Read The Transcript Of The Episode:

Speaker 1:

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 of.

Speaker 1:

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 practice's marketing to effortlessly attract new clients. So what do you say? Let's jump into another amazing episode of The Ultimate Adviser Podcast.

Brittany Anderson:

Welcome back to The Ultimate Advisor Podcast. This is Brittany Anderson and again, I have the lovely Draye Redfern and the wonderful Mr. Bryan Sweet. we are going to talk about a hot topic today that we all have a ton of excitement and energy around and that is on embracing marketing. Now I know that there are advisors out there who hear the word marketing and they cringe, right? They're like, "Oh, I just don't love that word. I don't know how to embrace it." Here's what we're going to do, is we're going to lay out, because this little mini series is really focused on helping you experience exponential growth during times of adversity.

Brittany Anderson:

As you know, there are many uncertainties right now. You're facing an economic kind of upset if you will. You've got ups and downs in the markets, you've got the COVID-19 crisis. There are just so many things that are being thrown at us that we don't even know what the future holds. So it was interesting on a recent ... Darren Hardy, he has a daily ... DarrenDaily is what it's called ... daily message, quick video that goes out every day.

Brittany Anderson:

He talked about how businesses over the course of time have been able to do three-year planning, five-year planning, ten-year planning. You're looking into the future, you're always looking ahead, you're planning for that. And right now it's kind of impossible to do that because you have to be ready and willing to pivot and not be so stuck on what you think the future is going to look like that you are not prepared and you're not marketing and you're not doing things in a way to grow your business now that could in turn impact you in the future in a negative way.

Brittany Anderson:

It's interesting because we've always been firm believers in creating a future vision. We still stand by that. I mean at Sweet Financial, we have our vivid vision, our three-year vision where we're looking forward into the future. That's something we still stand by. I know Draye is very much the same way in that regard.

Brittany Anderson:

But here's the thing is we have an opportunity right now. We have an opportunity to be different, to take advantage of marketing and in some capacity to be able to truly help people. To help people get to the other side of this, whatever that looks like. So the thing is, is that not all advisors right now are really honing their messaging to show people what that other side could look like. Right now there's a lot of advisors out there that are just kind of continuing on.

Brittany Anderson:

They've got their maybe, on occasion email or newsletter or whatever goes out. They're just keeping it the same, kind of hoping this whole thing blows over in a handful of months and then we'll come out and everything will be back to normal and fine. Well, maybe during other times of market fluctuation, that could have been the answer, right now that is absolutely not because nobody knows what the future holds. We just know that it's going to be different.

Brittany Anderson:

Now is the time again, that you can really make some conscious decisions in how to reframe your marketing, how to reframe your messaging to appeal to people that you can help. Something that I want to talk on, and I'm going to bring Bryan into this in just a moment, is that when people are afraid, when people are facing uncertainty ... and we're talking right now, especially with what's going on right now, there are major uncertainties.

Brittany Anderson:

I mean there's uncertainties that we're facing as a global community that could change the trajectory of our lives. So not only are you looking at people's portfolios fluctuating and that just be some sort of market fluctuation or tumultuousness or whatever you want to say, but what we're facing is changes in how we communicate, changes in how we get together, in how we deliver and receive information. We have changes of how people are going to work.

Brittany Anderson:

I mean you've got a lot of people right now that are out of work because they physically can't, they're not considered essential or their business has gone upside down because of this economic freeze that we've experienced. Things are going to be so incredibly different going into the future and you don't want your clients or your prospective clients, people who fit your target demographic to make fear-based decisions that hurt them in the long run.

Brittany Anderson:

So Brian, I would love for you to jump in because I think you have some great value to add here in talking about how we really are shifting our messaging to help people not do something that they're going to regret.

Bryan Sweet:

Yeah, I totally agree Brittany and I would tell the audience that I think this is a once in a lifetime opportunity that you really want to take advantage of. Literally we have never done as much marketing as we are doing right today and with the help of Draye, and he'll be telling you some of the great things that we're doing.

Bryan Sweet:

But a couple of things is I think the world, as you alluded to, Brittany is very fear based and you want to make sure that your messaging is getting people to keep a longterm focus and not to do things based on something that's maybe happening today and overreact and do something that will have a really longterm negative consequence. I think one of the things that if you're not doing this is going to be really, really essential, and it was reinforced in a conversation that I had, but the messaging that you have to have today needs to be different. And what do I mean by that?

Bryan Sweet:

Well, people have more fear and their emotions are running higher so you have to have a lot more empathy than you ever had before. An interesting thing is, I was talking to some colleagues at Genius Network and that was actually Joe Polish, who's the founder of Genius Network, and he had gotten this interesting email from a colleague. They were some studies or some online communication where Joe's messaging was the number one increase of any individual that they've tracked and the gentleman that was sending him this information, his input was down 260%. Joe's was up, this other individual's was down 260% and he just simply said, "What the heck are you doing while mine's down, yours is up?" And simply it was, "I changed my messaging to be about the clients. Instead of trying to sell them something or get them to some education series, I was just concerned about them as a person."

Bryan Sweet:

Draye will go into this a little bit more, but if you just keep the same messaging and you increase it, that's probably not going to be really well spent money. But if you change your messaging and start increasing it, I think you're going to find amazing results.

Bryan Sweet:

The other thing that we're doing that we've never done before or it's been a long, long time, is if you go to the TV stations, radio stations, newspapers, all of the costs to do media coverage is amazingly inexpensive. Draye can talk on this more too, but even Facebook is really, really ... the costs are way down.

Bryan Sweet:

And so why not take advantage of that to get your message out and show that you're different and show that you care and that you're the people that they should be dealing with when everybody else has their head in the sand? And so it's to me, an amazing opportunity to discuss and to be out there and making a presence. I think maybe before we're over we'll kind of maybe give you some ideas of all the different things that we're doing, but maybe start by turn it over to Draye and have him give some of his wisdom on all of the great marketing ideas that he's helped us with.

Draye Redfern:

Yeah, I think Bryan, there's a lot there that you said that we could probably unpack. I think the first one is messaging. Now the Sweet Financial brand has got the messaging really dialed in because at Sweet Financial, you're not working with a financial advisor, you're working with a dream architect, trademarked. Because dream architects are, frankly, they're way more interesting than financial advisors.

Draye Redfern:

The messaging is really, really dialed in and that stuff takes time and it takes a lot of thought. But what I would encourage you to do is, and we said in the last episode too is to just start communicating more, but what I would highly encourage that you do, it's keep a spreadsheet or a Google sheet or something that will allow you to start tracking some of your messaging if you're not as familiar or your messaging isn't actually dialed in yet.

Draye Redfern:

What that could look like is ... I'll just use Facebook as an example ... if you post to Facebook ... and that's maybe one of your distribution channels, [inaudible 00:10:39] like [lead gen 00:10:40] channels. Then track how many likes each post gets, how many shares it gets, how many comments it gets, and see what people are actually engaging with, what they're liking, what they're clicking, what they're commenting on. Because that gives you more metrics on what type of messaging you need to actually have if your messaging for your brand is not actually dialed in yet.

Draye Redfern:

Put actual numbers ... pen to paper or spreadsheet or whatever else ... on what is actually occurring. Maybe it's if you're sending emails out and an email has a theme, put the theme into one of eight or 10 categories and if you can track open rates and you can track click rates on your email and you could track how many people replied to that email. It's not hard to actually measure your marketing in order to really define what your messaging is and if you don't know what it is, that goes a long way to help you really craft who you are as a brand to get your messaging right.

Draye Redfern:

That's the first step. If you don't have messaging, figured out, maybe you're just starting out or maybe you've been in the game for a little bit, but you still don't have the mastery like one, two, punch with what your messaging is, who you do, who you help, et cetera, then that's a great way to really refining at what it's going to end up being.

Draye Redfern:

The second part is if you have your messaging, then you could easily move on to your marketing. Even if you don't have your messaging fully done, you can move on to your marketing right now because there's so many opportunities right now. As an example, Facebook, as the law of supply and demand, when crisis happens, people tend to pull back on their marketing instead of actually spending more. There's a video that I did a few weeks ago and I referenced a story from Post, the cereal company, and Kellogg's, and in the great depression Post basically scaled back on all of their advertising and they scaled back on a lot of their marketing spend and a little company called Kellogg's actually doubled down on all of their marketing spend. They were just really all in. And that was the defining factor that allowed Kellogg's to really surpass Post and Post has never really been able to catch up since then.

Draye Redfern:

I like that story because it's like I am a huge proponent of when everyone is doing one thing, you should be doing something different. So if everybody's actually pulling out of the market as far as advertising is concerned, that's a great time to go in. So Facebook as an example, they have a hundred million dollars that they basically are giving small businesses as cash grants or as free advertising spend that you can apply for. I think by the time that you'll hear this episode, you'll be able to actually apply for some of those things, and that's a great way to actually just use Facebook to get some free ad spend potentially.

Draye Redfern:

But not only that, you also have the availability because ad prices are down as much as 40% to 50%, in particular niches or keywords and such. So your same ad budget could literally go twice as far as it would have previously. Or maybe you've never advertised at all before ever and you can actually spend a little bit now and those dollars can wade a lot, lot further than they could even 60 or 90 days ago.

Draye Redfern:

Now Bryan also mentioned TV and things like this. Now a lot of TV is always high priced and yeah, it's hard to qualify or quantify your exact ROI and it can be tough. However, these media stations and TV stations are having such a hard time of it that you can get massive discounts on whether it's a radio spot or a TV spot, whatever it is. And there's even some of them that we've talked with, there're actually people who are getting the lower rates of 40 or 50, basically half of what it used to be, plus a minimum $1,000 guarantee as far as revenue that will come from that ad. So if you're basically giving these news or radio stations, let's just say $5,000 and if you're not going to recoup your entire investment plus make an additional $1,000, they'll give you additional time slots until you actually make that up.

Draye Redfern:

That's how desperate some of these news stations, radio stations actually are for doing that. Now everyone's going to be different so I wouldn't say this is every market, but that gives you a sense of, like if Facebook is down 40% or 50% on their ad costs and news stations and radio stations and the local affiliates are down as well, you have massive opportunity to take advantage of that to double down on some of your marketing in order to get the message out there, assuming that your message is really dialed in like we talked about previously.

Draye Redfern:

That being said, we also talked about in the last episode some of the video messaging and video marketing you can do, voicemail drops and email drops, and I think now is not a time to put your head in the sand. Now is a time that you really need to decide what you're going to do, who you're going to be to your client base to really get more communication out there, more messaging out there, and really leverage this time. If you've got cash on hand and you could weather another 30, 60, 90, 120 days, then now is a wonderful opportunity to put some of that cash to work, to really invest in your business and have some pretty phenomenal returns if you're using the right medium and you've got the right messaging in there. So Brittany, anything that you want to unpack or discuss more on that side of things?

Brittany Anderson:

Yeah Draye, I mean, you covered some awesome stuff there and when you look at again, the overall theme for today, it really goes back to differentiation, right? It's just deciding that you're going to do something that's different than what other people are doing and you're going to take the opportunity to stand out. I mean, something that again, another example, Draye gave the example of how some stations are doing it, where they're actually guaranteeing you need to make your money back in order to make this work.

Brittany Anderson:

We've found TV spots that normally run in the thousands of dollars for less than $700. I mean, this is crazy. Amazing opportunity and I just think that something that we really try to live by and that Bryan has done such an exceptional job at instilling in all of us at Sweet, and all the different businesses that we're involved with, is that you cannot be afraid to compress your margins. When there's times where the opportunity is literally sitting on the table in front of you, like a golden platter, don't be afraid and make sure that you've set yourself up.

Brittany Anderson:

Obviously that could be a whole other podcast episode where we talk about how do you set your business up in a way that helps you to do things like that and make decisions and have that cushion, but just be smart about it and take advantage of the opportunities that are hanging in front of you. That low hanging fruit is there right now. So whether you decide to explore and let's just say you say, "All right, we're going to get ahold of a TV station or we're going to just do radio right now, or we're going to just go to the local area papers and we're going to go that route." Just go back to what Draye talked about in the last episode where you take advantage of one singular action, find something that works for you and then you can replicate it.

Brittany Anderson:

So once you've seen, "Hey, I've had great success with this type of ad," take it and spill it onto the next media source. I would bet that this is going to be an opportunity while yes, it's hot right now because we are dead in the midst of it, but this is going to be something you could take advantage of for probably the rest of the year if not longer. So locking in those low prices now is just something that it's nuts not to take advantage of. Before I go into our few top takeaways from today, Bryan, Draye, is there anything else at all that you would like to add that somebody could really take and take advantage of when it comes to marketing during these times?

Draye Redfern:

You mentioned a few things there. I love the idea of TV because it can go so far, but it could cost a pretty penny to produce something that you may want to actually put out there for distribution. I'm glad that you also mentioned newspaper Brittany, because a newspaper ad is very quick and very inexpensive to get up and operational out into the public and a radio spot is as well because you could literally just write a script, have that approved by your compliance department and the on-air DJ or personality or whoever it is can just read your script. You don't have to have the full production value there either.

Draye Redfern:

So there's options that you have to get things out in front of the audience that do not cost an arm and a leg and are not super time consumptive, that wouldn't really take a lot of time to get them out there. So again, just to tie my section off again, a singular action, find the one thing that you're going to want to do that you resonate, that fits for your practice and take that 80% imperfect action and just get something out there like we discussed last time. 

Bryan Sweet:

I would just quickly add if you just do one thing ... when you said singular action ... if you just do one thing, do something that you've never done before. If you've not done radio, do that. If you've not done paper, do that. If you haven't done TV, do that. Just do something different and see what happens.

Brittany Anderson:

I love it. There's something else that I thought about as both of you were sharing and that's a quote from Darren Hardy, founder of Success magazine. He has this whole concept and it's a little risque, but he says, "Get in their bed to get in their head." What he means by that is think about the things that are keeping your clients up at night. When they're laying in bed and they're sitting there and you're having those last minutes before you drift off into your peaceful sleep, your peaceful slumber, what are the things that are going on there?

Brittany Anderson:

That's really where you want to tap into when you're looking at formulating your messaging, when you're deciding what it is that you're going to communicate out into the public, you really want to understand what is deep in their brains and what are the things they're thinking about that you could be a problem solver to. That's what this is all about. Marketing in a nutshell is solving people's problems and showing them how you can do that. Getting them to take action instead of sitting in their own misery.

Brittany Anderson:

You have tools, you have resources, you have a service that helps people, and that changes people's lives. Don't keep it a secret, right? So if you're one that's a little bit adverse to marketing and that term is a little uncomfortable for you, what you're really looking at is communicating to the world or to your demographic, how the heck you can solve problems, how you can make their lives better.

Brittany Anderson:

As long as you're running a business that's ethical, that does what you say you're going to do, that delivers and that truly provides value, it would be a shame to keep it a secret. So that's what we're trying to encourage here is action and momentum so that you can take advantage of this opportunity to help people and to serve people and to make a huge difference.

Brittany Anderson:

When we look at the few top takeaways from today that you could look at implementing in your practice immediately, number one is to be conscious of changing your messaging and increasing the volume of it. We would much rather have a client come to us and say, "Whoa, back it down. I've gotten a few too many emails." Than being like, "Hey, I haven't heard from you in how long, so now I'm going to go find somebody else." That's the thing that you want to get in your head, is don't be afraid to communicate, especially during times like this.

Brittany Anderson:

The second is to invest in your marketing, compress those margins. Bryan and Draye both shared some really good insight on how you can really get a lot more for your money right now. It's almost like buying things on sale. That's the way to look at it, is that you are getting ads on sale at discounted prices that we have not seen before. There's your opportunity plus you're supporting another business so it's a double win. That's something that we highly recommend you take advantage of.

Brittany Anderson:

Also, the third and final takeaway is to get creative. Decide how you can leverage technology. If you're not one that is super versed in technology, find somebody who can help you. There are a million resources out there that can help get you set up on things that maybe you're not comfortable with. And again, it goes back to the whole 80% rule that we've talked about, is it's just finding something and going for it. Deciding that you're not going to strive for perfection, you're just going for action. That rounds out today's episode on embracing marketing and experiencing exponential growth during times of adversity. We will catch you back here next week.

Brittany Anderson:

Hey there, Brittany Anderson here. If you are loving what you're hearing on our Ultimate Adviser 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 ultimateadvisorpodcast.com. If you want to learn a few other ways that we could potentially serve you as an advisor, go check out ultimateadvisormastermind.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.