Marie, the floor is yours. All right. Well, hello, and welcome back, everyone. You are joining us for the third session in this series where we've been talking about building trust and earning credibility in a digital world. And today we want to hear from all of you. How are you using niche marketing strategies in your practices? So again, my name is Marie Swift. I am the longtime emcee of the program, and I'm joined today by Johnny Swift. On the next slide, if you'll go to that one, Colin, who Colin is here as a volunteer helping drive the technology, and we appreciate that he'll be following my lead along as each of the slides and the surfing that's going to happen, the web surfing will be occurring here as soon as we get to sharing and taking you on a visual live tour and hearing from some of you as well. So again, just as a reminder, in the first two sessions in this series, we had practitioners come in session one and session two to talk about how they're doing their niche marketing and how they're benefiting as a result. So today, this is our interactive session. We're 75 minutes. So sit back, relax, and be prepared to get interactive. Also, Johnny will be showing, as he did in the past two sessions, some additional examples, and we're just going to be following your lead, too, depending on what you're sharing with us. And we may ask you to come off of mute, be on camera, and to interact with us today. So here we are, Johnny and Marie, and now let's jump into the reminders of the questions. The questions that we have asked the other panelists in the past two sessions, and we turn the table now on you, are describe your niches and how and why you've doubled down to serve them. So if you have an avatar, an ideal client persona, what are you doing on your website with your marketing? We want to hear about that. We also want to hear about who are your niches and how has it helped your firm and just how you're getting the word out there. So we have a volunteer. I think that last slide just reminds us that we want to talk about being hyper-relevant. So let's go to that next slide. All right. Keep going. All right. So this is where we're going to pause. We have a volunteer, thank you all, who responded to the pre-session survey to let us know if you'd like to share something, if you were bringing a show and tell or just wanted to converse about something. And so, Johnny, do you want to set the stage? We're going to be talking to Kevin Estes first from Scaled Financial Planning. Johnny. Yeah, Colin, if you'll pull up Kevin's website, that would be great. And Kevin, I'll take you off mute in a second because you can probably say more about this way better than I can since this is your baby. But I want to show Kevin's website here. And he has a really specific niche and seems like he's been working on a really cool piece of content geared towards this niche. But he serves T-Mobile employees and their families. And so across multiple different levels of T-Mobile employees, it sounds like. But the whole website is kind of geared towards that audience. You'll notice even the colors, the branding really speaks to T-Mobile employees. There's a lot of content here. And it seems like you are open to serving other types of people, Kevin, but you really dig into this niche of T-Mobile employees. And this is even a more unique and specific niche than a lot of the panelists we had and other examples that we've shown. So it really allows you to have a very specific lane and position yourself as one of the top financial planners and experts to help employees of T-Mobile. So, Kevin, I'm going to take you off of mute here and tell us what else you want to add about your website and your niche in general. One second. Here we go. All right. We should be able to hear you now, Kevin. Yeah. Appreciate it. Can you hear me all right? Yep. Perfect. Well, I spent nine years in corporate finance, financial planning analysis at T-Mobile, and I couldn't find anybody who would really work with T-Mobile employees specifically. A lot of people had questions. Even people in finance were very confused by things like, what is this employee stock purchase plan thing? And what do I do with RSUs? And so over time, as I've been going down my journey through the financial independence community, I realized there was a real need here. And that's when I decided to go ahead and launch Scaled Finance to be able to be theoretically targeted to T-Mobile employees. However, about half the folks that are reaching out are actually not T-Mobile employees. Well, that's a good problem to have, right? And so what percentage of your clients would you say actually are T-Mobile employees? About half of both clients and of my pre-clients, as I like to call them. Okay. Very cool. So, and I've noticed that a lot of the content you produce is geared towards this audience and you're working on a new piece of content. You want to tell us more about that? Yeah, the latest and greatest is I'm putting together a calendar. A lot of people recommend a service calendar for clients. And I see you're bringing it up already. So thank you very much, Johnny. My thought here is that I needed kind of all over the place with my marketing on LinkedIn and Facebook and YouTube and on my website. And so I felt like I needed a little bit of structure and something that would tie back to the needs of T-Mobile employees and their families each month. And so, yeah, you see here, this is kind of an annual draft of things that I think are important, somewhat color-coded. So if it's magenta or pink, it's actually not the T-Mobile magenta deliberately for trademark reasons. But if it's that color, it's like a T-Mobile benefit. If it's blue, it's typically a goal or long-term projection. If it's gray, it's taxes. And if it's black, it's something that's kind of personal to them, to their family. And so that's my thought here. And I'd love to get your take on it, Johnny, is to think about taking that other monthly calendar, I guess about 12 slides, and post one of those each month and then add content for each of those elements throughout the month. I think it's a great idea because it gives you a theme each month that allows you to follow up each month, do an email newsletter, break it out into different social media posts. You can do a blog post or some type of piece of content around each of these checkboxes here. And so it kind of lays it out throughout the year, but it really breaks it up into a nice way where you can be consistent in the kind of applicable and relevant content that you're sending to your audience. And most importantly, I think that you're providing a lot of value around a lot of different topics that provides value, but also positions you as an expert resource and the perfect person to be able to help them with all of these different areas. I love it. I'll chime in. I think it's a great way to be hyper relevant and to be spot on with your messaging and to provide great value. I really like the way that you've chunked it out and that you're going to fill in the gaps with hyper relevant content and just in time content. That's fantastic. Colin, if you would go back to that master calendar where it's color coded. When I looked at this, I wasn't quite sure what do these colors mean? And now that you tell me that it's color coded for a reason, I thought, oh, now I get it. Is there an index at the bottom of this? Are you planning to say what is the magenta mean versus the gray versus the teal? Oh, that's a great call. And I haven't done that yet. I was trying to find a way to do it, but I do appreciate that it needs to have a legend. Yeah, a legend would be great. So I called it an index, but that's the word legend. A legend would be great. What else could we do with this? Could we add some icons to make it more easy to digest? Or I don't know if you wanted to do it by quarters or if you just did this in rows and columns because four fit across, three rows form months per row. How could we add? Are you set on having it be one page? Oh, I like having it to be one page just because it's easy to, it would theoretically be easy to consume. However, I just didn't love that it was so busy. And that's why I went to the monthly calendar review for that. It was that I just, it, I got a little overwhelmed. I showed this to some people and the feedback I got from, it was 50-50. Half the folks were like, yeah, just give me the list. And the other half were like, this is too much. And so I tend to try to create content that is just enough. And if they would like more, they can double click somewhere and be able to see that. I love the idea of icons there, Marie. Is the word potential important to you? I think the fewer words, the better. Maybe at the very top in the headline, it says potential T-Mobile employee financial calendar. It was more of a compliance concern. I didn't necessarily want to have this come across as advice. So I don't know if you, I'll probably take that back to my compliance team and see what they think about that. It's a good call out. Yeah, yeah. Well, the fewer words, the better. And why not just assume that it works for potential and current T-Mobile clients slash employees? I'm thinking about just adding something above the January, February, March, April, even if it's just like a fancy numeral. Like we know month 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, all the way up to 12 instead of an icon. But I get that it's pretty busy. So I mean, just consider that whatever you could do, maybe put a box around each of the months, whatever you can do to make it more digestible and then run it by some people that you trust. Could be clients, could be staff, could be a spouse or a mastermind study group. Appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, I have run it by all of those individuals to some extent. And I want to touch it up and then take it back home. So Kevin, you said you're planning to produce pieces of content that are kind of geared towards each of these items. Are those going to mostly be in the form of blog posts? Or what are you thinking? I tend to cross post things quite a bit. So I'm a bit lazy and not really wanting to create a lot of new content. So I tend to create something for LinkedIn first, but that's been my primary engine for getting clients. And then cross post that to Facebook. And recently I started putting it on my Insights page, my blog page on my website as well. Let's pull that up, that page up on the website, Colin. But so it sounds like for each item, it's more like a social media post length, like a few sentences long, maybe a paragraph or so, not like a full blog post for each topic. Well, I had been kind of in between on that where I had started building out longer content and in fact hit the cap on one of my recent posts on LinkedIn. And then I received feedback that that would potentially be better as an article. So I started creating an article and then posting it as a bit more of a snippet. However, people tend to see the image and see the snippet and then they don't click on the article. So I don't really know what to do with that, but it's an interesting insight. Yeah. So you do have the ability to write those articles that live on LinkedIn. I would almost prefer and recommend that you just put them as blog posts on your website. Even if they seem like relatively short blog posts, that's okay. I do agree that writing a super long LinkedIn post, most people are not going to read that. They'd rather read it within an article on LinkedIn or click over to your blog. And the benefit of putting it on your blog rather than doing it as an article on LinkedIn is, number one, you're going to be driving traffic back to your website, which is great because then they can potentially click around and click on how it works, what it costs, find out more information about actually working with you. But number two, having all of those topics on your blog is going to be really valuable from an SEO perspective because all of those topics are going to be really keyword rich. I'm sure within those posts or those articles, you have a lot of relevant keywords that people are searching for and are going to help your website show up higher in search results when people are searching for those topics. So I think the LinkedIn articles are good and you could cross post and do both. Do the LinkedIn article just so it kind of lives on your profile there and is really easy and another place where it's visible and people can find it. But I think that starting to make the blog more robust would really be effective from an SEO perspective. Love it. Appreciate it. And yeah, that's where I was heading as well. I've been posting at least three days a week on LinkedIn and typically Facebook as well. And so I have plenty of content. It's just a matter of putting it on my website and getting some of that SEO juice you talked about. Yep, exactly. And it looks like this first one here, is that a video that you did? It is. You can always do short vlogs as well and put them, kind of vary the way that you're presenting this content and give people choice. Maybe some topics are written and on a LinkedIn article or on the blog in written form, but also doing short videos is a really good way to get that topic across, give people choice in how they want to digest the content, but also position you as a personable, friendly guy and not only an expert in financial planning, but also someone that they could see themselves working with. Appreciate that. I had planned on doing a vlog, so entirely video, and then I was hit pretty hard by my teenage daughter. It's not a vlog. It's not a lifestyle. You're not going around cities. Don't call it a vlog. And then I also didn't want to kind of pin myself in to just one type of content as you're talking about. So if I said the word blog or vlog, I just felt like I couldn't, I'd be kind of tied to that medium. And just calling something more generic, like Insights was a big unlock for me just a few weeks ago, actually. Yeah, I think Insights is great. And it gives you that freedom to post multiple different types of content. And if you don't feel like writing a whole big piece or an article or a blog post, and you can just kind of talk off the cuff about a certain topic, and that's easy for you, then it makes your life and your job a little bit easier as well. And I think it's good to, you know, the video just makes you more personable, allows people to see who you are as a person. But the blog content is really valuable for getting that text-rich, keyword-rich content onto your website. So, and then it just gives you, you know, lots of variation. And then I think like at the beginning of the month or end of the month or whatever timing makes sense, each month, you know, kind of do like a digest email where you send out all of the pieces of content you created that month around those different topics. And maybe it's a recap or maybe it's looking ahead to the upcoming month or something like that. Love it. Appreciate it. And I've also heard good things about LinkedIn newsletters. I haven't tried that yet, but it's on my list. Okay. I'm not too familiar with that either. So I'll have to look into it. Yeah. I love everything about what you're doing, Kevin. You've got great mojo. You look great on camera, really good setup, really good delivery to the camera. I get good vibes when I visit your site and watch your videos. You also have this complimentary video course, which is brilliant. Maybe Colin, just click on that and let's bring that page up. So everybody here can see what that looks like. So this is your lead magnet, right? You're getting people to give up that little bit of information so that you can begin that nurture sequence through other touch points via email. So I think this is really cool. I wonder if there's anything else you want to say about creating this course. Some time. I was something I was convinced to do at FinCon. I said I wanted to be video first. And I said, well, you have to create a course then, a video course. And so I just took the things that I felt were the most helpful in my family and my journey towards financial independence. And that had, it was a passion project. It took some time. There's a lot of resources. There are a lot of resources behind this. I do have quite a few, not a lot, but about 40 people or so who have signed up for it, which is good because I just launched in April, end of April. So that's pretty decent for that timeframe. And then I also send them the content that I put on my insights page, just to keep, to stay relevant, to get in front of them with what is, I think, the most relevant to them at that time, that just-in-time content you were talking about, Marie. Yeah, I've noticed in your comments that you had asked if we'd been able to make you able to screen share. Do you need or want to screen share or are you okay just having Colin be your assistant in that matter? Oh, Colin's doing a fantastic job for all of us. Okay, fantastic. Hey, Colin, before we go off of scale finance, let's look at the FAQs because I thought that was brilliant. Talk about being transparent and hyper-relevant. So when you click on any of the plus signs, it opens up the response about, if you don't live local to where Kevin lives, what does that look like? What about referral fees and commissions? There's one down below, like what if I'm not a T-Mobile employee? Let's look at that because I thought the answer was really good. So Kevin, talk us through about that. If nobody, there it is, that last one. Go down, Colin. Right under, there we go. Last one. Pop that open. Kevin, why did you- Oh, so well, I guess I'll go with the whole FAQ piece and then answer this particular question. What I wanted people to be able to do is to not have to waste time and I didn't want to waste time either. So if they had a question that is kind of a common question I get over and over, I thought I'd just put it right there on the page when they're trying to contact me so they can scan it real quick instead of having to shoot off an email and you have to respond back. Our time is precious and so that was a big part of the reason behind it. It also helps, I think, with SEO. If you have a question and then you have the answer right below it, then I just feel that that gives some credibility for the algorithms and whatnot for people to be able to get answers to whether or not I can be a good fit for them. And then with this particular question, yeah, it's kind of one of those, the more that they're in my core competency, the more likely I am to work with somebody. If they click all the boxes or check all the boxes, which no one ever does, of real estate and financial independence and T-Mobile employee and on and on, and college, somebody who's going to college in their family, it's never going to be the case where everybody clicks or checks every box that I'm looking for. However, the more commonality we have, the less time I have to spend analyzing things I don't know much about. I had a client or had a client refer a friend of theirs who works in the government, has a pension, is planning to invest in real estate. So there's a little bit of crossover there and then also wants to move to Jordan. And I immediately said, I don't think I'm your person and referred them out to a couple other advisors. I wonder if there's anyone on the, in the audience here today who has some coaching or questions for Kevin. If you have a question or would like to comment either on the chat or to have us ask your question or come off mute, we're open to that. So we'll give you a minute. You can type in the chat or I believe raise your hand. But I have to say Kevin that 40 signups on your lead magnet, it's only been up for a few months since April is actually really, really good. Thank you. I will not beat myself up over that then. It was quite a few upfront and then it's been drips and grabs since, which is, that's okay. That makes sense, yeah. So before we move on, I wanna ask you one thing, Kevin. So I'd like you in the last little bit to talk about how niche marketing has helped your firm. And if you can quantify it, great. And then if there's anything else you'd like to add for our peer group here today. I would say the biggest benefit is just with efficiency. So for instance, I have two clients who are at different companies. So one's at T-Mobile and one is not, who have almost identical situations. They've been starving themselves with cash. They have $700,000 in net worth. They make almost identical base salary and bonus slash RSUs. And so the big benefit there is just being able to go through in parallel with these two clients going through some of the same topics together. And it helps me edit my content, helps me clarify the processes. And it just ensures that I have a good client experience if I can run in tandem with a couple of clients and just start to build that efficiency. Fantastic. Well, it looks like we have no one from the audience raising their hand or asking to come and dialogue with us. Johnny, why don't you move us onto the next topic or ask anything further of Kevin before we let him go and just be a participant listening instead of on the hot seat. Yeah, thank you for sharing all that, Kevin. I think that you've got a really good thing going and we're excited to see where you continue to take it. And we'll watch out for your content that you continue to put out around the calendar. Thank you both Johnny and Marie for your feedback. And really we'll take it to heart and make some edits here in the coming future. Awesome. Well, if anyone else has an example or anything they'd like to share or discuss through or get feedback on, we're happy to give you the floor. So if you have anything, put a comment in the chat or raise your hand and then I can unmute you and allow you to talk as Zoom calls it. But I think we wanna just talk through a few other examples and that we wanna discuss. So a couple of them we've briefly discussed before shown off a couple of these first ones, but just wanted to rehash again, a couple of ones that I thought are really applicable and aren't super specific of a niche like T-Mobile employees, more general niches that a lot of you may also serve. And then we have some, we're gonna kind of go into some more extreme examples or not extreme, but edgy, I guess you could say, and go from there. So this first one is Brown-Bosteton Associates. They have this Who We Serve page on their website. Retirees and pre-retirees, next-gen accumulators, those are pretty general, but they also specialize in working with medical professionals and academic professionals. So click on either one of those, call in. And what I really like about how they do it on their website is they have these Who We Serve pages. They have a nice graphic here that's an ideal client profile that lays out identifiers, challenges, goals, and background and demographics. And then most importantly, how their firm can help them, what kind of services they can provide. So this graphic is great and it just really allows the prospect to put themselves in the shoes, identify, and most importantly, see how this firm can help them with these different challenges and issues they could potentially be facing. Another thing here is they have this lead magnet. So for each of these four groups, they have a checklist that kind of relates to the demographic they're serving. So for medical professionals, they have, obviously doctors, medical professionals have a lot of student loans. So here's a checklist on what issues to consider when paying off my student loans. And it's kind of geared towards medical professionals that have certain types of loans. And so enter in their first and last name and their email address, and they're able to download the PDF with lots of good considerations and checklists and make sure they're checking all the boxes and doing all the right things. And then down below, they also have a case study. So it's actually a story about a client that this firm served, and they semi-fictionalized the story, changed up the names and talked through the scenario that the client was facing, challenges, issues they were facing. And then most importantly, they talked about the solutions they were able to provide and how they were able to serve this client well. So I really like when you have a niche, if you can have a page on your website dedicated to that niche, that is an ideal client profile, a case study, and then better yet, have a lead magnet with a piece of content that's geared towards that audience. Because then not only does that provide a lot of value, educational value, and provide a resource for them, but you have a way to capture that contact information, feed their email up into your email audience, reach out, continue to drip market to them, build trust and authority and share of mind over time and provide additional educational resources and continue to provide value. So BBA is doing a great job here. Let's take a look at the next example. And this is Heller Wealth Management. They focus on serving clients and life transitions, and you can see a few of those here. So let's click on the divorce one. And I'm sure a lot of NAPFA members also specialize in serving divorcees, but they have individual pages for each of their niches and talk about their five-step process to help people achieve financial freedom after divorce. And so they go through each of those really interesting insights and content there, talk about what their personal financial plan covers. And a lot of these are kind of customized to each of these niches. And then they have a really nice case study here. Same thing. It's a story about a client they actually served. They semi-fictionalized it, changed the name, got a stock photo. Click on read more there, Colin. But they talk about what the client wanted to know, the issues they were facing. And again, most importantly, here's how we helped. And so how they worked with this client. And then they have a 10-step process for divorcees. I don't know if that's a lead magnet. I think they give this one away for free. So still another really great piece of education and valuable resource there. Let's take a look at that, Colin. I want to take a look at the PDF. 10 critical steps to, I was looking at the, to take once your divorce agreement is in place. So another nice checklist type of content here. And this is just value-add, educational resources. So builds trust and credibility and positions them as an expert resource. Another one here, Silver Oak. They specialize in serving retirees, obviously. Pretty broad, general one there. But also women in transition. So women in transition, when two become one, so divorcees or widows. And then preparing family heirs, helping with multi-generational wealth. So if you click on the, let's click on when two become one. They have pages set up for each of these niches that really lay out the ideal client profile and talk about solutions that they provide to help these type of women. Again, just more examples. I think it's really important to have these types of pages set up on your website because it works in a bunch of really relevant keywords, content-rich, text-rich. And these types of pages often show up higher in search results and even your homepage if someone is searching for these types of services or financial advisors that serve people like this. So, and always, if you can work in really nice graphics, that really helps from a user experience and visual standpoint as well. Let's move along here to Buckingham Advisors. Their Who We Serve page. Empty Nesters, Parents and Mid-Career, Business Owners, Executive Couples. So if we click on the last one there, Business Owners and Executive Couples, but they have some really nice case studies here. Same kind of idea. And then, yeah, just kind of how they're helping business owners and executive couples like this. Marie, I'm gonna let you take the next section. We're moving on to Keen Wealth here. Yeah, so one of the primary niches for Keen Wealth Advisors is engineers. They love working with engineers. And so a lot of the coined phrases and even the book title play on engineering the second half of your life because it's about retirement planning. And of course there's specialized knowledge that comes with any kind of a professional niche. And so they have about 50% of their clientele as engineers because they understand the employer ESOP plans and the retirement benefits packages and all of those good things. So not only does Bill Keen, who is the founder of this firm, appear on podcasts, but he invites some of his clients who are executives at engineering companies to come on his podcast. So about 50% of the business is with engineers and it's been a very good niche. This firm has grown from zero to about 800 million under management in nine years since they left a wire house environment. So if you spend some time on this site, you'll see that there's a lot of specialized content and events for engineers, but then they also serve spouses of engineers and they've branched out a little bit more as the firm has grown. Because if you think back about when James Bogart was with us talking about how they started out with narrow niching, now as they get additional advisors, their footprint grows, they are starting to get additional niches. So let's go to the next example. I believe that is dentist advisors. It's no surprise that dentists, doctors, other professionals make good money and oftentimes they're entrepreneurs. So having a niche serving medical professionals or dentists can be very lucrative. So this is the firm that Reese Harper started many years ago and of course we all know that he's also got elements, the financial planning software. I hesitate to even call it financial planning software, but it's an app that you can use to engage clients and it does have some financial planning element. So this is how they are niche marketing and being hyper relevant for a dentist audience. Let's look at another demographic or a profession that would be pilots and people who work for airlines. So aviation professionals. We've got a couple of examples here to show how firms are really going after these professionals pilots and airline professionals. So I even worked with a firm many years ago where they wanted to work with the baggage handlers. They got those people, they really understood what kept them up at night. So if you think about a niche is a need and understanding that need, then you can start to sync up your messaging and your services and become that hyper relevant professional for them. So if we think about other types of professions, there's the traditional ones like doctors, dentists, higher ed, teachers, engineers, pilots, T-Mobile executives. But if we think, well, how about military? That's another great example. Let's go to that. I think we might have one or two examples of how advisory firms are targeting military professionals because chances are, there's a reason for that. It calls to them or they actually served. So Colin is the next one, not military, but one of our more interesting niches. Let's go to the next example that we've got here teed up. Okay, so here we go. That we've started to see that more and more advisors saying I understand a particular profession. And in this case, this advisor understands strippers and sex workers. And so here's an article. Is this the Wall Street Journal? I know it's the street.com where this practitioner is talking about her why. Why is she doing this? If you'd go over to her website, we'll see how her website is targeting this group of professionals and how she can help them get personalized financial advice if you are a sex worker. Another interesting niche is the next example, tattoo artists. So we're seeing these more, I don't know. I don't know if they're edgy anymore, right? There's a place for everybody to be a financial planner and a place for every client. And people wanna serve people like them or they have a heart or a passion for that. So here is the tattoo artist advisory website. And here's the next example. Is there a place for everybody to be a financial planner? If you're ready to master your money. So I think that this is a really interesting turn of events in recent years where financial planning practitioners are able to look at this, express themselves. That's some pretty colorful language, right? So he's got a colorful clientele. I'm sure that he resonates with them and it's hyper relevant to them. So I think that's a really interesting turn of events and that kind of demographic, like the ages and stages and where do people work? That's one way to think about creating a niche or determining where you wanna double down on a niche. Helen, I think our next example is around ages, stages and special needs. So do we have an example of a firm that serves LLBGTQ? Okay, Modern Family Finance. I wanna say it ran on Netflix or PBS but you can go to their website and you can see how they position their services and who they serve and why. So it's highly relevant content for their clientele. The next example is we're gonna springboard over to an article in the street. I'll talk about Paul P. Lemery but I just wanna say about the last few examples is that obviously really interesting niches and a lot more edgy or specific than a lot of you may serve. But I think the most important thing to take out of those examples is just to really have your website and your marketing materials, display the brand and speak to that target audience. And so the tattoo artist website was really edgy and interesting using colorful language, speaking to the types of clients that he serves. So I think it really just comes down to knowing your audience and creating the branding that speaks to that audience. And Kevin, I think that you did a really good job with that on your website, even with just some of the colors and the layout of the website and things like that. So just always keep that in mind as you're creating your branding and your marketing materials. But Paul Peeler here, let's actually look at the website first, Colin. So he serves a general clientele, retirees, pre-retirees but this section of his business called the Preparedness Project is actually more of a passion project for him. So he specializes in serving SMI caregivers and their families. So SMI stands for serious mental illness and this is close to home for him. He has a family member that has dealt with an SMI. And as he went through it himself, he realized there are a lot of specialized challenges that they face from a financial planning perspective that he saw a lot of other financial planners not addressing and offering those services. So this is not technically pro bono. There's a $50 fee to participate in the Preparedness Project. Colin, if you'll scroll back up a little bit, I think it says there who he donates that to, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But he has a goal to help 500 families in this program. And so he's been doing a great job with this kind of work and helping more and more families and caregivers that are dealing with these unique challenges. And this is an addition to his normal line of business. So really commendable, but it has helped his normal line of business as well because he's won some awards, he's producing lots of content and gaining media attention around this topic, which just kind of endears him to his regular clients and other lines of business that he's pursuing and just really displays his character and the type of person that he is and how he's willing and wanting to help and providing really good value and resources to this type of clientele that cannot always afford these types of services. So I think that this has been really valuable for him to kind of pursue this and promote this. And he's producing, like I said, a lot of content and gaining some media attention around this type of stuff. So the first one is that article on the street, seven planning challenges for caregivers where he talks through these unique challenges that SMI caregivers face and provide some solutions for how they can address those challenges. Let's click over to the news page on his website, Colin, in the news there at the top. And he has a few other, he's been quoted in other articles and things like that, more generalized stuff, but let's scroll down the wealth management. This was a podcast example or a podcast appearance on wealthmanagement.com on speaking on caring for family with serious mental illness. I think there's a few others here from think advisors, a good one, making hard financial decisions when teens have a mental health crisis. So, again, we talked about this on the first two webinars and those four examples, the four gentlemen that joined us for those, and just talking about how when you have a specialized niche like this, industry publications, national publications, local publications, they're gonna wanna speak to you about it. And it just provides a really good avenue for people to take an interest and for you to have this specialized topic that you can speak on. And getting that kind of media attention around these specialized topics is only gonna help these kinds of media assets show up higher in search results when people are searching for those specialized topics and ultimately drive traffic back to your website. So, he's been doing a great job producing content and getting media attention around this very specialized niche, which obviously he's doing a great thing in helping out these families that need it, but also positioning himself in regular client relationships as well. And then what's this last tab here, Marie? I thought it was interesting as we were preparing to continue our own learning journey and to study what practitioners are doing that there are specialty designations cropping up. So, I found this one, the Chartered Special Needs Consultant. And if we think about niches and a niche is a need or the service provider sees a need and then says, I wanna serve that niche because I uniquely understand them and their unique problems. Yeah, then it becomes, it could become more relevant to pursue a credential like this. I don't have any examples pulled up for practices that serve families with special needs children, but I do know that there are some that have a division or a segment of their clientele where they declare that they have a special need where they declare that we're interested in serving people who have children with special needs because there are all sorts of planning needs and opportunities with trust and the complications that come when the child might live on and not be able to be self-reliable or self-employed or any kind of employment without the parent around. So, there's extra planning if you have that kind of a scenario. I know some of our audience could probably speak better to that than I could. We could continue down this path of like thinking about extra niches, community stewards, religious traditions, families in a sandwich generation situation, nonprofits. But I wonder if we get the audience, you guys jump in here and tell us what your niches are and let's talk about if you have any challenges or opportunities because if we think about there's demographics and psychographics, it's not always about the age stage or the profession, but what makes that group of clients feel like a tribe? What keeps them up at night? So, is there anybody here today who'd like to jump in and bat around a few ideas? We'll give you a minute to think about your questions. Marie, as people are jumping in, do you mind if I mentioned a couple of things? Please do. Appreciate it, thank you. The first thing I'd say is that what I've seen best here for special needs in particular is that in the Issaquah area, which is where I live outside of Seattle, Washington, there's an advisor who's not part NAFA, but he's doing something really smart, which is he has a special needs child and he has networked with a lawyer, a housing specialist, accountants, all these different professionals who also have special needs children. And as a result, they have this incredible network that pulls everybody together. And it is, if you get into that network, it seems like that is a one of a kind experience for that client. And the second thing I'd say is that one of the things I love most about really niching down is that, and maybe this is just hubris, but I feel like I could truly add value to any single person who works at T-Mobile in their family. And that's something that a lot of people can't do, right? That doesn't fit their business model. If they only work with executives, I don't. I can actually reach much further down and help people as they're in that accumulation, early accumulation phase. They might be retail store associates and I still think I could probably help them. Yeah, thank you, Kevin. Really helpful feedback. That's really cool to hear about the advisor that's partnering with all these other experts to create that unique experience for those clients. And not quite as unique as that, but if you all recall, Sam Brownell from Stratus Wealth Advisors who joined us on the first webinar, he kind of does the same thing. So his niche call, maybe you want to pull up his website. His niche is serving, he has a few minor niches, but the main one is serving lumber and building material dealers. And so he partners with estate planning attorneys that serve LBM dealers as well and other professionals and experts that serve specifically LBM dealers. And so he likes to position himself. I think he says that the quarterback of the entire planning process and working with all these other experts for these LBM dealers and business owners. So same kind of idea there by partnering with those other experts and positioning himself as the quarterback of the financial planning and the business planning, providing a really unique value proposition to those clients and such a specialized thing there. And something else, I don't know if we talked about this before, but something he does a really good job of is he partners with some organizations and associations and publications that work with LBM dealers. So scroll up, column up to above the media activity, the National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association. Scroll down to the bottom, you'll see in the footer, he's a proud member of the NLBMDA. So he actually joined that association. If you go to his insights tab and then go to the news page, he writes webinars or sorry, writes articles and participates in webinars for LBM Journal, Lumber and Building Material Journal. So that's a publication geared specifically towards that demographic. Also, HBS Dealer is another one. So he gets a lot of editorial opportunities, but also does sponsored paid opportunities to write articles and participate in webinars in these major publications that are in front of his target audience. And then, you know, attends and sponsors the conferences, exhibits at the conferences that they do. And so he's really positioning himself as one of the top financial advisors in the space and serving these types of LBM dealers and business owners. So, you know, no matter what your niche is and what your target audience is, there's gonna be publications out there that are geared towards those type of people. So try and find those publications, familiarize yourself with them, read the content, digest the content, you know, seek out specific journalists or the editors and pitch your content, pitch your topics and maybe look for editorial opportunities, but paid opportunities can also be really worth it as well if you are able to get your content and your expertise out in front of your target audience like that. We could also talk about special events for niche audiences. So I'm thinking back about some of the other firms that we've worked with and we don't have visuals today, but Colin, in the absence of any more web surfing, you can just go back to the slideshow and put up the homework slide. I believe that's slide number eight, where we ask for everyone here today to come prepared to describe their niches, how they court those niches and share success stories and challenges. So if anything occurs to anybody, we're here, we'd love to talk with you, but I'll give a couple of examples of how niching helps with client events. So we were working with a firm in Atlanta in a little suburb, actually outside of Atlanta, and the founder was Catholic and it was an important part of his life. And he found that as he became well-known in the community that he started to get a nice clientele of Catholics. And so he would hold special retreats for the clients to whom this called, and they would meet for a couple's retreat at a monastery. And there would be an aspect of being a good steward and stewarding their financial resources and just having a great life based on their beliefs. That really endeared him to the community. And of course, those clients would never leave and they told others about him. He also had a focus on serving business owners, small business owners in this community. And he noticed that year after year, there was a garden tour where the city would come together. There was a, you know, it was about flowers. It was about the gardens. It was also about the sculptures. And so he decided to raise his hand and put together like a micro event inside of that bigger event where he invited a number of clients to come on his dime. He actually bought them tickets to the garden tour, had them all congregate on the back porch of a local restaurant where brunch was served and some beverages. Everybody was given a branded cap with his company logo on it. He didn't put his company name on the cap, just a very cool little logo that was what we affectionately called the safari guy. So it was the safari guy like leading the charge and everybody walking around with those hats on created quite a stir. So you can imagine other garden tour goers would say, where'd you get that hat? They say, oh, Bill Spalding gave it to me. And so that was quite an eye-opener for Bill and he continued to invest in things like branded water bottles or fanny packs. He got some of the other local small businesses in that downtown area. It's not much of a downtown, but it was that downtown community, not like Chicago, but think small community. They would provide branded sunscreen from the beauty shop or whatever they had to give, little bags of cookies or muffins with their company logo and URL on it. So created quite a community and a tradition. If we think about other client events for niche audiences, I know thinking about Bill Keene, that he does events for all of their clients, but he also does events just for their engineers. And there's a strong focus on community and having local notable subjects, such as the Casey Wolf. Kansas City Chiefs has a mascot, the Casey Wolf will come. And so he's really building that sense of pride in the Kansas City community and his videos and subject matter around education plays out to that as well. Johnny, I wonder if you can think of any other events for client events and client events, what advisors are doing to draw them closer to their clients? Yeah, so I know that Blue Chip Partners is planning one for later this year. And if you all recall in the last webinar, Matt Mondew joined us and one of his niches and the firm's niches is serving corporate executives and specializing in those unique needs and challenges. But he also talked about another advisor named Nathalie, Nathalie Falco that works at the firm and she specializes in working with women in transition, divorcees, widows. And so she is planning a cocktails and conversations event at the office. They have a really nice office space with a big kitchen and she's really big into making cocktails at home or when she has dinner parties and has friends over. And so she's going to extend that to the office and she's going to have a select group of clients. I think a lot of them, single women, divorcees and have kind of a networking event in the office and the kitchen and do a whole cocktail craft experience and then provide a recipe and all the ingredients and everything and enjoy some cocktails. So I think that's a really great affinity event and great way to not only provide additional value and personal boldness to your audience and to your unique clientele, but also it gives them a chance to all get together and network and build community and connection within the clientele. So I think it's going to be a really cool event. We do have a question here and I think it's a really good one. It's very nuanced. So if you have, for instance, been serving the niche, maybe divorce clients, now you'd like to soft pedal, back pedal, diversify. How do you unwind that? So I don't know if the person posing this question would like to come off mute. If so, just give us the hands up, let Johnny know and he'll take you off mute and you can chat with us. But I wonder for those on the call today, how you would approach this if you wanted to back pedal or soft pedal or diversify. This was my question. My name is Jessie Howe and I currently just serve divorce clients as a section of my practice, not the entire practice, but I'm finding as I'm serving more and more of them that I want to cap or at least limit the additional folks that are added to that. And so it's sort of almost like an anti-niche or how do I defer or deter divorcees from reaching out without sort of totally giving up on serving single women or women in transition? I'll jump in on that. I think it's interesting and you could declare that particular practice line full because I'm imagining that it takes a lot of emotional energy on your part to be that partner through that divorce path. And so I think it would be understandable if you wanted to say, even on your website, this service line is not currently accepting clients. How would you feel about something like that? I think that that would work well. And it is interesting that that particular client segment tends to be the most in demand right now. I think that probably there were some pandemic marriages that were waiting to end until pandemic was over. And so I also think it's being contributed to by the volume that, and I like your idea because it would allow me to sort of uncap it if my capacity, both emotional and true capacity was better in the future. I also think about if I was having that in my life and I was referred to you and I went and saw, oh, you're at capacity. You're not accepting new clients. I really need help. I need you, but I understand you're not accepting clients. Could you have a referral list or even a link to a trusted financial planning colleague? Yeah, without a doubt that that divorce financial community is actually very strong and very refer friendly. So I definitely have resources I could share. Yeah, so then if I heard you correctly, you will want to continue to work with women in transition. Anything else about that niche? I have a particular love of working with widowed women and just single women as they're approaching retirement. So I'd still wanna keep that pathway open if not all divorcees. Yeah, I think the way that you display the information on your website could also be important because if you focus on the two areas where you do have energy and capacity and diminish the divorce client service line, I think that you might find a gravitation towards the people who self-identify as a single woman who would be a good client or a single widowed client who would be a good client for you. You could do more webinars and more content that would appeal to that audience and just downplay the divorce topic for a while. Thank you, Marie, appreciate it. Is there anything else anybody else on today's call would like to ask or add? Yeah, we have a couple of things popping up. Johnny, do you wanna check the Q&A? Sure, so Jessica, just so you know, Melissa says that that's her niche and we should be happy to work with them. You can reach out to Melissa Ellis, sapphirewealthplanning.com. A couple other comments from other attendees about that issue. So you can say that there's a wait list for divorce clients. That might be a good way to handle that. And someone else said, maybe you could consider serving another niche and build that out on your site and kind of just focus on that one more. So Kevin mentioned and said, would NAFTA member Daniel Kopp's website be helpful? He serves widows, military and Gold Star families. So let's take a look at that. Colin, I'll send you the link here. And I'll just add in here, appreciate it. He transitioned his niche, right? So he went one direction before and then sells a lot of tailwind working with widows. And so he decided to not just work with military, which was his background, but also add in this additional niche as I think some other people had mentioned. He's also doing a wonderful job of Google ads for his niche and Google wants to be able to serve relevant content. So he does so less expensively than the big guys. Very true. So it looks like military is still a main niche and right up there on his main navigation of his site, he has a page geared towards that. But let's see if there's anything else under services maybe. I did notice something about serving widows and widowers. And of course there would be, unfortunately, a fair number of those if you potentially had someone serving, probably a higher percentage than normal population. Good look inside. Survivor benefit plan analysis. So he's got a lot of information Good look inside. Survivor benefit plan analysis. I think that that's hyper relevant. It's beyond just military, but anyone who is going through a situation where they are the survivor and have benefits. Robert added that Daniel is himself a widower and a powerful advocate. Notice the hyper relevant and transparent pricing is right there. Helpful to just consider how needs shift. Niches and needs always shift. I know in my own 30 year journey as an entrepreneur, I started serving independent financial advisors and then 15 years into my business, a new niche just presented itself. It was a correlated niche to independent advisors. It was those who want to court and serve independent advisors. But today we turn away and rarely get any inquiries from advisors who are not entrepreneurial and are not high up on the fee only or fee based if not fee only spectrum. So that's what good niche marketing can do. It makes you hyper relevant and do more meaningful work, I think. You're also able to have less of a sales conversation and convincing people and more of, is it a fit? Are we the right fit for one another? Here's Daniel's story. I think that that's very powerful that he's willing to be that vulnerable. I'd like to give us about five more minutes before we start saying goodbye, just to make sure that we've got all of your questions and feedback as you reflect on everything you've learned today and over the past two sessions. Yeah, I just wanted to add another comment here. I think it's really powerful that Daniel himself is a widower and it just allows him to provide the most value to his widower clients as well, since he's been in that situation himself and has been in those shoes and knows the types of challenges, financial challenges you can face. And same thing for Paul Peeler. He dealt with that issue in his own family and positions himself uniquely and just provides that credibility to those types of prospects and clients. And you can truly relate. And same thing with Kevin, the advisor you talked about that has a special needs child, and even you, working at T-Mobile in the past. So you can truly relate. And I think that the clients that fit within those demographics, within that niche, see that and it just provides a base level of trust and credibility that you can't really get elsewhere. So as if some of you still don't have a niche but want to focus in on one and double down, really think about what's close to home to you. And even if it seems a little too specific, it can certainly work. We have another question here from Greg and he says, what's generally the best way, the most cost-effective way to generate solid SEO? Is it blogging on the website? Also, is it better to target keywords? Or to better target keywords, is it advisable to post videos on your website and put the video text beneath the video to enhance SEO? So I think SEO is such a large moving topic. I've actually done a few webinars and presentations on SEO and online presence over the past couple of years. We did one at the ACP Conference last fall, but I do have a couple that you can watch on. I did one with IdeaDecanter and also I did one with Indigo Marketing Agency. So you can go to either of their social media pages or their websites. I think the IdeaDecanter might be the most accessible. So if you go to IdeaDecanter's website, Colin, maybe you can pull that up while I'm talking through SEO stuff here and find that on their website there. Under the, it's the Advisor Video Academy. Yeah, so here we go. It should be somewhere here. But you can watch it for free here and it dives into all kinds of tips for SEO and using it to build your online presence. I think blogging is a really key component of it because Google Rewards pages that are content-rich and text-rich. And so when you can blog around a certain topic that speaks to your niche, you're gonna get a lot of really good keywords in there and it's gonna help that blog post show up high in search results when people are searching for those topics. And I constantly see that when looking at clients' Google Analytics. Oftentimes, if they write a really effective blog post that's really keyword-rich, speaks to a specific topic or audience, then I see that showing up as their most frequented page on their website that month. So blogging is certainly important. In, again, your question about videos, yes, videos are great for showing a personal side of yourself, for being personable, and for, a lot of people just prefer to watch and watch their content rather than read their content. But since Google can't really read the words that are being spoken in the video, it is best to put a keyword-rich title, a keyword-rich description, and maybe even the transcript of the video. And same thing with podcasts, but put the transcript of the video beneath it, or at least a really good keyword-rich summary alongside the video, and get that text alongside it on the page. And then you get the best of both worlds from an SEO perspective and a user experience standpoint. And then another really big component of SEO is generating backlinks to your website and just building out your online presence, creating that digital spiderweb. So, you know, when I was talking about Paul Peeler and all the industry publications and elsewhere that he's been featured speaking about his niche, all of those publications linked back to his website. And so it creates that digital spiderweb or net in the cloud. And not only does it lift up those individual online assets, but it lifts up your whole online presence entirely. And so whenever you can get a backlink to your website, the more popular, the more relevant, the more credible that website is, the more value it's gonna provide. So if you can get a backlink from the street, that's a really, really popular, highly frequented website, that's gonna provide a lot of value because it just tells Google that your website is also really relevant. And so the more backlinks, the better, and especially if you can get a backlink from an article that's speaking on a similar topic, that, you know, that niche that you serve that's speaking to that audience, that's just gonna provide a ton of value from an SEO perspective. So if you wanna dive in deeper to SEO tips, make sure to go check out this Idea to Canter webinar that I did. And I talk more about these things and some other ideas as well. Let's start wrapping up. Colin, if you go back to slide nine, where we have the fall series, and we're really looking forward to this. We have Bob Veras from Insight Information, George Kinder from the Kinder Institute of Life Planning, Eddie Kramer from Abacus Planning Group, and Meg Bartelt from Flow Financial Planning. I'll be leading the discussion. And it's gonna be so, so much fun and so meaningful. To hear from all of these folks, Eddie and Meg are practitioners of course, and Bob and George have been observers and contributors to the financial planning profession and the fiduciary standard for so, so many years. So we're gonna be talking about conversational selling skills and the art of influence. And spoiler alert, you don't have to be slimy. There are ways to get to yes through conversation and listening. So I can't wait to hear what all of them are going to share. We've already had our pre-webinar planning call, and it's going to be a very rich conversation. So the registration is open now. Colin, if you go to the next slide, that is the slide that reminds everyone how to, one too far, go back one. There we go, go back. There we go. That reminds everybody how to get over to the playbook page, or of course you can just look for a playbook on the advisor resources tab on NAPFA's website. But we hope that we'll have a huge audience for this because I think it's a once in a lifetime opportunity really to get Bob on three sessions, just for NAPFA members, George as a part of that for three sessions, Eddie and Meg. When I asked them, I said, you guys, you don't all have to come to all three. They said, we want to be here. We want to be a part of this conversation and to be of service to the NAPFA community. So I hope you will all come and join us and we'll have regular attendance for that because I think that the amount of energy and talent that's coming is going to be well worth the homage that we'll be paying. With that, we are just coming up to the 75 minute mark. I think, Heidi, you feel good enough for releasing everybody. It seems like we've covered everything today. So with that, we will say goodbye and thank you all for being a part of this particular series on niche marketing.

niche marketing

financial advisors

target audiences

trust and credibility

practitioners

experiences

fall series

conversational selling skills

art of influence

registration