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Jamie Shilanski  

Y’all plan for this. Have you ever heard anyone ask before which diet and exercise program is the best and the answer be the one that you actually do that’s the best one for you, the one that you’ll commit to stick to and do on a regular basis. Well, that is exactly how I feel about marketing, what marketing strategy is the absolute best for your financial advisory practice, the one you will do, the one you will do, the one you will be committed to, whether come hell or high water, you are going to be putting out content. You are going to be sticking with the plan. You are going to continue marketing the plan, because marketing is like an avalanche, and it takes an incredible force to get the snow moving, to get the windfall coming your way. And a lot of times, I’m sitting there with financial advisors, and they’re talking to me, and I’m like, Hey, tell me about your career growth. Tell me about your goals next year. Tell me about your objectives. And they’re like, oh, I want to onboard. You know, in the next five years, I want to have 100 clients. I want to have $100 million under management I want to be making a million dollars a year. And I’m like, great. Well, how many clients do you have? I have, you know, 40 or 50. Okay, let’s just say you have 50 in the next five years. You need to be bringing on 10 clients a year. Yeah, Jamie, that’s what I want to do. But I think I could bring on 10 to 20. Awesome. What’d you bring on last year? Two you brought on two clients last year. That’s it, and they were both referrals. Okay, well, how now are you going to 5x that number? How now are you going to bring it up to 10 clients a year consecutively, every single year for the next five years, to get to your benchmark? And by the way, not just any client. Because you told me how much AUM you want to have. You have to bring on qualified clients to get to that level. So what’s the plan? What are you willing to do? What are you willing to commit to, marketing wise, to get you where you want to be? A lot of times people set goals like they’re making up wishes, because a goal without a plan is called a wish. That is what it is. I wish I had 100 clients. I wish I had 100 million under management, and I wish I was making a million dollars a year, but you’re not doing anything actively to go pursue that. So when it comes to marketing, let’s dive into it. Today we’re going to talk about the different channels of marketing, because marketing feels really ambiguous, right? Like I want to go hiking. Okay? If I say I want to go hiking to some of my friends, do you know what that means? That means we’re gonna go for about a mile. We’re gonna have a nice little conversation. They might bring an algae and full of red wine, and then that’s it. That’s a hike. I say hiking to a different group of my friends. I better have a three day pack on my back with jet boils. And it doesn’t matter what the weather is, because there’s no such thing as in a bad weather, only inappropriate clothing, and we are off up a mountain that’s hiking for them. So you have to quantify. What do you mean by marketing? Now, when I talk to you about marketing today, you’re going to hear all of these things and nod your head and say, Yes, I should be doing that. I should be doing that. I should be doing that. Well, of course, we all know what the secret is to looking good, right? It’s a reasonable diet and a lot of exercise. But how many of them, including myself, actually go and do that? You have to commit to one of these that you know you’re going to do the worst thing in the world is to embrace all these different platforms I’m going to share with you today and say I’m going to do all of them right now. Bolshevik, you are completely lying to yourself. If you believe that rather, you need to take the one you are willing to go and do and do it. So let me give you an example. I generate a mass amount of content. I do a lot of content, but until I was harassed by our podcast curator Amber, I didn’t do it online. I didn’t do it publicly. I’m not the person that needs to be in the spotlight. I love to be the person handing the torch over to another person, to be in the spotlight and creating all the material. So I do a lot of articles, I do a lot of content. I do a lot of writing in general, and now, under her guide, the last two years, I’ve been doing a lot of podcasting. However, I don’t like to be on camera. In fact, she gets super annoyed with me, because part of our marketing efforts here at The perfect RIA are to come up with shorts and reels and things that have us all on video. I don’t like to be on video. I’m pretty I just not photogenic, and I know that about myself, and I’m just as surprised as everyone else about what’s going to come out of my mouth, and sometimes my face reacts too to what I said. So I don’t like to always be on video. If I have to shoot a video, it will be the very last thing that I do. I will procrastinate, like the best of them, and I will not make time, energy or effort to go and do that now. Conversely, my baby brother, Micah Shilanski, loves to be on video. He loves to be on video. It’s something for him to grab his iPhone and start a camera, to go into a recording studio at our office and flip the lights and camera on and do a video. He loves it. That is his medium. That is what he enjoys doing. But do you know what he will drag his be and almost never, ever, ever do write content. He hates writing content. And so if he knows he has to sit down at a keyboard and write content, it’s going to take him all bloody week to get out that article. But if I have to do it, I’m going to do it instantaneously. I jump out of that full of vigor and I’m going to want to do that article. I love writing. I love the medium of writing. And so guess what? We don’t do at the office. We don’t put square pegs in round holes. Micah wants to be on camera. Cool. Here’s the script. Micah, this is what we need to say. This is the article, etc. Micah gets a video, and he says, Hey, I just shot this video. I would love to have an article on it. Could you help me generate that? We use our pros and cons. We use what we are best at to deliver our message because then we give our prospects, our clients, our students, the ones that we teach. We give them our employees our absolute best when we are at our best. So as I go through these list of channels with you, and you start nodding your head and saying yes, yes, yes, I’m going to do it all. Don’t. Pick one. Pick one, one of these that you’re willing to commit to, and then go do it, and then find a way to automate it and design all the processes around it, so that way you can add a layer onto this. All right, so in no order of necessary priority, here are the different marketing. When I use the word marketing. These are the things that I am saying, because marketing is so ambiguous. Could be everything. I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not cutting a $500 check for somebody’s sporting event because their kid plays soccer or karate or hockey or whatever. That is not marketing. I don’t care if the arena puts your banner up for everyone to see. You could write it off as marketing, but we all darn well know that’s a donation, because you feel obligated to get it all right. So what is marketing? Very first thing, website and SEO. So regardless of what your physical office space looks like, your website and SEO should be on track. What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization? There are two ways that technology, when people go to Google or, gosh, you know what cracks me up when I use ChatGPT, it says searching with Bing. And I’m like, wow, Bing, way to hold on, way to way to keep yourself out there. You know, now that I think of it from a business standpoint, it’s probably the only search engine that would go with chat, because Google was trying to do their own Bard, and then I forget what they’re rebranding it now with Jay Z’s new song. But anyhow, so when you go to search engines and you type in whatever you’re looking for, the human is going to start deciding what articles apply and don’t apply, right? So I could put in, for example, for supplement, and it’s going to it’s going to give me a list of different websites, it’s going to give me OPM, it’s going to give me articles, it’s going to give me forums. And then I, as a human, must screen and say, Oh, that one’s the most appropriate to me. But how does the computer know I’m looking for that? Because I only gave it an acronym and a word. That’s all I gave it. Well, that becomes a search engine optimization and that is how many times those pages that are provided in the links below are using that particular set of vocabulary for you to land on. So understanding website and SEO is very powerful. Now I don’t have to be some tech nerd, because I’m certainly not. That’s definitely my brother’s wheelhouse, taxes and tech right up his alley. But he gives me a list of those keywords, and he’s like, Hey, these are the keywords we want to focus on. This is where our top demographic searches, and this is what we want, content we want to create cool now I take those and I create content around those words, using those words specifically, and that’s our website and SEO presence. Now, a lot of times people say, Jamie, I’m independent. Just went by myself. I need to redo my website. Websites are bloody fortune to create. It used to be where it was 3500 then it was six grand. Today, I’m getting quotes for like, $40,000 to create websites. And I don’t know if that’s because most developers have realized that AI is going to take over their jobs in the next five years, so they’re cashing up as much as possible. But it should have gotten easier to build a website, not more expensive. But you know, it’s not what you do. You’re not a tech nerd. You got to outsource that. Those are the ranges. You’re going to pay anywhere from five to 40,000 depending on your complexity of what you want. Whenever I work with a developer the best, although I did this this time around, I’m so annoyed with the developer. I gave them a site exactly what I wanted it to look like of a competitor in a different line of work. So it wasn’t finance, and they created a website based on whatever they wanted to create, and didn’t mimic it at all. So now going back to them and saying, No, I showed you exactly what I wanted this website to look like. All right, so that’s that one, and then you go into the next one is content marketing. So what is content marketing? Content marketing goes right into the SEO and the website. But this could also, when I talk about content marketing, you could be submitting these to different journals, different publications. So let’s just say, for example, you work with veterinarians. That’s your bailiwick. That’s who you focus on. Well, if I was focused on only exclusively working for veterinarians, then I would be looking at every single topic the AVMA, the American Veterinary Medical Association, was going to do at a conference, and I would be taking those topics, and I would be writing articles and doing content around those topics. Why? Why would I pick the conference? Because the conference is six months, eight months out, and that’s what everyone is going to be focused on. Are those particular topics. And think about it for us as financial advisors. I mean, how many times have we gone to conferences where everything you know. In the 90s, it was know your client, know your client, know your client, the federal rules. And so it was constantly being talked about. And then every time we go to a conference, it’s Roth conversions, and now it’s fiduciary and there’s certain terminology that becomes super trendy in every single aspect of business. And so if I was exclusively working with veterinarians, I would go look at the biggest conference that is showcased wherever I’m located. I would find out who’s speaking what they’re speaking on, and I would start extracting those common topics. You can apply this to anything I’m using veterinarians, but everything, even if you only exclusively worked with HVAC installers. This applies to you. So I would take that content and I would start writing articles, and then I would start submitting it to whoever advertises. Because here’s the thing, is that I’m not paying for those to get published. So if I was working with veterinarians, I got my topic here, I’m going to start submitting it to Vet Girl. I’m going to start submitting it to DVM 360 I would start submitting it to Modern Veterinarian. I would start presenting all of my content to all of these different publication channels that, guess what? Are looking for content like they want content on their website too. And then once I got published on their site, you know what I would do on my own website? On my own website, I would create an as seen in. Remember when we go to places and we’re trying to buy something, and it’s all as seen in Forbes, as seen in times, as seen on MSNBC, whatever it is, as seen in. And why? Why do we have the as seen in? Because now it gives us a level of credibility, because sometimes people haven’t heard of you. They don’t know who you are, they don’t know if you’re legitimate, and they don’t know if you’re a scam. But now I’m going to these different trusted places, and I know that other people are listening to you. Other people have heard you, and now that validates what I’m trying to do. All right, third, social media. I am not a social media girl. I see the value of it. I’ve definitely helped some businesses improve cash flow and built an entire multimillion dollar company using nothing but Facebook and Google ads. I know that there’s value in advertising these platforms, but you know what? There’s nothing in it for me with there’s no joy. I have no joy in promoting our business on social media. In fact, I don’t like it at all. It gives me a visceral reaction. So guess what I don’t do? I don’t promote us on Instagram, Facebook, X Twitter, when it was Twitter, all of it. I don’t do that one for RIA because I don’t like it. I don’t like it. It feels fake. It feels, you know, just inauthentic to me, and so I don’t do it. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s authentic and fake for everyone. It just means Jamie Shilanski does not find joy doing it. Therefore I don’t do it. Why? Because remember when I started talking to you about this, what’s the marketing plan that will work? The one you choose to go and work. And so if I know I get a visceral reaction from social media, then I’m not going to want to go and do it. And so I don’t do it. I eliminate it. But if you love social media, if you are good on camera, if you want to flip that on real quick and create it awesome. Do it. If you are a social media marketer. Let me give you a one piece of tip that I will tell you about. When that video starts, I want you to go ahead and say to the camera. Hey, I got a lot to tell you, and I know not all of you have time for the details. I’m gonna go ahead and put those ingredients, those steps, that information, that key piece to this video, down in the caption. So click on the caption and it’ll all be there for you. Now, when I’m into the word caption three times, what does that do? That piques my interest. Now I’m curious, so I click on the caption and I’m reading your caption. As I’m reading your caption, what’s happening with your video? Your video is still playing, and if it’s still playing in the background, then it looks like you’re on that longer and we read slower than we listen. So what does that algorithm tell us about that video? That algorithm says, Oh my gosh, people love watching this video. They watched it for a really long time. So it’s not just a number of times people watch a video, it’s the length of time they stay intrigued on your video, because our attention span is getting shorter and shorter and shorter. That’s why clips, reels, shorts, are shorter and shorter for us, because we can’t handle the attention span. In fact, this one, I was reading an article on producers that were talking about, when they do a production in the editing room, what they do now is the second screen test. And I had never heard that terminology, second screen test, and so I asked the question. I was like, what is the second screen test? And I was talking to a video production guy, and he said, oh, a second screen test is putting in less important moments in the film, or B level film, because, you know, the viewer is going to be checking their phone and not paying attention to the movie They’re actually planning strategically unimportant information to be peppered into a movie. In a film, because we lack the attention span to pay attention to every single part of the plot, because we’re distracted looking on our phone or checking up something that is useless, checking up the cast. Oh, who are they married to? How tall are they? Are their hair naturally that color? What else movies have they been in? We’re doing all of those things and not paying attention to the actual movie, and Lord knows, I’m guilty of it, but it blew my mind that that was something all right. Fourth, email marketing, your most powerful way of communicating with your target audience is going to be email marketing. It is, in fact, the more opportunity you have for people to hit your web page and gather information, gather their email address and have them reach back out to you. So a lot of times, and you might see in some of our stuff at The Perfect RIA, we’re going to ask you to come back to us with information, and we come back to you. What is it about? We want your email. Want your email so we can tell you about all the amazing, cool, awesome things that we are doing at The Perfect RIA, because we are in the pursuit of making financial advisors better and better and better, and in that pursuit, we need people who are equally passionate about it as we are people who want to change the industry. So it’s not slimy finance. It’s amazing, and that it’s an opportunity to make massive impact on multiple generations. So when I do my email marketing, I don’t like to to clients, I don’t like to send it out on a weekly basis, and I don’t even like to be on a monthly basis. So I will do another episode after popular demand. In fact, Amber, our podcast curator, was just telling me she’s like, Hey, people want a calendar like they want specific tell me what to go do, and I will go do it. So creating a giant marketing plan is a lot more intensive than than me just sitting here and talking to you for half hour. So I’m going to break it down to give you different segments, and then you’re going to have to put that master class together for you. So when I create with my different medium, and then we’ll do another episode on when’s the right time to send out content, I like to send out contents in erratic schedule. So I know every quarter I’m going to send something in addition to a value add to a client, but I’m not going to do it on the first of the second month. I’m going to do it like six months, eight weeks, you know, not six months, six weeks, eight weeks, and I’ll sort of pepper it around so it feels more occasional than methodical. Now, in the background, I know it’s methodical. I know I’m going to get this done on a certain schedule, but I’m going to be real specific about making it seem infrequent so clients know that they feel that it comes from a place of genuine communicate something and not something planned. Like, oh, the first month I always get this, that’s my take on it. That’s I like to have information so I like to deliver it that way. All right, webinars and online workshops. Do they work? 100% again. What marketing plan works? The one you’re willing to part the effort in we still do. We took a hiatus during covid, mostly because we had to. But we still do in person presentations and we do online things. We absolutely love doing it. We love getting a group together. I’ll normally cap it about 50 people with the expectation of having 40 people show up to the event, and we get a ton of content. You want to talk about, like a gold line of content. Throw an all day class and listen to the questions start rolling in. Whenever we teach an in person class, I always make a team member go with us to it, and we write down verbatim what every single person in the audience asks us, and then we get done, and that becomes our content for our next marketing calendar, verbatim as they asked it so that we can answer it. And so even if they’re talking about, you know, if they say, oh, yeah, I have a tax deferred account. It’s called Roth, and I know that’s incorrect, I’m not going to correct them on the spot. I’m going to find a nice way to do that. Why we don’t talk down to our audience? We don’t talk down to our clients. This is what we do every day. This is not what they do. In fact, one of my business partners, I made them attend the Financial Committee, meeting with me, with the CPAs, his attorneys, blah blah, just to make sure I had a third party and his attention for it. And we got done, he’s like, I don’t even know what we’re talking about. What is EBITDA? What are we talking about? What is a ETPS? And so we started doing these, and I said, Hey, why don’t I put on a gown, scrub in and I’ll go to the operating room with you. And you could feel completely intellectually superior to where I am. And you know, he got a good laugh, but he doesn’t do this all day. I don’t do surgery all day. That’s how this works. So we don’t want to talk down. We want to grab their questions, answer them, pivot them in a way that makes them feel really empowered and do that. All right, next medium that I would tell you about is podcasting, videos. Podcast and videos. I forget the joke, but Matthew Jarvis was telling me one time it was something about his cab drivers, like, oh yeah, listen to my podcast that everybody has a podcast today. So if you’re curious about starting up a podcast, do so. A good podcast would cost you about $3,500 a month to run. There are different platforms. Just make sure that you know who you want to reach if you are financial advisor starting a podcast that is not going to be client facing, you want to make sure that everything that you publish, clients can listen to and regulators can listen to, because they will all right, paid advertising. Paid advertising, to me, normally means Google ads and social media. Again, they do work. I don’t do a lot of social media paid ads because I don’t track the conversion to be high enough worth $1 it’s not high enough worth the effort for me on social media, paid advertising. But again, because I don’t, I don’t like social media, so I don’t do a social media presence, and therefore that doesn’t work for me. But if you do social media, and you have a presence and you’re regularly posting, for sure, do the paid advertising. Now, Facebook got in trouble about four or five years ago. They had to change a lot of things. So you can’t target in on the demographics as much as you want to now, but you can still do a really good job, and it gives you the cheapest trumpet around, because you can reach the widest amount of audiences with the fewest dollars by doing social media advertising. Google advertisement. I think we all pray at the altar of Google, and that’s sort of our tie to get in. So we need to make sure that we’re Google advertising as well. If you don’t even know how to start a website or web development or SEO or Google ads or social media ads, you can hire an agency. An agency is going to cost you around 15 to $25,000 a year to do that. If you’re like Jamie, that is astronomical. I do not want to do that, because those people will execute, but they won’t create content for you. You still have to go create the content, and then you hand it over and give it to them to run. Then you can jump on sites like Upwork or Fiverr. Fiverr, I think they should just call it amateur.com but Upwork is pretty legitimate, and they’ll have people in different professions. And you can choose if you want somebody US based or international, and you can choose somebody to do segments of your marketing for you. So I could hire somebody who says, Hey, do Google ads. We come in here. We’ll do screen share. You know, pay 300 bucks, get these ads set up, and they’ll just run their lifetime. I’m never going to change them out. And so that works as well. All right, the number one way that most financial advisors get clients, come on, tell me. Tell me what it is, referrals. Referrals are the number one way that we get clients, but a lot of times we forget to ask for referrals, or we do it so weird we’re asking them to write down five of their closest friends that we could contact. Don’t do it like that. Instead, show up and deliver so much passion, so much energy, so much enthusiasm for what you’re doing that people want to leave your office and go and talk to other people about you. That’s how, if you have not read Raving Fan, read that, implement that, let that become your liturgy of what you preach in your office. It is amazing when you create a raving fan, the referral sources that you end up coming up with, uh, networking. Now, networking isn’t something that Micah, my baby brother, and I do really well. Now, this is definitely Matthew Jarvis’s bailiwick. He is amazing at working centers of influence. I accidentally do it because I end up getting involved in CPAs and attorneys a lot of times, and so I network with them because I’m working on them with a case or something of that nature. But I’m not pumping them for referrals. It just it has never once come natural, and I don’t. I’ve gotten a few like, I’m trying to think, in my mind, I’ve gotten a handful of referrals from COIs before, but nothing that came out that was like, Holy Holy smokes. That’s a holy grail. I want that. But I will tell you it does work if you know how to work it. Now, if you’re like me, and you’re awkward with the asking a center of influence for referrals, then don’t do it. Then don’t do it. If you’re awkward with it. Do not do it if you think you might be okay with it, but want to get better. Make sure you email us at lifestyle@theperfectria.com, and talk to us about our different membership levels. I think Matt even has quite a bunch of material on how to work centers of influence and do it in a non awkward way that generates a lot of prospects. I know he’s very successful in that way, all right, industry events and conferences. I don’t think so. I don’t think so, not for US financial advisors, unless you do it in the way that I just told you with if you specialize in the veterinarian, apply dentists, apply attorneys, apply anyone that you work with in any industry. And it does not need to be white collar. It could be blue collar jobs as well. There’s that misconception that blue collar people aren’t online like white collar people are, because they work with their hands, but anymore, all of them have to plug in. In fact, I was just talking to my mechanic the other day, and he had to buy a Windows based computer because he can’t read any of the code errors in the engines without firing up this system first. So gone are the days where it was just troubleshooting and knuckle wrenching, all right, local marketing, you know, I got kind of mixed emotions on this one, we don’t do local marketing for us at Shilanski and Associates, because we say you don’t hear about us until you hear about us, and once you hear about us, you don’t stop hearing about us. So we kind of do this stealthy approach to the marketing that we want to be, you know, sort of these strategic professionals that everyone wants to work with, but we don’t need to do the blaring advertisements for but that depends on your demographic and who you’re working with. So once you understand your demographic, you’ll know if local marketing works for you. A lot of times I see local marketing in a coffee shop or a sports team again, like I said, advertising for sports teams, not marketing. That’s just having to pay good donation. We also do get a lot of direct mail. We used to do this a ton in the 80s and 90s. We sent out a ton of direct mail, 20, 30, 40,000, flyers at a time, and got a ton of attendance of people coming into seminars. So I think direct mail works. In fact, I’m just kind of breathing life back into it here at Shilanski and Associates for our in person classes. And why? Because everything pivoted over to email marketing, especially in covid. Nobody was sending anything out tangible, nobody was sending out letters, nobody was sending out postcards. And so while everyone pushed themselves to email. I stepped back and said, Cool, let’s start sending out postcards. There’s good postcard companies now, business to business, direct mail. MailChimp even does it if you’re looking for an email marketing platform. I like MailChimp, Constant Contacts, another one of those. But any one of those will get it up. And if you don’t know how to set up your different journeys and paths and things like that, because that’s part of our email marketing, is that if we meet with a prospect and they don’t become a client, but we wanted them to become a client, they go into our pitch and miss  campaign, pitch and miss is a terminology Bill good uses that we got. We pitch them, we miss. We want to stay top of mind for them. That does work. We find that people that were ready to hire us. In fact, one of our financial advisors just got a great client. A great client was a surgeon, hired us, or came in for a meeting five years ago, said, Listen, I’m doing this residency. I’ve got this this and this going on as I get this new specialty added in my name. I’m just not ready to work with anyone. But if you guys are around in five years, absolutely, then you’re 40, will continue to be here. And he said, then I would love to come back in. Came back in eight weeks ago, hired the protege financial advisor on the spot said, came in five years ago, met with Jamie, had an amazing conversation. Let’s get started. And instant hire, instant hire. But he remained on our pitch in this we remain top of mind because we were constantly feeding him information. So when it was time for him to hire someone. We were right there, and my father used to always tell us that somebody’s going to need us. They just don’t know when they’re going to need us, and we don’t know when they’re going to need us, but something in your life is going to change, and you’re going to need a financial advisor, and when that happens, you want to make sure you’re top of mind for that person, that’s huge. So I really, really like making sure that we remain top of mind. I think Bill Good’s team had it right on pitch and miss staying there, because a lot of times we’ll get up and if we don’t get hired, we’re like, well, we didn’t want to work with them anyway. Yes, you did. Yes you did. You did want to work with them. They just weren’t ready to work with you. You got to stay top of mind for these individuals, all right. TPR nation, this has been packed with action items. If you haven’t extrapolated something to go apply to your marketing this year, then you need to go listen to this again and again and again. But number one action item, what works? Whatever you are willing to work, whatever you are willing to work, all right. Second thing, choose the medium. I gave you a whole bunch of different ones that are working right now for financial advisors just like you, but choose the one you’re willing to commit to do. Not choose the one that you think you should do, but gives you a visceral reaction to that is the one that you will neglect the most. Third, metrics, metrics, metrics, metrics, you need to be tracking this and figuring out what is working and what is not, so that you’re not throwing good money after bad and so you really need to make sure that you can’t just say, Oh, I sent out a bunch of postcards and I didn’t get any client calls. I didn’t get any I wanted to sign up for my event. That was a total failure that no, that was a one time effort, and it was brand new information for the people that you were sending it out to. You didn’t have a habitual relationship in which you were getting this type of information to them on a regular, consistent basis. It was new. If I get an advertisement for something, I don’t run out and buy it just because Tommy Bahama sent me a postcard. No, I wait for it to become relevant to my life and then I go purchase it. But because Tommy Bahama sends me their information on a continual basis, when I need resort wear, that’s who I go to think about. So make sure that you’re not just one and done. Oh, that was a flop. That didn’t work. You need to try it consistently. Track your progress, and you’re gonna see the first couple of times you might swing and miss. But then all sudden, things are gonna start picking up. TPR nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, an episode of Worlds to Conquer. Go find people who share your values. Change the World.