be a brief pause. There we go. We're good. Welcome. Thank you for everyone for being here. We are going to go ahead and get started. This is number 3, the third playbook series that we've got. Our first one that we had in this series was about what your website should be doing for you. The second one is how you can make your website work, and the third one, which is today, is the next steps that you can really take to get your website working harder. We're going to get into some best practices from our panelists here. You guys have heard from amazing guests over these series. We've heard from folks from the Kitsis team, XYPN, you've heard from NAPFA members, some really great discussions. I'm going to be your moderator today. My name is Lauren Hong. I'm the owner of Out and About Communications. We are a full-serviced digital marketing agency based in San Diego, and majority of our clients we work with are all in the financial services space, so definitely know this world very well. But we're going to go ahead and dive in. Taylor, I'm going to hand it over to you to do an introduction, and we'll pass it around the room. Sure, thank you very much. Yeah, Taylor Schulte, like Lauren, I am also in San Diego. I own a independent RIA called Define Financial. We specialize in working with high-net-worth retirees over age 50 who are retired or about to retire. We work with about 105 families in 30-plus states around the country. And then in addition to the firm, I host a marketing podcast for financial advisors. I co-host the Kitsis Summits with Michael Kitsis twice a year, and I'm the co-founder of the AGC, which is a private online community for financial advisors. So a number of things going on. Abbey? Great, thank you for having me today, Lauren. My name's Abbey Tukey. I'm the director of marketing and shareholder at TruePoint Wealth Council. We are an independent RIA based in Cincinnati, Ohio. We have about 100 employees, just over 5 billion in AUM, and work with about 800 clients in about 40 states across the country. Additionally, we also have a separate service line called Commas, which is targeted towards our wealth accumulator. So part of all one company, just two brands to serve people based on where they are in their financial journey. Fantastic, and David? I'm David DeCel, CEO of Model F.A., which is a coaching and consulting company for advisors in financial planning firms. Also the founder of a community called The Exchange, and was an advisor for seven years before getting into consulting for the last eight. And I just wanna quickly emphasize something that Lauren started with. There's a number of you on this webinar, but what I found in doing many of these webinars is the people who actually spend the moment to ask the questions that are specific to them, basically get free coaching during one of these. So I would strongly encourage you as we're going through this, chime in with what is super relevant to you so that we can give you some personalized advice as opposed to just generalized advice. So just wanna emphasize taking the moment to utilize that Q&A function. Thank you all. So you guys can see we've got a very impressive group here. So let's go ahead and get started. So I'd like to just open up with a general question and just an understanding of what do you see as the number one reason that websites are not working for advisors? Challenges that advisors are typically coming up when they're going, why am I not getting leads? Or why are people not coming to my website? What all are you guys seeing in your work? Anyone wanna kick us off? I'll start quickly. So generally speaking, there's two main reasons that come to mind as to why a website isn't working. One is you are moving too quickly when you're launching your firm or wanting to redo your website and you just settle for something templated. You don't spend a lot of time on the copy on the website to make sure it's SEO optimized. And it just becomes sort of like a placeholder that you tell yourself, hey, I'm gonna review this and improve upon this later and later never really happens. So one piece of advice would be to do your website with some intention and not just as a I have to do this to have a legitimate business. And the other thing I noticed too is sometimes people put up a website, it's kind of like putting up a billboard in the middle of the desert and not on the busy road. So making sure that you're doing all the things necessary to attract eyeballs to your website, you're talking about it all the time, you're on social media, you're doing all the things that will attract that attention. And then when you have a website that has intention behind it, that attention turns into actual appointments and interest. Lastly, cause it's just popped into my mind, having a website that is actually interactive in some way, shape or form. So can they do a calculator thing? Can they download a PDF? Can they watch a video? Like, can they interact with it? Or is it basically an online brochure? If it's an online brochure, they're gonna bounce off quicker. If it's something they can interact with and consume from and get value from, as opposed to just being sold from, we'll keep them on there a little bit longer and increase the likelihood that they take whatever that action is that you want them to take. Yeah, Abby? Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think for us where we've seen a lot of value has been in having easy to schedule appointments to have that introductory call and have that very easy to access in a lot of different areas of the website. I think if you have kind of a static form where somebody has to put in their name, email, and hit submit and then have that go to an individual to then follow up, like you're just creating an extra step in the process. There's great tools out there now. We're big fans of Calendly. We've been using it for years. We're able to build all sorts of automations when people do submit some interest in meeting with us. So I think that's really important. And the other thing too, at the end of the day, we're in the relationship business and our people are really important to be promoting on our website. It probably would come as no surprise that our people pages on our website, individual bios for everyone on our team, that those are our most trafficked pages. So it really does bring the brand and our services to light. And in fact, we don't even use any stock photography anymore. We use actual photos of our team and that requires some effort, but it also requires the attention that David was talking about. Yeah, Taylor, what are you saying? Such good points, Abby. Yeah, I think to determine whether a website is working or not working depends on the, like David said, the intention and the purpose of the site. And I think that is where things get missed is not understanding why you have a website and the purpose or the goal of having that website and where that website fits in with your other marketing activities. You could have a beautiful website, but if nobody's coming to it, doesn't serve any role in your marketing funnel, then it's certainly not gonna be productive in your marketing efforts. So understanding the role of the website, its purpose in your marketing funnel and how it supports your other marketing activities is really important. The second thing that comes to mind too is, and this falls in line with just advisors not liking to spend money on marketing really at all is I don't see advisors spend much money on their websites. They look to cut corners, they find the cheapest person out there to build their website, and then they don't do anything more after that. My business turned 10 this year and we've easily spent over $100,000 on the website, about $10,000 per year making updates and changes to the site. We've made a huge investment in our website because it's critical to our growth. So neglecting your website would certainly be, and not investing money into it would certainly be a reason for it not to work. Yeah, I appreciate you sharing those numbers too. I do wanna, David, you had mentioned earlier this idea of, right, you don't wanna just kind of have the billboard, but no traffic, right? Ideally, and you want that ideally to be qualified traffic. I love to hear if there's key activities, especially like, you know, Taylor in your learnings too, as you've been making these adjustments that really help to make sure like your website is helping to be on that right road, right? That you've got that traffic that's coming in, that people are seeing you guys, that you're navigating them where you want them to go. Any insights on that to really kind of go beyond the website itself? So real quick, before I give some thoughts on that, one thing that I wanted to make quick mention of of something that's tactical is open up your website and take a look and see if you draw a Z across the page, what is in those different end points or corner points? So typically you want, like people will look at your website in a Z pattern when they first land on it. So is it your logo and your business name followed by a book here, followed by a download here, followed by something else they can interact with here. So making sure that your website flows the way that most people read a website. And also to the extent that you can, everything above the fold, which is basically before someone scrolls down, like what is above the fold? Because most people don't even make it past that point. So is there something that is calling them out directly? So I just wanted to hit on that quickly. And then what are some activities that people can be doing to attract people or create traffic? Well, I think there's two options, generally speaking. One is pay someone who knows how to do it to do it. If you don't yet have the budget to do that, leverage tools that are a lot less expensive to do that. So that could range anything from utilizing AI, like chat GPT, or there's another program, I think it's called SEM Rush. And you can help optimize your website for traffic and for SEO purposes. I have a client out of Long Island called United Financial Planning Group. And the advisor hired his son who has no website experience. And they didn't have the budget to hire us or someone else to do their website. So he learned WordPress on his own and he utilized AI to help shorten his learning curve, utilized SEM Rush. And this little firm, and by little, I mean, it's not a multibillion dollar firm like Abbey's, they manage a couple hundred million, but they now get 60,000 people on their website per month. Just because he used the proper tools and allowed AI to shortcut their learning curve. So that's one of the things you can do. The other things you can do is create content on LinkedIn, on Instagram, short form video, long form video, podcasting, all that stuff as well. We host a podcast for Model FA and that's where we get the majority of our business is people listening to the show. It took a couple of years for that to turn into something that actually generated business. But the first two years, it generated a ton of content and awareness around who we were. So just a couple quick tidbits. I think traffic and SEO can be a shiny, dangerous object for advisors. You could pay somebody to get 60,000 people per month to your website, but if you don't have a complete funnel and don't have a plan for what to do with all those people that show up to your website, then your money, those efforts are completely failed. So I see a lot of attention on search engine optimization. I want more people to show up to my website, but the question is like, why? Why do you want these people showing up to your website? Who do you want landing on your website and when? And if they do land on your website, what are they going to do next? Nobody goes from Googling San Diego financial planner to trusting me with their entire life savings, right? There has to be a nurturing process. There has to be a funnel in place to convert these people. So SEO on its own is not the key to long-term predictable marketing success. It could be a potential marketing activity for you, but it's not necessary. I know some great advisors that don't have a website at all and still grow just fine. So I think some of these things can certainly be shiny objects, but if you've determined that you need more traffic to your website because it supports other areas of your marketing plan, then sure, SEO can be great. My last thought on that is, look, we're all financial planners. We are technical experts here. We should be spending time with our clients and their financial plans, not trying to figure out how to be SEO experts. And so to David's point, there are some great people out there that you can lean on to hire to outsource this. So I would caution you against trying to go figure out SEO on your own, especially in the world of AI right now, SEO has gotten really, really, really complicated. It's not as simple as just, I'm gonna write a blog post every day or every week and people will show up. It's gotten pretty complex. I'm smirking because after I was done congratulating the client, I was like, cool, 60,000 visitors per month. How many meetings did you get booked from that and clients, and it was like a deer in headlights. So that's what we're in the midst of doing is rounding out the marketing funnel to give those visitors plenty of things to interact with, to build trust and credibility, to then ultimately put them on your calendar. So something as cool as 60,000 a month doesn't matter if there's nothing that converts them into whatever that next step is. So I'm glad that you highlighted that. Abby, how about for you? What are you seeing? So what's interesting is we, I think probably like a lot of people listening today, like the majority of our business is still actually coming through client referrals, COI referrals, and increasingly our broader team is people are just feeling very empowered to be able to make introductions to our firm. And so the way we look at our website, despite having a marketing team of, there's four of us total at TruePoint overseeing the marketing for both that TruePoint brand and our common service line, we sort of like, you know, kind of compartmentalize the website to some extent. We think it's really important that it's, you know, again, it in some ways has sort of a kind of a brochure function. It certainly offers that additional layer of credibility for the people that get introduced to us. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think, you know, we're just continuing to see the majority of our business come through, you know, in these warmer channels and even the leads that do come to us on the website, you know, those are the coldest sources that we're still trying to figure out the best way to nurture those. We, I'll be honest, we have not completely figured that out. In fact, right now, kind of my focus for the year ahead is actually focusing on that middle part of the funnel. We do a really good job on the top and the bottom, but people are just kind of getting stuck in that middle part. So for us, it's kind of doing a little soul searching to figure out what activities, what things we need to put, you know, in place. And likely these are things on the website to ensure that we're kind of getting people moving along. So I'd say I have like overall, like I know the website is very important, but at the end of the day, it's still playing very much a supportive role for all of the work that we do to push people out there to make personal connections and get those, you know, serve clients really well and get those introductions. There's, on that note about helping convert like that colder audience, because, you know, a website's great, 100%, I agree with that and it should be a part of your focus, but the majority of advisors experience growth through referrals from their current clients and it's important to really focus on that. But I want to share my screen quickly. This is a client that we've worked with for, gosh, seven years or so. So they're a similar size as you, Abby. They're flirting with the $5 billion mark. And I want to say it's every month they do a webinar and it's at the very, very top, right? And by the way, the Z pattern that I was talking about, logo, book a meeting, book a meeting, and then there's also this up here on their way to the first corner to register for that webinar. And that's something where they've tracked and have noticed that people typically don't, people typically don't sign up for a webinar and become a client, but what they do typically do is attend two, three, four webinars and then become a client. So something like that could be worth exploring and implementing as just, and then beyond that, what they do is in there, let me share my screen again quickly, in the resources tab, they have all the webinar recordings in there and people can interact with it after the fact. So it's just constantly building up more and more content for people to interact with, but all it takes is one webinar a month. Yeah. So Taylor, I love to hear from you too as a case study, right? I mean, just hearing you, you've got a firm, you're involved with a number of different ventures, you're hearing a lot of these insider conversations too. What are some of the takeaways that you've had and how has that been applied to your, kind of these regular updates as you were alluding to earlier about what you're doing on your website? Yes. I mean, I think Abby and David are bringing up really important points here that you could have this traffic. Well, I'll back up and say, it's okay that your website may not get traffic just because your website doesn't get a sizable amount of traffic doesn't mean it's failing. If you rely mostly on client referrals or COI referrals, your website might be more of a brochure, right? So that when that referral is made, that potential client can go to your website and see who you are and see what you look like and read some of your content. So you don't necessarily need thousands of people showing up to say that you have a successful website. So it goes back to, what is the purpose and intention of that site? So for us, we have been heavily focused on SEO since the very beginning. I'm an SEO nerd, I love this stuff, but I did learn really quickly that, quality is more important than quantity. I got a little distracted in the beginning just trying to game the system and get as many people to show up as possible and didn't really turn into much. so right now our primary, what I would call middle of the funnel activity to, to build trust and show expertise is my retirement podcast. And so essentially all roads lead to the retirement podcast, uh, search engine optimization will lead them to a page or two or three on our site and immediately try to capture them, uh, onto our email list. And the very first confirm email that they get immediately when they opt in is go check out the podcast. So it's structured intentionally that they found us through search engine optimization. They read this valuable thing. They opted into this lead magnet of sorts. And the very first thing they get is, Hey, if you like that, you might like this, go check out the podcast. And that's where I really nurture and build trust with them. So I'm not attempting to get people to my website and then try to get them to book a call. I think that's a really unreasonable expectation. So we use that podcast as that primary middle of the funnel, the kind of secondary middle of the funnel would be the email newsletter list. So once they opt in, they get that invite to go subscribe to the podcast. Great. If not now they're on my email list and I can nurture them every week there. Um, and I know we're going to get into it in a little bit, but the kind of second part of our website is for that bottom of the funnel that that sales process, and once they are on our email list or listening to the podcast, we will intentionally send them to a specific page on our site to go and take action. So the call to action is never, uh, click here to schedule a call. It's like, Hey, here's who we specialize in working with. If that's you and you're interested, go here to learn more. And there's a very specific page on our site and a lot of intention behind that site that we've spent a lot of money building out that process. Uh, and making those improvements to ensure that kind of everybody goes through that same, that same path to potentially becoming a client. Super interesting. I love you hearing how you're explaining the funnel and the thoughtfulness that you have behind it. And it's also not a kind of, uh, marry me on the first date kind of thing. Right. So, um, that warmth that it takes to really build that it's a long sales cycle, right? It doesn't, it doesn't happen overnight. Um, any other responses, David or Abby to that too? Uh, well, what I would add and Taylor, forgive me in advance, but I, I think that you'd be okay with this is that there's a lot of people like, uh, like Taylor, like Abby, like myself that have either worked with or created really great websites ourselves. And there's a lot of other advisors who have created really, really good websites and have spent a lot of dollars on that. And if there's folks on the call that have. Uh, any sort of budgetary constraints where it's like, Oh, I can't spend a hundred thousand dollars on the website granted over 10 years, but 10 grand a year, I can't do that. Go and look at some, some really, really cool websites from other advisors throughout the country and see if you can extract themes from each of those websites as to what's drawing you in and what you would like to replicate on your own and kind of take all the best ideas out there and, you know, turn it in, turn it into something for yourself as well. So, um, I would just encourage folks, if you're feeling stuck, like I don't have the cash to do that, or like, where do I even start go look at a website that looks really good and ask yourself, why does it look good and implement that for yourself? So, um, just want to share that, that perspective. Yeah. I'd, I'd say that that's a great, um, great tip there. And also you don't have to, you know, have this like massively complicated website. Um, it's funny, like I've been at true point now for eight years when I, I think I'm on maybe website number four and with every website iteration, we cut the pages like in half, um, most of the pages now on our website are more of our dynamic content, our blog content. Um, but like our kind of, you know, services pages, um, our team pages, we have a lot of team members now, but all of that has just slowly over the years just been cut because we had just too much information that we thought we needed to have all these pages about our investment philosophy and this and that. And what was great was the analytics were telling us that people weren't looking at some of these pages. So that was a really nice way to use Google analytics as a free tool, um, to kind of use some data to inform that. But even just from a user perspective, again, we just found that the journey that, you know, people were following was they're just not going that deep. So you don't have to have these pages that are these websites that just have page after page after page. I mean, sit, start simple, like, and then, and build from there. But, um, yeah, you don't, it's, you just don't need a very complicated website to sort of be effective. Great. Yeah. Simple is not easy, but if it's natural, so you talked about Google analytics as tools, David, I know you're talking to the number of different firms. You're seeing a different number of tools that they're leveraging. Um, any insights there, any key takeaways, um, for, for resources that you're seeing, um, firms lean into. Uh, I'm sorry. Did you say, so, I mean, there's a number of, uh, different tools. I mentioned, uh, SEM rush, what Abby said about the Google analytics. Um, like we have a client, uh, his name's Brian. And, um, one of the things that was super important to him, uh, was making sure that, Hey, every month I want to analyze the analytics. Um, so like we just have a report that gets sent out to him and, um, month over month, there's not a ton of changes, but it, it, there's sometimes some important insights, as Abby mentioned, it's like, Oh, this page is not needed, right? And we spent a ton of time on this. If anything, it's just bogging it down. Um, the other thing, um, that I would make sure that you do, uh, cause we've come up, this has been like, uh, we offer hosting for advisors too. And when we do a website for them, um, and our hosting offering is, is, uh, aligned with like pricing for other hosting companies, but we pay on our end, like for the fastest load time that you can, um, and that's been such like an easy value add is, is we'll be on the phone with them or on the zoom with them and say, look, I just went to your website and that took two seconds for it to load, look at this website. It was under a second, right? It was a 10th of a second. Like those little tweaks, uh, help a lot. Um, and then it's not so much a tool as much as it is, as much as it is a strategy, but making sure that now with the sec marketing rule, uh, that has been updated, um, to drive more traffic to your website, using the tool of Google, my business, and, uh, actually collecting client reviews, uh, on that. I mean, I have a client Trevor. Um, he texted me a couple of weeks ago, a few weeks ago now said, Hey, he was so resistant to asking for Google reviews. And, um, I got them on, uh, Google reviews and, and wealth tender. So he had both of those going. And, um, he texted me a few weeks ago and said, Hey, I have an $18 million prospect, uh, that found me through Google reviews. Um, and he liked the reviews. Um, and I talked to him, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday, Monday, I talked to him. Uh, that $18 million prospect is this close to signing on because of those reviews, so, um, a little bit of a tangent, but, um, that would be my, my brief brief ish response there. Yeah. You can't discount that social proof, right? The, the reviews, the media, the, the third party, um, you know, third party kind of validation that you have something maybe to share or say. So, um, Abby, I'd love to hear a little bit from you too. You talked earlier about sort of this idea of thinning out the website, right. And, um, making sure that it doesn't get kind of word stuffed, or I'm sure you're, you're also managing a lot of ideas from folks around the board. How do you keep that brand consistency with the website so that it's just, um, it doesn't kind of, uh, the brand doesn't like, uh, it becomes an asset over time. Right. So you don't want it to kind of, um, just fall apart. What do you do to make sure that you've got consistent consistency there specifically with the website? Yeah. Well, well, first and foremost, the number of people that have access to even update the website is it's, it's the marketing team. So, uh, if anyone has an idea, whether it's an advisor or someone on our estate team, tax team, whatever, um, for like, you know, some content that they want to see, or, I mean, if they felt like they even had an idea about a design or a different type of page, they're going to have to go through us. And so, you know, our team is really kind of the gatekeeper of the brand in general. Um, you know, again, we want to make, we make ourselves very available to work with individuals. And if people, again, have ideas that they're seeing with other firms, or if they're in a study group with someone, uh, we welcome those ideas and collaborating. But at the end of the day, you know, the website and our social media properties for our brands are only being updated by, by our team. So that that's first and foremost, first and foremost, you know, the kind of the most important protection that we can put in place there. And quite frankly, I don't think any of my colleagues outside of the marketing team would want to have that responsibility, uh, for website maintenance. We're just big enough now that we can, we can really kind of own that function. Um, but additionally, I mean, we, we take our brand guidelines very seriously. We do some, we do some training as new, as new team members come on board in terms of, you know, understanding kind of what our brand is, um, that the brand tone that's, you know, displayed on, you know, in website copy, not that they need to do anything with that necessarily, because they're not going to be writing copy, but it's important for them to understand, uh, what we're saying, how we're saying it, because if they're out in the community or they're talking to clients, we want there to be, you know, some similarity. We don't want there to be a disconnect between the in-person brand interactions that happens kind of on the one-to-one or small group settings, um, with what's actually shown on the website. So, um, again, this is the benefit of having a larger marketing team in a, in a bigger organization where you can really kind of lock that down. Um, and again, I think we've, we've sort of made that very clear that again, we're here to sort of manage all of that. We're very clear too, about, you know, again, what our logo, what our logos are, what our colors are. People have access to see all of this in a kind of a unified interface that we have that, that just documents all of this. Uh, but again, the, the kind of the onus is on us to be really kind of managing all of that work. I want to emphasize that maintenance piece, uh, quickly. Um, oftentimes plugins get updated and certain things break on your website. And if you don't have, uh, a website maintenance package that you're paying for or setting aside the time to double check it yourself, that's something where if someone goes to click on something and it doesn't work, sure. It's just your website, but it can be interpreted as a reflection of so many other things. And they're like, okay, if they can't handle this, can they handle my $2 million? Um, so something I think website maintenance packages are like a hundred, 200 bucks a month, maybe it's well worth it so that there aren't any broken links, uh, on your website. Well, and what, that's a great point. And on the few occasions that our website has gone down for some reason, it sends us all into a panic mode for that, for the reasons you just articulated. And what's interesting is that a lot of our clients visit our website to access their client portal, even though that's, that's a completely different entity. Um, they could bookmark, you know, uh, this separate website that to access their portal. But they're just sort of accustomed to going through our website. So again, if that goes down and a client is coming in to try to log in to see, you know, a report or a communication with one of our team members, I mean, that is not a good look. So, um, I agree. Um, we, I think website maintenance, not the, not the sexiest marketing spend, but, but really, really important for brand integrity. Taylor, anything you want to add to that? It's you nodding over there. Um, I'll just add two quick things. I know we're, we're sharing a lot here and it can be really overwhelming. Um, I like to think about my website build in, in stages as part of the reason why every year we're making updates to it, because you can't do all this stuff all at once, especially if you're limited on a budget, but I, I do kind of relate it to what we do as financial planners, where if you have a client who's not engaged and involved in the planning process, it's not a great relationship and they don't see much progress with their, their financial plan. And so you need to be heavily involved in this process. Even if you pay an agency, 10, 20, $30,000, just like a client pays you a premium fee, they need to be involved. You need to be involved in the process and it can be a lot. And so, um, I like to think about it in stages or, or versions even, and version one of the website might look like this. And there's all these other things that I want to do, but I don't have time or capacity or the resources to do them right now. So I make note of those in a folder and I've got version two, three, and four and five set aside. So, you know, I'm not going to forget about them. They've got, they've got a place, they've got a home. Um, you just can't do it all at once. So, uh, think about your website build or updates in versions here that you're not going to tackle everything all at once. And then if it's just overwhelming to think about the brand, the cohesiveness, you mentioned the brand guide, which is absolutely fantastic. Then the messaging, David, I, you know, I think you're, you're coming about the Z and it's all really important, but it's like, where do I start? Um, I feel like everybody has already heard of this resource before, but I'll just share it in case it's helpful. And that is a company called story brand. Um, and they've got a great book out there. They have website consultants that you can hire. They're now building websites. Not that I've, I've never worked with them, so I wouldn't recommend it just because I don't have an experience with it, but, um, a great place to start to just understand website messaging, copywriting, just the general framework of these things. So if you've never read the book, uh, highly recommend buying it's a, you know, uh, a cheap 10 or $15 investment. So speaking of such good insights and I think also very practical, right. For where you are. Cause there's a lot of things you can do. And I think that's part of the challenge with marketing and websites in general can be very shiny object. Um, and you can also get lost in sort of that depth by perfection. Yeah. So how do you really like tune out the noise? And as you all had alluded to earlier, like what's really important to you? If traffic's not important, then let's, you know, then that's not where he's better or resources, right. Or if it is important, how do we define that? Um, a little bit deeper. So, um, I mean, I wanted to go back to a question that I often see, uh, when working with advisors and folks that are in sales seats, right. It's sometimes you feel like you've got to have every piece of collateral under the sun, speaking of shiny object syndrome. Um, and I'd love to hear a little bit from you about how you help sort of channel those efforts and what actually shows up on the website, right? Like, are there key pieces of collateral that you have found have been really beneficial to make sure that they live in a digital platform for either the general public to access or they're gated where someone's got to put their, you know, their email in or a lot of contact form. Yeah, that's a great question. I I'd say there's actually been, I would probably answer this question very differently if you had asked me five years ago, where we were in the business of doing maybe, you know, more sort of one pagers on different services and all sorts of customized pieces, you know, uh, brochures like a, you know, the old like trifle type of thing that could be given out. We've really moved away from that. And, um, and the reason for that is, um, just our process for how we interact with prospects has become so much more conversational and we really, uh, we actually try to, um, kind of push back on the need to have like a ton of collateral to just throw at people, um, and really say that, listen, if somebody is already, you know, interested in potentially working with True Pointer Commas, you know, let's, let's have the conversation. You do not need to overwhelm them with a, you know, a huge deck or, you know, PDFs or things like this. Um, so I would say that, you know, we're not doing as much like one-off pieces anymore, but when the, when the request does come and it does come, it's, it's not dried up entirely, you know, what we're doing is trying to, you know, see how we can leverage those. If, if one advisor is asking for it, chances are other advisors may have a need for it, so where we can, you know, just be really smart about the content and use it in other areas. So if somebody wants us to create a one pager to just, you know, talk about decisions you need to make with regards to life insurance, well, that's probably a topic that's relevant to a lot of people, probably a pain point for a lot of prospective clients or even existing clients. Let's figure out how maybe like, let's maybe not put it in a PDF. Um, I mean, we can, if it's needed for a particular meeting, but maybe think about putting that as blog content, um, and just putting the content out there. We are, and I'd be curious to know what David and Taylor think about this, really moving away from gated content, um, and really just trying to put as much content out there as possible. I think a lot of that is re is in reaction to so many resources now that people can go online. I mean, Tik TOK alone, um, people, I think, feel that they can kind of get like a full package of financial advice, you know, through the social media channels. So for us to be sitting on something, when people can go elsewhere for free, um, you know, we're just trying to put more, more, more, more content out there that everyone can consume. And hopefully it's appealing enough that they'll say, I want to maybe work with that person. So, so I, I hate, uh, when I click on like a news article and it's like, you have to subscribe to get this. It's like, okay, let me just Google somewhere else. I do think that, uh, or I do agree in that the more you can put out there for free, the better, like give away the house, uh, so to speak. Um, and one thing I like about turning it into a blog or a podcast is like, as an example, a lot of advisors that I come across want help further developing their COIs. Well, guess what? I have a COI podcast and a COI blog that I did three years ago, uh, that I still share today. So it's like, Hey, let's have this foundational resource for you. And then let's have, um, you know, a productive conversation once you have a chance to, uh, to consume it. And let's say they're not a fit to work with us. Um, well, they still got value from that interactions. Just like if a prospect isn't a fit to work with you, let's say you get referred to someone's kid or their friend and you're like, Oh, they're not my ideal prospect. If you have resources that you can share with them, you can still provide a good experience. Now that said, um, as much as I believe in not having gated content, I think that there is a place to have as much free content as possible, but also like a sense of exclusivity if you're on like our email list. Um, so not like a, Hey, to continue reading, we need your email, but rather, you know, if there's something more exclusive or daily drips or weekly drips, that's where I think that can be gated insights. So I just want to remind folks, you can drop questions into the chat as we're moving forward. We all have a little bit of time here, um, at the end for Q and A. So, um, Taylor, before we move on to some Q and A, do you have any initial responses to that too? Um, I would just say that I think in this day and age, historically, you could throw a pop-up on your website, just join my newsletter, people would give their email address away left and right. And these days, I think you, I know you have to earn and build trust with people before you have the right to ask for that information, or if you want to have success asking for that information. So, think about it, think of a trusted expert in your life. Let's think about Michael Kitsis, how much value he adds to the advisor community, how much free content he puts out there. If he says, hey, I've got this amazing guide on the upcoming TCGA tax extension, it would be a no-brainer for you to go and give your email to download that guide, he's already built a lot of trust with you. So, I would think about it in terms of building trust with these people first, before you ask them to join this thing. And what I found by doing that is, and David, I think you're right, you can go the exclusivity route, like if you liked all this, you're really gonna like this. But I've also found that if you build enough trust it doesn't really need to be that sexy. I grew an email list, I didn't do any email marketing for a long time, and about two years ago, I'm like, I'm gonna commit to building an email list. And I didn't really do anything more than go to my audience and be like, hey, in addition to this podcast, I also send out a weekly newsletter, like go here to sign up. And it went from zero to 5,000 subscribers pretty quickly. So, I already built a lot of trust with these people, so it didn't have to be this like really exclusive, sexy offering. It was just like, hey, if you like this, you might like this too, like go here to sign up. So, that's the benefit of building that trust first, because it does become pretty easy to kind of move your audience around to different places. Yeah, I think keyword is that you grew it, like the growth, and that it came from a place of authenticity, right? If you buy a list, it's still cold, right? So, this idea that you really invested in that and building the trust is really huge. And just like the sales cycle, right, it takes some time. So, I wanna get in a little bit of show and tell. So, I know we're talking and covering a lot of different things here, but sometimes visual examples are helpful. I know, I think Taylor, you've got an example you wanna show folks of landing page and some other examples as well. Sure, I can start there really quick. Yeah. Just like anything, there's a number of different ways you can think about landing pages and different purposes for landing pages. On our site, the primary purpose of the landing page is to move prospects closer to taking action with us, not necessarily to join an email list. And so, I'll take you quickly through kind of the user journey that I think about. If somebody does land on our website, this is our homepage, and you'll see that all call to actions point towards this free retirement assessment. So, if somebody lands on our website and they think that they're potentially in the right place, the one thing that I want them to do is to click on this different colored, magenta gradient colored button to go learn about this free retirement assessment. I don't want them to go and schedule a call right away. I want them to learn a little bit more about who we are, what we do, how we can help our ideal client first. So, I don't wanna put that all in front of them here because that's a lot to digest all at once. But if they think that they're potentially in the right place and they wanna move towards taking action, they'll click on that button and it'll take them to this landing page. This free retirement assessment is essentially a free light financial plan for us to show value to them, show them how we will help them before they hire us. So, think about this as a free light financial plan. So, they went from like, I think I'm potentially in the right place to let me learn a little bit more, this three-step process to help them evaluate us. They'll scroll down, they'll learn a little bit more about who we do our best work with, over age 50, $2 million plus. Now, maybe like, I don't have $2 million. Well, then they'll go somewhere else. So, that's exactly what we want. We wanna add some friction to this process to ensure that the right types of people are getting on our calendar. Very clear about our process, setting proper expectations about what the steps are, what's involved, what the purpose are of these different steps. What happens at the end of this process? Is there a big sales pitch? Are you gonna try to sell me something? Am I gonna make a decision in that last meeting? And then giving them that opportunity to schedule that initial phone call. Perhaps they have some more questions, they're not quite ready. They wanna get answers to those questions. And then ultimately, they get down here to schedule that phone call. So, this landing page was built very, very intentionally to take them through that journey. I'm gonna pick on my friend, Chad Chubb here, who just goes from homepage to schedule a call, which goes straight to Calendly. And I think that can be a little bit dangerous. I joke that somebody on a Friday night could be having a few beers and land on your website and just schedule a call with you without really knowing who you are, what you do, how you can help. And so, we wanna ensure that the right types of people are scheduling those calls. So, I think it's really important to have a landing page in between that call to action and the actual action. That call to action takes them to a landing page to give them a little bit more information. And then if they still feel like they're in the right place, they wanna take action, then they have that opportunity. So, that's where I view our landing page and where it kind of fits into our process. The other way you can think about a landing page is giving them something valuable in return for their email address. Love them or hate them, Fisher Investments does a pretty damn good job with their marketing. And this is just an example of a landing page for their nine retirement planning mistakes, free guide that they're giving away. I just wanna show this as a quick example of just the different goals with the landing page where mine is I want them to ensure we know who we are, what we do, how we can help before they schedule that call. And this is kind of step one of getting them into the funnel, giving their email address. But the one thing I wanted to point out here, just in addition to sharing how simple this really is, like there's nothing really flashy going on here, really, really simple, is this tactic that instead of asking or having a blank field for their email address, the call to action button is just strictly get your free guide. So you compare and contrast that to something like this, where here's a free guide, but I'm asking you to give all your information on this page. Someone will be like, I don't really wanna give my information right now, I'm not prepared for that. But this little strategy here where it's not asking for your information yet, it's asking you to buy in first, like, yeah, I want this free guide. You click on that and now it's gonna take me to that form. So I'm already kind of like two thirds of the way committed, I'm like, all right, I might as well put my information and now I'm already here. So just a little quick tactic there and kind of funny, somebody was asking about StoryBrand and when I went to StoryBrand's website, they do that exact same thing, right? This pop-up here, there's no field for email address or name, the first call to action button is, yes, I want free access, I'm sure if I click this, it's gonna now ask for my information. So it is a little tactic and it does work really, really well, whether it's with a pop-up or on the landing page, but step one through all this is, what is the purpose of the landing page? And once you know what that purpose is, then you can build it out to help support that goal. Awesome, that's super helpful. I love all the examples to cross compare. Just to get some clarification, cause you've had the fortune right of having those conversations as they come through the form. So when someone's actually gonna click on that button, where would you say they are in the funnel, right? Have they already been listening to your podcast for a while and they kind of know where you are and then if you don't mind kind of sharing, if they're ready to take that action where you feel they are in the funnel? Yeah, I mean, here on the website, it really is just for, if people stumble across our website, if somebody tells them about our website, they just kind of land here on their own through search engine optimization potentially, that's the one action we want them to take. We want them to learn more about who we are, what we do, how we can help and basically point them towards that process of becoming a client. More typically on the podcast, a handful of times per year, I will have a direct call to action to the podcast and let listeners know that we're taking on new clients, here's who we specialize in working with. We're currently offering a free retirement assessment. If you're interested in learning more, go to freeretirementassessment.com and that redirect will take them straight to this page. So they kind of bypass the homepage or any of the internal pages and they just come straight to the landing page here because I'm very clear with that call to action on the podcast, go to freeretirementassessment.com, it redirects them here and now they're on this page. They've already kind of gotten the sales pitch or some context ahead of time, they landed on the site. Now, maybe they're not ready to go through this page and schedule a call, well, they might click through other areas of our website, learn more about our team. If they do that, all roads are gonna end up leading back to that page anyways, right up here, it's gonna follow them around up top. If they go to a blog post, they're gonna have this thing on the left, it's gonna take them there. So like all roads are just gonna come back to this page here. And then lastly, now that we're engaged in email marketing, we built up this email list, I do the same thing with the email list. A couple of times per year, maybe three to four times per year, it's a dedicated email, hey, we're taking on new clients, here's who we specialize in working with, we're offering this free assessment, go here to learn more. And that again, takes them straight here. So the homepage and some of the other areas in the website are just kind of the catch all to ensure everyone knows what that journey is. And again, I'm trying to prevent people from just calling our office. And if they do, by the way, if they do call our office and say, hey, I stumbled across your firm, I wanna learn more. The first thing that Karen, our office manager, will tell them like, have you been to our website? No, I haven't been to your website. Do me a favor, go to our website, click on that purple button, go learn more about our process for new clients. You can schedule that call directly there or give me a call back and I'll help get you on the calendar. But just really all roads go through this page here. And then just to get a little bit tactical here, but did you build this retirement assessment? Did you use a third-party tool? What, how did that come about? The landing page or? No, the actual, I think you said it kind of spits out a mini financial plan. What is kind of happening on the back end there? I mean, this is a four to six week process to go through. So it's actually us building a light financial plan for the prospect. So yeah, there's nothing automated about it. It's a pretty manual process, but for us, the lifetime value of a client is a very healthy six figures we're willing to put in five to seven hours of our time upfront as kind of a loss leader to build them this light financial plan. But on that note, we have to be careful who we're doing this free work for. So that's why there's so much friction in this process. And even once you get to schedule a call, you don't have access to our calendar yet. You now have to answer some questions and jump through some hoops. There's conditional logic built in here where if you tell me that you're under if you're under age 50, it's gonna submit the form and say, hey, we just don't have the expertise to help you. Go check out XY Planning Network. So there's a lot of friction in this process to ensure the right types of people are getting on our calendar. I went from 200 intro calls a year now down to about 60 per year, but they're amazing, highly qualified people that jump through all these hoops to end up on our calendar. Love it, that's awesome. Thank you for sharing a little bit more. Okay, let's see, any other pieces to show and tell? Just a quick example. And full disclosure, we have not done this website, but I know Nate Hoskin quite well. And just to kind of emphasize something that Taylor was just leaning on. That's funny, I almost pulled up Nate, one of Nate's landing pages. So what I like about it is he's just very direct in who he calls out. If you're making over 100 grand, but you have less than 500,000, because his business model is more so subscription-based than AUM-based in terms of his pricing strategy. So he's looking to work with the folks where that makes the most sense. And it's like, oh, I make 90, okay, I guess, okay. And then you bounce off and it saves him time. Whereas if you're like, oh, I do make over 100 and I do have less than 500, then yeah, I consider myself a high earner and I'm not rich yet. It just does a great job of either pulling in or pushing people away. And I'm willing to bet, Taylor, with your metrics, I forget the exact numbers, maybe I have them right, where you said you went from 200 intro calls to like 60 or 70 or something like that. You're probably getting the same amount or a similar amount of new clients, but on way less work and it makes your conversion metrics better and you're protecting your time a heck of a lot more. And the people that you're pushing away weren't gonna do business with you anyways, or vice versa. So it helps save a lot of time by being hyper-specific and try and qualify people out. Yeah, I will just emphasize that we do have the luxury of adding this much friction because of the audience that we've built. So you do have to be careful with friction if the audience isn't that large. We add all this friction, then nobody, you might have nobody show up on your calendar. So this certainly happened in stages going back to these different versions. At first it was like, here's my calendar, just schedule to, uh-oh, like we better be careful, let's add some more friction. And now we've gotten to where we are. I mean, this, what you just saw right now is something we just added in, I think it was January of this year. So yeah, just be careful about adding all this friction if you haven't proven that the quantity is there yet. Kabi, anything you wanna add? I mean, I just feel like I have to co-sign all of what was just said about, being able to really kind of narrow really at the end of the day, your target audiences, and that's where it kind of, I actually think that's always an evolving process for us. Sometimes there's still a little bit of pushback of like, oh God, we don't wanna narrow too much. We have to sort of be really kind of, we want everybody to see themselves kind of working with us, but the reality is, and I think Taylor, you've sort of proven this, and even that other example that you just cited with the Henry's, that is where you're gonna get the quality over the quantity. So that's a good exercise to just kind of be thinking through kind of in the context of your whole marketing efforts, not just your website. Your website is where you can pay off that copy. And StoryBrand does a good job of that. I mean, it talks a lot about the hero's journey. I read the book years ago, but I think that's a great resource. I'm glad you brought that up, Taylor, because that's an easy buy to get that book online. And they've got great content that they put out there, so would encourage people to follow them on social media, just for all the thought leadership they put out in that space. So the one thing I would say, like I think that with all of these things, like being able to be really organized about your approach, about like what kind of content you're creating, either for your website or maybe something that's, again, a PDF or something that's maybe not gonna end up on your website. And just thinking about the tools that are out there from something as simple as using like a Google Sheets for creating a content editorial calendar. We're big fans of Airtable. I don't know if anyone in this group is familiar with that. We've sort of used it across the firm in a lot of capacities. I have found it to be kind of the project management tool to build a content calendar that I've been seeking for years. I believe Airtable, it may have a free component of it as well, where the magic happens is when you kind of connect it to other tools like Zapier. I know I'm getting into kind of the weeds here, but the whole point being is like having some way to organize how you're thinking about your messaging, your content is really important too. And that goes back to what David said at the top of this about being intentional about what you're trying to message and what you're trying to say. And some of these tools for organizing are really critical to make sure you're doing it the right way. Yeah, so well said, Abby. So we just have a few minutes left. I wanna first and foremost, thank all of the panelists. I know you all have been answering the questions that have been popping in through the conversation. A reminder for those that are on to fill out the survey, it is in the chat there. And then I just wanna do a round robin, any final thoughts, final tools, takeaways, anything that you'd like to share with the group here. David, do you wanna start? I will, and I'll emphasize something that Taylor had said and also alluded to, and this is relevant for this session, as well as conferences that you go to, any other training that you're a part of. There's probably 24 different things that you could implement from this. Pick one, and then identify the second one, identify the third one, and just, best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time and to figure out what your first bite is, wipe your mouth and take another bite, is my suggestion. Yeah, great. Taylor, anything to add? I'll just, I was gonna say this anyways, but it was asked in the questions what tool we were using for the conditional logic form. So I'll just share with everybody that it's type form. So that's what we use to embed that form, which integrates with Calendly. So at the end of that type form, if they answer all the questions correctly and get to the end, it presents them with the Calendly calendar to actually schedule a call. So from WordPress and type form and Calendly, all three of those things integrate really nicely together. Great. And maybe, I'll mention too, David brought up SEO and SEMrush. There is a, because SEMrush, I don't think is cheap, but at least a couple hundred bucks a month. If you wanna dip your toes in the SEO water, which again, like I highly recommend you go and hire somebody who knows what they're doing. But if you wanna just poke around a little bit, Neil Patel has a free tool called Ubersuggest. So very similar to what SEMrush does or AHRF, some of the other ones that are out there. So Ubersuggest would be a free SEO tool to kind of dip your toes in the water. Yeah, and I'll tell you, once you get in there, you drop your website and it will spit back tons of data. And then you go, holy smokes, where do you even start with this? So, but it will start to show the complexity of these worlds, which are fun to unpack, but they take a lot of unpacking and then the algorithms change on you. So, but good places to start, to start to learn about it too. Abbey? Yeah, I would just reiterate the whole comment at the beginning about where does the website fall within your sort of your marketing plan and actually your growth initiatives for your respective firms? Because again, you might just find that the kind of business that you're trying to go after, whether it's referrals or something else, maybe one website will be fine for that. But if you're trying to go, maybe go into the digital space a little bit more, then maybe you do need to make more of an investment there. But at the end of the day, really think about the organization's goals and the marketing plan, and then find the right type of website that's gonna work for that and start small. Yeah, fantastic. Thank you so much to our panelists. I learned a ton today. I had a lot of fun with this discussion. I'm sure folks did as well. I was thinking you could re-watch the recording and probably pause at any point and just take nuggets as you were saying that elephant example there of, if you wanna eat an elephant, take it at small bites at a time. So Taylor, thank you so much for sharing those specific examples, sharing your background. Abby, great insights, especially firm-wide, right? And how to really tune out the noise and make sure the brands aligned. And then David, you work with so many firms and being able to bring in those best practices in your voice as well. So again, thank you for your time. Thank you for all who are attending. We appreciate you. And just a reminder, this is going to be in a learning center and we'll go from there. Thank you all. See you. Bye. Thank you.

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