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, this is Don Anders. I'm here with Donovan Stull. Welcome to Marketing For Financial Advisors. And this episode is going to tick a lot of you off because we're going to talk about why nobody really cares about your website.
I know you think it's great, I know you've spent money on it, or time, or whatever else, but nobody cares. And that's because it's 2019, almost 2020, and everybody has a good website. Everyone. If you don't: hire somebody for $300 and build one. It doesn't cost a lot anymore, really easy. But what we see a lot of financial advisors doing is trying to get everybody back to their website. Every Facebook post, "Go to my website." Every Instagram, every YouTube, every E-mail, "Go to my website. Go to my website. Go to my website." Nobody cares. They don't want to go to your website. Your website is a glorified business card, the thing that they take a picture of and then throw in the trash now. Nobody cares about your website.
So, what we want to talk about now, today, is about what they actually care about; or how you should be viewing different platforms. So I know, Donovan, we've talked a lot about it. What we recommend doing is kind of looking at it as, "I don't have a website." You have multiple websites.
Donovan Stull: Five, six, seven websites.
Don Anders: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn. Those are all your websites and they should be treated just as so, correct? And with the same amount of care or maybe even more, right? Maybe even more than your actual website. And so we talked about this all the time and we see…
Donovan Stull: Who are the people who actually visit your website now?
Don Anders: The people who are thinking about doing business with you. Keep in mind, they aren’t doing research on you to see whether or not they like you. They're trying to figure out why they don't like you. That's how people do research. Think about it, when you go on and you're doing research on a backpack you're not looking at all the five star reviews.
Donovan Stull: You're looking for those one stars or seeing why people hate it.
Don Anders: Yeah. Why did you give them a one star review? Is it because you just give everything a one star review? Or is there a legitimate reason that you don't like this? So, when they go to your website they're just looking for that. Also, your competitors are probably the most amount of people who go to your website. And then I think a lot of times it is your clients’ kids, who are making sure that their parents are doing the right thing, and you're taking care of them, and they want to see who it is. But, I would bet that the majority of people who go to your website are competitors. Unless you're sending everyone there. But, organically, the majority of people who are going to your website are competitors trying to figure out what you're doing and if you have a leg up on it.
Donovan Stull: It always makes me laugh too when working with other advisors. They're always so excited and happy to see that their Google analytics show, "Hey, we had 500 website visitors this past month!"
Don Anders: Yeah, that's not good.
Donovan Stull: All right, fantastic. And so how many clients did you get that month?
Don Anders: I think that's bad because if you're driving ... If you have that many people that go to your website it's probably because you're driving them there, and unless you have a website that is specifically designed, at a high level, to capture leads-
Donovan Stull: That or you're selling something on your website.
Don Anders: Yeah. I mean, you want a lot of website visits. See and that's the biggest issue: financial advising is not like any other industry. And so a lot of people will listen to these podcasts or they'll listen to, "Digital Marketing Experts," and they go, "Yeah, you have to have a pixel set-up, and then you send them to your site and then you re-target them." Which is what you should do when you're selling a product, right?
Donovan Stull: Yeah, so if you put something in your cart on Amazon and you decide to walk away for whatever reason-
Don Anders: You start seeing it again.
Donovan Stull: Yeah. Every ad that you look at on the Internet from that point forward is, "Did you leave something in your cart? Did you mean to leave this?" Or you just have ads for that particular product again.
Don Anders: Right. And so it's because if you think about a sales funnel where at the top is everyone and then it slowly gets thinner and thinner and thinner. If you've put something in your cart you're at the lowest point in that sales funnel without actually coming out the bottom and so ... Now, I'm not saying that we should ignore that, but people who are visiting your website are not necessarily people who are at the bottom of the sales funnel. They might not even be eligible to be in the sales funnel; I think most of them probably aren't. So the whole idea of, "You have to get people to your website and then re-target," is the accurate way to market if you're selling a product to everybody, right? Because you need to figure out who's interested in your product.
But as financial advisors, you're not trying to sell a product to everyone. You're trying to find people that need your help in the right demographic, so instead of trying to send everyone to your website our recommendation is keep them with where they're comfortable. So, if somebody is a Facebook user, and they're on Facebook, where do they want to be?
Donovan Stull: They want to be on Facebook.
Don Anders: They don't want to leave. And guess what? Facebook doesn't want them to leave either because then you mess up their ad revenue. If they're on Twitter, keep them on Twitter. If they're on Instagram, keep them on Instagram. If they're on YouTube, keep them on YouTube. The only way that you should ever link to something else is if you're offering something like a book download, or register for a seminar, or something like that. And even then there's times that you don't even have to send them away.
Donovan Stull: You can still keep them directly on that website and still accomplish that.
Don Anders: A lot of times, yeah. So, that's really the only time you should really be sending them to your website is for a CTA, or to collect a lead. Now, if you have a website, or a landing page that's built-out, that's specifically designed to get people's information and to get them through a sales funnel or something like that? Great. Use it, drive them there. But our websites are just glorified business card, that’s all they are. So what we always recommend is you want to post natively to digital marketing. So, if you are posting on Facebook, you really want to just take a picture, or a video, or a blog post, or whatever you want to post, post it on Facebook and don't link away.
One of the biggest issues that I see is a lot is that everybody wants it easy. They go, "I need to be on Facebook, so I'm going to hire this company. It's going to be really easy, they're going to do everything for me, and they're going to put it on there." I'm not going to name any company names. Yeah, I'm not going to do it.
I'm not going to name any company names, but a lot of the really popular ones, especially for financial advisors, they're charging you an ignorance tax. Because you go, "I need to do it, and I don't want to do it, so this company's just going to do it for me, great." And what they're doing is they're linking, they're just posting links on your pages to other pages, to USA today to wherever else. Or sometimes there'll be posting things back to maybe your website or a landing page, but even then that is not what you want to be doing.
Unless you're doing a definitive call to action you don't want to be posting it back to your website, you won't be linking it back. And it's not hard to do a simple post. You know what we recommend if someone really doesn't know how to do anything, you know, "I don't know what to post, I don't know anything else," we provide our clients ... we have some content that we provide and if you're interested in that you can reach out to us. But, what we recommend, if you don't have anything else, why don't you just copy and paste from your website, right?
Donovan Stull: If you have a website, you have content.
Don Anders: Right. And especially if your duly licensed, if you're a FINRA SEC, which most people listening to this are, you also want to make sure you stay compliant. And so the nice thing about your website is it is compliance-approved, so you can just literally copy a paragraph from your website and put it on Facebook. You don't need a link them to that page. It's costly, it ticks off the people that are using it because they don't want to leave, and it also ticks off Facebook, or YouTube, or wherever else you're posting this. Instagram, Twitter. So, our recommendation is post natively.
Donovan Stull: And Don you talked about this, about just, "Oh, I'm just going to click here and that." But so let's talk about, you know, you post a video on YouTube, right?
Don Anders: Right.
Donovan Stull: And right there at the end it says, "Where else do you want to post it at?" And you can click Facebook, and Twitter, and so forth. You're not actually posting it. You're not actually posting the video on these separate platforms. All you're doing is putting a link on your Facebook page now, or your Twitter page, or whatever the case may be. And when they are scrolling through that newsfeed, it will look like a screenshot of the video. But the moment you click it, where does it take you?
Don Anders: It doesn't auto-play.
Donovan Stull: Yeah, it goes right back to YouTube.
Don Anders: So most people aren't going to click it because they're used to everything auto-playing.
Donovan Stull: Yes.
Don Anders: So, you put that same video directly on Facebook instead of putting the link it is going to auto-play and then they're going to see it. It's going to be a lot more convenient for them. Now, I will link to my YouTube page every once in a while because if I'm trying ... But, the objective there is trying to get them to subscribe to my YouTube page. So every once in a while I'll do a campaign where I try to get some subscribers to my YouTube page, but I'm doing it for a reason, I'm not just doing it because I'm lazy. And that's what most people are doing, and for a lot of digital marketing companies posting a link is literally control+C and control+V. And that's what you're paying $100 - $400 dollars a month for, it's someone pressing control+C and control+V.
A lot of people have asked if we'll do that and I am just morally against it and I won't do it because I just don't think it's the right thing to do. It's basically charging an ignorance tax to people who don't know about digital marketing. I'm assuming if you're listening to this it's because you want to learn more. So, if you have one of those websites, my recommendation is go look at your page. Go look at your Facebook page and if everything that you have posted is a link to another website, or it has another website in there, or has one of those URLs, I would suggest to stop that. It's not doing you any good. And instead take that same content and just post it directly on the site and stop trying to get them to somewhere else.
Donovan Stull: And people aren't going to associate your brand on these different platforms of, "Oh, you know, financial company ABC is so great, they always post these wonderful articles that take me to this location or that." They're not saying that. They don't want to have to click on it to go somewhere else.
Don Anders: And then often times what we'll see is you can actually do this yourself as well. If you want to see how many people are clicking on it, you can look at it'll say engagements, okay? So engagements will be a comment, will be a like, will be a reaction, or share. So, if you really want to see how many people are actually clicking on the ad all you have to do is take the likes, the comments, the shares, subtract that by the total engagement, and that's how many people actually clicked on the link because that's the other way they engage.
And so we had a client that showed us they're paying $2,000 a month to basically link to this third party website. And they would post once a week and they were getting a total of about four to five clicks per week. So, if you break that down, they're paying four hundred dollars per click to get to a third party website.
Donovan Stull: That’s a ton of money. And some of these sites that they're being sent to, the content isn't always 100% relevant to what it is you're talking about. There's a couple businesses out there that, you know, they write articles for these advisors and so forth.
Don Anders: They don't write those. Are you talking about the ones that link to the third party articles?
Donovan Stull: Yeah.
Don Anders: They don't write those, they just find the articles.
Don Anders: It's like, "The best fast food chains in California," and you're like, "Okay, but I'm in New York. Why do I care about that?” Or, you know, "Best ways to retire." "Best places to move when you retire." I don't want my clients to move away, you know? So you just have to be really careful. One of my favorite quotes and things is, "You're always going to pay for convenience." Right? So, if you decide that you're not going to go to the gym, you're going to sit on the couch and watch TV and eat ice cream? That's a lot of convenience you're going to pay for that, right? If you decide that you're just going to take the easy way out and pay a company and not look at it and have that convenience? Well, you're paying for that pretty severely.
And so there's always a consequence for that. And I would say your business ... If you're listening to this and you're looking to grow your business, your digital presence in your business is way too valuable to be completely hands off and have that level of convenience go with it. That being said, I'm not saying that you should spend all your time doing posts to Facebook and everything else. A lot of you that's not what you're good at and that's not what you should do, but find a company that's ... we have content, or hire somebody, or find a company that actually A: knows the business. And then B: is going to do it the right way. And often times it doesn't even cost you anything extra; it's less than what you're paying now.
Donovan Stull: Yes. There should certainly be a level of accountability too. You know, we're not saying that you need to know how to do all of these things 100% all the way through, but you should have a level of competency of knowing the difference between right and wrong. If you are using another company-
Don Anders: Well, that's the ignorance tax comes in, right?
Donovan Stull: Exactly. Or even if you have someone in house that's doing it, we've worked with people who say, "Yeah, we hired this social media guru, they're right out of college. They've got a great resume…”
Don Anders: "The digital marketing degree!"
Donovan Stull: Okay, fantastic.
Don Anders: That's the worst thing.
Donovan Stull: And then three to six months later we just touch base with them and see how they're doing. Hey, how's that person working out for you? "I don't know." Do you know what they're supposed to be doing? "Not really." Okay.
Don Anders: "I know that there's posts on my page." Yeah, so just the whole point of us doing this is we really want to educate people and advisers on kind of that we're more that modern digital-age, and we know that a lot of financial advisors trying to get into that. So, if nothing else, take this content and then hold some people accountable. And if they can't give you a good answer, if you're hiring somebody and they can't give you a good answer of why they're linking away and what the results are? I would say that you probably want to look elsewhere because a lot of the "Digital Marketing Experts," that are out there have never sold anything in their life. They've never. And a lot of times they're figuring it out with your money.
So, one of the things that I did was I saw the value of social media, figured it out with our company, my money, and then we had some people that came in and said, "Hey, can you help me with this? Can you help me with this?" And kind of turned into advisers platform, which gradually built up and now we help advisors throughout the country. But I would just be very cautious about ... You need to know what should and should not happen and you need to make sure that people aren't A: taking the easy way out and just making a lot of money because you don't know any better. And B: they're not making mistakes and learning the business and social media by making mistakes with your money, which a lot of people are.
Donovan Stull: And Don made a really valid point that the financial industry is a very unique industry.
Don Anders: Nothing's like it.
Donovan Stull: And when people come on board and say, "Yeah, I'm a social media expert," and so forth, and they can tell you everything that they've done and so forth. And they honestly might be fantastic at what they do but you put them in the world of finance and it's like a blank stare. It's completely unique and different. You do not market the way you do for anything else. The world of finance is completely unique in this aspect.
Don Anders: That's why a lot of people will think that digital marketing doesn't really work because they've hired all these people and they can't make it work. We had a guy who he hired this company, I don't even know how much he paid them. It was in the tens of thousands of dollars and they were one of the major marketing companies in the country, and they got him zero leads. For I think it's upwards of $50,000 got him zero. Not zero business, zero leads, because they just didn't know. They just didn't know what to do, so.
Well, all right, let's go ahead and finish this one up. Thank you so much for listening, hope to talk to you soon.
Donovan Stull: Thanks guys.