Marie, the floor is yours. All right. Well, hello everybody. And today is March 23rd and this is your capstone of the first master class. And this one is the culmination of the prior two sessions we had about creating a lead magnet. What is a lead magnet? Why do you need a lead magnet or maybe even more than one lead magnet? And then how do you create one? So your homework assignment, as you all know, is to create something and bring it today for us to talk about. And so we had a couple of folks who through our survey questions that you all got, they said, yes, we'll be ready to show and tell today. So we have a lineup for a couple of live audience interactive participants today. And then we have several people who just said, you know, I'm not ready to show anything, but I'd like to talk about my idea and get some advice from the coaches. So speaking of coaches, we have again, Claire Aiken from Indigo Marketing, and we're pleased that Claire has been here for the first few sessions and also today. And then Johnny Smith, all of you know, Johnny, my sidekick here at Impact Communications. So with that, Johnny, you're going to lead us through the participation model and who's going to go first. Yes. So first up we have Derek Delaney. It looks like Derek's already on camera. So thanks, Derek, for showing up and having something to show and tell today. So your company, is it FarmD Financial Planning or is it Farmed? It is FarmD Financial Planning. And so you're planning on doing a book or ebook or free chapter of a book on how pharmacists, which are your niche, can best prepare to retire in their 50s. So what else can you tell us about that? Yeah. So due to the pandemic, the pharmacist industry has changed quite a bit. There's a lot more stress on pharmacists now than there were five, 10 years ago. But because it's such a well-paying job, it's not a profession people can just up and leave. And that has led to a lot of pharmacists, at least the ones that I have talked to, becoming more interested in retiring earlier than normal, which basically means retiring in their 50s. So I thought if I could write an ebook about just simple financial planning ways people can make that a reality for themselves, I could advertise that out through like Facebook or something where a lot of my niche market lives, and that would draw people to my website, get them to sign up for the ebook, and then I would capture their email information and be able to email drip on them in that way. So that was kind of the initial thought when I went out to create the ebook. All right. So are you going to show us something today, Derek? If we make you the presenter, I guess you just share screen. Will you show us what you've started? I think you have a landing page and a lead magnet started, yes? Yes. I have a lead magnet started, so I can show you that. I would just need access to share. It says the host is disabled, that part of it. Okay. Heidi's going to fix that. There we go. So can you guys see it okay? We can. Tell us what we're looking at. So this is an ebook. It was created using Canva. So I have the paid subscription to Canva where it's like $122 a year, and what I did is I just typed in ebook template, and a bunch of different options came up, and I found one that I thought looked okay, and I replaced all the colors in that prebuilt template with my company colors, and then just added in all the language I wanted in the ebook. So it's 11 pages long. The first page is a cover page that you're seeing here, and the last page is just a bunch of industry disclosures, and then in between, I just followed the template that Canva had created and just incorporated the language I wanted in the ebook, and again, a bunch of financial planners are on this webinar, so they're probably going to think a lot of this information is very basic, but that's how I wanted to present. So I started out just talking about what retirement purpose means for people who want to retire in their 50s, specifically pharmacists, and I talked about what that next stage of life could potentially look like, and then because the template was already pre-created in Canva, it had cool little areas where I could have like personal tips and different things in there that I think make the ebook seem more professional, which I could not have done on my own, and the entire layout is something I don't think I could have done on my own, but thanks to Canva, again, having that template pre-created, all I had to do was switch out some of their colors and just in place my own language, and it came out looking really, really good. So I'll just kind of swing through here and show you how it looks. I think it looks great, and it sounds like Canva made it really easy for you. Derek, about how long did it take you to put the whole ebook together using Canva? Yeah, so using Canva, it took me about three and a half hours. So I just did dedicated three and a half hours because I already knew what I wanted to put in it, and because the template was already created, it didn't take very long to input my color scheme and then just type up really quick the information I wanted in the ebook because it's information I share with clients, prospects, and in other media outlets before. So it's not like it was research I had to do because it was all very simple information that as a financial planner, most people already know. Yeah, this is fantastic. I just want to congratulate you, first off, for creating this and taking the first step. I think it looks really good, and I love that you've started from an emotional place when it comes to your client base. First off, you're recognizing the stress that they've been under. You're putting yourself in their shoes of the challenges they're facing, and I think you're really leading with understanding your clients and understanding what their emotions are currently and what they're looking for, which is such a powerful place for a lead magnet is you really want to have an emotional goal for them. I think you've done a really great job, and I love how you've adjusted some of these photos to kind of capture your target market. I think I saw a picture of the beach up higher. You could maybe replace that with more pharmacy-esque photography, but I think it's a really, really or maybe this is where they're going to be in retirement. So that makes sense. Yeah. And so I think it's a great start, and it's really your opportunity to show potential clients that you understand them. And so maybe even having a page that focuses on the unique challenges they face, so stress from the COVID pandemic, maybe consolidation of pharmacies or whatever their particular core pain points are, because what you want them to think about when they're looking at this is, wow, this advisor is going to understand me. I'm not going to have to explain to them who I am, what is a pharmacist, how does my business work, why are the reasons that it's challenging to exit my business? Those types of things. So really, really nice work here. Question for you guys, for the experts, if that's okay. Please. Should the goal of my lead magnet, because I always thought the goal of the lead magnet was to collect the email addresses of prospects, and that has actually worked out phenomenally where I have run some boosted Facebook posts targeted to pharmacists, and over the last two weeks, I think it's cost me probably like $55 for two weeks worth of boosted posts. I've gotten probably over 450 clicks, and I think it's like 45 now people who have gone in and downloaded my ebook. So I've collected their information. Is the goal to just collect their information, or should a lead magnet inspire them to act, which is to book an appointment with me, or is it kind of hit and miss? I'll jump in on this. So first of all, when you filled out your form, you said you had only gotten four people to actually put in their information to download. So look how the snowballing has occurred, right? Oh, it was 40 before, or was it four? 40. 40. So for some reason, I had only four, but Johnny, maybe you and Claire can give some statistics for norms, but to me, that seems like a really, really great download number. Now to your second point is, you were thinking that maybe it wasn't a good result. I think it's a great result. And you were saying maybe your landing page needed more work, but I think we should look at your landing page together while you've got the platform and talk about what could be improved on the landing page, if anything. And if you have one of your Facebook ads, we'd also like to see that. So talk us through what we're seeing. Yeah. So this is the landing page I have set up, where based off of, I think it was Claire who mentioned during the last session that having a video to introduce it is beneficial. So I created a YouTube video and implanted that here. And then it's just a simple ask for their first name and email address. My question is, because I've been getting such great traffic to this landing page based off of those Facebook boosted posts, should I include anything on the bottom here that could potentially allow them to look at different things on my website to get them more interested in booking a meeting with me and not just looking at the ebook? Or should I be happy enough with just this information and keeping it simple and not trying to drive them to too many other locations? I'll jump in on that. Oh, go ahead, Johnny. I was going to say that it would not hurt to have a button down at the bottom to direct them to, if you have another page on your website that talks about how you serve pharmacists or something along those lines. And you certainly could have a contact us button on that page as well. That wouldn't hurt. But as I recommended in the last session, putting that on your download landing page or the confirmation page after they fill out the form, I think is a better place to put that contact us button, kind of leading them down the path. And just to answer your question really quick about, you know, should you be, you know, just hoping to capture their information? Should you be hoping them they take an action, maybe reach out, schedule a consultation? Certainly that's, you know, great if they, if they do do so, once they get to the confirmation page and go to your contact page and reach out to set up a meeting. But you know, the main mode for most people, you're going to capture their email address. They're going to digest this information and it starts building their trust and their confidence in you as an expert. And then you want to feed them into your email list so you can continue to drip market to them and build trust and authority and share of mind over time and continue to drip educational valuable content to them. And maybe at some point also send an individual invitation to reach out for a free consultation. And after, you know, they've downloaded this, they've seen some of your emails and some of the other content you're sending. I think that's when a lot of people will start feeling more comfortable and actually reach out to talk to you. And before I pass it to Claire, I'll add one more thing about the landing page here. I would also change your name field to be first and last name. I think that most people are going to be hesitant to input their email address more than they would their name. So if they're already going to give you their email address, they're probably fine putting their last name as well. And I think that that's a valuable piece of info to have. Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So this looks really good to me. And so my, the way that I look at marketing is that you should always be pushing people along the buying journey to take the appropriate next step. So this is fantastic that you've created a landing page that captures a lead for you, but that doesn't mean that the guide or the lead magnet itself can't keep pushing them to the appropriate next step. So what that could be is, you know, maybe you create a short webinar on, um, you know, something that would be an appropriate next topic. What I would do is look at your Google analytics for all of the content that you've created on your website, find the top highest performing piece of content and do a 10 to 15 minute webinar on that topic. And then parlay your lead magnet into registering for the webinar. And then, you know, of course you can always follow up and say, Hey, I saw you registered for the webinar. You download the guide. Do you have any specific questions? One cool thing about having a webinar is because that captures the lead on its own. You could then turn your retirement guide into, uh, not a lead magnet and that you would not require their email address so that you could give it out for free. That would increase your conversion of your Facebook ads, which you're paying for because as people click on your ad, only a small percentage of them are actually going to put in their name and email address. But if you give away the guide for free and push that to your webinar, which then captured, um, you know, you could test the conversion and see which one, uh, would be more beneficial for you. I love what you're saying, Claire, and I'm going to jump in on that. So right now we're seeing about a 10% give up their name and email address in order to get the guide. You're still getting good exposure, whether or not people said, yes, you could have my information in order to get this guide, which I want. You're getting them to ideally get familiar with your brand. You've got your navigation right here. So for somebody who's like, well, I'm not giving up my name and email. They can still get exposure to who you are and what you do and how you add value. They can still watch your teaser video. One thing I will say before I forget to mention that is I watched your video. It was well done. If you can kill those YouTube ads on the backend, that's kind of an eyesore to me. And Johnny, maybe you know how to do that. I think you don't have to serve up all those YouTube ads on the backend. Is that correct? I believe there is a way to turn that off. We usually use Vimeo. So I'm not super familiar with YouTube, but I think, um, you only, well, actually, you know what? I don't know if there's a way to turn that off unless the user pays for a premium version of YouTube. So that might require a little bit of digging, but certainly look into that. But I think that's also just something that comes with the territory with YouTube. And a lot of people understand if they're watching the YouTube video. Johnny, do you recommend then Vimeo being the video host for any videos on your website? Because I have that service as well for kind of some of the webinars I'm anticipating doing. Is that what you would recommend instead of YouTube then? I think so. Obviously YouTube has a lot more benefit in terms of visibility and searchability because it's connected to Google and it's the number one video platform out there. So if you're certainly just looking to be found, YouTube has a lot more value there. But I think Vimeo has a lot more value for embedded videos like this one. It gives you more capabilities and features for, you know, what you want to show up on your video thumbnail and the different settings and functions that viewers have. And you don't have issues with ads, which is one of the main issues here. So, you know, if you have both, I'd say upload the video to both just to have that visibility and searchability on YouTube, but then embed the Vimeo player here on your website. Okay. Awesome. That'd be easy to do. Claire, anything from you? And then I have a final comment. Yeah. And I agree. So I don't embed YouTube videos on my website because sometimes the ads confuse people. So I do the double pronged strategy that Johnny mentions of Vimeo on my site and then YouTube on YouTube. One thing I would mention is retargeting. So a lot of people are clicking on your Facebook ads and they're identifying themselves as a pharmacist and maybe they're not putting in their name or email, but you could use that audience to market to in the future because they've self-identified as your target audience. So retargeting is usually much, much less expensive than targeting for the first time. Claire, would that be a good example of if I created a webinar, a short webinar to retarget audience who came to my page with that webinar? Exactly. Or you could try a variety of different boosted posts. There's actually a way to automatically do Facebook ads of all of the posts on your Facebook page and they basically can run a seven-day ad and use the best performing ads in the future. So you could really play around with your retargeting audience to see which performs best for you. Sure. Awesome. Great feedback. Thank you. Okay. So I'll give one more comment and then Johnny, in the interest of time, we should move on to the next person. But one thing that I want to emphasize is Claire talked about always thinking about the journey, the buyer's journey. So, and Johnny, you said this too, like the confirmation page, once they give up their name and email address, you can actually use that as a selling opportunity to get them to raise their hand for something more. The webinar or another free offer of some sort, and maybe you capture their name again because you see like it's doubly like they're clicking in. So they're like raising their hand. So they may not be giving their name again, but they're saying, okay, we're actually going to opt in for this. So you see that they're really interested in your content, which is a buying signal. The other thing that we're going to be talking about in our next trilogy in the Masterclass series is about pushing out email and drip nurture, drip nurture sequences through email and also social media. So we're going to cover some of that. How do you keep these leads warm and bring them down that funnel, that the marketing funnel? So, Johnny, with that, let me throw it back to you and who's next. Yeah. Well, thank you, Derek, for sharing. You've got a great start there and I wish you luck as you continue. And I'm sure you're already off to a great start. Next, we are going to be talking with David Tuzolino. Sorry if I mispronounced that, David. But you are with PathBridge Financial and you're planning to do a white paper or a special report on retirement planning for people who love to travel. Can you tell us more about what you have so far? Yeah. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. I do have a white paper that I've put together. My specialization, my niche is retirement planning for people who love to travel. Why? Because I love to travel. I'm selfish. That's why I decided to go with that niche. But I do find that it resonates with certain people. I put together the white paper and I can go ahead and bring that up. I put together the white paper, came up with the seven answers that must be answered. Really what I did was I tried to include the pain points or what's different if you love to travel with planning for retirement versus anyone else that's planning for retirement. I think all Canva users know it's great. That's what I also used to put this together. I'll just scroll through it a little bit. What I did was I did try to, it's long and that's going to be one of my questions certainly, is it too long? But one of the reasons that it's long is because it's full pictures. What I did was, I think it was a AARP survey and it was, where do most people want to go? I included all those pictures so that when someone looks at it, they might go through here and go, oh, yeah, that's cool. That's somewhere I want to go. Here are the questions that I asked. Then I go through and say, okay, what makes you different as someone who really enjoys travel? Then explain the solution. I have it broken down with each question. Just go through everything and then towards the end, I'll quickly scroll down. At the end, I have the last question basically being, should I work with a financial advisor? I try to not say absolutely. I try to give honest advice saying, not everyone needs to work with a financial advisor. However, if you fall into this category, then it makes a lot of sense. Then I just try to get a little bit of a call to action, reach out my information. Then I have a picture, a little bit more about what I do and what the firm does. Great. That's pretty much it. I did have it as a lead magnet on my site for a little while. But then I took it down because I developed a newsletter that I was using. But I'm trying to think of the best way to use this going forward. I did run some Facebook ads with it and it seemed to work pretty well. That's where I am right now. Next steps, what's the best way to utilize it? Obviously, any help with it would be great. Fantastic. Well, I think you have a great start here. I really like the design. I recognize all of those places as pretty common places that people look to do, for that luxury retirement end of career trip. That's great. It seems like you put some time into thinking through your audience, which was really good. A couple of ideas. I think you probably could make the title a bit stronger and I would maybe even try a few different title variations and see what performs best. Maybe you could just do three Facebook ads with three different variations. You could even try a fear-based. The biggest financial mistakes people make for retirement of travel or fear cells. Within the lead magnet itself or the e-book, I think you could share some stories of maybe your clients or maybe even hypothetical clients that have even made mistakes. Maybe you could even share some horror stories of a couple that took off for their retirement trip to Europe and they immediately had a medical emergency and they weren't covered by insurance or something like that. These are things that people don't always plan for and they should. Then maybe just talk about the challenges of traveling in retirement. Some of the emotional challenges and things that can hold you back from being able to do these once-in-a-lifetime trips. Is that their health? Is it the challenges of leaving their residence at home empty? Different challenges that show that you are in the mindset of your audience. Then the last thing is, once you finalize this, I think a really cool way that you could share it and get in front of new audiences that you don't already know could be to partner with travel agents. There's a lot of travel agents that focus on your higher net worth audience, planning very long trips. If you could get this co-branded with them or maybe presented together, maybe feature a travel agent as an expert with a quote or something, and get them to share it with their audience, that's always a big help. Okay, great. I love that idea, Claire, about collaborative marketing. Whether they know it or not, you're cross-pollinating your audiences and so that's always a great strategy. I want to go to your question, David, about the length. I think that a paper can be as long as you want it to be, especially if it's laid out nicely as yours is, with lots of white space and images. I think that this is perfectly fine. You said that you wanted to say it's a nice resource. Clark gave you some additional ideas which might actually make it longer. I think that's fine. We have some of our clients who do papers like this that are 20, 25 pages, but they're not hard to read or to digest, and I think that that's the main point. Now, you could chunk this out into little bite-sized pieces and tease it out in a blog post and then say, if you'd like to read question number 3, download the paper and you can have a whole series of teaser blog posts or social media posts that way they get people to engage with your content and to give up their name and information. Johnny, over to you. No, I agree with everything Marie and Claire added. I will say I love the pictures. I think that adds a lot to the visual elements of it, and that does make it a little bit longer, but I think as Marie said, that's fine because you have large text, lots of white space. It's not too much content per se. It's a good amount of content and it all seems relevant and valuable. I think Claire's suggestion to add some pain points or some issues that people in this demographic might be facing is a really good way to go. I guess the next question I have for you is where, you said you've used this before already as your lead magnet. Where were you housing that or featuring that on your website? It was on the front page down maybe a third of the way. But didn't have a standalone landing page for it or anything like that? I do have a standalone landing page now after I ran the Facebook ads. Let me grab that. Yeah. You mentioned sending out a newsletter. You could do both in conjunction. You could put your white paper as basically on your newsletter template. Every time you're sending a new newsletter, you're reminding people that you have a resource and that is your specialty, and just solidifying in their minds of who you are and who you serve. Yeah. Great. Yeah. There's the landing page. That looks very nice. These are video would be great to show your face and your voice and your personage. How did you do on the Facebook ads when you were running this? What kind of attraction did you experience? I don't think I did as well as Derek, but I got like 100 names just to sign up for the newsletter. But I spent a decent amount, I think it was $450, so it was like $4.50 a name. That's quite good. I usually see that closer to $10 for the actual downloading, the report or whatever the lead magnet is. I think that's really good. Obviously, you can add those to your e-mail list and continue to drip market to them. So one other question for you on the landing page here, is this only accessible via the link when you put it on social media or elsewhere, or are you able to navigate it to it just from visiting your site? Is it in the main navigation or anything like that? Yeah, no, it's not. It's not. So you would have to have the link. Gotcha. I do recommend adding that to the main navigation so any old website visitor can easily see this, no reason to hide this and have it just be a standalone landing page that you have to have the link to get to. So if we scroll up a little bit so we can see your main nav bar on the website, and so where you have your blog right there, you could change that to insights, and then you could have the blog be the dropdown, and then your special report or white paper or whatever you want to call it right underneath the blog. Okay. I have to jump in on one thing. The button says download sample report. I think that that's confusing. Did you mean to say special report? Yeah. No, I don't know. I'll try to think back when I set it up. Well, for what it's worth, I would just special instead of sample, special report because sample report makes me think, am I going to get a sample portfolio report or I don't want that. I want this paper on retirement and traveling, right? Yeah. The other comment I'll say is I love that you started with the youth-centered voice, the desire, what's pulling that person forward, what is their vision for their life? And Claire mentioned you can also lead with a fear-based something like don't miss out or the fear of missing out or a problem. But you started with a desire and then you got to solutions to help people accomplish that desire. So good for you for doing that as an approach. Johnny, I'm going to throw it back to you. Do we need to move on to the next person? Yeah, we do need to move on for a second. We may as well tackle this question now though from Derek. And David, this will probably apply to you as well since it sounds like you've used this lead magnet before. But the question is, how long should an advisor stick with a lead magnet? If we keep getting positive results, should we keep using it or is there a timeframe like six months where it should be switched up? Claire Marie, I'd love to hear your perspective. But I think if it's an evergreen topic and it's performing well for you and, you know, you're getting new leads on an ongoing basis, stick with it for, you know, six months, a year, a couple years, especially if it's evergreen and you're getting good traction, why not stick with it? Now, if you feel like everyone in your audience has seen your lead magnet or it's now, you know, it's not really relevant anymore to your audience or your niche has changed or anything like that, it might be time to switch it up. Or even maybe after just a year or so, it's time to switch it up and get fresh new content there anyway. But otherwise, I think if it's evergreen, you're good to keep using it. Yeah, I would never recommend taking down a successful lead magnet as long as it's not out of date, you know, sometimes they see social security lead magnets become out of date. As far as how long until you can tell whether or not it's working, I like to think of that as sort of like a statistically significant rate of impression. So on Facebook ads, I've done a lot of Facebook ads where I run them for a long time. And what I see is after they get 1000 impressions, the cost per click doesn't change very much. So once you've had 1000 impressions, you could start running variations and comparing them against the first one without needing more time. So it's not necessarily a length of time that you have to keep it around, but a amount of impressions before you have relevant data that you can make a decision from. Yeah, I agree, creating a library of lead magnets is a great idea. I think in one of our earlier sessions, Johnny showed Intercontinental Wealth Advisors, they have now created two lead magnets and they have a library that's growing with the teaser videos and the download forms. Yeah, so they don't really promote their old one, but they do have a link to it at the bottom of their new one. So, you know, if there is someone who's interested in that, they can click over and access that one as well, but they're actively promoting the new one. So as long as it's not outdated content or irrelevant or, you know, incorrect, then might as well keep a library of them up there. So thank you, David. Thank you. It looks like you're off to a great start and hope to hear more about your progress at a later date. But now we're going to move on to Mike Hunsberger of Next Mission Financial Planning. And he is planning to do, I believe, a special report, correct me if I'm wrong, Mike, but the niche is preparation for military retirement. That's correct. Yeah, I just retired from a career in the military, a career changer, and, you know, hoping to continue to work with military folks. So based on, you know, preparation for retirement, I put this together with Lead Magnet. So... Talk us through, what are we seeing? Okay, so opening just, this is a cover screen. Again, seven critical actions, senior military leaders should take one to two years before their retirement. And that's all you've got so far. Is there any more content? Here we go. Oh, there is. Yep, yep. So a quote here, just kind of framing it, that we're talking about retirement. Again, lots of images around, you know, military, military uniforms. Just an intro here, talking about, you know, some of the challenges as you prepare, you're typically in a demanding job, but you're also supposed to be thinking about the future and how you're going to, you know, make a big transition one to two years from there. So just talk about that, talk about a little bit of my experience and how I wish I had something like this, you know, all in one place, versus just getting little snippets of things here and there. And then we go into the action list, which is the seven critical actions. TAP is our Transition Assistance Program, commonly known across all the services. Also talking about building their timeline to make sure they're, you know, stay on top of those things that need to happen. Making sure they're getting their medical stuff done. This is something that for a long time, while it is a benefit, people weren't taking advantage of. And so it was really trying to highlight that as something they should be doing. Going on to, you know, the budget, talking about some of the other benefits, which includes some of our follow-on insurance and how that works. And then talking about what they're going to do next and, you know, what their options are and how military retirement gives them kind of a foundation to explore something maybe they didn't think, you know, was possible, but they could do something totally different than they were doing. And then the other piece is location, where people tend to end up. Some people focus location first. Some do job first. And then just wrapping it up with final thoughts. And then a little bit about me and the practice I'm building. Fantastic. So it's about seven pages long, right? Yeah. And did you build it in PowerPoint or Keynote? Actually, I had somebody, I can't remember if I used Fiverr or the other one, but she built it in Canva and then it's just a PDF out of that. So I have the ability to go in and edit it. That's great, yeah, that's great. We love Canva for that. It's great for collaboration and changes where if you paid somebody to set it up, now you can maintain it on your own and it's in the cloud. So you can just send the link to somebody else if you want them to collaborate with you on it or to make a copy. And then maybe you have a second niche at some point, you could create something like this that feels in family, but for that different niche. You know, one thing I'll just give you a big kudo for is including your own experience so that the reader knows you're one of them, that they can have confidence that you know what it's like to be in the service. So good for that. And Johnny, Claire, anything else that you wanted to ask about landing pages or promotions? Yeah, this looks great. I just took a few notes. Thank you for your service, first of all. I really like the images that you've used throughout. I wonder, you know, I see that the colors that you use are dictated by your logo. I'm wondering if you should consider changing some of the colors to more matched, like the armed forces colors as, you know, kind of the green and those types of colors may mesh well with the images that you have, but I like the design in general. One of the things that I, just some ideas that came to mind is instead of saying seven actions they need to take, you could say something like seven unexpected risks, again, playing on that fear. And then another variation of that is trying out seven common regrets or common mistakes. You know, you could still frame up the seven action items, the same, just adding a bit more urgency there. And then I'm wondering, is it possible for you to narrow your focus even more? So if you, you know, had a career in the air force, could you narrow this down and make a version for air force retirees? In that way, you're able to have more specific photos and even more specific language for, and maybe even more specific financial planning strategies for the air force specifically, if that makes sense. The more that you can narrow your focus, the more relevant people will find your content. So maybe you could do a generic armed forces version and then an air force version, if that makes sense. And then my last piece of advice would be maybe expounding a bit on your story. So maybe you could have a photo of you when you were in the air force. And then also maybe a bit of your story of, you know, five years from retirement when I was in the air force, I didn't know what was next. Maybe you felt hopeless or depressed or uninspired until you figured out your next mission. And so maybe a bit of an emotional story of your journey. Thanks, I like that. Would you, where would you kind of see that in the document at the front, you know, toward the beginning of the document, or, you know, kind of at the end where I just have- I would put it, yeah. So maybe you could talk a bit where you have your story, put a bit about your firm, but I would sort of lead with your story closer to the top of the document because we want to make sure people understand, you know, your mission and your story and what your passion is. And, you know, as people go through, fewer people get to the end. So we want to make sure you lead with the strongest thing, which is, you know, your credibility, your expertise, your story, that you are one of them, if that makes sense. No, that's great. I hadn't thought of that, and I like that a lot. Yeah, kind of using- No, no, I need, I had it as a, just on the website at the bottom as an opt-in that would, you know, come up a few seconds after somebody landed on my webpage, but I have not publicized this yet with ads, but that is something, you know, after getting some feedback here, I was looking to do. So appreciate the landing page things that you gave to the others. I think that'll help. So you haven't set up the landing page, but you did set up a pop-up, is what you're saying, where people can pretty much just download the PDF? Correct, yeah. Yeah, it just, well, you know, it's a small pop-up. I mean, it takes their name and email, and, you know, they can download them, but just as part of the website pop-up. Yeah, that's a good start. I mean, obviously the next step would be to set up that landing page and feature that prominently on your website in a few different places, but the, and then I would recommend changing the pop-up to just be a link that drives people to that landing page. So rather than downloading the PDF directly from the pop-up, just so they can, you know, get more info on the landing page, learn more about you and your brand, and, you know, continue to build that thought leadership and share of mind and push them towards a call to action as well. So that sounds great. One other, Marie and Claire pretty much nailed everything within the PDF here, but I would say also, I noticed on the cover page that you just wrote out your firm name in text. I would put your logo there instead and just get some of that branding right at the beginning of the PDF on that front cover page. And then as Claire was talking about telling more of your own story, maybe a picture of you in the Air Force and that kind of stuff, I think that would be great as kind of an intro into the lead magnet. And it just builds that trust of the audience that's reading this right off the bat. I want to add one more thing for that teaser video, because you were in service, if you have any old photos or old video that you could layer in instead of just sitting, talking at your desk today, you could tell a little bit of your story and, you know, how you came to this career choice after leaving the service and layer in those photos or those old videos, just to give it a little bit of something special. Okay, great. And again, you can find video resources, you know, through Fiverr, Upwork, Sur Guru, or any marketing agency like Indigo or Impact Communications, we all do that kind of work. Or if you have a nephew or a niece, sometimes that works. Anything else, Johnny, Mike, before we move on? Nope, thank you. All right, thanks, Mike. Thanks, Mike. So that is it for our members that brought examples to show. And then we have a handful of members that brought some ideas to discuss and want some advice and feedback. So first off, Mike, if you could turn off your screen sharing, that would be great. But we're going to move on to Angie. I'm going to butcher your last name, Ferboten Larosi with Avea Financial Planning. So Angie, if you could come off mute and talk to us about your ideas. You told us you were considering a pre-retiree playbook, or that's for Pacific Northwest National Lab, who are one to two years from retirement, and then six tax tips or year-end tips geared towards those employees. So can you tell us more about those ideas? Sure, I did use the six year-end tax tips last year. It was just a link. I don't have a landing page. I'm right in the middle of kind of developing that and updating the website right now. But I did just have a button out there. I did not promote it. So it just didn't do anything. I got no feedback on it at all. So it's just there. I did it. It's like a two-page deal, two or three-page deal specific to this company. And it was helpful to see some of the Canva tips because I kind of struggled with the way that I created my document in Canva, but I see that there's maybe some other alternatives that I could look at. So that was a good tip, the e-book right there in particular because I struggled to put my own formatting and things like that. The playbook is going to be basically a longer version and it'll have chapters much like the first gentleman who spoke today where he had different topics. And so I'm developing what those topics are, what's relevant, what's important, what do I wanna say, how do I make it targeted to those specific people who work at this company? So it's a work in progress. I didn't really have too much to discuss with you guys today, but this has been very helpful seeing examples of others. And have you used LinkedIn to target these employees of this lab? Yeah, this is where I am at. I'm not really on Facebook and I do hope to get a little more into Google ads. We've got, I'm part of the XY planning. And so we have a guy who's in one of my study groups and he's gonna try to bring people together to kind of help us understand how we can do that ourselves. And he's had good success with that for not a lot of money, which is always kind of a nice thing. But the Google ads, which are targeted as well as the LinkedIn, which is obvious, yeah. Obviously you can target the people at that company. Yeah, that's really where I would start. We love LinkedIn campaigns for company specific campaigns because it's so easy to target anybody that used to be at the company. You could say, what should you do with your, Abbott Labs 457 or whatever it is. And then people who are currently at the company, there's a technology called LinkedIn On that is an add on an extension to LinkedIn where you can send messages based on a certain search criteria. So that's been really successful for a lot of our advisors doing employer specific campaigns. And then you do have an SEO opportunity too. So if you can't anticipate the most common keywords people are searching for regarding this employer, maybe it's their, you know, their savings plan or whatever the terminology is for their different benefits. And then you create content for each of those benefits. And then you have a resource page that links to all of your other content. Your resources page for those employees may start to get a lot of SEO traffic and then you don't need Google ads. If you're coming up as the top search result, you can circumvent spending for that traffic if that makes sense. Yeah, excellent, thank you. I'll jump in. So I love how specific it is you are going with your targeting. Were you formerly employed at this company, the Pacific Northwest National Lab? No, no, they're just a major employer in the area. And they're part of a bigger kind of employment structure that's here in our area. So I just didn't wanna go for the bigger structure. I just really niched down to this one company. And do you have a couple of internal advocates or what I call torchbearers at the company who helped spread the word about you? Not yet, no. This is kind of a new development within the last year. And I was really toying with going that niche to begin with but I've committed to it. So I'm in that development stage trying to get those people, get the word out. Yeah, well, there are applications for all sorts of content based on just this one idea. So you can create one big piece of content and then slice it and dice it into a webinar, into a teaser video, into a live seminar, into an article. Maybe you can get something placed in the local paper or a publication that you know they all read. Sometimes there's an internal human resources person who will take this type of content. So I think that you're on a really good path and we look forward to hearing back from you maybe in the next masterclass about how it's going. And then again, reminder everybody, once you get the names and emails, don't stop there. That's like wasting all of this work to get them into the funnel, into this top of the funnel that you wanna draw them down into the middle, convert them, turn them into clients, raving fans. And then they tell others who feed the top of the funnel. Johnny, back to you. Yep, that sounds great. So thank you, Angie. We're gonna move on to our next member here. And that is David Fowler of High Mountain Financial Coaching. Considering doing a book or ebook, three warning signs you may be gambling or speculating with your investments. So what else were you thinking there, David? Whoa, sorry. There we go. I'm ready here. Yeah, I guess I'm going with the fear-based move. That's pretty much all I have right now. My idea is to put probably a seven, eight page ebook together around that topic and then have that tie into a webinar that I'll run probably twice a month. So direct people to a webinar. So how did you come up with this topic? Is it something you've tried before or something that's resonated with your audience? Yeah, it's actually an event that I actually have run in the past that has done well. And my story is, wow, I was tied into another company. I broke off and started my own company about a year ago, had COVID. So it's been like this whole like train wreck. So like right now I'm kind of getting back up and running. So recently joined NAPFA, got a website, just going through all the maneuvers. Okay, great. So I just wonder about that topic. So are you gambling or speculating with your investments? I think that's great, but who are you targeting? Could you narrow your focus to make your content relevant to a certain subset? Is there a way to niche it down a bit more? So are you gambling with your XYZ company's benefits package or your alternative investment portfolio? Or could you target it a little bit more to a specific audience and identify exactly who you serve and how you help them? And that may come from just some discovery you do of who are your favorite clients? Who are your ideal clients? What do they have in common? Those types of things. Right, thank you. I can definitely do that. Where do you live, High Mountain Financial Coaching? I am in New Jersey and where High Mountain comes from is, which incidentally my target market is, outdoor enthusiasts, outdoor industry professionals. And High Mountain Preserve is right by my house and that's where I go to do my trail runs. So that's perfect, right, Claire? That's what you're talking about. Target those people, enthusiasts, outdoor enthusiasts. Probably in a similar vein as Dave Tozzolino. So you haven't started developing. Did we answer enough of your questions and get you thinking about next steps? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I have an idea of which way it's headed. I just have, I have so many irons in the fire right now. It's constantly working on one, working on the next, working on the next, but I'll definitely get it done, so. Yeah, and I could even see, you know, with outdoor enthusiasts or maybe kind of like adventure types, you could even tie that in of like, as adventurers or outdoor enthusiasts, we like to take risks, but maybe that's not the best place to take risks is in your investments, you know, sort of try to tie it into your target market. Yeah, great. Thank you. That's a great thought, Claire. And I do like the idea of having this be an ebook that then leads into a webinar of the same topic. So that gives you your drip marketing content, gives you multiple touch points, multiple ways to capture those email addresses. So that sounds like you're off to a great start. And, you know, it sounds like you're, you have a lot of irons in the fire, as you said. So, you know, I think like, I forget which gentleman said they use someone on Fiverr to help them put together the lead magnet and Canva. Don't be afraid to look for resources there. You can provide the written content and find someone to design it for you and put it all together. It might save you some time. Yeah, and Dave, if you're an outdoor enthusiast, which I'm guessing you are, let's get some photos of you into that paper, that ebook. Oh yeah, absolutely. If you look at my NAPFA profile, it's actually me in the Grand Canyon, so. All right. All right. Thank you, David. All right, we're going to move on to Julie Quick with Cultivate Financial Wellness. You are thinking about doing a webinar or recorded video series on mistakes to avoid during divorce and cultivating your financial compact post-divorce. So Julie, what else can you tell us? Is Julie here with us today? I don't know if she is. I will jump in on this because her note says she's having a hard time reducing the length of the webinar or the video, whichever it turns out to be, from 45 minutes down to what we had been saying last time or in one of our prior to 20 minutes or so. I'll jump in on this first, and then Claire and Johnny, I'd love to hear what you think. I think if it needs to be 45 minutes, have it be 45 minutes. If you really can't figure out how to chunk it out and make it into part one, part two, or two sequential pieces of content, just go ahead and do something. Don't have the length stop you. Get out there and do one thing, and then try to chunk it out and reduce it next time. Yeah, I agree. And then going back to, we were talking about video tools. If you use a tool like Wistia to host your video, you can actually watch where people fall off your video, and that may inspire you to brevity if you're saying everyone's falling off at 20 minutes, or maybe people are making it to the end, or maybe there's a section where you get really into the technical financial planning and everyone's dropping off, and then maybe you decide to remove that section. So I would get a first draft out there and then look at the data. Agreed. That sounds like a great suggestions. And I mean, Julie, hopefully you'll watch this recording, but you wrote out these two topics that go hand in hand, but if you're combining this into one webinar, that sounds like a great place to have part one and part two is mistakes to avoid during divorce and how to cultivate your financial comeback post divorce. So it sounds like you already have your two different parts if you were to section it out into parts one and two. And yeah, I think that's enough said on that. We'll move on to someone else who's here. So Maureen Demers, are you here with us? Demers financial planning, idea for a checklist or quiz, but unsure on the topic. So Maureen, are you here with us? Let me check the attendees. Looks like she's here, Maureen. Hi, I'm here. Hi. So have you had any topic ideas come up yet? I really don't. I really just came to see what other people were doing before I even got started. So sorry, I have nothing to share. Okay. Well, it sounds like you're interested in a checklist or a quiz. Can you tell us, do you have a niche or ideal client profile or anything like that? Right now I'm targeting retirees, which I guess is a giant. It's not really a niche, but that's kind of the target audience. What kind of retirees do you tend to attract just naturally? They just find you. I would say I work mostly with a lot of women or couples where the women are the primary finance people. So they tend to find me. Do they have anything else in common? Not just the age or that their gender is usually women, but are they family stewards? Are they members of certain communities of interest? What holds your clients together? Any commonalities? I've looked at that and they're really all across the board from teachers and nurses and they're various. Teachers and nurses are big helpers. So maybe there's something there around the pillars of the community, the people who are community stewards, the ones who want to help people. Teachers and nurses are passion driven for the most part, not money driven. Right. What were you doing before you became a financial planner? I pretty much started out doing this, so I've been doing it a long time. But I do, I like the idea of them being helpers. I agree with you in that they tend to be very, they tend to be very, in some cases, charitably minded and just really nice people to work with. I have to say, I love all my clients. I don't have anybody who's really difficult. So there is that, I forget what you would call it, psychographic, I guess. Yeah. You know, who comes to mind when I think of helpers is Mr. Rogers. Didn't he say something like, kids look for the helpers, you'll find them everywhere. And so that would probably resonate as a figurehead for retired people. If you think about the boomer generation, they probably remember Mr. Rogers, had their kids watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. So maybe you could even shift away from a checklist or a quiz more towards something that is inspirational, like five lessons learned from watching Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and then tie that into financial planning. Maureen's not reacting. Yes, I'm sorry, I'm taking notes. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. Okay. Anything else? I like that. And then as you dig deeper, I think that's a really nice idea, Maureen. I love how you just went through that process and dug down from my niche as retirees to teachers and nurses, which have similar characteristics, but from a marketing perspective, you could really dig deep into the financial planning opportunities that teachers have. Often they have different vehicles available to them, as well as nurses. I mean, you could create content marketing campaigns for both of these that can be very powerful and get more of those clients that you love, because you were speaking about them being very kind people, easy to work with and enjoyable to work with. So I would pick one or two of these niches that Maureen helped you kind of guide you to, and then start creating content that's specifically for them. So a checklist for teachers within five years of retirement, or a quiz for nurses on the biggest financial planning pitfalls they may be missing or something like that. And I think that will help you identify who's your perfect client, and then you can create very relevant content for them. Okay. Yeah. And for anyone that's struggling to think of a topic idea, or maybe thinks that you don't even have a niche, this is the process you should go through is identify your top clients or your clients who you most enjoy working with and try and find those commonalities between them. And you might discover that maybe it's not a niche that you can easily vocalize, but there are going to be commonalities there in terms of values or characteristics that you can kind of center your content for your lead magnet around. So thank you, Maureen, for sharing. And we're going to move on to Amber Miller with the Planning Center. She also is interested in a checklist or quiz and thinking about doing an impact calculator or assessment for sustainable and ESG investing. So any progress on your end there, Amber? Let's see if Amber's with us today. I don't think she is with us. So Marie Claire, what do you think about that topic for a calculator assessment quiz for sustainable ESG investing? Yeah, you know, personally, I prefer checklists to quizzes because quizzes can be challenging technically to set up. And so I would test the idea with a checklist and see if the topic garners interest. And then you could always change it to a quiz or a calculator. But yeah, I guess that would be my advice, Marie. Yeah, I think it depends on the whether it's a checklist or quiz based on who the audience is. So I could go either way. I don't have a preference. I just want engagement and I want people to interact with the content and ultimately be motivated to to contact you to get into the list or to raise their hand for something else. But I love this idea of some kind of a calculator or things to watch out for. Maybe that's the checklist idea. But if you could calculate, if you're environmentally conscious, ESG or government or sustainability, then you want to see how you're doing. And is there something that you're missing? So if it's a calculator, a quiz, a checklist, I think that's great. Recently, Impact Communications did some work with a woman named Holly Madassar. She is with Stern Financial Group. They're also NAPFA members. If you Google her name, it's Holly, H-A-L-L-E-H, Madassar, M-O-D-D-A-S-S-E-R. You'll find hollymadassarauthor.com. You'll see the book that she wrote called Women on Top about women, wealth and social change. You'll see how she did research. You'll see how she's got a podcast. You'll see how she's creating engagement and content that speaks specifically to what motivates her and what motivates her best clients. So she talks a lot about the power of the purse and also how you can vote with proxy shares and exclusionary investment strategies and so forth. So since we don't have Amber here, I think, Johnny, maybe we should move on to the next person. We have a couple people have also come in on the comment board. I want to make sure we get to them too. Yeah, let's save a couple minutes on the back end for the few questions we have. But let's hear from Diana Yates from Yates Financial Planning, also interested in the questionnaire checklist. And the topic is early retirement. What else can you tell us about that, Diana? Hi. I can tell you that similar niche, although I'm just starting out and don't have the website yet, but my niche is on educators and nurses. And the reason being, I have been an educator and I've worked with teachers many years ago. I've also spent a lot of time in the health field because my husband had a stroke and I started a stroke support group. So in the back of my mind, the whole time I've been thinking about somehow putting together my company and networking with people in the health field, like caregivers and different organizations, Alzheimer's organization and that type of thing. But since I'm at the beginning right now, I mean, that's in the future, but I'm starting simple. And what I have is different white papers that I can use from Vanguard, for example, that have topics that reach the niche that I will have on my website is mid-career, pre-retirement and retired. So there's different ideas. A lot of topics we're real familiar with. I was thinking maybe I could, well, first of all, the website will say, contact me for a complimentary or introductory conversation that's already planned in, but I was thinking maybe to put topics to choose from for the different groups, age groups that they could choose from to get more information, whether it be like rebalancing for one, being prepared, a critical checklist that could be for mid-career or pre-retirement or any age really. But there's lots of ideas that go through my head. And I have right now resources at Vanguard for their white papers and precise FP. There's a couple there and PF Pathfinder, since I haven't really gotten to the mode where I can spend time creating something, I'm still just getting everything organized, although I do see clients. So yeah, that's either have something that somebody may want to access. It sounds like they can access it all on the internet if they want, but I have a knowledge center on my website and also a place that says who we serve. So I was thinking placement wise, who knows, but I could put, you know, like where I have a list of little questions for each group. I could put something like, you know, push this to get information on long-term care for experience, for example, or just generally is a Roth IRA good for me? The critical financial checklist. I mean, there's just a lot of things like that already out there that I won't be creating at this point, but something that might catch somebody's thoughts. And I also was, you know, also going to give in-person little seminars, like go to a nurse's meeting. I'd have to connect with all this, but eventually go to where people are in hospitals and maybe during a lunch break or snack break or something be available. So go ahead. We have five minutes left. Thank you so much for sharing. Come to the next masterclass and keep with us and we can help you sort this out. Johnny, speed talk us through these last little bits. We've got some stuff on the chat board and I want to end on time for those who have to go to something else. We're not hearing you, Johnny. Sorry. One of the questions should be, where should a lead magnet live if different advisors in the same firm have different niches? So, Claire, I'll be interested in your perspective, but I think that one good place is on your bio page for that individual advisor. You could have a button at the towards the bottom of your bio page that leads to the landing page for that lead magnet. You know, I don't think that it hurts to have a lead magnet, you know, I don't think that it hurts to have a normal landing page the same way we've always talked about positioning your lead magnet under resources or insights or something like that. Even if it doesn't necessarily apply to all of the advisors in the same firm, it's still going to benefit the firm overall. And, you know, those inquiries can be directed towards that advisor. You could have multiple lead magnets positioned there, but I think the bio page is a great place for that as well. Any other thoughts there, Claire? Yeah, I would think of just adding a resources page for that specific niche. So, you know, for teachers, for dentists, for pharmacists, you know, having a drop down tab with all of your resources for that niche. Yep. Before we run out of time, I want to tell everybody, since we're not on GoToWebinar, you will be getting a separate survey link to write today's presentation and session. So watch for that to come from NAPFA. Johnny, do we have time to take the question that's in the chat box from Matthew Crum? I am not actually seeing that. How about the one from Greg Jed? Yeah, that's what I was going to move to next. So a question on speaking of personal stories, I think this came from Mike's example of having personal experience in the military. But if you have a strong personal story, how do you determine when to market it publicly on a website versus revealing and saving the personal story on a first meeting with a prospect for maximum impact? I say tell your personal story early and often. You can't tell it too often. Tell it different ways. Work it into everything. People want to know who you are. Yes, I would agree. And then you can always expand upon it when you meet them. So, you know, Mike has a story about 25 years in the Air Force. And then when you meet somebody, you can mention, you know, when I was in the Air Force, one of the biggest challenges, or this is how I felt, or I was worried about this. So you can always expand on it and remind them in person, but definitely telling your story on your website. Yeah, I think, Johnny, in the interest of time, Scott didn't really have anything to talk about. He said his topic is retirement. He knows it's not specific enough. I think we've covered that through other conversation today. The last thing we have is Matthew Crum. You wanted to talk about an idea that you have, but you didn't send it in on the survey. So we'll stick around for another couple of minutes. For those of you who have to go, please go. But Matthew, what's your idea? Hi, Marie. Can you hear me all right? We can hear you. Hi. Perfect. Thank you. So I initially was thinking about a checklist. My target demographic is, I guess, relatively broad. It's just young professionals. I'm on the younger side myself, but my idea initially was a checklist, and I'm thinking it may be more of a special report. But the idea was essentially a young professional's checklist for seizing current financial opportunities. Or I took some of the feedback that you provided earlier with the idea of using a little bit of fear to sell the urgency and maybe making it into a special report, like seven crucial employer benefits young professionals may be missing out on. Yes. You would say that would probably be a better... Claire, speed round, lightning round, quick advice for Matthew. Got it. Thank you. I like that topic, and then I would challenge you to duplicate it for one specific employer and then write it for Amazon employees or whatever, the largest employer in your area or in your demographic is, and just tweak it for that audience, and then find them on LinkedIn and send it to them that way. Thank you. Johnny, final word. No, that's it. I agree completely. So I think we're out of time, so let's wrap it up. Thanks, everybody. Hope to see you in the next trilogy. Thank you. Bye.

retirement preparation

military personnel

Transition Assistance Program

retirement timeline

budget and benefits

smooth transition

lead magnets

specific niches

checklists

webinars

engaging content