Read The Transcript Of The Episode:

Speaker 1  00:09

This is the ultimate advisor podcast, the podcast for financial advisors who want to create a thriving, successful and scalable practice. Each week we'll uncover the ways that you can improve your referrals your team, your marketing, and your business operations, helping you to level up your advising practice, bring in more assets and create the advising practice that you've dreamed up, you'll be joined by your hosts Bryan sweet, who has more than half a billion dollars in assets under management, Brittany Anderson, the driving force for advisors looking to hire improve their operations and company culture, and Draye Redfern who can help you systematize and automate your practices marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So what do you say? Let's jump into another amazing episode of the ultimate advisor podcast. 

Draye Redfern  01:00

Hey everybody Draye Redfern here. And welcome back to another episode of the ultimate advisor podcast. I'm really excited to be here for this one where we are continuing the mini series on selecting our favorite episodes over the last 90 some episodes Well, since I'm a marketing guy. And since it's one of my favorite things, in this episode, we're going to be recapping and re listening to one of my favorite episodes on marketing actually came early on in the podcast called, where to start with your marketing. So in this episode, even though it was a little bit ago, we're diving into some of the stuff that's more relevant now than ever before. So in this episode, we're sharing the marketing stuff that works is still working and will continue to work for you and your practice using a couple different tactical strategies. So share briefly some of them with you. But I want you to listen to all of them. So the first one is calendar automation, we're going to talk a little bit about in this episode, how you can use your calendar to not only book more appointments, but also save between five and 20 hours per month using calendar automation. Now, the five to 20 hours per month is usually with existing clients that you have relationships with where you can eliminate the back and forth scheduling, and save you a lot of time, save them a lot of time and really help you out there. But more of a focus for this episode, I suppose is going to be from the lead gen side, we're also going to be discussing some of the ways that you can actually convert more individuals in your buying cycle because the buying cycle for financial advisors is very long, it could be a month till you convert a client could be six or 12 months. So what are you doing in the meantime, to stay in front of them and stay relevant to convert more of those people who just take a little bit longer. So that is the next part we're going to talk about. We're also going to talk about some of the ways you can drive additional traffic inside or traffic web traffic to your company's website to convert more clients and create more leads and a lot of additional ways to really level up your entire practice. So lots of really cool and fun things we're going to cover this week, so can't wait to get into it. Here is the episode on where to start with your marketing. Enjoy.

Draye Redfern  03:19

Everyone Draye Redfern here and welcome back to the ultimate advisor podcast where In this episode, we're going to be taking a little bit of a different direction and going down the marketing rabbit hole. And the stuff that I want to share in this episode, isn't the hyperbole stuff? It's not the stuff? That's theory. It's the stuff that's actually working. And we're gonna answer some of the questions that we often hear from advisors across the US now, both Brittany and I have spoken in the multiple stages together. And Bryan himself speaks often across different platforms at different events across the US. And so all of us with all of these sort of different facets and speaking opportunities, we often get asked a lot of questions around marketing. And so in this episode, we all want to kind of touch on a variety of ways that we think that you should use marketing, differentiate your marketing, and really find ways to implement your marketing in a way that is not overwhelming or stressful or causing a ton of frustration. That really is a really clear and easy action plan for you to get started. So where do we start? I think that the first place to really begin here is that from the advisors that we've talked to and have surveyed over the last 18 months 70% of advisors there basically so marketing purpose for generating leads, is referrals. Now, this is super, super scary, because these are the individuals who already have a practice that's sustainable, that's already more or less growing. But just like you wouldn't advise your clients to put all of their investments or all of their retirement into one singular vehicle, whether that's a singular stock or mutual fund, or whatever it may be. That's essentially what you're doing with your business if you're only having referrals as your lead gen strategy. So I really sort of interesting approach when it comes to this. So we're going to go through some ways that you can essentially change this and maybe sort of balanced that out and put your eggs in more than just the one basket. But I think it's also important to realize that of the advisors that we've talked with 80% of them do not have a dedicated marketing person. And I'm sure that that's probably you, if you're listening to the podcast, there's a good chance you don't have a dedicated marketing person. And that is perfectly okay. Because none of the stuff we're going to go through in this episode is going to be overwhelming, or it's going to take someone having to constantly do the same action over and over and over again, basically, we're only going to use strategies in this episode, that where you can use or repurpose someone in your office for a few hours a week in order to help leverage their time and also help you leverage your marketing. And so we're gonna really begin with this is the differentiation. And we talked about this and our first episode of the really sort of key difference between an enhancement differentiator and a never seen before differentiator. And this concept is so imperative that you have in your marketing is you really find a way to create something that is not seen before in the market, and don't just try and enhance what your competitors are doing. And so a perfect example that we've referenced before, is that sweet financial, has the dream architect process, you're not working with a financial advisor, you're working with a dream, architect, Game Changer good. And it really makes an incredible distinction that sweet financial has against the rest of the competition. Now, you can't knock that off. Don't try it. We have bots and stuff set up to monitor this stuff, and the whole thing is trademarked. But it gives you a really good idea, really how to create some of those differentiations in the market for you and your business. Once you have that, then we can go a few different ways. The next thing that I want to talk about is singular actions. Now I'm sure everyone knows what SEO is. It's search engine optimization. And it's really, really important. But one of the only ways that you can continually rank higher in the SEO algorithm with Google and all these sorts of things, is to continually keep putting out content. So that means a new blog post or several new blog posts every single week without fail. And it sounds really good. And someone can commit to it. But from experience and literally haven't talked with dozens and dozens, if not hundreds of advisors at this point in time, who have all said, Oh, I had a blog, and then I just stopped writing. And it happens time and time again, because everyone knows they need to have this blog, but they don't actually keep up with it. And so what I want to talk about with singular actions, is doing something really well once that could then be reused, repurposed and leveraged, and perpetuity. And so what would that be, that would be something more than just a, you know, your monthly state of the market newsletter, some sort of content or download that allows you to interact with your audience. And so a perfect example of this is like a checklist. It could be the second opinion checklists that we've had, you know, the Brittany and I have used a lot over the last few years, it could be the 10 things that you want to make sure that you have. And in a good financial advisor, it could be all sorts of different things that would allow that individual to download some content in exchange for their name and email address. And then you could basically what we call drip content onto them where it's basically they receive an email a week, or maybe it's a few emails a week, for a set period of time. And this is called an email autoresponder. And what it essentially allows you to do is to write all of this content once, set it and then forget it. So a perfect example. And an example that we referenced in the first episode is women in transition. So if a woman has just had her husband passed away, and she's obviously going through a whole variety of complex emotions, and finances are absolutely going to be one of them. Well, if you've seen the case of variety of times, you most likely know what this woman or this group of women will most likely experienced next, maybe at first, its disbelief, then it may be overwhelmed, because they don't know how to manage all of the finances. And then it's uncertainty whether or not they're certain enough that they can even take care of it. And then it could be complete overwhelm after that, if that's the client journey, or the client path. You can walk them through this in an automated fashion using singular action. So maybe it's a download where they 10 things that you need to consider after a spouse passes away. And then you could walk them through this process over this multi step emails afterwards, where you take incredible amount of time upfront to write it out. But then you set it and forget it. So that way, if someone unfortunately has their husband passed away, tomorrow, or six months from now or a year from now, that journey, and that email sequence isn't going to change, it's going to be the same thing, every step of the way, that you can walk them through that that process, and then really help build that trust with you. And that rapport with you, eventually inducing that sense of reciprocity where they know you, they like you, they trust you. And you're the only logical option that there is in order to for you to manage their finances, or help them along this tumultuous time. And that's a singular action that's doing something once that could be leveraged, ongoing. And so what I would challenge most people, most advisors listening to this would be, what are the singular actions that you can do in your business today. And I'm sure there's a list of at least five, if you can't think of five, then I would really maybe start this episode over from the beginning, and go through some of the stuff again, because I promise you, there's at least five things you could probably do, whether that's an email sequence, whether that's a downloads, whether that's even just redoing your homepage, so that it's not just a pretty business card. So that sort of talks about what we've talked about in a previous episode, that really pushed that client centric approach. First, all of these are things that you can do once and be highly, highly leveraged, ongoing. And then once you have a variety of these singular actions in place, whether that's email sequences, or downloads, or all these other facets, then you can automate. If you automate before this, you're not really going to get a whole bunch of benefit from it. Because what are you automating, you're not automating an email sequence, you're not automating a download or delivery, there's really not a lot to automate. But after you have done some of this work upfront, then you can automate a variety of things. So for example, when someone finishes, maybe the women transition email sequence, they can be automatically moved over to a separate sequence that could take them to the next part of the journey. Ai automation sequence could be where someone visits your site for the first time. And they're a prospect or maybe they're a returning customer or a client, you can have a variety of buttons that allow them to follow through to get them to the right spot on the website that most resembles the need that they experience. So for example, someone may want to schedule their annual review with you. So you give them a couple options on the site, you allow them to work to a calendar page, that would be an hour long review specifically with you. And that whole process can be automated, they could book that spot on your calendar that's automated, so you don't have a whole lot of back and forth. And their needs were met without anyone having to reach out or back and forth, emails, all of the stuff that may occur with your existing client base. If someone's a new prospect, and maybe they want to book an appointment with you, well, we're not necessarily proponents of spending an hour hour and a half with every potential prospect under the sun, because you know, they may not be a good fit, and you may not be a good fit for them. And so you can schedule 15 minute little exploratory calls that would allow you to see whether or not you're going to be a good fit. If you are, then you can move them down this next process, that whole thing. And all of these processes can be automated inside of your practice, to where it doesn't take administrative time, it doesn't take your time as the advisor, there's eliminates all of the back and forth. And then once something is booked, whether a calendar appointment is booked, whatever you may be setting up, you have additional content and resources that you can provide to them through the singular actions that we basically talked about, to really help create that deeper relationship with more of that rapport and really strengthening the bond with your existing clients. And then really taking massive leaps and bounds with those prospects compared to your competition, to really engage with them have that deepen sense of rapport, and then bring them in with that heightened sense of trust, to really start leveling up that whole relationship. So I've been talking for a little while now. And I know you guys have definitely got some things you want to add in here. But those are the three big things that I would say when it comes to marketing. I highly, highly recommend differentiation, singular actions and then automation.

Brittany Anderson  14:25

Hey, Brittany here, stopping and pausing for a moment to talk about something that we've had so many of you inquire about and that is our ultimate advisor, mastermind. Now I'm going to start by saying if you are not a growth minded individual, if you are not somebody who's focused on taking your business to the next level, if you're not focused on engaging your team, and helping them to help you in turn, level up the business, the service model, how you provide that wow experience to clients. If those things are not your focus, just fast forward right now, because the ultimate advisor mastermind would not then be for you. However, if you are looking to take your business to the next level, if you want to experience exponential growth and feel supported along the way, if you want to start working smarter and not harder, if you want to help your team members to work within the God given talents that they were provided, and use those skill sets in a way they haven't yet to help support you and your business, to help them realize their biggest goals, their biggest dreams. If you want creative approaches to marketing, I know that can be an intimidating word. But we're not talking here about the fancy Facebook stuff, or you know, the latest and greatest, but rather looking at how you can market what you do, how you can express how you're different, and how you can truly differentiate yourself in a crowded market space. If those are problems you're looking to solve, then you absolutely want to go check out ultimate advisor mastermind.com, to learn more about how we can help you on your path and journey to growth.  So Draye, you said something earlier that just it just kind of sparked a thought for me. So you were talking about how you know when you set this whole thing up. And you're talking about these singular actions, making sure you don't necessarily have to have at this point in time a dedicated marketing person, but you need somebody who can allocate a few hours a week to this. So Dre and I, for those that don't know, that are listening, we work with financial advisors all across the United States, on getting their teams engaged, getting all these marketing components in place. And there's only been one instance that I can think of where it just didn't seem to work. And it's with an advisor that wanted to do it all themselves, right. And what we've just talked about if you if you listen to our last episode, we talked about different Colby types. And we talked in previous episodes about the difference between the visionary or the primary in the company, versus the person who is an implementer is an integrator. So the thing that I want to comment on is that you absolutely without exception, have to identify somebody on your team that has the skill set to be an implementer or an integrator to take some of these things and actually bring them to life. And like Dre said, once you identify that person, this whole process, and I can speak from experience, because we at sweet financial Dre is our consultant in this, he is our marketing guy. So he's able to tell us, hey, here's the few key things that you need to do to bring this to life. And then we take it and run. But it's because we have somebody designated on our team who's spearheading this, if I were to have Brian be the one that's like, hey, Brian, I need you to actually implement some of these automations and integrations. That's not where he should be spending his time, he should be spending his time on on the big revenue generation right on the things that he most enjoys and is most passionate about. You need somebody else that can take this and bring it to life so that your automations are set up. And I think Brian, I think you can comment to the importance of that. And just making sure that you are surrounding yourself. I'll have you talk a little bit maybe about the the who versus how mentality, and just really embracing that and how that's impacted you and help us implement some of the things that Draye has brought to the table.

Bryan Sweet  18:37

Yeah, exactly. Brittany, you know, first of all, it is going to take somebody and as Brittany alluded to, it needs to be somebody other than the advisor to, you know, get these things set up. But literally, they don't take a lot of time. But if you think about it this way, maybe it takes you an hour to set it up. But then it saves you an hour a week, well over a year, that's 52 hours that it saved you. So is it worth spending an hour today to save 52 hours later on? I would tell you yes. The other thing is, a lot of these little you know, introductory comments are things that you can do without a lot of work. Dre was kind enough to create a book. And a lot of these concepts are in that that we'll have available as a link after the show. So look out for that. And I think that Brittany alluded to this who versus how concept, I think is probably one of the amazing concepts I've gotten from Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach. And I think one of the things that was always frustrating or things that held us back in the office over the years was we would try to say hey, that'd be a really good idea to implement. How do we do that in the office and So then we would have somebody that would have never done it before, but dig in and try to, to learn it. And we were so wrong with that. And Dan Sullivan came up with this concept of find the who that's out there, that's the expert in what you're trying to do hire them to be the how. And that's how we got Dre, because we didn't know how to do marketing other than get referrals. And so we went out and found the expert Redfern media to help us, you know, deliver all of our automated marketing, and that really is applicable to virtually everything is instead of doing it yourself and taking that curve, and there's a an interesting comment I, I heard from Don Connolly, if anybody knows, Don, you know, you ask the question, when was the last time that you did something for the first time and got it right? And the answer is probably never. So why don't you go to somebody that's done it 1000s of times, and that's their expertise plug in to them, it shortens the time period of which you're, you know, become an expert might cost you a little money. But once again, cost versus investment, I would tell you, those are great investments. And so I think just regardless of marketing, just use this who versus how thought process. And Matter of fact, once again, if you wanted to go to Strategic Coach website, there's actually a book that you can download on that topic, that would be another good source for, for reading. So I'll turn it back over to you Draye, if you've got any other thoughts or comments on, on those things that we've been chatting about,

Draye Redfern 21:51

no, I think that it's, you know, really good, a really good conversation to have. And I think that it's really important that it's almost unrealistic to expect that all of the brilliant marketing ideas and automations will come from within inside of your own your own practice, we haven't seen it, we know we usually the stuff that's working really, really well was iterated on or improved on from an outside individual consultant outside build or outside marketing company that has just been taken to the next level. And not that these things couldn't necessarily work. But I highly, highly recommend, as Bryan was saying, Get some outside help, or at least someone who can take a look at some of this sort of stuff, to to see what's maybe working for you What's not look at what you're offering, and then really take it to the next level with something that's custom for you. Now, that may be you hiring somebody, but there's also plenty of mastermind groups that are out there that you could join, where you can see what's working in your particular niche or vertical really, really well that you can model, not copy model. So that really could figure out that's more tailored for what you may need. Regardless, whatever, whatever way you sort of go with this, what we've talked about so far, will remain true, you've got to have that differentiation, after you have the differentiation, find those big singular things you could focus on to really make some giant leaps forward, not just literally no two steps forward one step back, then once you have some of those single actions in place, whether that's an email sequence, whether that's downloads, whether that's follow up sequences, whether that's different segmentation stuff that you could use, it doesn't matter what it is, because it's going to be different for everybody, then you could find more ways to automate that sort of stuff, and really take it to the next level, buy back more hours per week. And that that third component there with automation, that's where you can basically set it up to where once your team has it in place, you no longer have to worry about them executing on it or doing it because it's done, or it's automated. And that's where you see a really wonderful time ROI, that you can get back with that maybe 50 hours a year, maybe 200 hours a year that you could buy back up your time, and your team's time when it comes to marketing these things. And it makes it so so much easier.

Bryan Sweet  24:14

Yeah, and that's how I actually can run, you know, our wealth management firm and for other companies and take time off is I've gotten really good at finding the who's and so I don't need to spend my time, and my team can spend their time on specific things to get it done. And so to me, that's one of the secrets of, you know, how do you free yourself up to spend your time doing only those things that you truly enjoy are good at and that you get some passion from doing. 

Brittany Anderson  24:48

You know, one component that neither Draye or Bryan has touched on yet is that when you look back to episode number two, we talked about the importance when you're communicating with prospects with client And about how it's all about them versus you. So I want to put a spin on this too, because one of the efficiencies that we have found at suite financial services, is that through some of these automations, that Draye has, has helped us put in place. So he referenced earlier about the efficiency within the the scheduling component, and how you can have a portal on your website or somewhere that they can schedule. So the thing to think about with all of this is not only the efficiencies that it creates within your company, but also what it does for your clients and your prospects as well. So when you're looking at when it would like to, I'm going to, I'm just gonna go on the example and piggyback off of what Draye talked about earlier with, you know, creating this opportunity for somebody to get direct access to your calendar, there's ways that you completely, you block out what you don't want them to see, you block out times, you don't want them to sneak in on you on. But actually, it's an efficiency from the client perspective, too. Because just like you get a ton of emails in a day, so to your clients, so to your prospects. So you can save the hassle of going back and forth with them trying to coordinate a time trying to coordinate their annual review their semi annual review, whatever it is, and you can just give them direct access to your calendar saying, Hey, here's the next three weeks, four weeks, six weeks, however, you're however you work within your office and your practice, but you can actually give them direct access and let them pick rather than going back and forth 15 times. That's an efficiency for them too. So that's the way to look at the at these things. Also the the different things that Draye brings to the table that he is going to talk about, not just today, but in upcoming episodes is it applies to so many different aspects, it's efficiency for you, it's efficiency for your client and efficiency from a prospect perspective as well.

Draye Redfern 26:47

That's exactly it Brittany. And I think that, you know, implementing these things into your advising practice really just goes a long way to just level up what you're doing compared to your competitors. lead with value, make it easy on the client to work with you to schedule time with you make it easy for them to learn from you. So you share great and valuable insights and information. And really just going that extra mile. That Frankly, I would say just having been to 1000s and 1000s of advisor websites at this point in time that 95% of advisors are just doing awful at. And so you have an incredible opportunity, I wouldn't look at this as like an overwhelming thing. But I would look at this as there's such an opportunity. In this market, we call them red oceans and blue oceans, where most of the advisor market is in this red ocean where they're all competing over enhancement differentiators. And it's just like there's, there's blood in the water, and it's awful. But if you compete in this blue ocean, that's completely different. And you have more, you know, streamlined client communication, automation and value that you can share with them. It makes you so difficult to compare to other advisors out there, because you are head and shoulders above the rest, you make it easy on the client, you share great value. And from your standpoint, much of the process is automated. And it goes a long, long way to really making you stand out amongst the crowd.

Bryan Sweet  28:14

That's an interesting point. Draye, I was just thinking, as you were speaking, how often do we run into competition for clients and things that we're, you know, trying to capture for new new business. And I really can't hardly remember the last time where we had to compete against ourselves, but we didn't have to compete against anybody else. And I think it's because we've set the stage and have all that differentiation already there. And before the clients even contacts us, they know we're different. And so that's a very helpful point. And I'm not only really I'd only have to compete by impressing the potential client, and I don't have to overcome, you know, four or five other financial advisors to get the business. So I just have to make sure I let my value proposition show and how I can solve their problems. And assuming they agree that that's the case. It's pretty much done, and they don't have to look anyplace else.

Brittany Anderson  29:15

Yeah, Bryan, that's just an interesting point. And I think it just ties back to what you were you were talking about prior also with, you know, the who versus the how mentality right. And when we're looking at it, Bryan, I think I just have to commend you, you've done such a great job within your wealth planning business, within suite financial services, of instilling in your team that if there's nothing else, make it easy for the client, right? Make the experience easy, because finances in general can be overwhelming, right to somebody who, who doesn't do it, you know, 1000s of times a year and go through a million different portfolio reviews. So from a client or prospects perspective, whatever you can do to make their life easier. And that's some of the things that Draye is talking about, is taking these different concepts and like I said, not only applying them within The business but externally as well, that's a differentiator for you. And that lets you stand out. And as like Bryan said, it really helps you to not have any direct competition in your marketplace. Well, that's so important.

Draye Redfern 30:12

I think that we've covered a lot in this episode, I think it's a really good sort of initial starting point to start the marketing conversation as we go. And we're gonna dive a lot more into all of these concepts over the coming episodes. But I think this is a really good foundational way to really make sure that marketing is not overwhelming. You don't need to hire a whole new person in your office to get it going. And you can really do a lot to differentiate yourself from the competition relatively quickly and pretty painlessly in the grand scheme of things. So, hope you got a lot of value out of this episode, and we are really looking forward to seeing you in the next episode of the ultimate advisor podcast.

Brittany Anderson  30:50

Hey there, Brittany Anderson here. If you are loving what you're hearing on our ultimate advisor podcast, don't keep us a secret. Share us with other advisors that you think would benefit from the messages that you are hearing. The easiest way to do that is to simply send them to ultimate advisor podcast.com. And if you want to learn a few other ways that we could potentially serve you as an advisor, go check out ultimate advisor mastermind.com. As always, we are so happy to have you here with us as part of the ultimate advisor community and we look forward to a continued relationship.