This is a transcript from the Marketing for Advisors Podcast. To listen, please visit mfapodcast.com and every episode is easily available and free to listen.
Don Anders: Hello and welcome to Marketing for Financial Advisors. My name is Don Anders. Here we have Donovan Stull. We work with advisors throughout the country and just kind of talking about different subjects that come up and we talk about just pros and cons of each. I've been in the business over 10 years. We've done a lot of events, kind of tinker on the marketing side, but we also work with other financial advisors. So it's interesting to see their viewpoint.
So last time we talked about, do dinner seminars still make sense? Should you do dinner seminars? Why would you do dinner seminars? Today I want to switch it up and talk more about purely educational events and I'd like to really talk about the difference between a library, a community center, a college, and even doing it at your office, an educational event, and just the pros and cons of it.
I have mixed feelings about educational events, but we can kind of get into it. So to start off, if we look at the traditional educational event, some type of digital marketing usually fills it. You could be paying for leads per, or you can be just paying a flat amount and then you'll get there and you're usually talking about social security or taxes and retirement or income or something like that.
The pro that I hear people talk about is, well yeah if they come, you know that they're interested. Those topics are all really good to get people into a room. So let's kind of get into it. So first off, out of all those different types of places, I think the best is a library.
Donovan Stull: People already associate libraries with education.
Don Anders: Yep.
Donovan Stull: That already helps out a lot. So when we tried to do ours, we'll do them at a local library in one of their rooms, community rooms I should say in their library. Like I said, people already resonate the library with education. So that's a good from people in it, it makes them feel a little less intimidated going to these things instead of try to bring someone into your office because e you have a really nice conference room.
Don Anders: Yeah, that's the scariest. I mean a lot of people want to try to get people into their beautiful office, but walking into a financial advisor's office is scary. They don't know if you're going to take out applications and make them sign it there.
Donovan Stull: Let's be honest. Most advisors probably do have very nice offices.
Don Anders: Yeah.
Donovan Stull: They probably have really nice conference rooms that can hold 15,20, 30 even more people in there, but at the end of the day you're walking into an advisor's office and like Don said, it's intimidating for people.
Don Anders: For first approach, you should really be on neutral ground. It's kind of like if you're coming up with a peace treaty for war, you want to be on a neutral ground. You don't want to bring them into your area because it's just not where they're comfortable with. So the nice thing about libraries is it's education. Colleges are associated with education as well. My one issue with colleges is college campuses can be a little bit hard to navigate and then you also have to be really careful because I've seen a lot of financial advisors who try to make it sound like the college puts it on. You really have to be careful with that.
Donovan Stull: Certainly some legal issues that you could run into.
Don Anders: Yeah, yeah. I mean you also want to leave the whole bait and switch coming into a "college class" and then switching it up and now you're a financial advisor giving out cards and talking about annuities or mutual funds or retirement plans. A, I have a moral issue with that. B, I really think you could get yourself in trouble with the regulatory boards as well. So I would highly recommend staying away from doing that. Now there's some colleges if they're the hub of the community and they're easy to navigate, great. I would say out of the different venues, I would say the number one place would be a library in general. Now your area might be different, but the number one place is the library. The number two place is a community center because those are oftentimes the hubs of the neighborhood. The last one would be your office. I see a lot of financial advisors who build out conference centers in their office and I would say that's really good to host events for your clients, but we see people build those out and then they use it once a month and it's really kind of a waste of space and real estate. I think you'd be much better off from a business perspective if you get more people in, you get a higher ROI and you'd use it more often. If you just used paid for a library or something for $100 for a room rental over a thousand square feet of your office at $30 a square foot per year. That's a lot of money. It's $30,000 a year.
Donovan Stull: Now with that I'm not going to completely knock trying to do it at your office, especially if you're in like a shared building where you have your own suite or whatever the case may be and the building is associated as this is just a public building.
Don Anders: Yeah. There's a conference center inside the building.
Donovan Stull: That building I understand, but yeah don't try to pack people into your office.
Don Anders: If you're going to have people in your office, from what we've found is you should really offer some type of refreshments or food. We started doing a pasta bar from Olive Garden. Going back to our last podcast about should you feed people or not? I mean, yeah I just feel like if you're bringing them in your office, we found it's a much better draw to offer them something to eat and afterwards maybe take them for a tour of your office and have your staff there. Yeah, I think it's really good. The topics that you can go over are great as well. We're going to get into that in the next episode of the benefits of the different seminar topics and the seasonality of some of them.
Yeah, so I would say educational events are great. You just have to really look at the cost per person coming in and the overall ROI of the event compared to what it would be for meals. We have some people who on average they have five to 10 people in a room, but they get half of them as clients. Then we have other people that will get 30 people into an educational seminar and get no one as the client. So it just has to be a right fit for your firm. If it is great, go ahead and use it. You don't have to pay for meals. It's a lot easier just to set up and tear down. You also want to make sure that you're careful about the pay per attendee model that a lot of these digital marketing companies are doing because their job is not to get you the best leads. It is not to get high quality people in the room.
Donovan Stull: Their job is, to the phrase, put butts in seats.
Don Anders: That's it. That's it. As many people that they can get in. They call them units. As many buying units, which I hate that term.
Donovan Stull: They're not even households.
Don Anders: Yeah.
Donovan Stull: They're buying units.
Don Anders: As many buying units as they can get in, they'll charge you for that and they don't care. They don't care that they've been to five of the other events they did in the area or that they're just completely not good fits for your firm. So just be careful. So what we do is we can, at our firm we we will say, "Okay, well what's your ideal kind of avatar client?" We'll try to match who gets the content there for that. There's also ways digitally that you can create what's called a look alike list. We're going to get into that in later episodes, but with those look alike lists you can create. If you have that avatar client, you can create other people who look like that and try to get them in as well.
Donovan Stull: I want to touch base on something here real quick and kind of banter back and forth on this. You had talked about having the moral high point when you talk about the bait and switch. So let's talk about those who market and try to bring people in under not necessarily a false pretense. That's not what I'm trying to get at. I think it's people who say, "Oh, we're going to host a educational event at this place and at this time," but you don't actually know who you're going to see or things of that nature. Now there are pros and cons to it. I don't deny that.
Don Anders: Yes.
Donovan Stull: Let's talk about the ones who always put the veil up first.
Don Anders: Yeah, so I mean the pros are you're definitely going to get more people in the room because they don't.
Donovan Stull: When you don't associate the brand name initially.
Don Anders: Right, right. When you use an "educational page." You're going to get more people in the room and mainly because they think that it's just a nonprofit or something like that. So my real moral objection is these companies that are set up as "nonprofits" to get people in a room and then their sister company charges you to get to pay for those people that got in.
Donovan Stull: I see that from time to time too. We have a nonprofit that's hosting this educational event at a community center library, fantastic. That's great. Then they're up there, they're presenting. Oh by the way, this is a educational event, but if you do need help our company, financial advisor X, Y, Z is also here to help. That's also us.
Don Anders: Yeah. Then there's one other con. The main con of doing it that way is if you just have an educational page, you're getting no residual branding done as well. So for instance, when we run an event or just last month my company, not the advisors that we work with, just my personal financial company. We ran events and we had a total of just on Facebook, we do other marketing as well. Just on Facebook, 250,000 impressions, a quarter million people. So there is a residual benefit of a quarter million people seeing your brand. Well it wasn't a quarter million people it's about 80,000 unique people and they saw it 250,000 times.
There is a residual benefit of people, seeing your content, seeing your name, seeing your logo, seeing your brand, seeing your face a quarter million times and you are losing that. So my question is if it's 20% less, so let's say you can fill up a room for whatever $2,000 on a purely educational page or you could do it for $2,500 on your page. Is it worth that extra 20% increase or whatever it ends up being? Is it worth that to get that extra brand recognition?
Donovan Stull: From that standpoint if you're talking about brand recognition, let's just say the results are the exact same. It's 50 people signed up on either one of them. $2,000 for purely educational note branding, 2,500 for your brand. I would absolutely say, yeah that little extra is going to be fantastic because now your brand is associated with that and now these people have seen your logo, they've seen your name. Now they're going to start doing some digging on you.
Don Anders: So for instance we were getting some work done on our house recently and we hired somebody to come do some drywall. The guy who came out to give us an estimate, he was in his sixties so the people that we target in the area that we target. He goes, "I know you." He goes, "Where do I know you from?" I said, "Are you on Facebook pretty often?" He goes, "Yeah." He's was like, "Oh yeah, I've seen your invites." He's never registered for an event. Never. He's like, "Yeah, you did a social security one recently at the library." Never registered for event. Never, but he had seen it.
Donovan Stull: The branding is there.
Don Anders: Yeah, I mean I think it personally; it's almost like having that extra 20% increase is like paying for a little mini TV show or radio spots or TV spots, but even more valuable cause a lot more people are on Facebook.
Donovan Stull: Well and you're actually when we run our ads, we're actually running it to people who we want to see it as opposed to a TV show that's going to cost you X amount of thousands of dollars per month and it's running at a certain time hoping.
Don Anders: It could be a 16 year old watching it or something. You don't know who you're paying to get in front of.
Donovan Stull: Yeah, I mean if your ad spot is on Tuesdays at 11:00 AM, are you hoping that you have potentially the retiree or pre-retiree watching it at that time? Or is it like you said, the 16 year old kid that's home from school watching whatever's on that channel?
Don Anders: Well I think that's a good conversation for a different podcast. So let's go ahead and wrap it up here and thanks for listening.
Donovan Stull: Appreciate it guys.
Don Anders: Thank you so much for listening to Marketing for Financial Advisors. If you want more information, you can visit our website at mfapodcast.com. You can watch one of our webinars, contact us, and also subscribe to our email list and we look forward to talking with you next time.