Marketing Strategies That Bring in the Business: Think Synergy

Jun 30, 2021 / By Debra Taylor, CPA/PFS, JD, CDFA, Sean Bailey, Horsesmouth Editor in Chief and Doug Pierce, Horsesmouth Staff Writer
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Building a Better Advisory Firm Series: Growth guru and veteran advisor Debra Taylor shares her insights on marketing and what specific strategies and broader concepts have driven her firm’s impressive growth.

Editor’s note: Today we bring you the third episode of “Building a Better Advisory Firm Series: How to Earn More, Better Serve Your Clients, and Work Smarter, Not Harder.” Broadcast live earlier in June, it is part of a series of interactive discussions about practice management that we are hosting weekly through July. The series is simultaneously streamed on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook on Thursdays at 10 a.m. You can learn more here about future session topics, how to attend live, and how to add sessions to your calendar. You can also watch replays of past sessions here.

You can either listen to the complete discussion above—which includes much more discussion—or you can read selections from the talk in the edited transcript below.

Doug Pierce: OK. Today, we are going to be talking about marketing strategies that are working for financial advisors right now. I do want to remind everybody that this is session three of the Building a Better Advisory Business series. If you want to find out topics for future shows and add them to your calendar, you can go to addevent.com/calendar/ph343792 to do that. And you can go to horsesmouth.com/betterbiz, that’s B-I-Z, to watch other replays.

And without further ado, I will hand things over to Sean Bailey, Horsesmouth editor-in-chief, and Debra Taylor, the founder and principal of the Taylor Financial Group.

Are referrals the best source of new business?

Sean Bailey: Debbie, what are some of the common mistakes you see advisors making with their marketing? What comes to mind when I ask you that?

Debbie Taylor: The first thing that I think of is they don’t dedicate enough time or resources to marketing. They just think, “Hey, I’ll build it, and they’ll come.” But the truth of it is, if people don’t know you exist, if people don’t know about your niche, or how great your services are, then they’re not going to come to you. That is because there’s so much noise, there’s so much competition that you must really dedicate yourself to getting your message out there.

Sean: My experience over the last 20 years is that there tends to be an over reliance on referrals. Advisors are very intermittent about embracing more traditional marketing, whatever that may be. You have any thoughts or observations about that?

Debbie: Yeah. I’ve seen plenty of data on this, and referrals are not always the number one source of new business.

For a lot of people out there, they’re not getting their new business through referrals. Even if they’d like that to happen, they’re not. So, they’ve got to be creative. They’ve got to be assertive. They’ve got to get out there and spend money on this and dedicate resources to it. For the people that referrals are their number one source, good for you. I want it to be in that position. But it’s very difficult to get into that position, whether referrals are from clients or centers of influence. But I would tell you, you still can’t get complacent. You don’t know what’s going to happen to those clients or centers of influence. They retire, they move on, whatever. This is something you’ve got to constantly be in the game with. You’ve got to be proactive, have a marketing plan, track your results.

I have somebody who, literally, almost their full-time job is dedicated towards marketing in my firm. Now, I know some firms are not big enough to have that, but it has always been a critical function, even if it is just one function of somebody’s job. But now, literally, it’s almost a full-time job here for one person.

Are you cheaping out on marketing?

Sean: So what are your thoughts on people cheaping out, for lack of a better word, on what actually is a very critical aspect of their business?

Debbie: Yeah. I mean, when I said before, you’ve got to dedicate time and resources, that was my polite way of saying, you’ve got to spend money. And a lot of folks in this business are cheap. They don’t want to spend the money on professional development, on learning, on growing their business, and that’s a huge mistake. Because if you’re not growing your business, then if you look at your net new assets, your net new assets are shrinking, because your clients are taking out those RMDs every year, which are 4%–6% a year, roughly. You’ve got clients dying, and every once in a while, you actually do get fired.

When you factor in all that money going out the door, what I tell my team is you’ve got to drive 60 miles an hour to go 30 miles an hour. And a big part of allowing you to do that is the marketing. You should focus on spending anywhere from 3%–5% of your revenue every year on marketing. It really should be the bogey. That could be in a bunch of different strategies, but you have to spend. You have to spend.

Sean: All right, people should make the commitment to spend the 3%–5% on marketing. I think people say, “OK, I’m alright with that.” But then they don’t do the planning, and then a year goes by, and maybe they spent one and a half percent, and it was intermittent, and it therefore is lacking. It doesn’t have legs. A good marketing program has to have legs.

It’s got to keep rolling along, because it is a long-term approach. I think that’s the problem. People are thinking short-term. “I want to spend X to bring in Y.” Whether it’s leads or new business, whatever the case may be. But they’re not accounting for the long tail of marketing.

Sean: For instance, we’ve been doing the Social Security workshops for advisors for five years now. We hear about prospects coming in the door to talk to the advisor about Social Security. And they have material in their hands that they got at a workshop the advisor presented two or three years prior. People are curious, and they want to learn this stuff. I think that some advisors aren’t realizing that this is a long game.

The long tail of marketing

Debbie: I think that is a brilliant point. Just last week, I received a phone call from somebody out of the blue. And basically what happened is somebody mentioned, “Hey, I listened to Debbie’s monthly webinars.” See how we’re connecting the dots?

Some guy, not a client, not someone I’ve even engaged in. I see him on the list, attending my monthly webinars. He’s talking to a friend of his. The friend says, “Hey, I’m looking for somebody good.” The friend is actually with Morgan Stanley. The guy says, “Oh, I listened to this woman, Debbie Taylor’s webinars, you might check her out.” He goes to my website, listens to a radio show that I had done a year ago, called me. And now, he’s going to become a client with $2–$3 million.

So, think about the long tail and think about how serpentine that long tail is. Some guy that’s not even a prospect, I haven’t even engaged in, he’s listening to my monthly webinars, tells a friend and now the friend listens to my radio podcast. So, if I wasn’t doing the webinars…

If I didn’t do that radio podcast, this $3 million guy would never become a client. And you say, “Oh, that’s just one example.” But to your point, Sean, I was doing workshops in the libraries, before we went into lockdown. And like you’re saying, I have people show up now from workshops from three or four years ago, and they’re like, “Hey, I saw your workshop three or four years ago. I don’t even remember what you talked about, but now I’m ready. My father died. I’m divorced. I’m retired. Now, I’m ready.”

Part of it is just being out there and just dripping, dripping, dripping. And it’s amazing when you are just planting the seeds, planting the seeds; that crop might not come this year, but it comes next year or the year after, or the year after that. But that’s part of that dedication and the discipline of spending 3%–5% a year on marketing. That’s just a line item. That’s just what you’re doing, and then you’ll see over time it coming back.

I want to reinforce that. I’m a 100% big believer of that. If you’re looking for that ROI to come back in 30 days, it’s not going to happen. I mean, it could, lucky for you, but don’t count on that and then give up.

More stories of the long tail

Sean: A friend of ours, Jeff Young, is an advisor out in Scottsdale, Ariz. And he is an evangelist for Social Security and doing speeches, really. He doesn’t do slides or anything. He’s a former world champion of Toastmasters, so he just loves to just speak from his notes, but he does give some handouts for people and invites them to come in when they’re ready for the Social Security analysis.

And he had a woman come in the door three years after she had heard his speech. Now, she was retiring. She was an Arizona state employee. And she said, “I heard what you said. Are you going to offer me the Social Security analysis?” “Yes.” “OK. I’ve just retired last week, and I’m rolling over $500,000 with you. And by the way, I want to open a couple of 529s for my grandkids.” Fantastic business, right?

Then just two weeks later, that woman’s best friend at work, her partner, she also retired. She came in with $500,000 and wanted to open the 529 for her grandkids too. I mean, the long tail and also the ripple effect. There is a sort of physics or metaphysics. You’re doing these activities out into the universe, and then the action comes back to you. Sometimes it comes back right away. People sign up for that appointment. Within a few days, they’ve had a meeting with you. Hopefully that turns into business, and that’s fantastic, and that is part of measuring your return on investment. But the tail is long, and to get the full measure of it can take years.

No Johnny-come-lately

There’s another guy, Joe LaTour in Springfield, Ill., who has built his business very successfully since 2008 doing Social Security and Medicare workshops. He is on billboards. He is on radio and T.V., and then he uses direct mail to drive people to his workshops. He says, “I’ve heard from advisors from time to time, they said, ‘Yeah, I tried radio, I tried T.V., it didn’t work for me.’” And he says, “Oh, well, how long were you on for?” And the advisor said, “Three months or six months.” Joe is like, “No, if you’re making a commitment to these kinds of things, you have to think in terms of years, not in terms of months.”

So he’s been on radio for 10 years, people have seen him up on a billboard in his town, and he’s on T.V. Then he starts dropping targeted direct mail to the pre-retirees to get them to come to his Saturday morning coffee, doughnuts and Social Security workshop. These people who are getting his invitations in the direct mail, they actually know him. They have heard him on radio, they’ve heard him on T.V., they’ve seen the billboard. And so, then the invitation comes, they actually recognize him. He’s not some Johnny-come-lately who’s just started doing this sort of thing last week. And so, he gets really, really excellent return on investment.

Marketing is synergistic

Sean: So, Debbie, what sort of epiphanies have you had as you transitioned into the business? As a trained lawyer and a trained CPA, but not somebody trained in marketing. What has been the evolution of your understanding of the importance of marketing?

Debbie: Early on, it was nothing. I mean, I wasn’t doing any marketing. Particularly coming from a professional background, it was considered unseemly or beneath you to advertise your market. And actually, the ethics codes for CPAs and attorneys forbade that traditionally, and there’s a lot of restrictions around how attorneys can advertise. So, that’s where I was coming from.

And then my business was not growing as quickly as I wanted it to. My marketing started off very clumsy. This is before digital stuff and social media. I would just advertise in the local newspaper. Literally just take out an ad and advertise. For some people, that might be effective. For me, it didn’t really work so much, but I think part of what you have to think about with your marketing is it’s not any one thing that brings people in. It’s just sort of a combination, a synergy, sort of like what Sean was just talking about with the other gentleman.

You can’t just do one thing and say, “This is it, this is my marketing, this is my home run.” And again, maybe that works for you. Maybe you do some webinars, and you get thousands of clients, and you’re like, “Hey, this was brilliant.” But more often than not, it’s dripping, it’s synergistic, the effect. That’s sort of how you have to look at it.

Sean: Right. Like when I was talking about Joe LaTour out in Springfield, Ill. Joe is a classic example, something that you would be taught in your marketing class if you were in an MBA program. And it’s something called integrated marketing. There’s channels. Some people only listen to radio. Some people only listen to T.V. Some people are just looking at what’s in their local newspaper, or what’s in their mail.

And the point is that Joe, as he’s building his brand, is consistently showing up in all those channels over time, so that then when he does finally drop $6,000 on a 7,500- or 10,000-piece mailer for a series of workshops, his results are juiced. His results are good, because people have seen him elsewhere.

3 Marketing epiphanies

Debbie: One of my epiphanies is you’ve got to spend money. I have, like I said, one person who is pretty much solely dedicated to marketing. I don’t call it marketing, I call it communications, because I do think marketing is a little bit of a dirty word. So, I call this person my communications assistant. And her responsibility is educating clients, educating prospects. I take that sort of term very broadly. So, that’s our newsletters, that’s our webinars, all that stuff.

I will tell you then the second epiphany is you have to commit yourself. You’ve got to dedicate somebody in your office who’s passionate about it.

And then I’ll tell you the third thing: What gets measured gets done. It cannot be sort of this sideshow thing that you get to every once in a while. It’s got to be a priority right up there with reviewing investment returns, or whatever the priorities are in your firm.

We create a marketing plan at the end of the year for the next year, and then we measure that plan, what we’re working on, literally, every week. We go back and we measure it, and we review it. That’s the other thing is it’s just got to be right up there. What gets measured, gets done.

Listener questions

Doug: A listener shared that when the epidemic hit this past year, she tried virtual events, a happy hour, mixology, trivia, and she says that these became less attended as people grew tired of virtual meetings.

Sean: We saw that last spring. And at some level, I think it’s true about people getting tired of virtual meetings, but I also think that what we were observing was summertime and people would rather be out and about. But Debbie, go ahead, because I know you had some pretty darn good success last year with virtual events, right?

Debbie: We killed it with the virtual events last year. I think her point is more that folks don’t want to do those virtual events anymore. I think we’re going to evolve just in general to a hybrid world where some people really like not leaving their living room. And I do think after the last year or so, there’s some people who are a little bit introverted that feel very comfortable not leaving.

The Wall Street Journal had an article last week about, “OK, now it’s time for you to go out with friends again.” How are you going to do that? Talking about some of the social, psychological issues, because some people are just like, “Hey, I’m good here. This worked out really, really well for me, not having to leave my house, getting my groceries delivered and stuff.” I mean, that’s the truth.

So I do think we’re going to evolve to a hybrid world where some people continue to be very happy with virtual meetings, virtual social hours, virtual conferences what have you. I think the name of the game going forward is being flexible.

There was a time two years ago or five years ago, whatever, where if you tried to do something virtually or on a phone call, whatever the thing was, that would have been considered short shrift, like you’re not giving the person the proper attention. So, we were all the way at one extreme. Then we went to the other extreme, because we had no choice and 100% was virtual.

I think now, we’re in this middle ground where we’ve got to meet people where it’s most comfortable for them. And so, you’re seeing the hybrid approaches. Even here at the office, we’re offering now in-person meetings or virtual meetings. And I’m going to tell you, I think a lot of clients are still going to choose virtual. They like the fact that they were able to sit there and look at their computer screen and not have to take 45 minutes to drive here and 45 minutes to drive back and all that other stuff.

And you’ve seen the conferences, I think they’re going to continue to be hybrid. There was a conference this week that my RIA held, and they had a virtual component and an in-person component. Guess what, I didn’t go, because I looked at the agenda, I said, “This is not worth my time to fly out, all the stops, whatever.” So, anyway. And my team then was able to participate because it was virtual. If I went out there, my team couldn’t have sat in on some of these sessions.

So, anyway, I think the name of the game is being flexible going forward.

I don’t think I’m ever going to go back to in-person workshops. Or if I do, it’s going to be very, very infrequently, because it’s so limiting. That’s the other thing to think about is even though now we cannot go out and be in person, it’s limiting. If I do a workshop at the local Franklin Lakes Library, I’m going to get 20 or 25 people, they’re all going to be local. If I do a virtual webinar, it is open to the whole country, and I had people from Dubai sitting in on my webinars who were friends of a friend, and I want to continue to have that level of openness and access.

But I do think people have gotten a little bit tired of some of the virtual stuff. This summer, we’re doing golf clinics and golf outings. And in the fall, we are planning to go back to in person events for the fall.

Experiences raise overall happiness

Sean: I mean, those client experiences are…I’m just looking at a new book that came across my desk the other day, and it’s basically about happiness and money. I guess a lot of research has been done where they’re ultimately identifying that people get a lot more satisfaction out of experiences than they do out of concrete things like their Tesla or whatever. I mean, they like their Tesla for the first month or so. And then six months later, their relative happiness level might not have moved.

But if they take the family to a three week safari in Tanzania, the happiness levels are higher and stay higher. There’s a whole point about experiences, which advisors, I think, have been pretty good at creating these client experiences.

But the other piece I just want to mention is positioning yourself as a financial educator in terms of your marketing approach, where you’re out there teaching the public, educating the public about any variety of topics relating to personal finances and family issues, financial planning issues. It really does seem to work, and the question is going to be, in the future, what is your mix of virtual versus in-person? I don’t think the in-person is going away at all, but with the hybrid approach, clearly something is going on.

More listener questions

Building an email list to promote webinars

Sean: “What do you do about getting the word out about doing webinars?”

Debbie: We have basically a multimedia strategy. Our Salesforce contact distribution list is about a thousand names that we’ve accumulated over years and years of doing workshops, and other folks. We, obviously, then send out Constant Contact, advertising the webinars. Then it’s also in our weekly newsletter, advertising the webinars. It’s on our client agendas, and then we do Facebook ads that we boost. And we also post on LinkedIn and Twitter. So, I would tell you, those are the key ways.

Sean: To build your email list, you need to have a regular presence on Facebook and a low but consistent budget of money being spent to engage your target audience on Facebook with paid advertising, inviting them to download something or register for something before you ever even invite them in to come to a webinar. And then when people are on the email list, then it’s going to be easier for you to be inviting them to these other events down the road.

Best social media advertising

Sean: What do you think would be more beneficial, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or LinkedIn Ads?

Debbie: Google and Facebook are very, very good. Facebook, particularly, I think, has an amazing back end that allows you to really drill down and know in quite a lot of depth who your target audience is and how to reach them. Basically, in the Facebook advertising machine, Facebook is loading in all of the data that typical direct mail companies have and sell about your target audience.

Then they layer on top of that the kinds of things that people have done or the data that they have in terms of activities of liking, and commenting, and subscribing to different Facebook groups. That’s data that’s not available to the direct mail people.

I tend to be slightly biased toward Facebook at this point in time. I think Google is a little more complicated, but is also powerful.

Turning likes into prospects

Sean: How do you get your likes on Facebook to actually sign up?

Debbie: This is really hard, these last few questions about social media, digital campaigns. Because as Sean was alluding to before, there’s a little bit of a black box thing going on there. And by the way, they change it. They change the algorithms.

You think you have a strategy, and then six or nine months later, your experts come back or you’re reading an article, and they’re like, “Oh, by the way, they changed their algorithms.” And they don’t really disclose, there’s not a lot of transparency there. So, it’s a really tough space to be in is what I would tell you.

We have hired different marketing consultants over the years. A lot of them cost $1,500–$2,000 a month, so they’re not cheap. We’ve hired more to help us with the SEO to get our name to the top of those organic Google searches.

Integrating your approach

Sean: How are you coordinating your webinars, podcasts and blogs with digital paid ads?

Debbie: We have an entire schedule and a checklist for the months when we do the webinars. We just went quarterly now, but we have a whole checklist. We make a post seven days to the webinar, five days to the webinar, one day to the webinar, four hours to the webinar. And then we’re also boosting those posts. It’s all in the checklist, all very coordinated and laid out. I don’t even get involved. They’re basically in autopilot now.

Sean: The coordination is important. If you’re going to go to the trouble of posting to your blog on your website, then you do want to go over to Facebook and boost that post, spend a little money and put that post in front of your target audience who aren’t your clients. Because otherwise, who’s seeing your blog post other than your clients when you include the link to it in your newsletter?

Debbie: Yeah, 100%.

Sean: And likewise, if you put on a webinar and you record it, OK? So, you’ve done a live event for the people who are there. You can put the recording on your website, you can put it in an email, but you also can take the recording of that webinar and have a transcript pulled of all your comments, and somebody on your team can clean it up and edit it into a white paper on that topic that is then put on Facebook or some other place where people can go ahead and sign up and download it. Likewise, you can pull just the audio and it becomes a podcast.

Debbie: Yeah, we call it repurposing it. And you’re right, we take the one thing, and then we keep repurposing it. The radio show, we get the recording, get through compliance, then we use it as a podcast. Sometimes we break it up into little bits that are more subject-matter oriented. Same thing. Absolutely.

Sean: OK, time to wrap up for today. Now anybody who’s looking to get a shot of adrenaline into your marketing program with tons of highly tactical, action-oriented ideas and plans, Debbie’s upcoming “New Normal” workshop is for you coming in July. You can start overhauling your marketing later this summer, so that you can finish strong in 2021 and be really up and flying, full bore into 2022. I’m actually saying the word 2022!

Otherwise, if you just want to jump in and take a look at what Debbie is offering for her “New Normal” practice management workshop, you can go to horsesmouth.com/newnormal, one word, and you’ll see everything you need to know there.

Debra Taylor, CPA/PFS, JD, CDFA, is Horsesmouth’s Director of Practice Management. She is also the principal and founder of Taylor Financial Group, LLC, a wealth management firm in Franklin Lakes, NJ. Debra has won many industry honors and is the author of My Journey to $1 Million: The Systems and Processes to Get You There, a book about industry best practices. Debbie is also a co-creator of the Savvy Tax Planning program and co-leader of the Savvy Tax Planning School for Advisors. Several times a year she delivers her Build a Better Business Workshop for advisors.

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