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, my name is Don Anders, here with Donovan Stull, and this is Marketing for Financial Advisors. And this episode we are specifically talking about why digital marketers suck at helping financial advisors. And that's not a universal truth, but from what we've found, it's true about 90% of the time for a few different reasons.
The first reason is because a lot of “digital marketers” are just kids who got out of school and don't feel like working with anyone. They would rather sit around and do digital marketing. Donovan and I are in a Facebook marketing group, and a lot of times the questions are, “How do you make your clients any money? I have a client, how do I make them money? How much should I charge? Or how do you actually run a Facebook ad?”
Donovan Stull: “How much money should I put towards the ad?”
Don Anders: Yeah, I spent $10 for my client and I charged him a $1,000. Why am I not getting any results? A lot of this is people who, they know more about digital marketing, they know more about social media than you. And so you'll think, "Oh, well they know what they're talking about." Marketing on social media and using social media are two completely different things.
Donovan Stull: Especially in this field.
Don Anders: Yeah. In business in general, I would say probably 80%, maybe 70% of “digital marketers” know how to run an ad. They know the different types of ads you can run. But that's pretty much it. They don't really know how to do advanced targeting. They don't really know the difference between lead gen, but they might be able to get people to your restaurant or sell your widget, or your app, or something like that. But most of them did not know. I would say from talking with people and chatting with people, they're really just trying to figure it out with your money.
But even consider the people who do know about digital marketing. I would say out of those people, still about 80-90%, do not know how to apply that to financial services. And the main reason is what we've talked about before. The entry, the risk of hiring a financial advisor is higher than almost anyone else. Maybe surgery is higher, but after that… If someone picked the wrong mattress, they get a bad night's sleep. If they picked the wrong car, they have to get a new car, and they're out a few thousand dollars. But if somebody chooses the wrong surgeon or the wrong financial advisor, it means devastation. It means that you're going back to work. You don't have any more money.
Because of that, we don't really sell products. What we sell is us, our knowledge, our ability. And even other people who sell other services like dentistry, and people who work with lawyers, and those types of things. If you pick the wrong lawyer, then for your car crash, then you just you don't get as much money. And so once again, it's still not as high.
So for financial advisors, our approach, and what we have to do to get people as clients, that's why you see so many financial advisors doing radio shows, and doing TV shows, and doing dinner seminars and everything else, because that's the process that we needed to take to get people to say, "Okay, this person knows what they're talking about. I'm comfortable with them. Now I'm willing to come in for an appointment." And since a lot of people don't realize that if you haven't been in the industry, or you haven't been an advisor, it's really hard to realize what advisors actually need. So you have to be really careful with that. And we've seen a lot of mistakes.
Donovan Stull: Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who again, maybe they really are great social media gurus or digital marketers. We're not discrediting any of those, but then you're going to have the ones who-
Don Anders: I'm discrediting some of them.
Donovan Stull: Some of them, yes. Now you will get the ones who are the self-professed gurus, and they know what they're doing, and they know what they're talking about. And we talked about this previously, having some accountability over these people. I get to sit here and tell you right now, “I'm the best to ever do this. No one else is better than me. And someone hires me, and they're just taking my word for it, and hoping for the best.” Right? And we see that happen to even some of our clients that we work with now.
With that said though is, this is just such a unique time right now with marketing, and doing things. And I work with a lot of different marketers who are very good at what they do already. And you introduce the social media side of things, and they're a deer in the headlights.
Don Anders: Yeah, it's a whole different process. And it's so complicated. And like Donovan said, we work with advisors throughout the country, and what works for us and our firm does not work everywhere. There's sometimes that something will work in north Texas, but it's not going to work in Houston. Something will work in Miami, but it's not going to work in Tampa. A lot of factors go in.
If you're going to outsource it, if you can bring it inside, if you have the money and the ability and the staff to bring it in house, that's what we recommend doing. So we actually teach a bootcamp. If you are interested, you go to AP, it stands for Adviser's Platform, bootcamp.com, or APbootcamp.eventbrite.com if you're interested in that. We pretty much teach what we do, and then you can go and apply it to whatever your unique business is, your area, whatever else. And we also do coaching as well. That's mainly what we do, is try to coach people's staff up to the point where they can do it in house. The reason why is every single business is different. It's like a thumbprint.
Donovan Stull: Because there's so many different factors that play into this. They're seasonal, they're situational. There's a lot of different factors into this. So what we do in our office, let's say, "Hey, we're going to run an event to get people to a dinner seminar. And we end up with 60 leads that sign up for the event. It didn't cost us that much. We're happy. We get about 40% of the people there. It's great. Fantastic." We do the exact same model for someone who's one state over, and we're like, "Hey, this worked for us." And they get a total bust on it.
Don Anders: Or in the same state.
Donovan Stull: Yes, even in the same state.
Don Anders: We were running ads for somebody in Sarasota the exact same way that we run ads in Orlando and down in Fort Pierce.
Donovan Stull: It just didn't work nearly as much.
Don Anders: It just didn't work. I think they are still ROI positive, but it was instead of having 30 people there, they had like eight and so. We deal with financial advisors everyday, and I have a financial firm, right? So this is what we do every single day, and for it still can be difficult for us, can you imagine a digital marketing company that's never worked with financial advisors before? That's why “digital marketers” suck for financial advisors, most of them, because it's hard. It's really hard.
And we are huge, once again, huge proponents that if this is important to you, digital marketing is important to you, try to bring it in house. I think it's way more important... It would be better for you to do that, and figure it out, and do it while Facebook is cheap. If you bring it in house for the long term it'll be cheaper. It'll be custom fit like a glove for you. You can break it in your own way. That's the way we recommend doing it.
Donovan Stull: Yeah, there's going to be a lot of different factors again that we talked about, but in line with Don's comment, have someone in office that has a little bit more accountability. Again, we don't expect the managers, the owners, to 100% understand this side of the marketing, but I like to use this analogy of, you might know how to change your own oil and that's fantastic. For the most part, it's probably more convenient for you to outsource it to someone else, right? You take your car to a shop, you pay your $30 to $50 to get an oil change, and you're done. Call it a day. With that said, if you know how to do it, you can know if it was done right or wrong, right? It's pretty simple. It doesn't mean that you have to do it, or even understand how it's done all the way through and through. What I'm getting at is, if you bring someone in house and you're doing it that way, then just being able to know, "Hey, this is right. This is wrong. You're not doing it the way that it should be done." Whatever the case, just the accountability of bringing in house is going to be a lot better.
Don Anders: Or at least knowing what you can and cannot do.
Donovan Stull: Yeah, and even if you aren't able to bring someone in house, if you still continue to use an outside company, a marketing agency, an ad agency, whatever the case may be, then yeah, it's good to at least have some accountability. And Don and I talked about this in a previous episode, of an ignorance tax.
And if you don't know what you're paying for, or what they're exactly doing, and they say, "Yeah, it should be X amount of dollars all the time." And you just say, "Well, I don't know any better." Then okay, you're not really understanding what your services are that you're paying into all that well. So just be really mindful of that. Have some caution with it. Don't be super cautious of pumping the brakes and saying, "Well I don't want to do it then if I don't understand it." There's certainly help out there. It's just a matter of which direction you want to go. And again, I think that key word to remain focused on: accountability.
Don Anders: And you're going to have to test. So if you are going to outsource it, my recommendation is, just like we talked about niches for your financial practice, find someone that their niche is working with somebody like you, right? And then I would not sign a contract where you're going to give somebody 20, 30, 40, 50, a 100 thousand dollars to run ads for you, just because they've done it for Coca-Cola. What my recommendation is, run a small campaign, maybe throw a couple of thousand dollars at it, and see. And if it doesn't work, then just move on. They didn't understand your area, your business, your brand, whatever it is as well, so.
Donovan Stull: There's certainly nothing wrong with testing out.
Don Anders: And you're going to have to do that yourself anyways.
Donovan Stull: Yeah. And if you're already doing this, and you're trying to find perhaps a digital marketer to bring on board, whatever the case may be, there's no harm in asking them to, "Okay, let's test run something." You do it all the way through. And you go from there. Obviously don't put a huge budget on it, but at least try to you to figure out what you'd be working with.
Don Anders: You can't be afraid. You can't be afraid to make mistakes. You will make mistakes. You are going to. You're going to have to spend some money, whether you're outsourcing it, or bringing it inside. People will come to our boot camps, they leave, and they need to make adjustments 3, 4, 5, 10 20 times before they get it right. So the one thing I would say is make your mistakes in small batches.
Or if you want to utilize something like our boot camp, or our class, or our coaching, the way I positioned it is, we've already made most of those mistakes, so if you're about to make a mistake, and you're doing coaching, or the bootcamp, we could say, "Well here we've tried this, and this is why it didn't work." And usually what we've seen is we can save advisors money, or company's money, for not repeating the mistakes that we've already made.
All right, well thank you so much. We appreciate it. Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you next time.