Today, I am proud to announce The Marketing for Financial Advisor Podcast!
We’ve partnered with top advisors and industry experts to create a powerful audio series to explain everything you need to know to grow your advisory firm through marketing.
We’ll cover what works in marketing today, how to avoid wasting money, what you need to know about technology, how to embrace a specialty, and so much more.
On the Financial Advisor Podcast, special guests and top advisors will join us to give you real-life examples of what’s really working for them. Here’s an overview of the season:
Episode 1: Introducing The Marketing Podcast for Financial Advisors
Episode 2: The Truth About Marketing for Financial Advisors
Episode 3: How to Stand Out From the Crowd with Marie Swift of Impact Communications
Episode 4: How to Get More Referrals with Bill Cates, The Referral Coach
Episode 5: What Makes Your Firm Different? with Maribeth Kuzmeski of Red Zone Marketing
Episode 6: The Best Websites for Financial Advisors with Brandon Brown
Episode 7: Search Engine Optimization with Mike Dobransky
Episode 8: Video Marketing for Financial Advisors with Jill Addison
Episode 9: How to Become a Specialist Advisor with Doug Rainbolt
Episode 11: Preparing to Sell Your Financial Advisory Firm with Ron Carson
Episode 12: Productivity and Technology for Financial Advisors with Tammy Hawkins
New episodes will be published weekly with various guests, including top advisors, tech consultants, and marketing machines who are excited to tell you how to use proven marketing strategies to grow a thriving practice.
Listen here now, or download and subscribe on iTunes to listen during your commute!
Transcription
Thank you so much for joining me! I’m Claire Akin with Indigo Marketing Agency and you are listening to the marketing for financial advisors podcast. On this financial advisor podcast we are going to teach you everything that you need to know about marketing for financial advisors. If you’re an advisor who is looking to grow their firm, you should listen to the entire season and it’ll teach you everything you need to know from the foundations of marketing, what works in marketing today, how to avoid wasting money, how to build your website, search engine optimization, how to embrace this specialty and so much more. I get a lot of questions from the advisors out there that I talk to every week on the phone about misconceptions they have about marketing or strategies that they are considering doing. I just want to lay it all out on the table for you and give away everything that I know about marketing in a podcast format.
You can also check out my book and Marketing Guide for financial advisors and if you need help doing your own marketing, go to indigomarketingagency.com. We are a full service marketing firm serving independent financial advisors. We do everything from websites to running your marketing for you to helping you create webinars that position you as a subject matter expert and get your clients. Today I just want to walk you through my background and then give you an overview of this season. It’s going to be so exciting with a lot of special guests and tons of value for the advisors listening. Just to give you a little bit about my background, my name is Claire Akin. I actually grew up in the financial services industry and my dad was one of the first independent financial advisors with LPL financial or back in the day, it’s so private ledger back in 1981 and he had been working as a life insurance salesman with prudential for a decade.
Once the concept of an independent financial advisor came out, he jumped on it and he was so excited to be able to offer his clients and more to be able to do their investments to offer comprehensive financial planning. So he was one of the original first independent advisers. And I actually worked with him growing up. I started with him when I was 16. I would do his filing, answer the phones, and then as I got older, after college I went back and worked with his firm. And then after I got my master’s degree, I went back and became an independent financial advisor with LPL financial and worked with my dad for several years and did mainly his marketing. That’s where my passion for marketing really grew and I started my company to help advisers like you who maybe have a small firm and know that they need to be doing marketing but don’t know how to do it on their own and don’t necessarily have the resources to hire a full time marketing person.
My firm allows people to outsource their marketing to a company that understands what works for financial advisors and the compliance constraints that we all face. We actually do all of your marketing for you with the minimum investment of your time because we know that you’re really busy and that you don’t have a lot of time to spend on your marketing. So if you’re interested in something like that, you can go to indigo marketing agency.com learn more about what we do and how we can help. It’s my mission to help advisors like you to serve more of the people who they love to work with. We talk about multiplying your best clients and that’s something that I got from one of the podcast guests this season. Bill Cates, who’s the referral coach. What we really want to do is we want to help you focus on what you do best and to help more of the clients that you love working with so that your marketing is easier because you know how to reach your ideal prospects.
What are the pressing concerns they face and which messaging is really going to resonate with them. And so I’ve seen my dad through the course of the past 30 or 40 years go through a process where it was easy for him to grow his business. He was growing rapidly, his growth was exponential and he was happy. Then things changed. Once the internet came around and he’s not as tech savvy as he would like to be, things got harder, and he started not being able to find the clients he wanted to work with. It became frustrating. It became overwhelming. He didn’t understand what he didn’t know about marketing. At the end of the day he just wants to help his clients and he wants to serve more people that he can help.
It’s my mission to help advisors, like my dad, to reach more people who they love to serve so that they can do more of the really important work that you guys are all doing. I know how important the work that you do is… you’re helping clients at the most difficult times of their lives. It’s one of the most important things in their life: their money, their security, their confidence, their hope in the future. It’s incredibly powerful the service that you do for people and for our communities. So it’s my mission to help you do more of it. This season we’re going to cover a lot and we’re going to give you a foundational marketing perspective. We’re going to start out with the truth about marketing for financial advisors. In this episode, I’m going to tell you what is really working and what no one wants you to know about marketing for financial advisors, how to avoid wasting money on marketing schemes that don’t work, why marketing is so challenging for advisors, what advisors are doing to get new clients today, and how to take something that’s confusing and maybe complicated and to turn it into a consistent repeatable process so that you can feel competent about the future of your business and how you can be in the driver’s seat of growing your business in the future.
The second episode in the financial advisor podcast, Greg and I do is with Maribeth Kuzmes of Red Zone Marketing and she’s phenomenal. She’s going to talk about what makes your firm different and how to unlock what truly differentiates your firms so that people understand why they would work with you and that you’re easy to refer because even people who don’t buy still understand what makes you different. So we’re going to talk about how to figure out what truly makes you different, how to stand out from the crowd, focusing on what clients actually care about.
In this episdoe of the financial advisor podcast instead of talking about what you think makes your firm different. We’re going to talk about how to use the language that your clients use about what differentiates you and how to use video and social media to capture their attention. Next, we’ll talk to Bill Cates and Bill’s of referral coach to financial advisors. He is a bestselling author and a hall of fame keynote speaker. He’s going to talk about how to get more referrals without being pushy or begging, how to turn your referrals into personal introductions that actually lead to new appointments with clients, how to set more appointments that stick, how to convert prospects at a higher rate, and we’ll talk about his proven referral advantage system and how you can take advantage of that. The next episode we’ll talk with Marie Swift. Now Marie is the president and CEO of impact communications and she’s a marketing and communications and PR expert for financial advisors.
She’s going to help talk about shooting videos, recording podcasts, improving your digital presence. We’ll go through everything about how advisors can stand out using these new technologies and opportunities. How to clarify your ideal niche, the easiest way to record high quality videos, communicating your specialty and how to communicate your specialty without alienating people, which is a big question that I get from advisors out there. After that we’re going to talk about your different marketing channels. The first thing we’re going to talk about is your website, which is critically important and it stands at the hub of your marketing efforts.
We’re really lucky to have an exclusive guest, Brandon Brown, who is with FMG suite, the leader of websites for financial advisors and Brandon actually and still work with him at FMDC and he has supervised tens of thousands of website builds for independent financial advisors.
He’s going to share with us everything you need to know when building your site. So what’s new and website designed today? What are the biggest mistakes advisors are making on their websites? How advisors like you can choose the best website platform for them, the three things that your website has to have today and how to build your website quickly without stressing. And so that’s a really valuable episode. I definitely encourage you to listen to it. After that, we’re going to talk about something related websites and that’s search engine optimization. You may not even know what this means. You may be confused or mystified by optimization. Take the expert in SEO in our industry, Mike Dobransky, and we’re going to walk through everything that advisors need to know about search engine optimization. First of all, what is it and why does it matter? What advisors need to know about SEL?
The three changes you can make to your website today to drastically improve your search engine optimization. Why you don’t need to spend money each month on SEO and why you can just do a one-time package to lay the foundation and then move on and the biggest SEO mistakes advisors are making. And we’ll also give you one tip of the one thing you can do to improve your SEO now and into the future forever. And so that’s going to be a lot of insight. It’s really going to uncomplicate SEO for you so that you understand what it means. You’re not overwhelmed by it anymore. And the next episode we’ll talk about video marketing. I get so many questions from advisers about creating videos using youtube and whether they should do that, how they can go about doing it. So we will join Jill Addison, the founder of FAA client machine and she helps advisors to create videos and put them on youtube and use youtube as a marketing platform.
We’ll cover how youtube can help you show up veteran search results, the three keys and videos that advisors should have on their websites. If you are only going to create three videos for your website, what are those three videos? How do use video to get people to know, like, and trust you, biggest mistakes advisors make with video and some success stories and how to create your first videos today. Jill is a great resource and she will walk us through how to get started on video marketing. Finally, we’ll have how to become a specialist advisor. So we know that embracing a specialty can help advisors be more successful in their marketing and it can help you charge a premium for your services and make it easier to find your ideal clients. But how can you go about choosing a specialty that’s right for you?
The next episode in our financial advisor podcast, Doug Rainbolt, who is a top consultant to advisors, we’ll talk about how to sane, how to evaluate the potential niches that you’re looking to focus on, how to choose which one is right for you, a proven process for defining your ideal client, solving the biggest problem that is facing your target market. How do I embrace the specialty you love and you using your specialty to market to your ideal prospects. And so he has worked with one of my topic size, our clients, and he really helped them to hone the specialty that led to their marketing success and exponential growth for their firms. So he’ll teach us how he did that and how he helped those advisors. So that’s going to be a really interesting episode. And then to give you even more kind of expertise on embracing the specialization or going to talk to one advisor who is doing it so well.
He’s growing his firm. He started with zero and he used his specialty to build up his firm and they’re growing at an astronomical rate. This is Landon level with kb financial advisors. And we’re going to review how he builds his firm from scratch using niche marketing, including how he originally chose his specialty, how he uses niche marketing to reach his ideal clients, his strategy to avoid alienating people who don’t fit as niche. Then his proven specialty marketing tricks, the one thing that he recommends advisors in order to embrace the specialty and really make their marketing more successful.
In the next episode, the second to last episode where I’m going to ask Ron Carson on the show. I get a lot of quick questions from advisors about how to do their marketing and their branding when they’re looking to sell their firms
A lot of the advisors we work with are getting a little bit older. Maybe you want to sell half your firm, maybe you want to completely exit and retire or maybe you just want to have the buy sell agreement and maximize the value of your firm should something happen to you. So I pulled in the top expert on this area, Ron Carson with Carson group and he is one of my heroes and mentors. He is a bestselling author. His firm has 15 billion in assets under advisement and he helps advisors all the time to prepare to sell their practices. He’s going to give us all of his secrets on what the selling landscape is like for advisory firms today. How advisors can plan to get top dollar for their firm and what are the things that advisors can do five or 10 years out to help maximize the value that they’ll get when they do sell their firm.
Then we’ll talk about the elephant in the room. Everybody wants to know what are the evaluations that he’s seeing for advisory firms? How much could you sell your firm for? Could you walk away? Could you sell your firm and retire with true wealth? That’s the big question everyone really wants to know. Right? And so then we’ll talk about the factors that impact the success of selling your firm. And so that’s going to be a really important episode. The final episode is a little bit of a bonus. One thing that I think makes advisors happy and successful is when they can use productivity and technology tricks to run their practice in a way that’s efficient and that empowers them to get everything that they need to get done complete and to sleep well at night. I’m going to bring in an expert productivity and technology guru, Tammy Hawkins, and she’s going to discuss how advisors can lead more efficient, less stressed and happier lives by embracing systems and technologies.
We’re going to talk about the top technologies that our advisors are using, how advisors can approach new technologies to be successful. The three secrets to being as productive as you can be. I’ll give you my favorite productivity rule that will change your life. How does stress last they get more done? And how do we improve your client service by embracing technologies in your firm? I really think this is an important episode to listen to and I know that it’ll make you more productive with less stress and be happier when you leave the office each day. So I hope that you enjoy this season and I am, I really appreciate you listening and being a part of indigo marketing. If you have any questions, you can always email me at [email protected] and I hope the season podcasting is really valuable to you. Thanks for listening.
About Claire
Claire Akin runs Indigo Marketing Agency, a full-service marketing firm serving financial advisors. It’s her mission to help independent financial advisors help more people through their incredibly important work. Claire is a former Investment Advisor Representative who holds her MBA in Marketing from the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego as well as a BA in Economics from UC Davis.