Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#110 - Marketing Like a Pro: James Pollard’s Playbook for Financial Advisors
Learn the keys to financial advisor marketing with James Pollard, founder of The Advisor Coach and host of the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast. In this episode, James shares how he built a business focused on helping financial advisors succeed, offering insights into practical strategies that work.
James dives into the continued power of traditional marketing methods, like direct mail, and how they can complement modern approaches to grow your business. He explains how building credibility through strategic efforts can help advisors stand out, attract more clients, and establish trust in their niche.
We also cover email marketing tailored for financial advisors, including tips for crafting warm emails, lead magnets, and automated sequences that engage without overwhelming. Whether you're just starting or refining your marketing strategy, James offers actionable advice you can implement right away.
Social:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/theadvisorcoach/
X: @theadvisorcoach
Website: https://www.theadvisorcoach.com/
Music in this episode was obtained from Bensound.
How's it going? Everyone, welcome back. This is the Only Fee Only podcast, and in today's episode, we are talking to James Pollard, who is the founder of the Advisor Coach since 2015. And he is also the host of the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast. James had all kinds of things to say that I did not actually expect, one of them being that mailers still work. He also talked about the statistics around marketing, reaching out email campaigns and things to really be able to grow your business. I really enjoyed this episode and I'm sure you will too. This is James Pollard on the Only Fee Only podcast.
Speaker 2:What's up everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travelo. I'm here with my co-host, Brock Buckles. How's it going today, Brock? Happy Monday, man. It's going well. How are you Doing? Great? Happy Monday and today very excited to have James Pollard on. He's the founder of TheAdvisorCoachcom. I've been following him for a long time now and very excited to have him on today. He's an expert in all things advisor marketing, so really excited to have him on and let him share his story. So, James, welcome to the show, man.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I try to be. I hope to one day reach expert status. I'm glad that you said that and not me. I'm getting there One day I'll be there.
Speaker 2:Hey, you were named on the Kitsis comments for a good podcast to listen to, so that's a lot of credibility right there.
Speaker 3:Do you know? Here I'll throw this out. Let's play a game.
Speaker 1:Who do you think has been podcasting longer? Michael Kitsis with the financial advisor success podcast, or me? Because you asked that question, I'm going to say you but only because you asked that question.
Speaker 3:Yes, but you know what kind of sucks. Here's a marketing lesson. So I had a podcast called the advisor coach podcast before the financial advisor marketing podcast Podcast. I wish I never switched gears or changed that podcast completely because then I could have a claim where I'm the long. Technically, if you consider the two shows, I'm the longest reigning solo financial advisor marketer podcast in the industry period and podcaster. So that's kind of cool. But I don't say that because it's kind of weird and it's a jumbled sentence and it just loses its effectiveness if I have, like asterisk disclaimer, had show before.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, used to whatever I kept it didn't change it. Yes, it makes it too complicated.
Speaker 3:Yep. Well, I am glad to be here. We'll chat about marketing and hopefully provide a ton of insight and value to your audience marketing and hopefully provide a ton of insight and value to your audience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. How about, for those who don't know who you are, you want them just to give a quick 30, 60 second overview of who you are and a little bit about your business, and then we'll dive into it.
Speaker 3:Sure. So the advisorcoachcom the company is the advisor coach and the reason it's called the advisor coach is because back in 2015, I so I've been marketing for a long time before 2015. I've had multiple businesses, multiple industries I've worked with clients I've consulted with and I started taking the show on the road with financial advisors specifically because I had a passion for psychology and marketing and finance personal finance Like I'm involved in that world too. I actually had a company we don't have time to talk about that now, but it was basically a personal finance company and I wanted to merge those two passions and I was pretty darn good at the marketing side of things. So I started helping a financial advisor in my area, got a referral to another financial advisor, then another. I was like I should probably make this a business. So I did, and that business was the advisor coach. So I was coaching. It was a coaching service.
Speaker 3:Then I realized that I wasn't really a fan of repeating myself constantly because it was like every single new client I had to start from scratch, like week one was the same stuff, week two was the same stuff, because I had a process that just worked right Repeatable marketing systems, follow up, all that stuff and I was like I kind of don't want to do this anymore.
Speaker 3:So around 2000, late 2016, early 2017, I shut all the coaching stuff down and the advisor coach, or the advisor coachcom as you know it today, is primarily like a media slash publishing company. So there are tons of courses and trainings and the newsletters. So that is what it is today, simply because it is a way for me to disseminate information throughout the financial advisor marketing universe without being tied to my time, right, so I can just go out and do whatever I want. I mean selfishly. I mean that's one of the coolest things about what I do is I can. It's not limited to my time whatsoever. So that is like what has evolved over the years and today almost all of my effort is with the monthly newsletter. It's a paper and ink newsletter. I just try to put all of my effort into that because it's just a way for me to help the most people and have the most impact possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I like that man, and one of the things that I think is really cool about that is kind of the way that you're able to be omnipresent in a way. When you set your business up like that right, like a lot of people they say, and exactly like what you said, right, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing the one-on-one stuff, but at the end of the day, if it doesn't energize you to have the same conversation over and over again, put it on camera record it, be able to put it out into the world, let people understand it and have that same exact conversation to where you've literally perfected it, put it into a packet and said here you go, right, and that way, not only can you help more people, but you can help more people in a more affordable way, because if they want to meet with you face to face like your time costs more money, if you do it that right way, right Versus something that you've already packaged, that is a great introduction to you and your services.
Speaker 3:Totally yeah, and not to get too meta here. But like I'm a big believer in leverage and scale and that's kind of what I am doing myself, I'm leveraging my time, I am scaling it. I have paid ads that are running right now. I just refresh the link here and I'll Now look. So far today I've gotten 470 link clicks to one of my campaigns at 11 cents per link click. I mean that would be extremely difficult for me to do with any other mechanism. I mean sure I could do it with something like direct mail and I do that all the time. I have envelopes right here. But I just like to think in terms of leveraging my time, my ability, my skills and financial advisors' abilities and skills and scaling that to a wider audience. So that's not, like I said, not to get too meta, but that's what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very cool. I mean, let's drill in on that. I mean, you're a marketing guy, so you've got multiple experiments going on at once, but you know, let's just say a fee only planner who's listening to this podcast? Hey, I'm interested in marketing. What does James Pollard say? You know, like, like, where do you even begin? What's working in 2024, as we go into 2025?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that a lot of the best marketing principles and fundamentals and foundations don't change. I do think that there are a few things I keep going back to that have served me extremely well and served financial advisors extremely well. I think the most important thing that financial advisors need to understand and get to have successful marketing campaigns is understand that marketing comes from a market where you must know your market. You must know their desires, their challenges, their pain points, what they want, what they don't want. You have to know that market. I constantly harp about having a niche, having a specific target market. Do you absolutely have to do that? Is that like a law written in stone? No, it's not, but it makes it so much easier and so much more effective to know that market. When you have a market, I'll give you a specific example.
Speaker 3:Pre-retirees think in terms of am I going to outlive my money? They don't think in terms of longevity risk. Now, they might be the same thing and they might be closely intertwined and related. The financial advisor who isn't there with them, helping them, might think my job is to help them with their longevity risk. That's not wrong, but as a marketer, you change it to reflecting what the market wants, which is not outliving your money. There are so many examples of that I've seen when financial advisors target occupations like corporate executives or dentists or firefighters or police officers. When they start, even little things just gave you, it increases the open rates, which is a proxy for increasing conversions later on in the funnel, so on and so forth. But that is like step one must do if you're interested in maximum effectiveness and minimum time is just knowing your market point blank period.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, man. I mean, I think that one of the biggest things that a lot of people miss is it's like, if you're talking generically and I mean I'm on LinkedIn all the time, so I just use that as an example like all these copy and paste things that you see, where it seems like everybody's saying the same thing to everyone is like that that's never going to work Right, that's not the answer. Like, if you're not talking specifically to the people that you're trying to get in front of, then it doesn't matter. But, like you said, I mean you know, I was an EMT back in the day If you say something about an ambulance or or you know a signal 10 or whatever it is, then immediately it's like oh, you have my attention, because now you're talking my language and I'm at least going to be peaked enough to get inside that email.
Speaker 1:And then if, when I'm in there, I find something that's intriguing to me, maybe I do reach out Right, and at the end of the day, it's a it's a big game. But one of the things that I'm interested in. You said I have the envelope right next to me, so you're still doing traditional mailers. A lot of people would be like that's crazy. I mean it's, it's still you.
Speaker 3:So, according to the Data Marketing Association this was a study that was done in 2021, the average response rate for direct mail to prospect list is 5.3%. So let's think about this this envelope cost me one nickel. The live stamp that I put on it cost me 73 cents. So so far we're at 78 cents. Let's say that paper and printing and everything takes me to $1. If I send 100 of these and I have a 5.3% response rate, that is like $18-ish per response, $18.87, something like that. That's pretty darn good. That includes markets like selling shoes and selling candles and catalogs with tons of products. So that's kind of misleading. Right For me to say, oh, 5.3%. Like, yeah, you can set appointments for 18 bucks. Well, let's cut that in half. Let's cut it in half again. Now you're like 70 something dollars per response.
Speaker 3:Now, remember you're not asking people to give you money right away. As a financial advisor or financial planner, you're typically asking people to enter your world, meaning opt into an email list, visit your website. Ideally it would be schedule an appointment with you. Now there are lots of little levers you can pull, but asking for an appointment is not the same as hey, give me $2,000 to repair your siding or to paint your house or any of the other things that you get in the mail. You get like oil changes, and you come into this car dealership. That's what direct mail has become today A lot of home repair stuff, a lot of car stuff, sending an appointment with a financial advisor or planner, especially given if the financial advisor or planner has.
Speaker 3:You can put three pages in here, not to go off on a tangent, but if you Google it and you ask how many pages fit into a forever stamp, they say four, but I've had four get rejected. I've never had three get rejected. So let's think about this. Three pages printed front and back is a total of six pages that you can type out to explain who you are, who you help, how you help, why they should trust you, why they should believe you, why you're credible, and describe the process in your meeting, what they can expect, what it will look like, the tangible benefit they will get as a result of booking a meeting with you.
Speaker 3:That's incredibly important. If you want to get more meetings and more appointments, you need to sell the thing that people get as a result of setting a meeting, but you can send six total pages for about a dollar to anyone in the United States. That's pretty cool, especially when you consider the financial advisors spend hundreds of dollars on mediocre leads that get sent to multiple people, that they spend two, three, four, five dollars per click on online ads. Sometimes this is just an alternative. I would never say only do direct mail, but I think if you're a person who wants to get more clients in the financial advice space, ignoring direct mail is a mistake, I think.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, let's drill down on that a little bit. I mean, so let's say that you were to send out a hundred um, you know letters like where would you get the list? Like, if you're an advisor, I help dentists save. You know, tax plan, everything, okay great. Like would you just send it to a hundred dentists, like what? Like, what do you say to clients of yours?
Speaker 3:So it depends on the market For something like dentist. This is going to sound super basic and lame, but it could be as simple as just Googling dentist. Let me pick a. I guess I'll pick Delaware, because I'm in Delaware Dentist Dover, delaware, dentist Wilmington, delaware, dentist Seaford, delaware and just going through you could purchase a list. If you Google list rental for whatever the niche is dentists, corporate executives then they're probably going to be companies that specialize in selling or renting. The renting is the technical term. Uh, renting list to people for whatever. Um, you can chop and slice and dice However you want. General list brokers like these big list companies can give you. You can say I want people in this age bracket in this income bracket, in this geographic area, so you can rent list that way.
Speaker 3:A very effective way that I have personally not discovered, but I guess have applied slash kind of discovered for financial advisors specifically is publications are extremely effective. So let's say that you're targeting police officers. Well, there's a magazine called K9 Magazine police with the canines, and that's what it is. Now, I'm not saying that they rent lists. I don't know that for sure, at least not anymore. But let's say you go directly to K9 Magazine and you say hey, I'm a financial planner. Do you offer any list, rentals of your publication? Well, that's a way to get the list. You should just pay for it that way.
Speaker 3:And then what's really cool is that in your direct mailer you could say hey, I got your name from K9 Magazine. People are not naive. They know you got their name from somewhere. You be transparent about it. You say I especially love reading about XYZ, to build rapport with them. Even better if you can reach out to K9 Magazine and say look, I'm willing to pay for an article in this magazine, I am willing to pay to have an editorial. You write an editorial in that magazine, willing to pay to have an editorial. You write an editorial in that magazine. Then you print the darn thing that you wrote in a previous issue. Attach that in your direct mailer and say you might have seen my article in K9 Magazine in July. In case you haven't, I've attached it, or I put it in the PS of this, or I put it in this mailing. That also builds tremendous credibility. So it truly does depend on your niche, but those are some absolutely killer ways to do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's such a good. I didn't think about that. I mean that's. That's a great point You're you're talking about, you know, adding credibility from a publication immediately. And in the financial world you know, a lot of people have been published in all kinds of things. That's featured on Michael Kidd's podcast, I guess if you're going direct to clients featured in the Wall Street Journal or featured in one of these publications that somebody knows about immediately, it's like I might not know who you are, but I definitely know what that publication is. So it completely changes the way that that feels, rather than it it being like just some random piece of mail. It's like, well, it might just be some random piece of mail, but at least now there's some authenticity and some credibility behind it.
Speaker 3:Yes. So about two years ago. I don't offer much consulting anymore practically zero. About two years ago I opened up my calendar for some consulting and basically did it around LinkedIn. I don't have the biggest presence on LinkedIn. That's intentional. I don't spend that much time on LinkedIn, but I still realize it's a powerful tool for financial advisors.
Speaker 3:And one of the things that I brought up again and again in those consultations was that one of the shortcuts for all marketing, not just LinkedIn, was credibility. I'm going to use a silly example. But sometimes financial advisors say okay, james told me to pick a market, I'm going to serve astronauts. It's like well, have you ever worked with astronauts? Do you have any reason why astronauts would believe you, any reason why you're actually credible? So I would.
Speaker 3:In these consultations I say, oh well, I don't have any credibility. Therefore I can't do the things that you told me to do. No, that's the wrong way to think about it. If you don't have the credibility, get the credibility or build the credibility, I would say, especially with direct mail. We just talked about direct mail but in almost all marketing, the biggest thing that I see missing, that hamstrings financial advisors results, is that they're just simply not credible. They're not believable. There's no compelling reason why someone should reach out.
Speaker 3:I'll give you, I'll give you one quick little tidbit and then I'll I guess I'll open it up because I feel like I'm talking a lot. Let's say that you are a generalist financial advisor. You work with everyone, you have all this experience and certifications, but you never tell anyone about it. But you know that you are just highly qualified. And then you're competing with someone where the only thing that the audience knows about this person is it's Michael Jordan's financial planner. You're going to lose, right? Because even though you have all of that stuff, if it's not perceived to the audience. Then one little thing from someone else, even though that's a big thing, right, that's a huge credibility mechanism, but anything can just top the scales in the other person's fate, or tip the scales in the other person's fate, or tip the scales in the other person's favor. So that's a huge thing that I see missing it. Just they're not credible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean that's a huge issue. I mean, if you don't have that credibility, it can be a massive problem. Do you know? I mean, what's the comparison when it comes to marketing on social media versus some of the other methods? Because I mean I know you said you didn't have a huge LinkedIn presence, but have you seen, as you've been using those, better results from one rather than another seen?
Speaker 3:as you've been using those better results from one rather than another. Yeah, email, email is by far the most effective appointment setting tool I've ever seen for financial advisors period. Social media helps in the sense that social media is another follow-up tool, another way for financial advisors to follow up. So once someone is connecting with someone on social media, whether it be X or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, then that person will continue to see the financial advisor's content over and over and over, and that trust, credibility and rapport begins to be built. The mere exposure effect begins to take place. They trust them a little bit more because of that.
Speaker 3:And so one of the tenets of marketing is that, in order to make it work, you must have the right message to the right person, but it also must be at the right time. Now I can control the right person, I can control the right message, but I can't control the right time. And social media is powerful in that way, because if I send a direct mailer out today and I send it to 100 people, let's say that 95 of them throw it in the trash and never think of me ever again, that I never crossed their mind. 40 acceptances as an example. Then those 40 people will see me again and again, and again and again, and when it is the right time. The likelihood of me being their choice is significantly higher than a one and done type deal. That is the reason why email marketing tends to work very well in addition to social media.
Speaker 1:I have to ask you a question on top of that, right, because I think that if we didn't touch on this, we'd be remiss. Sometimes people get annoyed by email marketing and I think more, more or less, it's the. It's the things that feel like spam, right? So what would your advice be to people so that they don't feel like you know it's like the, you get those that one email, right it it's like here's how I can boost your whatever by a hundred percent by the end of the month, like some crazy claim. And then, if you don't respond, it's like hey, not sure if you not so sure.
Speaker 1:If you got my last message, it's like yeah, you definitely did. I mean, you're like, you're reading it, you're just, it's a follow-up. Anybody that's ever been in any type of sales or anything understands that. But, like, how do you counteract that? How are you making sure that advisors or people that are doing email marketing and I think you touched on it when you said use the terminology of the group that you're going for right, like, actually be relatable, but what are some of the other things? And then, at some point, do you give them a way to opt out, like, if you don't want to hear from me anymore. You know, let me know it's all good. No hard feelings.
Speaker 3:Well, that's one of the reasons why I love email marketing is because people can leave at any time. So when I mentioned email marketing, I don't mean cold email, and this applies to pretty much any interview I've ever done, any training I've ever done. I don't like cold email. Can it work? Yeah, I guess I've seen it work, but you have better uses of your time. I like to think in terms of alternatives. So if someone came to you and said I'm invested 100% in CDs and my money is growing yeah, technically it's growing, I get it, but are there better alternatives? That's how I view cold email. That's how I would view door knocking Like can door knocking work? Sure, yeah, entire companies have been built on it, or one big company and, uh and, but are there better alternatives? Right, so I don't. I don't like cold email in that sense. I love warm email, basically where someone opts into your email list.
Speaker 3:Now, the biggest lever of financial advisor can pull in terms of email marketing is not necessarily the emails themselves. It's actually the thing that gets people on the email list. So there's an old saying from Abraham Lincoln where if he had like six hours to chop down a tree, he would spend the first four sharpening his ax. Well, the majority of your time, the sharpening the ax in email marketing is getting your lead magnet right. The PDF, the video, the webinar, whatever the thing is that gets people into your world. You should be able to get to a point where you show up to your market and say market, I'm putting together this thing, it's about this topic. I'm wondering if you'd be interested in it. If they say anything, but where can I get that, then it's not good enough. I don't think I can stress this enough. It has to be good. The reason it has to be good is because it dramatically shifts the economics of your business in every other part of your funnel. Meaning, if you are paying $20 per email subscriber through your ads because you have a moderately okay lead magnet and I have something that is downright amazing and I pay $5 per email subscriber, well, that not just changes my email marketing, that changes the entire economic impact of my entire business, from start to finish. We don't have time to get into that today.
Speaker 3:With the emails themselves, I love giving people a way to opt out. That's just a standard unsubscribe button. I believe if people don't want to get the emails, they shouldn't, as far as them being annoying. They're annoying if you don't have the right message for the right people. I want you to imagine that it burns when you pee and it feels like broken glass is exiting your body every time you use the restroom and you're praying to God or Buddha or Jesus whoever you believe in to please make this pain stop. It's the worst pain you've ever felt in your life and you finally found a credible person who has trust, credibility and rapport with you, who has a very believable solution to your problem, the intense burning you're feeling. But that person tells you don't worry, I'm not going to annoy you with this solution. I'm only going to email you once a week. You'd be like, no, I want my darn emails now to help me with this problem. So that's a philosophical shift, not to like, get weird about it, but I guess it's truly what it is.
Speaker 3:It's just a shift in how you approach the market.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I think that's good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's how valuable it is, too, right, I mean, do you just have a generic newsletter or is it short, sweet and concise? Because I mean, I know, right before we hit record on this, you're like, hey, I think I've been emailing every day since 2016,. Right, so like you don't just start emailing people every day, but like what type of like cadence you know? So, hey, you know we'll go back to the dentist example from earlier. Hey, dentist, download my free PDF guide on the top five things you should be doing, or you know, whatever the pitch is Okay, great, they're signed up. What do we do?
Speaker 3:So I definitely don't want to give financial advisors the impression that they should sit down and write an email every single day. Typically and by typically I mean like 90 plus percent of the time what happens is financial advisors will write a sequence of emails, and this is like five to 12. There are some studies that have been done which basically says that after 12 touch points, this could be email, it could be anything. Touch points, I mean, the response just falls off a cliff For financial advisors. That's been my experience as well. I'm a big fan of multiple marketing strategies like LinkedIn, email, direct mail, so the touch points can be all across the board. So they create the sequence. They use an email software like Kit, which used to be ConvertKit or MailChimp or Constant Contact or Drip or any of the tools out there to automate it, meaning someone subscribes to the email list, the email number one gets sent out immediately, then the second email gets sent out the next day. The third email gets sent out the next day. The financial advisors don't have to think about it. They've created the sequence. Once they can move on with their life, the financial advisors don't have to think about it. They've created the sequence. Once they can move on with their life.
Speaker 3:The secret sauce of email, as best as I've been able to tell, is handling objections, because when someone subscribes to your email list as a financial advisor, you know two things. You know, number one, that the person who joins your email list should know that you are a financial advisor, because the person got there from an ad or LinkedIn or your website. They got there from a place where they can kind of see that that's what you do, so they know that they're in that space. Number two thing that you know is that they haven't set an appointment yet and typically when people don't do things, they have reasons for not doing them. Most of the time in the marketing space, these are objections like not enough time, I don't have enough money, I'm intimidated by the process. That's actually the number one. I did private research in 2023. It's literally the number one reason why people don't hire a financial advisor. You make a list of all of the objections, that the most common ones that people have, and each email should subtly and intentionally and purposefully dismantle that objection.
Speaker 3:One of the most effective emails that I have personally seen is about a financial advisor who was hesitant to schedule an appointment. Now you could really make this anything. You say I've had this toothache, but I'm scared of dentists. I don't want to set an appointment because I have this fear. But I eventually got over it and I realized that setting an appointment with a professional was one of the best things that can do, and it's just being responsible, so on and so forth. So the advisor is demonstrating that you've handled 11 major objections. Well, now it's just put up or shut up time, because you have now reached a point where if people have opened your emails and they've consumed the content and they've had those objections handled, then they're either going to work with you or they're never going to work with you, statistically speaking. So that's really the value in email marketing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the most beautiful thing about what you just said, too, is you've already addressed all of the objections, and Peter and I have talked about this a million times. What's the worst thing that can happen by you reaching out to someone, whether it's one time or 11 times, right? They say no. And if they say no, where are you? You're back right to where you were before you reached out the first time. So like, what's the harm in doing it? And so many people see, like reaching out or you know, whether it's calling or emailing or whatever it might be is like this huge hurdle and at the end of the day, you're right back in, like you're right back at square number one. At the end of the day, you're right back in square number one if you don't do it. So there's not really a huge risk to reaching out, as long as you have your stuff together. I would say.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm actually kind of terrified of following up and reaching out. I used to have a bad case of call reluctance, which I call prospecting reluctance, because, truthfully, it's not just calls, it's not just call reluctance, it's prospecting reluctance. But in psychology there's something called a Ulysses contract, where you do something that ensure you do something now, that ensures that you will do something in the future. So A good example of this is like automating your savings. You make the decision right now, today, that you're going to automate it that way in the future. You don't even have time to resist or to fight or to screw it up. You don't actively screw it up. So a marketing can be done the same way. Email marketing for sure, is a Ulysses contract, because once you set up the automation, you've committed that you're going to follow up no matter what, because the machine is going to do it for you. So that is super powerful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, making tomorrow's decisions today essentially Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go ahead Playing to your strengths I think that's something that's you know, you've really pointed out too is, like you know, play to your strengths, be relatable, build some credibility. Um, you know what are some other, just like tidbits or some head trash advisors, need to either figure out or get out of their head and just get on with their marketing.
Speaker 3:Um for head trash. I mean, there's so many, I'm not sure where to begin. I think overwhelm is very common, like at some point you just have to pick something and do it. I think due to financial advisors usually being highly analytical, like I asked ChatGPT as a marketer, what are the most skeptical markets that just pretend that we're doing market research on all businesses what are the most skeptical markets? Financial advisors was number one.
Speaker 3:They are so skeptical of everything and, not to kind of get crude, but I think, looking at my own life, a lot of the success that I've had was because I was just too dumb to know any different. I was too dumb to think about all the things that could go wrong. I was too dumb to think about all of the problems and roadblocks and things like. I just didn't consider it. It never occurred to me. And I think if I could go back in time and, knowing what I know now, maybe I would consider it. Maybe that would hamstring me, maybe that would be bad. But I just talk with financial advisors and they're like well, what about this and what about this? I think another thing that holds them back is thinking that everything needs to be perfect. I guess that's kind of like overanalyzing. They think that the LinkedIn message needs to be absolutely perfect, as if the LinkedIn message is going to be the thing that transforms their business, instead of a multi-point process with multiple marketing strategies, like it's not going to make a difference. So yeah, the just crazy level of skepticism, paralysis by analysis, for sure.
Speaker 3:I guess one more would be comparison, and it's like this kills me. I get emails like this all the time. I love financial advisors, I love helping them, but truthfully, there's just some things that are just bad habits. They will ask what is the average insert, whatever you want here average response rate, average click-through rate, average open rate. And I just think to myself how does this impact your life? So let's say that you have an above average open rate but you're still unprofitable Congrats, is that what you want? No, let's say that you're super profitable and you're running an amazing business and you spend time with your family and everything is hunky-dory, but you have below average metrics. Who cares? And it's just constant comparison. It does not impact you one bit. They'll ask oh well, what is this? I saw this person on your office hours talking about how he did this and this and this. It's like what that has nothing to do with you. So that's a big one.
Speaker 1:No, that's a good point, man. Comparison is the thief of joy, and I think a lot of people don't think about that. And you look at others and you say, well, wow, like we started at the same time as them and look at what they're doing. Or look at what we're doing, I wish we were doing this. Instead of that, it's like, all right, whoa, yeah, what are you getting out of that? Right? How does how is that making you feel right now? Right, because everybody's been guilty of doing the comparison thing and that that was one of the my favorite points that you've made in this entire podcast.
Speaker 1:Everybody's been guilty of doing the comparison thing. But think about how that makes you feel, versus just saying you know what, I'm gonna be the best I can be today. I'm gonna go out there and do the things I can do. I'm gonna go out there and control the things I can control, and a hundred% of the time, that's going to leave you better off. So, yeah, love what you're saying, james. I appreciate you coming on, man, and I think people should definitely, if they're not already following you, give you a follow because just in this conversation, having talked to you, I think you've had some incredible things to say. So how can people follow along with what you're doing and your journey, man?
Speaker 3:of people will follow along with what you're doing and your journey, man. Well, the advisorcoachcom so T-H-E advisor O-R coachcom is a way to start, and I like that because it's a choose your own adventure. I'm not telling you to go do this thing or whatever. You can watch any of the videos. You can subscribe to my email list to kind of see how I do the things, and you won't be able to reverse, engineer a lot, because there are certain things that I do that are not visible on the surface. You could subscribe to the Financial Advisor Marketing Podcast to choose your own adventure, so that's usually the best way.
Speaker 2:Awesome, love it, james. Thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your expertise.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I appreciate it.