we started calling people as soon as they register to make sure that they know we’re really going to do it.

How do you entice them?

The one difference, I would say, when you’re not doing a seminar is how do you entice them? What we’re doing is offering the choice of two different gift cards. They can choose a $50 Stone Werks gift card, because they were a great restaurant partner, or $50 to a local business that’s kind of like a Harry and David called New Braunfels Smokehouse.

The things is, to get the gift card, you’ve got to be on the webinar when it starts and you’ve got to stay on for the entire webinar until we end it. You leave early, you don’t get the gift card. Then we’ve got to find out where to send the gift card, so we’re going to call you and you’ve got to take the phone call.

If you’re using Zoom, you want to make sure you use their webinar feature and not their meeting feature. The webinar feature gives you a detailed report of when people logged in or logged out. You could set yourself up for a problem there if you’re using the wrong one.

Developing a new marketing stream

Our goal is to get back to seminars at some point, but we just don’t know when. We look at it as COVID-19 giving us the opportunity to develop a whole new marketing stream. Is it challenging? Is there a lot to sort out on the front end? Sure there is. But getting seminars going in the first couple weeks of my career as an advisor—that was challenging, too. Over six to eight months, we felt like we’ve got a really good handle on that. We’re always getting better, but we feel like we’ve got that pretty well figured out.

If we can pretty well figure out webinars by the end of the year, or hopefully sooner, then maybe 2021 is a really explosive year for us because we’re doing both. Hopefully the only issues we have then are staffing, right? Having enough people on the team to really work it.

You need a copilot

You need a copilot as you do webinars. My partner Kenneth is essentially the administrator. You’ve got to have someone who is focused on the late person coming into the call. This will make you go, “What?” but you need to have someone who is checking your voicemail in the first 10 minutes because you’re going to have someone call you who’s having problems on the webinar. It just happens.

If you’ve got a good partner or assistant who can do those things, that’s ideal, because once you get going with your presentation, you need to focus on your presentation. But that person can be admitting new people, just calling the voicemail to see if anyone is having problems getting in, it can really go a long way towards making sure people have a good experience.

That second person could be on the event and then back out while they’re taking care of those things, or they could just be entirely behind the scenes. I look at it as having the partner or business manager or whoever in the back of the room during a seminar. If someone has an issue with something, they’re the ones getting up and dealing with it, not me.

I don’t bring anyone on live to ask questions, and the main reason is that you have no idea what’s going on in their background when you bring them on. I’ve got two little kids. At any moment one could just come wandering in here, and who knows?

We ran one webinar for the branch where a bunch of different advisors invited people, and we learned the hard lesson about Zoom webinar versus Zoom meeting. This person was sharing their camera with everybody who was there and they fell asleep on their couch during the event. You’re going to do whatever you’re going to do when you’re on the other end of the webinar. We don’t want to see it. We want to control it and make sure everybody has a good experience.

We did our client webinars at 4 p.m., and we have the Leading Edge ones scheduled for 6:30 p.m. We’ll see what that looks like. Part of the reason we went for 6:30 is that we had a fair number of people say, “I’m still working. If I’ve got to get on a call for work, I’m not going to be on your webinar.”

Get out there and start doing it

The biggest thing is to just get out there and start doing it. People want to feel informed when they’re making these important decisions. If you can get them comfortable to where they’re confident in what they’re doing, they’re yours at that point. It takes a lot to shake that confidence once they’ve got it.

If you’re going to do presentations, which I highly recommend, you may have a wholesale partner who’s helping sponsor or whatever. My advice is don’t let them speak. You need to do the speaking, and if you’ve got to invest a little time and money in a public speaking course or something like that, do it.

The fact that you’re the person delivering the content, you’re the person following up with them, and you’re the person who’s actually giving the advice, they’re going to be more confident in you than in any other advisor they’ve ever had. You’re educating them about things they’re concerned about. Just education works. Get good at it.