Marie, the floor is yours. Well, hello everybody and welcome back. My name is Marie Swift. I am one of the anchors of the Trilogy Series, the Marketing Playbook Trilogy this year. And we are kicking off the second trilogy. And this one is all about social media and email marketing. And so as you know, if you were in the first masterclass, we try to take you from theory to practice. And so there's a method to our madness to get you to listen and learn and engage with us on the first two in every masterclass. And then if you're willing to go and take on a little homework, to go away and work on something and bring it back for some constructive criticism, some feedback from the coaches. So speaking of coaches, Johnny, if you'll go to the coaching slide, we wanna mention that our special guest coach this time is Alex Cavalieri from The Seven Group. And of course, I'm joined again by Johnny Swift, who is my co-anchor on all the masterclasses in 2022. So let's go to the next couple of slides and quickly look at what we covered, in general, what we're hoping to accomplish and then what each of the masterclasses is about. So last time we talked about lead magnets and custom content as a way to pull interest to your website and to your firm. This time we're gonna be talking about pushing out content in the form of emails and social media. Now, could they be argued that it's also a poll strategy? Yes, maybe so, but we're gonna be talking about pushing out your messages to targeted audiences. And as we did in the last session, we're gonna talk about the why. Why do you wanna do that? And then we're gonna drill down into more of the how next time. And today's lead presenter is gonna be Johnny, and then next time it's gonna be Alex. And I'll be here as the glue, if you will, the wise woman. Hopefully I'll say a few things from my 30 years of experience working with independent advisory firms like yours. But Johnny, let's get going right into the content. I think we're pretty much through the reminder slides. Well, of course, here's our bios. You all know me. And then Johnny's bio, you all know Johnny, but maybe we'll just touch briefly on Alex. So Alex is the co-founder and CEO of 7Group, and he has a great podcast, which I've been on called The Advisor Lab. So I recommend that you all tune in for that. You'll learn a lot. He's also been quoted in the media, and he works with RAs to build a niche-focused brand. So you can learn more about the 7Group just by listening to Alex. And Alex, I know later today, you're gonna share a little bit about how you think about email marketing and social media. But Johnny, why don't you dive right into the core content? And then we'll wrap up and let's get going. Sure thing. So I apologize in advance. I am getting over a bout of COVID. So if I sound stuffed up or my voice is scratchy or I have a coughing fit, please bear with me. And I might have to call on Marie to rescue me here and there. We'll see what happens. But as Marie said, this masterclass is gonna focus on how to use social media and email as push strategies. And today, we're going to cover how to effectively use social media to share relevant content to your audience and fill the top of your funnel, good types of content to share that will help you grow your audience and get engagement, and why to embrace an automated lead nurture sequence. So today, we're actually gonna focus more on social media as a push strategy. And then next month in session two, led by Alex, we're gonna focus more on email marketing and automated email campaigns and sequences. So today, we'll kind of touch on all of that, automated sequences, but more on the social media side of things. So first of all, why should you be active on social media? Well, to build your network and grow your audience, find new leads, connect with other professionals, clients, prospects, COIs, and more. To amplify your voice, display expertise, and build credibility, authority, and thought leadership. To build trust and stay top of mind with your target audience. To feature and get engagement on the content that you create and you produce. To show the character, culture, and personality of your firm with some behind-the-scenes type of content. To enhance your reach, your online presence, and your SEO, since social media profiles show up high in search results. And to provide more points of contact for people to find you and be led back to your website. And finally, it's pretty much table stakes at this point due to so many people having an active social media presence, not just your target audience and ideal prospects, but also your competitors. So this is a great quote, we don't have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it. And one of the main reasons you wanna be active on social media is because it enhances your reach and allows you to connect with more people and prospects by giving those people more places to find you online. And it also enhances your SEO, since they show up very high in search results. And it's always great when you can have profiles that you can completely control the image and the messaging showing up high in search results when people Google you or your firm. So where should advisors be visible in terms of social media? At the very least, I think you should have your company social media pages staked out and set up on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as well as a strong personal profile on LinkedIn. And also for a lot of you, maybe an Instagram page, a YouTube channel, or a Vimeo channel, for those of you who have a lot of photo and or video content, or maybe even a SoundCloud page or another audio hosting site if you have a podcast. But the most important thing to remember is that you wanna have a presence where your ideal clients are. So even though a lot of advisors aren't on, for example, Instagram quite yet, if you find that you have a lot of your clients, a lot of your clients have Instagram profiles, then you should have one there as well. And while they're not really social media pages, having profiles set up with applicable membership groups and organizations and directories like your NAPFA profile, that also helps to boost your online presence and extend your reach. And many of those profiles also allow you to share content there as well. Yeah, and just one thing to add to that, Johnny, and just for everybody who may be thinking who may not be active on social media yet or just getting started, the biggest thing that Johnny said to reiterate is to live where your audience is living. I think, and also too, that you don't have to be active on all these channels together. I think one of the biggest mistakes we see advisors make when they're starting their marketing is saying, I need to be active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever it is. What we usually recommend is pick one to two workhorse channels, what we deem as workhorse channels to start and really start to build your brand based on that individual channel where your audience is living, and focus on those from anywhere from six to eight months to really build out your brand, your following, your content strategy on those channels, and then start to diversify outside of that. Because what you're gonna understand is that the minute you're able to focus on one, you're able to really go deep on one, specifically on building your brand, engaging with your audience, creating new content for that channel, versus if you're spread too thin across all of these, the focus is gonna be spread too thin and you're gonna feel like you're pulled in a thousand different directions. Yeah, great advice. So it really comes down to knowing your audience and don't be afraid to ask your clients and other members of your audience what social media platforms they use most. And how about some ideal content to share on social media? So media and press activity, articles that you're quoted or featured in, profiles, bylined articles, news releases. So that could include media activity and industry publications like Wealth Management or consumer publications like Forbes. All of this media activity is great for displaying your expertise, credibility, and thought leadership. Blog posts, insights, and other educational resources. Any type of content that can provide educational value to your audience is gonna be a great way to build trust and display your knowledge and expertise. Photos, videos, and podcast episodes. Videos get shared about 12 times more often than text and images alone, so video content is always great. And obviously podcasts are all the rage right now and another great medium for sharing educational content. Special reports and white papers and other lead magnets like we discussed in our last masterclass. So that obviously was all about lead magnets and whatever your lead magnet is, you want to share it far and wide on social media and oftentimes even pay for targeted boosting on social media, which we'll dig into a bit more later in the presentation. Next is going to be personal content that shows behind the scenes into the character and culture of the firm and the people behind the firm. So this type of content usually performs really well on social media and gets lots of engagement because it lifts the veil and allows your audience to get to know you and your firm on a more personal level and feel a deeper level of connection and it allows you to build trust with your audience. So equally important these days is credibility marketing, is authenticity marketing, and this type of content allows you to show yourself as an authentic human being in addition to a trustworthy advisor. Yeah, and three things to just note here as you're thinking about what to share on social. Because there's a, as Johnny mentioned, there's a bunch of different types of content that you can share. The first thing is that social platforms love when you stay in feed and on platform, which is why video does so well because of the fact that when you're sharing a video natively on these social channels, you're keeping people within feed. They're consuming within the feed, they're consuming within stories, they're not driving off to an asset. So when it comes to social, these social channels love when you are staying on feed and that's why, for example, on Twitter, if anybody's active on Twitter, threads do really well. Posts that don't necessarily have links out do really well. On LinkedIn you see videos do really, really well. And from that perspective, keeping your content diverse enough to where you may be sharing links out to articles or press or whatever the case may be, but you're mixing in content that's keeping people on feed via images and videos. In addition to that, when it comes to sharing content on social media or creating content for social media, not everything, and I think Johnny has the great examples here because not everything needs to be you coming to the table with a specific opinion on a topic or a thought leadership on the topic. One of the things that we like to say is infiltrate your audience. So from that example, if you're talking about things that your audience is thinking about or questions that they have. So if you're going after business owners as an advisor and essentially you're talking about how business owners can navigate the hiring process, right? It's not necessarily core to you talking about in creating a solo 401k or building out a 401k plan for your employees as a business owner. You're talking about topics that are one step left or one step right to your core expertise. However, it's very important to your target audience. So it's important to take a step back and really understand what are the big questions that your audience cares about? What are the big questions, the needs that your audience has? And think about your content strategy in that sense where you may cover things that may not necessarily be as close to your financial planning expertise, but it's very close to your audience's needs. Yeah, Johnny, I'll just punctuate one more thing to what you two have said is being hyper relevant. I think Bill Cates is the one who coined that term, being hyper, hyper relevant to your audience. And if you have a niche focus or a couple of niche focuses, having graphics or things that draw their attention that stop people from scrolling in their feed, they wanna pay attention because it shouts out to them. This is for me. And then posting the link, if you're gonna post a link away, post it in the comment. You'll oftentimes see a graphic like John Smith was in the news, he's in the Barron's Top 100. Here's a graphic of him, it's splashy, it stops the scroll. Link to the article in the comments below. So that will be another way to help keep the higher ratings with the relevancy with the social engine platforms. Yeah, so another great tactic I see lots of advisors using when they are, for instance, quoted in an article is putting together a social media graphic in something like Canva, which we discussed in the last masterclass with the publication logo and a photo or a screenshot of the quote from the article. And you can post that as the native image so it keeps the on-platform content there. And then either in the comments or just in text at the bottom of the post, you can put the link to the full article to read more so you kinda get the best of both worlds there. And then last on this list here, I just have canned or curated content. We'll dig into that in a minute. But finding good content that aligns with your views or your thought process and that you think will provide value to your audience is another good way to provide good content to your audience without always having to create custom content. But regardless of what kind of content you're posting, ultimately, you just wanna share content that's gonna provide value to your audience. And a great way to keep the pulse on what consumers wanna learn about is to follow industry publications and also consumer finance publications and see what types of topics they're covering and cover those same topics, whether you're posting curated articles or you're using them as inspiration to write custom blog content or film a short video with your own thoughts on the subject. And I'd like to dig into canned and curated content a bit more, which can really help you save time on your content marketing and automate your marketing efforts, including your social media process. And you can find good canned content from many industry service providers, like Wendy Cook is a good one, and website platforms that double as content management systems, like 20 Over 10. They have built-in content libraries with canned content that you can customize. You can take the canned, you can customize it however you like and turn it into a blog post. So if you use 20 Over 10 for your website platform, be sure to check out their content library. Companies like Snappy Kraken and also 7 Group provide a service where they provide advisors with a form of content that's canned and curated, but can also be customized and then fed into your email marketing and social media. So Alex, could you tell us more about 7 Group and what kind of content you all provide and the different types? Yeah, for sure, and I think it's important to note here, as Johnny mentioned, that when you're sharing content, the key is that you're keeping it diverse in what you're sharing, right? You don't just wanna share one type every single time or just don't wanna share a blog post. You wanna make sure that when people come to expect as you post and they come to expect to see your name within their feed and your profile picture within your feed, they're able to understand that there's a few different types of content that you share. From original content to curated content, it's good to keep that mix. Usually what we have advisors do, because writing essentially takes a lot more time for most people, we have them usually do video themselves because it's their personality, it's their face, it's their profile. And then a lot of the written content comes from a platform like ours or one of these other great platforms that are on the slide here. So 7 Group, we cover a number of different topics, a number of different niches. We're much more niche focused than a lot of other players out there. So we bucket our content within the context of personas. So we cover 12 different personas on our platform and we're developing content for those niches where advisors can then leverage that content for their audiences, customize it and use it in their email marketing as well as in their blogging. And then we also provide video scripts, eBooks, presentations and more similar to what you talked about in some of the other sessions via Lead Magnet. So we cover the full funnel, I would say, from a content perspective. But the key here is that you're finding one, what your strong suit is from a content development perspective. If you hate to be on video, there's no reason to force it. And then two, making sure that whatever your strong suit is, you're able to supplement that with other content from some of these other providers and partners. Great, thank you, Alex. And the next slide, I just wanted to cover one other great strategy for creating custom content and determining what to share on social media is by always taking into account what your clients are asking you because if a client is asking you a question on a specific topic, you can bet that many other people have the same question. So whenever a client asks you a question, rather than just responding to them and answering their question directly, take your responses and turn them into a blog post that you can post on your website or a bylined article that you can pitch to journalists and publications and then obviously ultimately share on social media, in your email newsletter and on your other distribution channels. So what's the best way to create custom content? Every time someone asks you a question, every time you see something interesting in an industry publication, every time you see something you disagree with in the news, blog the answer, film the answer, write a bylined article to pitch to third party publications, turn the topic into a media pitch, write a special report or white paper around the topic, post a webinar around the topic and ultimately push out on social media. So I think it's important to just keep your ear to the pavement for hot topics and stay tuned into current events and listen to what people are asking you by being active on social media and staying tuned into industry news and following publications and peers and other thought leaders and then paying attention to the type of content that they're sharing, you'll gain a lot of insight and ideas for custom content for your own efforts. Yeah, and I think the key too is that don't be afraid to reshare a lot of the same content. You know, the average life of a tweet, I think now is like 18 minutes. I think the average lifespan of a LinkedIn post is I think a couple of days. Facebook, I think the percentage of people that see you, that follow you organically on Facebook is single digit percentages. So the idea that your full audience is seeing a single post is just not possible. So a fraction of your audience is seeing a lot of your content. So what I would say is, to Johnny's point, if you're blogging, find other ways into that content that you're creating. You're spending the time creating this content, post it once, twice, five times, 10 times. Don't be afraid to reshare it, repackage it in different ways, leveraging graphics and videos to reshare that content out to your feeds on a regular basis. So we have this whole philosophy called scale distribution, where essentially you're creating templates to be able to promote the same asset 10 different ways. So when you're thinking through that, and you're developing a piece of content, think through the distribution plan. How can I send this, get this out the door in a number of different ways to attract the same audience into that piece who maybe didn't see it the first time or the second time I pushed it out? Yeah, I'll just add one more thing. Another great way to find out what's on the minds of readers or consumers, whether they're your clients or not, is to reply to press requests. And I know many of you get the press requests from NAPFA or other sources. And so if you've written three paragraphs, maybe to US News and World Report or Wall Street Journal, just wait until the article runs. Don't scoop the journalists by taking your responses and putting them as a blog post, but wait a respectable amount of time, and maybe you'll even get quoted in the article. And then you can have a post on your blog that says, recently I submitted comments to the Wall Street Journal, and I'd like to expand upon the quote that I provided. And maybe it's two sentences where you submitted three paragraphs. You can turn that into a nice, easy blog post and crosslink over to that article, thus creating some search engine optimization for both you and the publication. Great advice. All right, moving on. So how to generate content that resonates. I'm going to address what's on your audience's minds. So it could be finances, heritage, health, happiness, lifestyle, taxes, legacy. Take note of what your audience is sharing and what your clients are asking about, and make sure to address those topics in your content. How to capture attention with content. Well, you want to trigger their emotions, pride, concern, purpose, curiosity, FOMO. If you're able to trigger emotions with your content, you're going to get a lot more attention and engagement on that content as well. And then why do people share content? Their personal motivations. So entertainment, purpose, family, culture, community. So ultimately, if you share content that resonates with your audience, captures their attention, addresses what's on their minds, triggers their emotions, and appeals to their personal motivations, you're going to be much more likely to get engagement, to build share of mind, and to ultimately pull ideal prospects into the top of your funnel. So just to go a bit further into why people share, the New York Times Insights Group published a study that looked at the key factors that influence people to share content on social media, and unsurprisingly, they discovered that sharing is all about relationships, and they outlined these key motivations for people to share, to grow and nourish relationships, to bring valuable and entertaining content to others, to define ourselves to others, and to get the word out about causes and brands that we care about. So that's what motivates people to share. And when you create or curate content, it's important to be mindful of what the motivation of your audience is. So when you're planning each piece of content that you're going to create or curate and then share on social media, make sure to answer these questions. How does this add value for your audience? How will this help or entertain them? Why will they share it or engage with it? And then always remember that relevant content is going to be the middle of the Venn diagram between what you want to say and what your audience is interested in. Yeah, it's such a great point that Johnny makes here. I think the other thing I would just say is that when we see advisors do content marketing successfully, and just to reiterate, it takes a very long time to build an audience and to build a content marketing engine that is sustainable for your practice. Usually if you talk to anybody who's been doing it for a long time, they'll say at minimum six months. But like you're looking at 12 to 18 months to really see a lot of true, true, true sustainable momentum. The one thing that I would say here is that people are looking for deeply educational information on stuff that can educate them to the point where they can then take action off that or think about taking action off that. And that's one bucket. And then the other bucket is people want to be entertained. And to Johnny's point, if you're doing one of those two, if you're doing in the middle where you're kind of doing a little bit education and trying to be a little bit of entertaining, that's where that will struggle to gain traction. You have to be on the edges of the spectrum to where you're either providing people deep value in terms of education or you have a deeply entertaining series. So from that perspective, really think through that. If you're teaching someone about a topic, financial planning wise or other, making sure that you're getting to a place where you're able to share really in-depth thought leadership on a specific topic and it didn't show your expertise and help them think through a specific question that they may be asking. Or on the other side of it, entertaining wise, you may be doing something that is just fun to watch. You know, we had a conversation with an advisor in Texas and her niche is all she does is serve farmers and her whole niche is serve farmers. So we got to a place where from a content series perspective, she should just bring on farmers and farm industry experts and interview them about the farm industry and what's going on. So from that perspective, she's bringing that one, that deep knowledge factor, but she's bringing the expertise from people who are living within that industry. In addition to that, farmers want to hear from other farmers about what's going on in their lives. So she's really fitting those two buckets well. Yeah, that's hyper relevant. Perfect example of what we were hitting on earlier. You know, there's a term that I've heard used, edutainment. And I think that it's a tricky, it's a slippery slope, right? So not everything is funny to everybody. So I sometimes see videos and people put a lot of work into them and they think they're super funny, but I do not. So just make sure you know your audience and that you're not a legend in your own mind, you know, do a little reality check. But I think the point about having farmers on to be hyper relevant to a farmer audience is brilliant, because you've also got the calling card, hey, would you like to be on my show, whether it's a video series or a podcast series, or you're writing a book or an anthology or an article, or you would like to have them help you cross pollinate and market a webinar or an in person event, all of that is really good for being hyper relevant and building those relationships. And I think we're all hungry for relationships, especially after everything that we've been through the stressors of the past couple of years and too much being virtual. But you know, there is a question on the board that I want to just take right now, I want to talk about the quality of the equipment real quick. And I know that we're going to drill down into the how more as we get into next week. But there was a question because Alex, people can see your mic. So that's a blue Yeti, isn't it? And it's a 10 year anniversary blue. Talk to us about why you chose that mic. Yeah, so honestly, I chose the mic because it had the best reviews on Amazon. You know, I saw a lot of podcasters using Blue Yeti and you know, I bought the podcast a little two and a half years ago. Here's what I would say about equipment is a lot of people and it's funny, we just had a podcast about this last week with Matt Halloran, who runs Proud Mouth, who's all about podcasting. And we share the same opinion is that you don't need expensive equipment. I think this Blue Yeti mic was like $150. My camera here on my computer, I have a Logitech attached. That's a 1080p camera. So it's HD. If I'm filming any video, it's going to be very high definition. You don't need a big, impressive $4,000 tech stack. It is one thing that if you've been doing this for a while and you're trying to take your video from X to Y, then maybe it's worth the investment if you built up that following. But just to get started, you should make an investment in your sound quality, in your visual quality, because that is critically important. However, the investment needs to be a few hundred dollars. It does not need to be a few thousand dollars. And we've seen advisors who have spent six, seven, eight K on equipment and they haven't used it. It's collecting dust. So you want to get to a place where like, is this even a core part of your business development as a practice? And with that, spending a few hundred bucks to get the right equipment can go a very, very long way from a marketing perspective. Yeah, I'll just add, and then Johnny, I'll throw it back to you. I'm here at the FBA retreat in Austin, Texas. And so I'm using my good old earbuds and I hear that these corded ones are retro chic now because people can see I'm busy if I have a cord versus like just the cordless kind. So I don't know how the experience is for you, Alex and Johnny listening to me, but I guess time will tell when I play back the recording, but I'm doing onsite video interviews just with my iPhone and they're turning out great. I can get people in their natural habitat. I have a little adapter that I plug into my phone. I shoot in landscape and then I have a brand new handheld Comica mic, which I love because the sound, Johnny, you're going to love this when you see the footage, it's great. The sound that comes through that Comica plugged into my iPhone is spectacular. So you can do a lot with just a little tripod and any kind of a lavalier or a microphone on your handheld device. Johnny, over to you. Yeah, I too am using a blue Yeti microphone right now, it's just off camera. But honestly, when I do listen to myself, listen to recordings between that and my built-in microphone on my MacBook Pro, it's not that big of a step up in quality. You know, so many of the devices that we own now have really good built-in microphones and cameras, including our laptops and our smartphones and everything. So like Alex said, I mean, don't let that stop you from getting started in video and audio content. If you're going to start doing a video series for your website, for your blog, or start doing a podcast, you know, if you have, for most people, using your iPhone, using your computer webcam and your built-in cameras and your built-in microphones is going to be good enough in most cases, and then you can continue to upgrade over time to some slightly more expensive devices if you want to just up your quality a little bit. But you know, the iPhone videos are amazing nowadays. When we go to conferences, oftentimes we just bring our iPhones and get some better lighting and a better microphone, and it's great. So I'm going to move on here to best practices for posting to social media. So try to stay active once you're established. Post at least once a week, at least to the couple of social media platforms that you're really going to stake a claim to and be active on. Post at least once a week, but ideally a couple times a week. Link to media mentions, articles, photos, videos, podcasts, blog posts, all that different type of content that we've already discussed. Share valuable content from trusted sources. Tag other users, both personal profiles on LinkedIn and company pages on all the platforms, which promotes them, it gives credibility, it encourages engagement between the audiences of the two pages, and it helps to widen your audience. Tag and mention NAPFA whenever it makes sense and share the content that's being posted to the NAPFA pages. Follow and like who you want to be followed by. Engage with people and pages that you would like to engage with your content. Promote others more than yourself. Don't be a braggart or a bore, and have fun with it. You know, once you get the hang of it and you start engaging with your audience and your peers and you start seeing some engagement back on your own content, social media and social networking can be a really fun process that's extremely useful for promotion and engagement, but the more you promote your connections and other industry thought leaders and journalists and publications, the more that you're going to be seen as a booster and cheerleader for others, and people will start to promote you in turn. Yeah, and just a couple of things to add on to this. So the first thing is, I would recommend if you're just getting started with social, a lot of this can seem overwhelming. It's like, okay, I'm going to spend all day on social media, is that how I'm going to have to build my brand? Time block it out. So usually we have advisors do a 10-10-10 strategy. So for 30 minutes a day, you're spending 10 minutes building your network. That's building your network on LinkedIn, following people on social, adding new connections, whatever the case may be. You're doing 10 minutes a day posting content, essentially crafting up content, crafting a post copy, sharing the content we've been talking about. And then for the next 10 minutes a day, you're engaging on other people's content, commenting, being thoughtful about what they're sharing, reposting, retweeting, whatever the case may be. So time blocking out, literally physically putting a time block on your calendar to make sure that you're focusing and that's your time to build on social. And then after that, you can shut down. And then maybe you book, you do time block once in the morning, you time block once in the afternoon, and then that's really all you need from a social media perspective throughout that day. That's the first thing. The second thing I would add is physically when advisors do that, they make so much more progress than someone who doesn't do that because basically what we see is that advisors either spend all day on it and they're like, this is such a time suck, or they just don't go on it at all and they don't allocate the time to do it. So from that perspective, time block that out. The second thing I would add is when you're posting on social, whatever you're sharing, you're sharing a video, you're sharing a graphic, you're sharing a blog post, whatever the case may be, your post copy that goes on top of that asset that you're sharing. If you're uploading a video and you're giving context to the video that you're posting out about is the most important part of any social media posts. And so essentially what you want to do is when you're posting it, when you're crafting a post copy, the 280 characters on Twitter, you can have, I don't know the character count on LinkedIn now. I think it's like 700 and something characters, so you can have a lot on LinkedIn. On Facebook, you can like write a whole novel. I'm pretty sure. I don't think they have a limit anymore. But generally when you're crafting up that post copy, think about it as a hook and this kind of goes back to the questions you should ask yourself that Johnny mentioned when you're posting on social, there's essentially four types of hooks that you can create. A hook of sharing a personal experience that you've gone through yourself in that post copy, a hook of sharing a data point, X percent of business owners think this when it comes to this, to start your post copy, a question, maybe you're posing a question to the audience or you're referencing some type of trending headline. So those hooks essentially set up your post for whatever asset that you're sharing and generally that's helping craft and set up your post copy. So don't shorten or skip or try to shortcut the post copy. It is so, so, so important when you're building out your social media posts. I'll just add one more thing and then back to you, Johnny, but I have seen a couple of advisors that all they do is they upload the link, let's say to LinkedIn. There's an ugly link sitting there where the post copy that hook should be. They could have taken 15 seconds and written something to engage me. I mean, they just think, oh, well, the graphics there, it, it unfurled. That's the URL unfurling and showing right there. Well, you know, to your point, Alex, that's not what we want to be doing. Right. Along with the hook, we also want to call to action and you really want to drop people in and like Marie said earlier, stop the scroll. And I love the idea about time blocking out and that certainly helps advisors save time on their social media efforts. Another way that advisors can save time is by utilizing social media automation tools, which can help you free up some time and be more efficient with your social media marketing efforts. So automation tools allow you to schedule and automate your posts across multiple platforms. You can plan out posts in advance and create a social media calendar. You can easily track all of your social media activity across all of your different channels and profiles. And you can also easily review stats and analytics across all of your different profiles. Some of the downsides to these automation tools include there's no personal tagging on LinkedIn, only the company pages, so you can't tag an individual. There's less control over the individual platforms and it's easier to make a mistake and or be lazy and not differentiate between the platforms. So what I mean by that is obviously a tweet is formatted much differently than a LinkedIn post with the character limit and the tags are displayed within the text with the at sign directly in the text. So if you're going to use one of these automated tools, I would just caution, you know, especially if you're going to use the feature where you can send the same post to multiple social media platforms, just double check that you're not sending a post that's formatted for Twitter to LinkedIn and vice versa, you know, and just having the ability to write out one post and share it across all of your social media platforms is really nice and can save you some time, but it also makes it easy to be lazy in a sense and not differentiate the post between platforms, which you should always do, not just because of the differences in formatting and tagging and so forth, but you want to change up the language and the voice of the post for the different audiences on each platform. And you know, if you have some of the same audience members on multiple platforms, you want to differentiate the post. So personally, when I'm going in and I'm going to post the same content to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, I personally like to go into each one separately so I can change up the language of the voice a bit for each platform and the different audiences and I can also have full control and functionality and make sure the tags are done properly. But losing some of that control and functionality may be worth it for some of you that are looking to save time and be more efficient. So if you are looking for some good automated social media platforms, here are some ones that I would recommend. Hootsuite is a good one. I've used that plenty of times in the past and it's a very popular one. Loomly is another one. HubSpot is a whole CRM platform really and they have email marketing and landing pages and also the social media calendaring so that's just one component of HubSpot. Sprout Social and SocialPilot are other ones that are good just for social and then Meltwater is actually for PR and media activity as well and has the social media management component built into their platform. So lots of options. Some are free. Some have premium plans. Some are paid. Alex, do you have any recommendations here? Do you have any favorites? Yeah, I usually recommend Buffer because it's usually no cost and it allows you to go across platforms. The one thing I would say is if you're scheduling a social media post out across channels and you're not posting individually and or tweaking graphics individually which obviously is a big time commitment if you're an advisor running a practice and to create a number of different graphics for different platforms is not realistic. Format your posts, your graphics in the size for Twitter. If you format for Twitter first then that will be applicable to all platforms as it relates to LinkedIn and Facebook. Instagram is a different beast but essentially go square or horizontal in your graphics. Go vertical, tall graphics that will get cut off in Twitter. So from that perspective, format for Twitter and that usually spans across the social media post that you can do within these platforms specifically. So if you go to Canva and you literally search like Twitter post, it will pull up a bunch of templates and you can just manipulate them, build them and you can build a bunch into your brand and just keep manipulating them to post out. Good advice. Thanks. I want to make sure we have enough time for questions at the end so I'm going to kind of speed through these next few slides here. But the next slide is all about advertising on social media. So benefits included that it's a cost-effective way to reach a larger targeted audience made up of people similar to your clients. You can gain more followers and prospects, get more engagement on your posts and your social media activity, get more prospects into the top of your marketing funnel, get more views, clicks and downloads on your lead magnet, grow your email list and amplify your voice and extend your reach. So when you advertise and boost your posts on social media, it really is like using a bullhorn here to blast your message and your content out to a much larger targeted audience. And some best practices for advertising on social media, consult the social media platform advertising support pages. You can Google those for each social media platform. But these pages are going to be really helpful for getting your ads up and running and give you some specific details on each platform. You want to use detailed, descriptive, clear and inviting language with a clear call to action. Make sure to say who, what, when, where, why in your post and lay out all the info clearly. Use the learn more button rather than sign up or register. Studies show that the learn more button performs better in boosted social media posts than any other button since it's more inviting and noncommittal compared to sign up and register. Use a specific link in the post and make sure the link preview loads. Make sure you use a clickable link as the media in your post and not a native image. I say this just for advertising purposes. We were talking about how native images can perform really well for organic posts. But when we're advertising, most of the time we're wanting to drive them to a specific landing page or something on your website. Use a visually appealing image or video thumbnail in your link preview. Use a special and unique landing page link as well as a pixel if possible. If you can create unique landing pages for your advertising campaign, it's going to be much easier to tell how much traffic came to your landing page specifically from a certain platform. And a pixel is a line of code from Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever platform that you can add to your landing page in the back office of your website that will track when someone visits that page. This code allows the pixel to receive information about the actions taken on your site and better track conversions when someone actually signs up or fills out your form or takes the action that you want them to take. Name your ideal audience based on demographics, interests, or behaviors. And also use a look-alike audience if possible. If you don't know, look-alike audiences are created by uploading a list of your contacts. And then the platform finds the profiles of the people that you uploaded, but it doesn't advertise directly to the people you uploaded, but it goes out and it finds other profiles that are similar to those of the people in the list you uploaded. So if you upload a list of clients, the look-alike audience is going to be made up of people who are similar to your clients and fit similar demographics with similar interests and behaviors. So you know you're paying to boost your content to an ideal audience. Set your budget and time frame. Experiment with $100 to $200 for one to two weeks. I think you want to set it for at least one week, but ideally longer because the longer you let the ad run, the better as it takes a few days for the platform to get out of the learning phase and get a good feel for the type of audience that your ad is performing best with. So the longer the ad runs, the more time the ad can be optimized and learn which type of people are going to be most likely to click on it. And your amount of clicks will go up while your cost per click goes down over time. So if you're unhappy with your results after a few days, be patient and give the ad some more time to learn and improve. I recommend spending $100 to $200 at least to get a full idea of the effectiveness of your ad and up to $500 and even more for a big campaign around a lead magnet. But even $10 to $20 per post can have a great effect and get a lot more views and clicks on your content than a simple organic non-paid post would. So I think your average cost per click you should be shooting for is around $1 to $5 per click. And ultimately, you want to examine your results, tweak it, and try again. Maybe do some A-B testing by changing the image and the language and the call to action or the audience and see which criteria performs better and continue to tweak it and try again. Yeah. And on the ad front, just something to note here is that essentially, as Johnny mentioned, $500 on Facebook can take you a long way. So a $500 budget on Facebook, you can get really good results, usually at $500. We see anywhere from, if an advisor is running lead gen, we see anywhere from 30 to 45 leads at like a $7 to $13 cost per lead on that ad run. Where you get into other platforms, and this is where you really got to figure out, one, what your budget is, and two, what your audience is going to live on, where your audience is living. LinkedIn, you really can't get the ROI on the ad runs unless you're spending over $1,500 at least a month on that campaign. So from that perspective, LinkedIn, because of the B2B targeting, because you could do job title targeting, because all these B2B software companies have huge advertising budgets and they're basically bidding against each other, LinkedIn charges a premium on their impressions. So you definitely need to invest more money if you're using a platform like LinkedIn to advertise. On the Google Ads side, because I'm sure some advisors have expressed some interest there, there's two ways to essentially go after folks on Google Ads. There's a number of ways, but two traditional ways in search, which is one, you're going after local, which Financial Advisor, I'm in New York City, New York City, and then also topical. When it comes to local advertising, using Google Ads as a specific strategy, it can get very expensive very quick. The reason why is because you're bidding against Morgan Stanley, Smart Asset, Edward Jones, pretty much every big entity is deploying these regional strategies on Google for Financial Advisor New York City, because that's a very down-funnel intentional search term that someone's searching. So from a competitive perspective, going local on Google Ads can get pricey and you can have some tough ROI on that, so just something to note as you're building that strategy out. On Google Ads, where you can win is going topical. So if you're going after Roth IRA conversions or IRA conversions and thinking about those longer tail topics that you could potentially target and get people more in that mid-funnel, can have a better ROI from a cost perspective and a cost-per-click perspective than some of the local stuff. So just something to note in terms of that budget is that it's going to flex and change based on the actual platform. We have 10 minutes left to go, Johnny. So let's get through the core content, and then there's another question here. Johnny, who's within the sound of my voice, if you have a question, now's the time to give it on the board so that I can triage and ask the panel. Johnny, back to you. So regardless of what platform you're going to advertise on, a great one for social media is Lead Magnets. So obviously our whole first master class was on Lead Magnets, and I'm sure many of you were there for us for that. So once you have that set up on your website, that's going to be best for you to boost and advertise because it drives people to the content, ideally on your website, where they have to give up their name and email address in order to access it. And then you can feed their email address into your email list and continue to drip market to them over time. So that's going to give you the best return on investment with social media advertising, in my opinion. So if you recall, good examples of Lead Magnets include special reports or white paper, a webinar or in-person seminar, an educational video series, a free chapter of your book or an e-book, a quiz or a checklist, a free consultation or financial review, or anything that you can provide, a piece of educational content where people have to give up their email address in order to download or access. So paying to boost that Lead Magnet that you worked so hard to create is going to really help to get more traction with it on an ongoing basis and get more qualified prospects to access it. Yeah. And one thing to note here on your Lead Magnets is just the mindset of someone who's downloading a Lead Magnet. So one thing that if you're having people downloading a Lead Magnet, specifically an e-book or sign up to watch a webinar online, the mindset of those folks is still in the educational phase, right? You're infusing yourself into their feed. You're pulling them into your Lead Magnet. So a lot of the time, and this is kind of a good segue to what Johnny's going to talk about next, but a lot of the time, people are not ready to have a conversation off of the download of that Lead Magnet, which is why it's super important that if you're running these advertising programs and you're getting contacts or getting leads, you're getting qualified folks, which you can get to qualify in terms of the forum questions that you're asking when they fill out the forums. It's important to have that mindset of you have to drip on them, stay on them, and not necessarily a lot of those folks aren't going to be ready to convert on that first follow-up email. So it's something that sometimes they will, and we've seen the wins, but a lot more times it's going to take them to engage with two to three, four of your email campaigns to really get them warmed up to do more direct outreach on the meeting side. So just something to note if you're promoting a Lead Magnet or doing an advertising program around a lead asset. Great point, and that's why it's great to advertise your Lead Magnets and get that email address so you can continue to drip over them over time and build that trust and share of mind. So a quick example of an automated sequence throughout this whole process, but you post the link to your Lead Magnet on your social media profiles, either organically or through an automation tool. Pay to boost your post out to a larger targeted audience, ideally using a lookalike audience. Drive traffic to the landing page on your website featuring your Lead Magnet. Get people to sign up, download, or access your Lead Magnet by giving up their name and email address. Feed the email addresses into your email list. Set up an automated email sequence and campaign that follows up with those people who downloaded your Lead Magnet. And then continue to include them in your email correspondence, drip marketing to them and building trust, authority, and share of mind over time. And continue to reach out and provide educational content and valuable offerings like a free consultation, eventually converting prospects into clients. As Alex said, many people are not going to be ready to even have a conversation with you after they download your Lead Magnet or even just receive a few emails from you. It takes time to build that trust and authority, and so having them in your email list can really help with that, and that's what we're going to drill down into the next session next month. So why embrace automated sequences? As we wrap up today, it helps you fill the top of your funnel with ideal prospects. It makes it easy to drip market to them over time and nurture your leads. It helps you build trust and stay top of mind with your target audience, helps you be more efficient, and it saves you time and energy with your marketing efforts so you can focus on your business and serving clients. So Alex, anything else you want to add there? No, and we'll get into it on the next session. There's very specific instances where you want to automate, particularly email content versus not. There's instances where if you're having inbound where someone's downloading an asset, having an automated nurture set up to go out to those folks who are coming inbound to you, and then you're sending them follow-up content from a value-add perspective over the course of days or weeks can be incredibly effective to move them down the funnel and get them introduced to your firm. Eventually they would move off that automated sequence once they're engaged enough to essentially warrant a direct outreach, and that's the goal of the automated sequence is getting them to either raise their hand for a meeting or get them to a place where they've qualified enough, aka, and engaged with enough content to move them into you being able to directly outreach to them to have that business development conversation. So from that perspective, it's super important, and we'll get into this next on where to set up your automation sequences, why you should have certain ones off things like your website or assets like your website or properties like your website, and we'll get into that next session, but when it comes to automation, you don't have to automate everything. I think in the marketing world, we've gotten a little automation happy. I think from that standpoint, we're going to get very particular in the next section on what exactly needs to be automated, when, and why. Agreed. Thanks. So, just a couple things to wrap up. If you're interested in seeing what type of content that Impact Communications is sharing, you can visit the Best Practices blog at the URL there. We have SwiftChat video chats. We had one with Alex recently, and you can check out Marie and myself and Impact on social media to see what kind of content we're posting on social media. Do the same with Alex and Seven Group. Just a couple reminders before we go to the Q&A, but next month, Alex is going to lead that session on email marketing. That's May 25th. Then, the third session will be the interactive coaching session via Zoom. Masterclass number three will be on ungated custom content and organic SEO. Upcoming Spring NAPFA Conference, May 4th through 7th in Atlanta, and then the ongoing Mindset Mastery podcast, so tune into that. We have a new episode on the first Monday of every month. So, with that, Marie, do we have any other questions? I do have two, and I want to get to this one. So, somebody's asking about my Comica mic, C-O-M-I-C-A. It's got a long cord. It's got a jack. It goes right into my phone. Sorry, my Siri turned on. I wasn't speaking to her. When I plug this in, the sound is so much better, whether I'm holding it and talking to a guest or if I have my guest hold it, and I'm just asking them questions off-camera. So, this, to your question here, it drowns out a lot of the ambient noise, whether there's an air conditioner or whatever the background is, and some of it you want. You want that ambient noise. I'm here at the FAA retreat. I want to hear people talking and walking around or the hotel staff because it's more authentic. You can also get a jack and put a lavalier mic right on your lapel, and then there's sometimes a splitter that you can get, one for your guest, one for you, and that's going to help anything that gets the voice and the chest right into the machine. This is my little Comica bag. This is my whole mic kit right here, easy breezy. The other thing, and I'll just take anything that Johnny and Alex want to add to this kind of in two. So, the other thing is about compliance, and with social media particularly, how do you think about compliance and archival? So, I know of a couple tools, and maybe Seven Group does this. Alex, I'll toss it to you next, but Global Relay is one that you can, it's a plug-in that you can use for email archival, and I think they also do website archival and social media archival. Page Freezer I've heard good things about. They're little plug-ins. There are some bigger systems, Orato, Acteon, Smarsh, Hearsay. Those are more like enterprise systems that I don't hear a lot of RAA entrepreneurs using, so Alex, can I throw this over to you just in, we're at the top of the hour, spend one minute, and then we need to wrap up. Yeah, PreSALTS, P-R-E-S-U-L-T-S, is a newer one that does archiving on email. I think they also may do social media, but they do archiving specifically, so I've talked to those guys a few times. Great group with a great team, building a cool platform, so they're another platform that you could add. And just one last thing. I see that there were some comments saying they weren't able to download the slides, so Heidi, if you can get with the people who left questions for that and said they weren't able to download those and get them the slides, that'd be great, but yeah, with that, I think that we are going to wrap up for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thank you.

Marie Swift

Marketing Playbook

social media

email marketing

lead magnets

custom content

push strategy

target audience

automation tools