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.
Hello, this is Don Anders and welcome to Marketing for Advisors. A lot of people know me kind of as the digital guy or the social media guy. But that kind of came out of necessity. Back in 2015, I was in a minor car accident. Wasn't anything too big. But then the next day I started feeling some dizziness and then the following day, I felt it more. And then more and more. And finally guys at the point where I was almost bedridden for almost two months where I couldn't go work, I couldn't go out. I couldn't do seminars. And at the time I was doing a lot of seminars.
So I had already put the deposit down for three upcoming seminars. I had already scheduled the mailers, had already paid for them, everything else. And it was pretty much all just a sunk cost. I just had to deal with that. And ever since then, I thought, “You know what? There has to be a better way.” And while mailers are great and it's a fantastic way to uncover some assets when you can really do it accurately, the problem is, number one, they're costly. And number two, they're gone after you mail them. You mail them out and let's say you mail 10,000 pieces of mail. Well, about 9,000 of those are going to go directly into the trash. 900 are going to get a glance, quick read over, and then they're going to go in the trash. The other hundred that are leftover, they're going to consider it. And some of them are going to respond. Some of them aren't. Some of them might go in your fridge to save the date because they're coming.
But then after the date, they go in the trash, and then it's over. And then you have to pay for it again. I’m not bashing mail, all I'm saying is that it doesn't really last. And once you've paid it, if something like this happens, I've heard from advisors who have had $16,000 mailers that had already gone out and they can't do any of the actual events because the restaurant's closed from COVID-19 state closures. And that money has just gone. Now they're trying to convert those people to online, which we're going to get into over the next few episodes. But it's really tough. And I know this because I experienced it when I had vertigo.
So I was already in the place of, I knew it was possible, so I didn't want to deal with it again. I set my business up so I would never have to deal with that. The nice thing about digital ads is it's not a sunk cost. If you're doing a seminar in two weeks and all of a sudden the restaurant goes out of business or closes because of COVID-19, you can turn off the ad. Now what you've already spent, is spent, but you're able to turn it off and adjust and be flexible. Which in my opinion, modern day marketing, you really need to be able to be flexible.
If you're in this situation, my recommendation is, you have to just start learning some new techniques. If you're one of those old school advisors that are in growth mode and you just do a lot of seminars and you do a lot of radio and you do those types of things, well now's probably the time to start learning how to be a little bit more nimble, how to connect with people at home and learning these different techniques.
The main topic we're going to get into today is live webinars versus online webinars. This is a pretty big topic because a lot of times people think, well, it's a webinar, so I just have to be there and I have to record it live with people on the webinar. But what if people don't show up? What if you say something you shouldn't and it's not compliance approved? So there's a lot of risks to actually doing that. I did live webinars for the longest time because I thought that's the only way I could do it. I thought that I had to do all of the webinars live and be there.
And then recently I found a software called Webinar Jam. And what it did was it allowed me to record the webinars live, but then I could automate them. And by automating them, it makes them look and feel live, but I recorded them in the past. So the nice thing is I have webinars running that have been running since 2017, now it's 2020 and they're still going on. They're still live. They're still producing the leads. They're still producing me phone calls. And it's not like how we talked with the mailer, where after you pay that, whatever $10,000, two months later, there's no sign of it. It's all gone. This way these webinars are live and they're active and they're still producing leads.
The other benefit of doing automated webinars versus real live webinars is you can do them more often. So for me, most of my webinars, we have them go once a day, every day throughout the week. And then twice a day on the weekends. I personally do not work on the weekends. That is the time for my family. That is the time for my faith. That is the time for me, that is my time. I don't work on the weekends, but my webinars do work for me on the weekends, even when I am not. So that's another benefit of that because you might have clients or prospects, and the only time that they have to actually sit down and interact with you or your business might be on a Saturday at 8:00 AM when you're probably not going to do a webinar. Or you're not going to do a seminar or something like that. So that's another benefit there.
And then the last one, like we talked about, is from a compliance standpoint, you can record these live, but then you can run them through compliance. You don't have to worry about getting in trouble because if you mess up or if you say something you shouldn't, or there's something you need to change about it, you can always go back and rerecord it. And if you do it live and your software messes up, or your presentation messes up, or nobody shows up, then all of that time and effort and energy is basically wasted and there's no undoing it. So my personal recommendation is do them live, make them look and feel live, but automate them using the software Webinar Jam and Ever Webinar.
Now, the other thing that we've set up is a best practices webinar. So a webinar specifically about, basically what I did wrong and what I did right. So if you're thinking about getting into webinars, I can show you those two years of mistakes in that webinar. All right, thank you so much. And look forward to sharing some other digital tips with you next episode.