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Claire Akin:
Hi and thanks for joining me for Google Analytics for Financial Advisors. I’m Claire Akin with Indigo Marketing Agency and in today’s webinar we’re going to talk about how you can use Google Analytics to see your website traffic so that you can tell how your website is performing. Now, if you’re like most advisors, you’re probably not familiar with Google Analytics and you probably don’t really have a good grasp on how much traffic is coming to your website, what that traffic’s doing on your site and how your website’s performing for you. But there’s a simple and free way to get connected to your website traffic so that you can analyze it, view it and tell a lot of information about how your website is performing in your marketing efforts. So today we’re going to go through in 30 minutes or less, everything you need to know about Google Analytics.
So I just want to remind you to stay tuned at the end of today’s presentation. I’ll give you a special bonus, a special gift where you can get up and running with your own Google Analytics and your own website. You’ll want to stay tuned until the very end for that.
So I’ll tell you just a little bit about myself to get started. So I’m Claire Akin with Indigo Marketing Agency and what we do is we do custom marketing for top independent advisors and most of the advisors that we work with are specialists. So whether they work with physicians or dentists or widowed women or people who work at Qualcomm, they’re all specialists who really need custom content created and custom marketing strategies to reach their target audience. We work with several of Barron’s top 100 advisors and we do content marketing, so blog posts, articles, reports, social media marketing, event marketing and we manage their websites. As part of that, I run the Google Analytics for many advisors. I see kind of what’s normal and what’s not and I log into Google Analytics for a lot of different firms and so I have some experience there and I can help you out a little bit with my experience and if you’re a specialist advisor that needs custom content for your marketing, please get in touch because that’s exactly what we do.
So just to give you a little bit about my background, I’m actually a former investment advisor representative. My dad has been in the business for over 37 years. I kind of grew up working with him in high school and then after college and then again after grad school, I ran his marketing department for his advisory firm. I have a degree in economics and a master’s degree in marketing. I wrote the LinkedIn guide for financial advisors and I created the LinkedIn course for financial advisors. So if you’re interested in using LinkedIn to prospect, those are two really great resources for you and as I mentioned, I administer the Google Analytics for hundreds of advisors. So I have a lot of exposure there.
So let’s talk about Google Analytics and why it’s important. So here’s one real life story working with one of my clients. You can see his Google Analytics here and this was as part of our monthly marketing package, we actually look into Google Analytics every single month to make sure that the traffic on your site is doing what we want it to be doing, that it’s growing over time, that we’re having good successes with our marketing. So for this advisor, I noticed a huge bump on May 11, 2016 and so you can see that day he had 3,500 sessions. Well that day we came out with a really cool infographic for his firm. So he works with anesthesiologists. So we came out with a helpful infographic for anesthesiologists and it got 3,500 views in just one day and so after that it kind of went viral on Facebook and we ended up getting between 5 and 10,000 views of qualified traffic to his website, making people aware of what he does just with a piece of content.
But without Google Analytics, we really wouldn’t have known how successful this piece of content was. It’s really important to check your Google Analytics on a regular basis so that you can understand when you have big successes, you can copy them. You could do more of what works and in this case we ended up turning this report into a Facebook ad that we knew would do really well with his audience and so it’s a way of taking what works and using it in a different format to get the most mileage out of each piece of content that you produce.
So I also want to tell you a little bit about the Google Analytics course for financial advisors. So if you do need help getting your analytics up and running, there’s an associated course and you’ll get a discount today if you want to enroll. It tells you exactly step by step how to get Google Analytics set up on your website, so step-by-step videos for installing it on your website, whether you use FMG Suite or WordPress or advisor websites and then it also includes a free downloadable tracking template where you can put in your Google Analytics traffic each month so that you can see which of your blog posts are performing well. Is your traffic growing over time? All of the important metrics that you need to know and so you can save 20% today on that course and it’s a great reference.
Maybe if you have the time to get your Google Analytics set up or if you have somebody in your office, a staff or a member of your team who can take the time to get everything set up and start interpreting that data for you, the Google Analytics course has everything that you need to know.
So how much time and money do you spend on your website? So most advisors spend a couple thousand dollars getting their website up and running and then probably spend 50 or $100 a month on your website every single month. But is it working for you? Do you know who’s visiting your site? Do you know where they’re located in the world, what demographic information about them, how old they are, what gender they are, what operating system their computer’s using? Are they coming from a mobile device or a desktop device? How are people finding your site? So what are the terms that people are typing into Google to find your website? Which are your top performing webpages? So on your site are people going to your bio or your team page or maybe your services page? Until you know that, you can’t really dedicate focused time to improving your website if you don’t know which pages are the most visited and then how are people leaving your site? Which pages are inspiring them to leave and go somewhere else?
That’s important to know because if we can improve those pages and add some conversions to those pages, we can keep people from leaving your site and convert more clients.
So today we’re going to cover what is Google Analytics? Why do you need it? How do you use it? We’ll take a live tour and we’ll talk about which numbers you should track and then we’ll review how to get started and I’ll give you that special offer that I mentioned.
So what is Google Analytics? Google Analytics is now the most widely used web analytics service on the internet. It tracks and reports website traffic and behavior. So that’s kind of the textbook definition. But if you’re like most advisors, that doesn’t mean a lot to you. Really, what is it? Well, if you ever have worked on a car, you may be familiar with one of these systems that you can plug into your car to read the error codes coming out of your car. So this is kind of a translator between the information that your engine computer is giving you in the form of a code and what actually is wrong with your car. So it’ll give you some kind of code and then you can look up that maybe it’s an oxygen sensor or maybe you have a tire pressure sensor that’s out. But without this computer you really don’t know what’s wrong with your car and Google Analytics is the same.
It’s something that plugs into your website to tell you and translate the information about your website traffic into actual actionable data. It takes all the traffic and all the data from the visitors to your site into a dashboard where you can make inferences and you can understand your website traffic. You can learn more about the people who are visiting your site, how they got to your site, when they’re on your site, which paths that they’re taking and so it’s so much information that Google is really translating for us and giving to us so that we can understand more about the website traffic and so it’s actually the most popular web analytics tool and so it’s installed on at least 10 million websites. It’s used by 64% of the top 500 US retailers. So overall it’s about 82% of the top websites in the United States use Google Analytics. So it’s really the most popular. It’s the best. It’s also free. So it’s important to realize that this tool is completely free from Google and it’s just an amazing wealth of information.
So one thing to note about Google Analytics that a lot of people don’t understand is it gives you data on aggregate about the visitors to your site. But it doesn’t give you any personal information. Sometimes advisors will ask me, “Well can I get their email address from Google Analytics?” No, it doesn’t tell you any personally identifiable information about each visitor to your site. But in aggregate, you can tell information about the total of the people who are looking at your site. Also it updates about every hour. So that’s important to know as you’re looking at your site and we’ll take a live tour later. But it takes about an hour for any information from Google Analytics to get to your dashboard. So if you put out a big blog post and then you check on your Google Analytics and you don’t see anything, that’s because it takes about an hour to update and when you first get your account set up, it can take up to six hours to start showing traffic. So just be aware of those things.
So why do you need Google Analytics? So it’s the only way to tell how much traffic your website got last month. Is your traffic increasing or decreasing? Which pages on your site received the most traffic? Which of your blog posts were the most popular with prospects? How much of your traffic came from social media? I know a lot of advisors are investing time and money in social media. So we want to know how is that translating into actual traffic to your website and conversions and where should you spend more marketing dollars and there’s a lot of advanced Google Analytics techniques that we can use to see how your conversions are doing to set goals for your website. You can even assign dollar amounts to each goal. So say you know that each new newsletter sign up for you, each person who signs up for your newsletter is worth about $25 to you. We can assign a goal value of $25 to that action and then if you do Facebook Ads, you can see how well they’re converting for you.
If you’re spending two or $3 per click on a Facebook ad and then each signup is worth $25 to you, you can tell whether or not your campaigns are profitable. So it’s very helpful to kind of drive your overall marketing strategy.
How do you know if your marketing is successful? So here’s a great example. This is CRNA Financial Planning and they work with certified registered nurse anesthetists and here’s a fun infographic that we did for them and this is the annual salary for CRNAs across the United States. It’s kind of interesting because there’s a wide variation in salaries. So you can see the highest salary’s in Montana. It’s $243,000 per year and the lowest salary is just down the road in Arizona, 120,000, so almost half as much and so you can see there’s a great disparity in the salaries between the different states and so if they had this graphic for financial advisors, you may be interested in looking at it and it turns out CRNAs were very interested. We got at least 5,000 views of this infographic. But we wouldn’t know that without Google Analytics and so we can see that so many people came to this page on their website to view this infographic and we could tell in particular where that traffic came from.
It ended up coming from Facebook. A lot of CRNAs shared this post on Facebook and that’s how we got so much new traffic to the adviser’s site and so without Google Analytics, we wouldn’t know how successful this piece was.
Here you can see how successful your social media marketing is on Google Analytics. We can see the different social networks, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and the different traffic that they’re getting. In this example, you’re not doing very well on Twitter. So you can either double down on your Twitter strategy to try to bring that up or you can discontinue your Twitter strategy and put all of that energy into Facebook, which is really working for this advisor and so it can allow you to make informed decisions about your marketing in general.
How are people finding your site? So this is a really important clue that Google Analytics gives us is it will actually tell you the keywords that people are typing into Google to find your website. So a lot of the information Google keeps about from 40 to 60% of the information they keep and they won’t show you. But they’ll show you the other big chunk of information. So from this we can see that people are searching for CRNA tax bracket, anesthetist jokes and CRNA business owners. Those are keywords that we could potentially create blog posts around or we could create content or Google ads strategies around those keywords because we know that’s something that people are searching for to find this website. We know in particular taxes came up a few times for this search and so we were going to want to do some more tax content related to CRNAs in the future.
So let’s talk about how you use Google Analytics. So in general, first, if it’s not set up, we’re going to need to set it up. So everything is free. But at first you’ll need to get in general Google account. If you have a Gmail account, that’s your Google account that we’ll use to create your related Google Analytics account. If not, we’ll just need to set up a Google account and then we’ll create your Google Analytics account and we’ll get the tracking code for your website. So this is a unique code that Google assigns just for your Google Analytics account and then we’ll put this code on your website so that Google Analytics knows where on the internet to look for traffic to populate on your dashboard and so without this they wouldn’t be able to see your website. So this unique little piece of tracking code allows them to see your website out there on the internet and to report all of the traffic.
Which numbers should you track? So I really recommend when you’re getting started tracking three main numbers. So the first is traffic to your website. So how many people are coming to your site each month? That’s just a very important metric to track to understand if your traffic is increasing or decreasing and how you’re doing compared to other websites and other advisors out there. The next is acquisition. So how did people find your website? Are they coming to you because of emails that you’re sending out or are they coming through social media or maybe they’re coming through organic search when they type in words on Google and they find you. So it’s important to learn how most of your traffic is finding your site and then the results. What are people doing on your site? How are they behaving on your site and how are they converting into actual leads? So maybe you have a get started now button on your site and we want to know which blog posts on your site are inspiring people to get started now.
That’s a great goal that we could set and then we can look at the reverse goal path and we could see that maybe your top one or two blog posts that are driving actual conversions and then we can do more of this similar marketing to increase your conversions in the future. So these are the key numbers that you should track and if you do take the Google Analytics course for advisors, there’s a free downloadable template that features all of these numbers and allows you to easily track these numbers.
So let’s jump in and take a live tour and I’ll show you exactly what Google Analytics looks like.
So the first thing that you’re going to want to do is go to google.com/analytics. We’ll sign in.
So this is what your dashboard looks like. The first thing that I’m going to want to do is change the dates. So it will default to the last week. But let’s actually make it a little bit bigger of a date range just to give us some more interesting information. So I’m going to make it January 1 to today and then you can see all of these peaks and valleys and this is the traffic to this site and so this is actually my own site. So you can see each week when I send out a blog post to get a bump in traffic and then this is an area of time when I actually changed my website. I updated my site and so we didn’t have Google Analytics connected and then I got my new website and here you can see the traffic goes back to those peaks and valleys. So the first number here, actually let’s jump over to real time because this is kind of interesting. So if you go to real time, you can see how many people are actually on your site right now.
So right now you can see that zero people are on the site. But if you go over, I’ll go over and jump onto my website and pull it up and then we should see this number. Oh, and now there’s one person on my site and you can actually see the pages that people are on. You can see where they are in the world. So here we have somebody in San Diego. That’s where I am. So it’s very accurate, real time data that you can get from this tab. Let’s go down to the audience tabs. If you go to the audience and then overview, so here you can see total sessions, users and page views.
So sessions is how many times somebody comes to my site and spend some time on there before they leave. So anytime that you come to my homepage, maybe look at a blog post and then you exit the site, that counts as one session. Through the past few months we’ve had 2,500 users with 3,500 sessions. So obviously there’s some users with multiple sessions and you can see that I’ve had about 6,100 page views and so that correlates to the 1.77 pages per session. That means for the 3,400 sessions times 1.77 pages per session, we get 6,100 page views and so that’s interesting just to track and we know that the average session duration is one minute and 44 seconds and so that’s about the time it takes to watch a video or to read a blog post and so most of my videos are about 90 seconds.
So that makes perfect sense and most people spend about a minute and a half perusing a blog post. So that’s great to know. The bounce rate is how many people leave your site. So they don’t actually interact with your site. So you want to try to lower this as much as possible. If your bounce rate is over 90% I would say that’s a big red flag. We’re going to want to do something. But if it’s under 70% that’s within normal ranges. Don’t get too worried about that and the other thing that I want to point out from this page on the dashboard is new visitors versus returning visitors. So you’re going to want to keep track of this because most advisors who aren’t doing active marketing have a very, very high returning visitor portion.
So your returning visitors, maybe 90% of your traffic and that’s because most of your current clients come to your site to log into your accounts to get access to see their accounts. But the problem with that is those aren’t potential new clients. So we’re going to want to increase your new visitors high enough so that this actually represents new traffic coming to your site that could be a potential new lead for you. So most advisor websites, this will actually be flip flopped and so your returning visitors will be a greater proportion than your new visitors. But we do want to aim to get your new visitors over 50%. so take a look at this metric and just realize that if all of your traffic is returning visitors, it’s probably all of your current clients. Let’s look at a little bit of the different information that we can get from the audience tabs.
So one of my favorites is demographics. So we can learn a little bit about demographics, age, interests, things like that, gender. Geography is interesting. So looking at the location can give you a lot of information. You can see most of my traffic is from the United States. I actually do business in the US, Canada and the UK and so this represents my target market perfectly. If you see really high levels of traffic from countries that you don’t do business in, it may be something having to do with spam that you’ll want to address and so once in a while I’ll see really high traffic from Russia and that’s a spam issue that we’re going to want to put a spam filter on your account. So we’re filtering out that traffic. Within the United States it’s interesting to see where people are.
So I’m in California. So most of my clients are in California. So that’s great. I also have clients nationally. So we’re pretty spread out. So Texas, New York, Florida. So this accurately represents where I do business. So that’s perfect and you can even drill down and see where people are in California, so San Diego, Encinitas, San Jose. So this is really interesting. So it’s just interesting to know where your traffic is coming from and for most advisors it will be really localized traffic, which is normal and appropriate. Another tab I want you to take a look at is the mobile tab. So if your website is not mobile responsive, you’re going to want to take a look at this tab and see what percentage of your traffic is coming from a mobile device. You can see about 70% of my traffic is coming from a desktop computer. But about 24%, 23% is coming from a mobile device so a phone and then about 4% is coming from a tablet.
So I really want to make sure that my site looks good on a mobile device and a tablet because it’s over a quarter of my website traffic. That’s important to understand so that you can make sure your website is displaying properly for the visitors that you’re getting and then let’s also take a look at technology. So we’ll take a look at the browser and operating system that people are using. You can see most people are using Google Chrome. I know my site displays great on Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox. So these are all the browsers that people are using and so it’s important to just be aware of those and there’s websites online where you can test how your website looks in each of these browsers and on each mobile device and so that’s important if you want to make sure that your website’s displaying properly for these people.
So that’s the audience tab. After you take a look at the audience tab, the next thing we want to take a look at is acquisition. We’ll click on the acquisition tab and this tells you how people are finding your site. So you can see most of the traffic to my website is direct traffic. So they’re typing in Indigomarketingagency.com and so you can see a large majority is direct. But the second largest majority is organic search, which is great because these are people typing in maybe marketing for financial advisors and they’re typing it into Google and so it’s important to know how much of your traffic is organic search traffic and so you can see they’re typing in Indigo Marketing Agency or a broker check button.
I did a blog post on the that you need to have the broker check button on your website. So that got me some traffic. This is important just to see the different channels of how people are getting to your site. Social media is a big driver for me. So you can see here that people are coming through social media and then referral traffic is another website that’s referring traffic to you. So I write blog posts for GuideVine, for investment news for publications like that and at the end of the post there’s always a link to my website. So that’s where this referral traffic is coming from. So if you partner maybe with a CPA or maybe with a real estate agent in your area and you are listed on their website, that’s where the traffic will come up. So you can see how much traffic is coming to your site from their site.
So it’s important to just kind of be aware of that and let’s dig a little bit deeper into the social media campaign because I know a lot of advisors are interested in how social media is translating into people coming to your site. So you can see on this social media tab of my 3,400 total sessions, 621 of them came from social media. That’s great. LinkedIn is where I do most of my social media marketing and so you can see about 69% of my social traffic came from LinkedIn. But I also get traffic from Facebook and Twitter and so it’s great to see the different traffic there and just be aware of how your campaigns are performing. I don’t do any paid ads on Facebook or Twitter. So this is all free traffic from me as a result of my social media efforts. So let’s talk a little bit about behavior. So what are people doing on your site and so for that we’ll go to the behavior tab. We’ll go to overview and this is where it’s really interesting for me.
I think I could spend all day looking at the behavior of visitors to a site. Here you can see the behavior and so this tells you which page people are coming to on your site and so if it just has a slash, this means your homepage and so if you go to your website, typically it says yoururl.com/ and so that’s your homepage. So you can see a vast majority of people are coming to my homepage first, which is great and then you can see this as a blog post that I did on how to get a virtual assistant and that is my second most visited page for this date range and then my third is my monthly marketing package and so you can see all of your different blog posts or your different pages of your website and how they’re performing for you here. Another way to see this, so this lists the individual pages. But my favorite way to view the traffic to the different parts of your site is actually in site content and content drill down.
So if you take a look at this view, it gives you the main sections of your site. So you can see on the other view, it appeared that my homepage was my most popular. But if you add up all of the traffic to each of my blog posts that we saw, actually my blog is by far the most popular page on my website.
So gives me about 36% of my traffic. So you can see each week when I write a blog post about marketing for advisors, that’s helping me get 40% of my traffic on my site and this is very common for advisors too. For most of my advisors, their blog is about 50% of their website traffic. The monthly marketing services that my firm offers gets them about a 50% boost in traffic each month and so that’s what we want to see. So we can see most of the traffic comes to the blog and then the homepage, recent blog posts within 2017, the monthly marketing package and my story, my social media products and some information about my book and so these are how you see the main functions of your website and how much traffic that they’re getting for you.
You can also take a look at your landing pages. How are people coming to your site? Which pages are they landing on and you can see this will give you really your top blog posts, so “How to Prospect on LinkedIn,” “Creating Your Client Avatar.” These are all my top blog posts recently and then let’s look at behavior flow. This is really interesting. So this will tell you when people do come to your site, what are they doing after they come to a certain page? So this is my homepage and let’s view the traffic from this segment. You could see from my homepage, people are coming to the homepage and then they’re going to the monthly marketing package page or the blog or my story. So those are kind of how they’re transversing through my site and then once they get to the monthly marketing package, then we can see that go to the social media optimization page or they go back to the homepage.
So you can see how people are actually looking at your site and which pages they’re going through and if they go to the blog, then they take a look at these blog posts. It’s just interesting to take a look at the ways that people are using your site and kind of the path that they’re taking through your website and so this is the behavior flow tab and then of course there’s conversions and so conversions are interesting. It’s kind of an advanced technique. So I’m not going to cover too much today. But you can set goals and assign goals and value and so you can see one of the goals that I’ve set is for people to take a look at the LinkedIn course for financial advisors and you can see I just set this up yesterday.
So within the past day we’ve gotten five people to go to that website. I can take a look too this page on my website and so what I can do is look at the reverse goal path and figure out how are they getting to that page? I really want them to go to that page and learn more about my course. How are they getting there and it looks like they are either coming in directly to that page, so maybe through some ads that I’m doing on LinkedIn or they’re actually getting there from my speaking page. So that’s interesting. So they read about having me speak at their events and then they go to this page and so maybe I’ll want to play up the LinkedIn course on speaking page a little bit more to get more people to go here. So through this reverse goal path, you can do a lot of manipulation for your traffic to try to improve your conversions. All right, so I think that’s everything I want to cover in the live tour. Let’s jump back into the presentation.
So I know there’s a lot of information that we covered. There’s plenty of resources to help you learn more. So you can learn everything that you need to know to get Google Analytics up and running on your account. So the first thing you’re going to want to do is get your step-by-step setup instructions and then I have a Google Analytics master class and so that will talk about everything really taking a deep dive into analytics so that you can see specific information. We give examples from other advisors sites. I show you step by step how to go through your website traffic and track it on a weekly or a monthly or a quarterly basis and so the Google Analytics masterclass is a great way to kind of become a Google savant, if you will and then we’ll talk about some advanced tracking and reporting and we’ll give you examples from top advisors, website traffic so you can see how your website traffic compares and then we’ll give you that free downloadable tracking report template.
So this is all a part of the Google Analytics course for advisors and you can save 20% today if you’re interested in having you were a member of your team take the course and get up and running.
So normally it’s $99. Today it’s only $79. You get lifetime access to the online video course. You can complete the whole course in less than two hours. I think it’s about 90 minutes start to finish. There’s videos. There’s supporting resources and more and you can always re-watch the videos. There’s step-by-step videos to get your Google Analytics account up and running, to create your Google account, to install the tracking code on your website. So it’s everything that you need to get started and to become really a master at Google Analytics.
So thanks so much for joining me today. I want to mention the free gift that I have to offer you. If you really aren’t interested in the Google Analytics course for advisors and you really need somebody to do this for you, I’m offering a one time offer of $200 where I will actually install Google Analytics on your account for you and prepare the Google Analytics report that I mentioned so that you can review your website traffic over the past six months and take a look at what’s happening on your site, get Google Analytics up and running and get some preliminary data so that you know the most popular pages of your site, how you’re doing on social media. So I’ll do all of that for you for a one time charge of $200. So shoot me an email if you’re interested in that and then we can jump on a quick phone call and talk about how your traffic looks and just go over all of the important parts of that report for you. So thanks so much for joining me.
If you want more information on our other courses, check out How to Supercharge your LinkedIn Profile, the LinkedIn course for financial advisors, our newest course Websites for Financial Advisors and then coming soon is webinars for financial advisors and this is going to be a really cool course. If you’re interested in how to market your business using a webinar, just like I have today, I’ll show you exactly how financial advisors can take advantage of webinars and start bringing in new leads through webinars. That’s going to be a really exciting course. Thanks so much for joining me and have a great rest of your day.
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A born strategist, Jordan always starts with “why” when brainstorming marketing tactics with her financial advisor clients. With recommendations rooted in data and industry best practices, she loves growing advisors’ awareness of their strategies’ positive impact on their business.
Jordan obtained her bachelor’s degree in business administration (with an emphasis in marketing and management) and her master’s in communication and media management from Colorado State University. Before joining Indigo, Jordan already had 6+ years of financial services experience and 8+ years of marketing/project and campaign management experience under her belt—making her a powerhouse addition to the team! Outside of strategizing for her advisors, Jordan’s hobbies include pottery, hiking (when she’s in shape), and ordering delivery or takeout. She is happily married to her husband, Max, and a dedicated dog mom to her oversized golden retriever, Kai.
Anne Wheeler is responsible for a variety of administrative tasks as well as updating social media pages for clients. Anne enjoys the creative side of her position and the ability to collaborate with the team to help advisors get started with Indigo.
Anne holds a bachelor’s degree in communication from the University of Tennessee. Outside of work, she enjoys walking, baking, spending time with her husband, Rick (a structural engineer), and two sons, Thomas and Turner. Anne loves being a full-time mom, and appreciates that Indigo gives her the opportunity to work part-time while still caring for her boys.
Leading the Indigo team with heart, Hugo Fernandez is passionate about helping our financial advisors attract a flood of their A+ clients with sustainable marketing campaigns. He enjoys running companies that are wildly successful and wearing a black t-shirt every day of his life. When his two favorite things come together, you have an average day at Indigo.
Hugo Fernandez is also CEO of Indigo’s partner company, Just Digital, and author of The Client Acquisition Blueprint. He has personally helped hundreds of entrepreneurs grow their business through his proven blueprint for creating an EPIC marketing strategy and online presence.
Kelli McLeod plays an integral role at Indigo while overseeing the Account Services Team, providing customer service, getting financial advisors onboarded and in serving as their primary point of contact during that process. Her team looks to her for her leadership and decision-making abilities For Kelli, the most rewarding part of this role is working with clients one-on-one to ensure they’re happy and that their needs are met.
Kelli has a bachelor’s degree in communications and public relations from Pacific Lutheran University. More recently, she’s done extensive work in the corporate housing and property management industries.
Kelli currently lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with her husband, Ian, who is an officer in the U.S. Army, and their two sons, Zachary and Cameron. When she’s not working, you can find her running or hiking, attending group fitness classes, and cooking. Kelli’s also an avid book club enthusiast, so be sure to reach out to her if you’re looking for a new read.
Sara Dressler manages all systems and operating processes while overseeing several departments. Sara is responsible for supervising many activities within Indigo and identifying areas of improvement to better meet company goals. She functions as the bridge connecting management to every department.
Sara has a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a minor in communications from Pacific Lutheran University. She leverages this degree, along with her years of experience as a virtual assistant, to keep our company running like a well-oiled machine. Sara is happiest when spending time with her family. Her three young boys and life as a military spouse keep her busy, but she wouldn’t trade it for the world. She lives an active lifestyle and loves working out, getting outside, and watching sports with her family (whether it’s on TV, at her kids’ games, or in the backyard).
Elizabeth Reider is a woman of many talents. She spent 10 years as a Chief Marketing Officer for a top-level independent financial advisor, and since her entry into financial services, she has networked and become friends with many advisors. Elizabeth admires their empathy, knowledge, and passion for their work, and has seen how independent advisors are more than professionals providing investment and planning advice; they are trusted confidants, life coaches, and guides. Over time, they become a part of their clients’ extended family—and she loves coming alongside that. (Check out this video to hear directly from Elizabeth about why she loves working with financial advisors.)
As Director of Marketing, Elizabeth helps get the word out about how partnering with Indigo can take an advisor’s marketing to the next level and beyond to grow their business and increase their productivity.
Elizabeth earned her bachelor’s degree in management information systems from the University of South Florida Muma College of Business. She also holds a life, health, and variable annuity license, which gives her a special understanding of the many products and services advisors offer. Originally from Clearwater, FL, Elizabeth loves to travel and has visited 12 countries, including extended visits to eSwatini, Africa, to visit family and assist with humanitarian relief programs. She has seen firsthand how independent financial advisors are providing advice to their clients that outpours into the lives of their own families, staff, community, and sometimes across the globe. When she’s not working, Elizabeth enjoys attending orchestral and theater productions with her husband, David, and taking their son, Julian, to art museums, as well as family evenings in the backyard playing baseball with her son and shih-tzu poodle, Wrigley. She is also an active participant in overseas humanitarian work—using her skills to make a difference in the lives of others.
It’s Katie Cress’s mission to help financial advisors reach their ideal prospects through custom digital marketing. On any given day, you can find Katie meeting with new financial advisors to learn more about their marketing goals, who they love working with, and why they’re passionate about helping others. Her favorite part of her job is meeting new advisors every day and continuing to learn how each firm and individual advisor is different, and using her marketing and small business background to help them craft a game plan that empowers them to grow their business and enhance their services. Often described by loved ones as a “helper” and “caretaker,” Katie is passionate about advocating for her advisors’ needs and supporting her coworkers to help them succeed.
Katie holds an MBA from Xavier University and a BA in Economics from Ohio University. A Midwest girl for life, she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband, Brandon (who’s also a marketing guru), and their three kids, Charli, Lucy, and Teddy. She and her husband also own Clean Eatz Cafe, where they use their collective marketing prowess and love of food to create a welcoming space for employees and hungry customers alike. Katie is passionate about and for small business owners, being raised by her father who was an entrepreneur, being one herself with her husband, and working with them every day at Indigo. She loves the spirit, creativity, and drive of entrepreneurs. When Katie’s not working or helping run the family business, she enjoys working out with her husband at Orange Theory, loving on her three kids, and cooking delicious food.
Lori Koepke plays a major role as a liaison between Indigo Marketing Agency and its wonderful clients. She works directly with our advisor clients on their marketing strategies, marketing calendars, article creation, editing processes, compliance approvals, deployment of their content, and more. Lori enjoys helping strategize and be a support to her clients, and loves the camaraderie among the Indigo team members.
Before joining the Indigo team, Lori was a schoolteacher for 10 years. She has a Master of Education and Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education from Concordia University in Portland, OR. She was born and raised in Vancouver, B.C., and lived in Vancouver, WA, for 25 years before moving to Boise, Idaho, where she currently resides with her husband, Jeremy, and four wonderful kids, Sophie, Tanner, Jonas, and Violet. In her free time, you can find Lori reading, watching football, and driving her kids to all their activities.
Watch this video to hear why Lori loves working with Indigo.
Heidi Wilson thrives on helping advisors create an online voice and streamline their marketing efforts. With her mother being a retired financial advisor and her brother-in-law currently a CFP® professional, she’s passionate about taking the marketing pressure off of advisors so they are able to focus on their clients. She loves when advisors tell her something we did for them helped; it can be as simple as taking something off their very busy plate or helping them land a new client with one of the articles we wrote. With broad-based consumer and B2B marketing experience, Heidi is constantly thinking outside the box and brings a fresh perspective to the Indigo team.
Heidi holds a bachelor’s degree in public relations from Florida State University and hails from Tampa, Florida. Her husband, Chris, is in the U.S. Army, and as they are constantly moving, they take every opportunity to explore the new areas where they’re living. Some of their favorite places they’ve called home include Hawaii and New Orleans. Heidi is thankful for the opportunity to work remotely with Indigo, which allows her to take her job with her, no matter where the Army moves her family next.
Watch this video to hear why Heidi loves working with Indigo.
Jillian Segrue acts as a liaison between clients and the Indigo team, using her 12 years of customer service experience in fields such as healthcare, financial services, and risk management to help hone their message and deploy it effectively and efficiently. Jillian enjoys building unique relationships with each of her clients as she uniquely helps them reach their ideal target audience.
Jillian has a bachelor’s degree in healthcare administration and a minor in business administration from SUNY Brockport. Originally from Rochester, NY, she currently lives in Columbus, GA, with her husband, Tim (an Army captain), daughter, Macie, son, Henry, and two cats. As a military spouse, Jillian appreciates the flexibility Indigo provides—allowing her to juggle motherhood and excelling in her career—and its unmatched positive, supportive, and uplifting company culture. In her free time, Jillian loves to read, shop, and go running outdoors (just not in the Georgia heat!).
Amanda Laskey works with clients one-on-one to develop and implement marketing strategies that help spread the word about who they are and how they help. In her role, Amanda strives to deliver outstanding customer service to our clients. She is tech-savvy, an independent problem-solver, extremely organized, an excellent communicator, and thrives on helping others. She appreciates the ability to work remotely in a collaborative team environment while supporting her family.
Amanda holds a Bachelor of Arts in Education and a Master of Arts in Inclusive Education from Seton Hill University and has over 10 years of experience in secondary classroom teaching and over 3 years as an Executive Assistant. A proud Army spouse, Amanda resides in Pittsburgh, PA, with her husband, Brandon, their two sons, Jackson and Harrison, and their sheepadoodle, Waylon, and goldendoodle, Cash. Outside of work, Amanda enjoys spending time with her family, relaxing at the beach, traveling to new places, dessert, and all things Disney.
Beverly Anderson is the go-to contact point for advisors to create a targeted and cohesive marketing strategy that is unique to their specific goals. She loves seeing her clients experience positive results from their marketing efforts, and as a world traveler, she appreciates the ability to work remotely and connect with clients from any country.
Beverly holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Oregon State University. In addition to traveling, she enjoys making music as a singer/songwriter and anything outdoors (she’s an avid snowboarder and rock climber). She and her partner have a rescue pup, Toro, a former street dog in Cabo, Mexico, before they adopted him. Beverly has three older sisters, with whom she is very close, and they all, along with her mother, live in the Portland area. Although she spent the first half of her childhood in Fountain Hills, Arizona, Beverly considers Portland to be home.
Watch this video to hear why Beverly loves working with Indigo.
Kasey Yhap’s commitment to her clients is the driving force behind her work. Her diverse educational background (a bachelor’s and master’s degree in vocal performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Music and a master’s degree in communications from Syracuse University) has equipped her with the unique skill set required for success. Kasey’s strong communication skills and creative mindset, combined with her passion for helping her clients, make her a valuable asset to the team.
In her free time, Kasey stays active and maintains a healthy lifestyle through yoga, CrossFit, and spending time outdoors. These hobbies complement her professional life by allowing her to recharge and bring new ideas to her work at Indigo.
Dan Corcoran enjoys being on the front lines of financial advisor marketing, working directly with advisors to help them build a strong marketing plan to get their firm’s message out. Working remotely can be a challenge as talking to others, brainstorming, and sharing experiences recharges him; he maximizes touchpoints to connect with others to make every day at Indigo rewarding.
Dan holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He enjoys drone photography and videography (he owns his own drone business, Forward Focus Photography), sports broadcasting (he was a hockey broadcaster for four years prior to COVID), spending time with family, camping/hiking, running, swimming, and road biking.
Originally from Sun Prairie, WI, Dan has three siblings, and prior to joining Indigo’s team, he worked for an RIA in Madison for two years.
Jennifer Farrior is Indigo’s go-to for all things proofreading and editing. Her attention to detail is unmatched, and she takes pride in making sure every article is clean and concise before it heads out to our financial advisors. She says, “Even a single typo can affect an advisor’s credibility, and we strive for perfection when it comes to how they’re presented online.” As Lead Writer, Jennifer trains and manages the team of writers, and also writes and collaborates with team members to create Indigo’s blog posts and promotional material.
Jennifer holds a bachelor’s degree in English from UCLA. In addition to her role at Indigo, she runs her own copy editing and proofreading business, She Proofreads LLC. Jennifer hails from San Diego, California, but now lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her three kids, Joshua, Julia, and Joel, and goldendoodle, Dexter. She loves working at Indigo because it provides her with the income, flexibility, and the community she needs as a stay-at-home mom. Outside of work, you can find her spending time with her kids, friends, boyfriend, or working on a puzzle while watching Netflix.
Lisa Gaines spends her work days uploading blog posts to our clients’ websites and LinkedIn profiles, drafting emails, and making adjustments to content as advisors request. Lisa has learned a lot as a long-time member of the Indigo family and has enjoyed seeing the processes evolve to become more streamlined and efficient over time. And she loves working with the amazing Indigo team!
Lisa is a proud alum of Texas A&M University, where she received a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance. As a military child, Lisa feels as though she grew up everywhere; however, she claims central Texas as home where most of her family is originally from. She currently lives in Fort Hood, Texas, with her husband, Korey (an active-duty Army officer), and two kids, Madelyne and Jameson. As a military family, Lisa moves quite a bit—often to areas where the job market is small. She loves that Indigo provides her with a steady job she can take with her wherever she goes. When she’s not working, Lisa enjoys dabbling in interior design, binging a good Netflix series, and spending time with friends and family.
Read more about why Lisa loves working with Indigo.
Joining the Indigo team after more than eight years of experience working with advisory and fintech firms, Andrea is passionate about helping advisors across the country use digital marketing strategies to grow their business in innovative and effective ways. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Berkeley College in New York.
Originally from Guyana, South America, Andrea now lives in the Long Island, NY, area with her husband, beautiful daughter, Sophia, and their puggle, Rex. When she’s not tackling her marketing duties, Andrea enjoys practicing yoga, taking long walks, watching thriller movies, and spending time outdoors with her family. An animal lover (specifically dogs), she spends time raising funds or supplies for shelters when she can.
Sarah Robichaud uses her love of spreadsheets to create engaging content calendars for our clients’ social media pages. Sarah holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Salisbury University and a master’s degree in marriage and family counseling from Liberty University. In addition to her role at Indigo, Sarah volunteers as a virtual administrator for Army Wife Network, a nonprofit organization that aims to empower and educate military spouses through blogs, podcasts, and various other resources.
Born and raised in Maryland, Sarah currently lives in Rochester Hills, Michigan, with her husband, Andrew, two children, Emily and Logan, and two fur babies, Penny and Chewbacca. As a military spouse and mother, Sarah loves working for Indigo because of the flexibility it affords her, allowing her to continue to build her career while frequently relocating around the globe and working on her own schedule to accommodate a busy lifestyle. Sarah also loves Indigo’s supportive team atmosphere. Outside of work and volunteering, you can find Sarah enjoying time outdoors with her family, typically running, camping, or traveling. An avid traveler, she’s visited 16 countries and is always planning her family’s next great adventure.
As a natural problem-solver, Peter Wardenaar uses his skills to help financial advisors find new ways to grow their site traffic and attract more clients they love. Peter enjoys the dynamic nature of his role; the challenges are never the same as every situation is unique and requires a different approach. But don’t let Peter’s technical prowess fool you—he also has quite the creative side! Before joining the Indigo team, he worked as a first-grade teacher and university English professor in Cali, Colombia.
Peter has bachelor’s degrees in education and in music from Portland Bible College and a master’s degree in music production and technology from Berklee College of Music. In his spare time, he loves writing and recording music, graphic design, engaging with people, and studying leadership and theology. Peter is also one of the most well-traveled people you’ll ever meet! He was born and raised in the Netherlands but lived in the Pacific Northwest for over 12 years. Today, he resides in Cali, Colombia, with his wife, Gloria Isabel, and their three kids, Emanuel, Paloma, and Violet.
Kourtney Kearney is a data-driven woman with a knack for coding. On any typical day, you can find her building web pages, troubleshooting bugs in code, and setting up automations to make life easier for our clients. Thanks to her technical background, Kourtney has a vast understanding of the inner workings of websites and the data associated with them. She’s always on the lookout for new technology that will help us improve our workflows so we can focus on what we do best—helping financial advisors grow their business. Kourtney enjoys the variation of tasks and loves the challenge of taking an existing website and making it better without completely rebuilding it.
Kourtney is originally from Newark, CA (Bay Area), but currently resides in Antelope, a suburb of Sacramento, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Art History and Curatorial Studies. Outside of work, Kourtney spends her free time reading, playing volleyball, baking with her two sons, and hanging out with family.
Adrian Bachini works on tasks requiring technical knowledge and other various administrative tasks. A software developer by day, prior to joining Indigo, Adrian had very little knowledge on how nontechnical positions operate. His position at Indigo allows him to both learn and experience a variety of platforms and gain more knowledge about how to maximize marketing initiatives.
Adrian holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science with a specialization in software technology from De La Salle University Manila. Adrian considers himself somewhat of a workaholic, with a full-time day job in addition to working with Indigo. When he’s not working, he enjoys watching documentaries, action movies, and anime, and also loves cycling on muddy downhill trails or cross-country rides, playing video games, and simply resting when he can. He is also a licensed commercial pilot and flies in his free time; he obviously also enjoys traveling. Adrian lives with his family and more than a few pets (11 dogs, 6 cats, a few birds, and fish)—he has more pets than humans in his home!
Adriana Escalante thrives on creating an online representation that looks and feels true to our financial advisor clients as she builds their websites to best represent them and their businesses. Her experience working on travel and tourism websites motivates her to make sure every site she works on is exciting and engaging to web visitors. A graduate of University of Texas in Austin, Adriana double-majored in International Relations and a Liberal Arts program called Plan II. She also received a certification for front-end development from a coding academy in Austin, which has equipped her to serve as a great liaison between developers and clients.
After living in Austin, TX, for most of her adult life, Adriana now resides in San Antonio, TX (a city with a ton of history and many things to do), with her partner, Russell, and their dog, Abbey. She also has a brother and sister with whom she’s very close and tries to see a few times a year. Most of Adriana’s hobbies revolve around nature. She grew up spending lots of time on a sailboat or at a beach, and her family has a small cabin in Creede, CO, where she spends half the year hiking, camping, skiing, or snowshoeing (depending on the season). When she’s in Texas, she tries to get out most weekends to kayak. A Texas Master Naturalist, Adriana loves learning about all the plants, birds, and animals in her home state. She also dabbles in making stained-glass suncatchers!
Kaitlin Thornal helps clients onboard as they begin their marketing journey with Indigo, and she loves meeting new people and learning new things. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Mass Communication/Public Relations, International Studies, and a minor in French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as a Master of Arts in Communication and Leadership Studies from Gonzaga University.
Kaitlin was born at Fort Lewis, Washington, but she moved around a lot growing up, spending the most time in North Carolina. She now resides in Fort Moore, Georgia, with her husband, Mason, and their four children, Caroline, Mason, Jack, and Bo. Kaitlin’s favorite place to live has been Europe (Italy, Ireland, and Belgium) and she would go back in a heartbeat! In her spare time, she enjoys long-distance running, reading, and spending time in the mountains of western North Carolina.
In her integral role, Samantha Triglia schedules social media posts, deploys email campaigns, and updates Google Business Profile pages for clients’ new blog posts. She also assists with lead generation/tracking and other administrative tasks. Helping out wherever she’s needed, Samantha appreciates the opportunities she has to learn and grow in her position. She says, “I love being a part of the team, especially when content deployment involves many moving parts and collaboration to get done and ready to go.”
A former teacher for 14 years, Samantha holds a Bachelor of Arts in Childhood Education from St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She also holds a Master of Arts in Middle School Earth Science Education from CUNY Brooklyn College and a Master of Science in Educational Administration and Leadership from the University of Scranton. (Yes, TWO master’s degrees!) While in college, Samantha was the assistant to the Chief Compliance Officer of a brokerage firm on Madison Avenue in New York City for high-net-worth individuals and families, so she’s quite familiar with the types of clients Indigo serves.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Samantha currently lives in Rockaway Beach in Queens, New York (the place the Ramones song is about!), with her husband, Matt (a Navy veteran and currently a New York City Firefighter), and their three sons, Matthew, Thomas, and James. Outside of work, Samantha enjoys spending time with her family riding bikes on their neighborhood boardwalk and going to the beach. They love to travel, including yearly family trips to Hershey, Pennsylvania, and Universal Studios in Florida (they’re big Harry Potter fans!). Samantha also stays active exercising and playing on a women’s softball team and a co-ed beach volleyball team with her husband.
Amanda wears a few hats at Indigo, bringing value to the team by creating custom social media posts for advisors, assisting with the onboarding process of new team members, and tackling behind-the-scenes team tasks. She loves to collaborate with our amazing clients and supportive team members.
Born and raised in Fort Myers, Florida, Amanda holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from the University of Central Florida and a master’s degree in education from North Carolina State University. She worked as an educator for about a decade before pivoting to a career in writing and marketing. A Space Force military spouse (former army), Amanda and her husband, Michael, are currently located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with their two children, Mikayla and William, and two fur babies (a cat and a dog). When she’s not reading or writing fiction in her spare time, Amanda enjoys hanging out with family, hiking, trying new foods, and traveling.
A marketer at heart, Adam finds satisfaction when consulting, strategizing, and implementing strategies to improve his clients’ business. He specializes in organic and paid social campaigns, as well as email and SEO optimization.
Adam holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Central Florida and a Juris Doctor degree from Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Raised in Boca Raton, Florida, by his mom (an event planner) and dad (a private boat charter captain), Adam currently lives in Astoria, New York, with his wife, Olivia, who works in pet care. When he’s not cooking up killer marketing strategies, he enjoys role-playing games, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and reading non-fiction and philosophy books.
With her marketing expertise, Melanie Valdez leaves no stone unturned when helping clients hone their marketing strategy. She loves interacting with clients and brainstorming new ideas to enhance their marketing results. No two days are ever the same, and that’s the way Melanie likes it!
Melanie holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Western Washington University as well as an MBA from Western Governors University. When she’s not rocking her role at Indigo, she enjoys cooking (trying out new recipes every week), painting, and discovering new restaurants with friends. She and her husband, Dat, love to travel and go on walks with their dog, Brutus, a pomeranian-chihuahua whose personality is definitely not proportionate to his small size!
Joshua spends his days developing client websites, implementing automations, and troubleshooting website issues. He enjoys the challenge of working with websites while simultaneously learning new tips and tricks to optimize them for maximum efficiency.
Originally from Pulupandan, Negros Occidental, Philippines, Joshua holds a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, and in his free time enjoys playing computer games and watching anime and movies.
Hugo Fernandez acquired ownership of Indigo Marketing Agency from founder Claire Akin in 2022. Leading the Indigo team with heart, Hugo is passionate about helping our financial advisors attract a flood of their A+ clients with sustainable marketing campaigns. He enjoys running companies that are wildly successful and wearing a black t-shirt every day of his life. When his two favorite things come together, you have an average day at Indigo.
Hugo Fernandez is also CEO of Indigo’s partner company, Just Digital, and author of The Client Acquisition Blueprint. He has personally helped hundreds of entrepreneurs grow their businesses through his proven blueprint for creating an EPIC marketing strategy and online presence.
To get in touch with Hugo, email him or connect with him on LinkedIn.