Advice Line: Are Paid Ads Worth It For Advisors? (Aaron Brask)

Summary

Episode Summary: "Advice Line: Are Paid Ads Worth It For Advisors?" featuring Aaron Brask

Podcast: Advisor Marketing Made Simple
Hosts: Taylor Schulte and Kendra Wright
Guest: Aaron Brask, Founder of Aaron Brask Capital
Release Date: June 18, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Advisor Marketing Made Simple, hosts Taylor Schulte and Kendra Wright welcome Aaron Brask from Aaron Brask Capital. With a firm managing $60 million in assets and ambitious plans to scale to $500 million over the next five years, Aaron seeks expert advice on optimizing his marketing strategies, particularly regarding the efficacy of paid advertising channels.

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Aaron’s Marketing Challenges and Current Strategies

Organic Content Creation as the Primary Strategy

Aaron begins by outlining his current marketing approach, which heavily relies on organic methods:

Aaron [00:32]: "I just wonder if some of the paid marketing opportunities... I basically do no paid marketing anymore. But it's in the back of my head, I just wonder, I continuously wonder, am I missing out on something?"

He emphasizes his focus on creating educational content through research papers and YouTube videos, which have organically attracted clients. A significant boost came when one of his videos was featured in the New York Times, leading to a substantial increase in website traffic and email sign-ups.

Aaron [03:00]: "When I do that, I find that people look around my website... and it just kind of shows up in my calendar. And it’s a great feeling."

Limited Time and Delegation

Having recently hired a junior planner, Aaron aims to shift from working "in the business" to working "on the business," dedicating more time to content production.

Aaron [05:07]: "I tell him I want to work on my business, not in the business, and focus very much on content production."

He allocates about one to two full days each week to marketing efforts, supplemented by some weekend time.

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Exploring Paid Advertising: LinkedIn and Google Ads

Past Experiences with Paid Channels

Aaron shares his attempts with paid advertising, which have not yielded satisfactory results:

Aaron [06:39]: "I did Google Ads about three or four years ago and the results were very close to zero."

More recently, he experimented with LinkedIn ads targeting engineers nearing retirement, leveraging his analytical background to resonate with this demographic. However, the campaign failed to generate meaningful leads.

Aaron [07:50]: "I used a firm to help me out and do this and automate some things... the tools were a little bit blunt and weren't precise enough to help me target just that typical demographic."

Despite investing approximately $1,000 monthly in LinkedIn strategies over eight months, Aaron saw negligible returns, leading him to abandon paid ads for the time being.

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Hosts' Insights: The Importance of Focused Marketing Funnels

Kendra’s Emphasis on Target Audience

Kendra underscores the necessity of identifying a clear target audience before delving into paid advertising. She emphasizes understanding the ideal client's pain points to tailor marketing strategies effectively.

Kendra [01:56]: "For your ideal clients, you know, who is your ideal client? What are some of those top pain points that they are eager to pay you to solve?"

Taylor’s Perspective on Marketing Funnels

Taylor elaborates on the importance of treating paid ads as a top-of-funnel activity aimed at generating awareness rather than immediate client conversions. He advises that a successful marketing funnel integrates various activities cohesively.

Taylor [09:18]: "Well, if you have a dollar value on that and then you have statistics on, you know, what, how many clients or conversions and so forth, I'd like to have some more horses in the race."

He recommends committing to a single content platform to avoid diluting efforts across multiple channels, which can hinder sustained growth.

Taylor [27:44]: "Pick one single platform that you would like to commit to creating content on... Which one would you commit to?"

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Strategic Recommendations for Aaron

Narrowing Down the Ideal Client Profile

Both hosts stress the importance of Aaron refining his target audience. While Aaron leans towards retirees broadly, he initially considered targeting engineers due to his analytical background. The hosts suggest consolidating this focus to enhance marketing efficacy.

Taylor [16:58]: "We have to get focused. And so a starting point there for getting focused would be who is our ideal client?"

Leveraging Video Content Effectively

Given Aaron’s passion for video, the hosts recommend investing in professional video production to maximize reach and engagement. They highlight the complexities of successful video marketing, including the creation of compelling thumbnails and titles.

Taylor [30:18]: "Spending money on video is a requirement. So if you want to grow, if you want to use video to grow and you're willing to spend money, which you said you were, I think you're in a fantastic place."

Kendra adds that effective video marketing involves meticulous packaging and strategic distribution across platforms like YouTube.

Kendra [33:00]: "There's a lot of nuance and there is a lot of opportunity here."

Building a Cohesive Marketing Funnel

The hosts guide Aaron to develop a comprehensive marketing funnel that aligns all activities—from content creation to client conversion—ensuring each step complements the other.

Kendra [35:00]: "First you're going to choose video as your medium and we're likely looking at something like YouTube videos. So your top of funnel is going to be your YouTube videos."

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Aaron’s Reflections and Action Plan

Aaron acknowledges the need for greater focus and plans to refine his website messaging to emphasize retirement planning more explicitly. He recognizes the value in concentrating his efforts on video marketing while setting aside other channels for future exploration.

Aaron [38:34]: "The biggest message to me really is just say, hey, don't bother with putting too many irons in the fire. Focus on one and do it right."

He commits to enhancing the quality and consistency of his video content, including improving thumbnails and titles to better attract his target audience.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with Taylor and Kendra reinforcing the importance of strategic focus in marketing efforts. They encourage advisors like Aaron to prioritize specific channels and refine their client profiles to achieve sustainable growth.

Kendra [40:09]: "Less is more. More marketing doesn't always equal more results. The opposite is often true. More focus equals more results."

Aaron leaves the discussion with actionable insights aimed at streamlining his marketing strategies, particularly emphasizing the pivotal role of high-quality video content in his growth trajectory.

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Key Takeaways

1. Focus is Crucial: Diversifying marketing efforts across too many channels can lead to inefficiency and diluted results. Prioritize and master one primary channel before expanding.
2. Understand the Marketing Funnel: Recognize the role of each marketing activity within the funnel, from awareness (top) to conversion (bottom).
3. Invest Wisely in Paid Ads: Paid advertising should complement a well-defined funnel, primarily serving to increase visibility rather than directly converting leads.
4. Professionalism in Content Creation: High-quality content, especially video, requires professional handling to maximize engagement and effectiveness.
5. Consistent Messaging: Ensure that all marketing platforms and client touchpoints align with the defined ideal client profile to build trust and facilitate conversions.

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For more insights and strategies on simplifying advisor marketing, subscribe to Advisor Marketing Made Simple and tune in to future episodes where Taylor and Kendra continue to uncover effective marketing tactics for financial advisors.

Transcript

[Kendra]

Hey, it's Kendra and Taylor and we're here to make Advisor Marketing simple. Today's guest is Aaron from Aaron Brask Capital. He recently hired a junior planner and he wants to grow. The firm's AUM is 60 million and Aaron wants to grow to 500 million in the next five years. Welcome to Advisor Marketing Made Simple. Aaron, what's that big question you want to bring to Taylor and I today to help you solve.

[Aaron]

Yeah. As a small and growing advisor, obviously growth is on my mind. And one of the ways I have sort of my own ways I approach marketing just by putting educational content out there and trying to get it in various media outlets. But I just wonder if some of the paid marketing opportunities, if I'm. If I'm not missing something there. And I've had a couple of. I don't know if they're missteps, but I did pay and put a fair amount of money into some marketing on Google, but also more recently on LinkedIn with somebody who said he could help me target very specific profiles. And it didn't meet my. I don't think it'd meet anybody's benchmark for success. So I basically do no paid marketing anymore. But it's in the back of my head, I just wonder, I continuously wonder, am I missing out on something?

[Kendra]

I really like this question because paid is a channel that a lot of advisors are wondering if it could be a fit for them, and I want to dive deeper into that. But before we get there, before we think about how do we get paid marketing to work well, to drive interest and awareness with a firm, I want to first think about who are we trying to reach with paid targeting? Because it's going to change the strategy a lot of. So for your ideal clients, you know, who is your ideal client? What are some of those top pain points that they are eager to pay you to solve?

[Aaron]

Yeah. So this is probably gonna sound a little bit familiar to Taylor, but I do focus on people preparing for, thinking about retirement and people in retirement. And in general, I think a lot of the tax strategies that I emphasize are more relevant or most beneficial to people with more money. And I don't really draw a line for who I accept as clients. I do pro bono work. I do a fair amount, but when I think about somebody that's going to be what I call a personal CFO client, I think they have in general, better part of a million dollars. But million dollars is probably. I don't enforce that as a hard limit.

[Kendra]

Okay. And how have most of your Current clients found you in the past.

[Aaron]

So my background, previous quant research on Wall Street. I wrote a lot of research and I sort of pivoted into financial planning when I moved back. Well, moved back to the US but was sort of looking for something entrepreneurial to do. And I really kind of just stumbled into this career. So the reason I mentioned that is because my approach to marketing and finding new clients is writing research and creating educational videos, post, putting it on my website, trying to get it plugged into various media channels. And when I do that, I find that people look around my website. You know, I have a free consultation widget or calendar on my website. And I just. I never viewed myself as a. As a rainmaker or salesperson. But this business model just works perfectly for me because they're already warm leaves, they're coming to me, and they just kind of show up in my calendar. And it's a great feeling. I don't have it perfected by any stretch of the imagination, but it works. And I did have a big plug last year. I was. One of my educational pieces of video was highlighted in the New York Times and the author wrote a. Really sandwiched me between Wade Pfau and Lawrence Kotlikoff with a kind of very nice positive description. And I can tell you that was just one of the biggest spigots or funnels or what do you want to say? Catalyst for business that drove a lot of traffic, had a couple hundred signups on my email list in short order, and it really got me busy for the most of last year. But getting back to your question. Yeah, so my, my approach is really just writing research or creating educational videos. And that's what I love to do.

[Kendra]

Okay, and right now, how much time do you currently have to spend on marketing each week?

[Aaron]

So now things change. About six months ago, I recently hired a junior planner and it was. It has been one of the best decisions of my life. People told me to do it for years and years, but I, I don't know. A mixture of frugality and inability to delegate probably kept me from doing that sooner. But I would say, to answer your question, my goal now is, as I tell Austin, my. My junior planner, I tell him I, I want to work on my business, not in the business, and focus very much on content production.

[Kendra]

Okay, and how many hours a week do you have for that?

[Aaron]

Right now I'm going to go with one to two days. Full days?

[Kendra]

I'm sorry, one to two full days?

[Aaron]

Yeah, I would say one to two full days because I fill in some of my weekend, my downtime during the weekends. There's not a lot of it, especially now that kids are getting out of school.

[Kendra]

But let's talk a little bit about what you're actively doing right now with the bandwidth you have in the firm. You mentioned from a marketing activity standpoint, you, you're doing some writing. Could you expand a little bit further on what are the active marketing activities you're doing?

[Aaron]

Yeah, so it really is limited to creating content. I am investigating some other channels and I can touch on those, but the main one that 90 plus percent of my efforts are focused on is content creation.

[Kendra]

Can you give me specifics on where you're creating content? Like is it YouTube? Is it writing for publicity outlets? Where is that content going out?

[Aaron]

I found YouTube videos are the most beneficial.

[Kendra]

Okay, so YouTube videos is your primary kind of push right now on marketing.

[Aaron]

That is correct.

[Kendra]

And you enjoy videos?

[Aaron]

A lot of it? Yes, I do. I do enjoy that more than being able to delegate a lot of the administrative tasks, onboarding new clients and some other things that historically I, I kind of did everything, you know.

[Kendra]

Okay, now you've also dabbled in paid traffic. You mentioned, you know, in a few details you gave us working with a LinkedIn marketing agency and pot actually some Google Ads. Tell me a little bit about are those activities, you know, irons still in the fire or have those been completely crossed off the list?

[Aaron]

Yeah, so they are question marks in the back of my head. I have not put a penny into those recently. I did Google Ads about three or four years ago and I mean, the results were very close to zero. And any of the results that showed up were far, far from war, what I would call warm leads. And it just, I didn't like to defend myself or have to get people's guard down and kind of advocate for myself.

[Kendra]

How Recent was the LinkedIn?

[Aaron]

Yeah, so that one I did last year started up in March. And you know, as I mentioned, I focus on retirees and the goal was to focus on retirees and you know, they said they could do it. I used a firm to help me out and do this and automate some things. But I guess, you know, the, the tools are constrained in terms of age targeting. I, I think there's some issues, legalities or regulations around that. But that to me seemed that the tools were a little bit blunt and weren't precise enough to help me target just that typical demographic for the LinkedIn marketing.

[Kendra]

What were you guys, you know, what was the offer? You were running an Offer to a lead magnet. Like where. What was your approach there?

[Aaron]

It was focused through InMail and generating or start trying to start up conversations and focusing on engineers. My background, if I didn't mention earlier, is math PhD. So I'm quite analytical and I think that resonates with clients that have more analytical backgrounds like engineers. So I figured if I could just get myself in front of engineers who were thinking about retiring or in retirement, they might like my profile better than a lot of what else is out.

[Kendra]

There with those engineers. Is that an area that you are actively trying to target like engineers going into retirement? Are we still staying broad here?

[Aaron]

Yeah, I, I do stay broad now within the LinkedIn. That was specific because you know you can focus on people by their trade or their job or their company, but in general, no, I do you know, anybody approaching or in retirement is, is my target clientele.

[Kendra]

Okay, and one last question here and then Taylor, I want to see what's coming up for you when you think about the ideal client you like to serve, the clients you're serving now, is there a large chunk of your current client base that's engineers?

[Aaron]

No, no, I would say it's close to 10%, maybe two or three that I can think of and it's just one that I figured from a marketing perspective would be a little bit easier or get quicker buy in.

[Kendra]

Cool. Taylor, what's coming up for you?

[Taylor]

Aaron, you had shared with us that you have about 60 million of asset center management right now and in five years your goal is 500 million. I'm just curious, how dedicated are you to that growth trajectory? Like in five years if you don't have 500 million, are you going to feel like a failure?

[Aaron]

No, I, I realize I, I do set goals high. To me I thought it was high. But the basic idea is when I kind of model out time usage, my bandwidth, my first hires bandwidth, and I kind of map that out, hit a fast forward button. Of course I build a model for this, you know, and, and there's just a lot of efficiencies I think that I can create and I think doubling as I add resources, I think I'm going to encounter problems that I don't know of. You know, the unknown unknowns. I'm sure I'm going to run into those.

[Taylor]

I guess I'm just, I just want to make sure I understand how much you truly want to grow. Like sure, if it'd be great if I got to 500 million in five years, I don't need to. But you Know if everything works out really well, my junior planner works out really well. We hire a few more people. Like I would love to hit that or no, like that is my true business goal. I am on this path of growth and I want to get to 500 million in five years.

[Aaron]

Yeah, it's closer to the latter. I, I, I won't say I'm one of these ruthless, must obsessed going to do this. I, I do have actually I do have kind of some elements of that in my personality. But if I only achieved half of that, I think I would still call it success and I would try to learn from my mistakes. Say where in my modeling and my projections did I fall short and try to address those. I'm also 52 years old, you know, and that to me this is a business that, you know, I'm not lifting heavy objects all day, I can do for a long time. But I also feel that I have more internal pressure on myself to grow a little bit quicker because I treated this business a little bit as a lifestyle business. Having two little kids, I spent a lot of time with them and I'm kind of circling back and saying hey, I want to build a more traditional business with a growth trajectory.

[Taylor]

Cool. Yeah, very cool. I love this topic, like Kendra said of, of paid ads, LinkedIn, Google, I know it didn't work out very well for you and we can talk a little bit more about maybe why that was but I am curious, how much did you pay this LinkedIn expert strategist? How much, how much did you pay them monthly or in total?

[Aaron]

Oh goodness. I think there was some setup fees. It might have been one or two thousand dollars. And I think that there was obviously the LinkedIn fees but, but the, the ongoing fee per month, I think I'm going to guess it was somewhere with a few bells and whistles attached, was around $1,000.

[Taylor]

Okay.

[Aaron]

The Google Ads I will say years ago was much more expensive, you know, in, in driving those, pushing those ads out.

[Taylor]

Okay. But so going back to LinkedIn, you said about a thousand dollars per month.

[Aaron]

Yeah. And I, I ran that I think for about eight. Yeah, just about to the end of the year and I mean we're getting close to zero results and it just, it was clear to me but we had made various pivots or changes to the strategy but it was clear to me the tools, it would have been better if I did this 10 or 15 years ago when you could just say I want 60 year olds and up or something like that.

[Taylor]

Sure, yeah. I do know One of The limitations with LinkedIn is you cannot screen even with LinkedIn Sales Navigator when you pay for that function. You can't screen for age or date of birth or anything like that. There's some know clever ways around that, but it's not perfect. So that is one limitation with LinkedIn that you don't experience with some of the other paid platforms. So I mean you invested real money into LinkedIn paid ads, you invested real money into Google Ads. But let's just stick with LinkedIn just to sure simplify things. What were your expectations when you said I'm going to Pay this person $1,000 per month? They said they can get me in front of my ideal client. What did success mean to you in engaging that person? Like by the end of our engagement together, I want to see X. What, what was the thing you were looking for them to do for you?

[Aaron]

Yeah, so you know, in this business, you know, clients, it's a profitable business on a per client basis. And honestly all I really needed was one conversion. But we weren't even getting things to the top of the funnel. I mean just the conversations were getting shut off. People are not wanting to go, you know, you know, to have a conversation outside of LinkedIn or things like that. And it just, yeah, it was a, I felt like it was a struggle and I felt like once the initial targeting, like when you're trying to use the other tools, I think you mentioned being clever about them, seniority or. There were a couple of fields we could use. I still got people that were like a handful of years out of college and it just told me that this is missing the mark. I would love to sell them. Oh, I know, I wouldn't like to sell them retirement strategies, but you get the point.

[Taylor]

Sure, sure. Okay. We'll certainly circle back to that. What, what is your current marketing budget? If you're going to truly invest in marketing for, I don't know, let's say the next three years, what would you set aside and budget for just pure marketing dollars?

[Aaron]

I'm going to steer away from that question first and say right now my marketing budget is zero unless I account for my time, which I have recently started to do. And I think that's important for everybody anyhow. But you know, I was looking at what the Google Ads putting in three, you know, $3,000 a month. If somebody had a marketing strategy that worked, I think, you know, $5,000 a month is reasonable. I guess I forgot about one thing. I also do local seminars, educational seminars, and I find those to be extremely profitable for a mailer and a room reservation, all in five, $6,000. You know, the, the math can add up pretty quickly if you get one or two clients out of that.

[Taylor]

You know, one of the things that's immediately jumping out to me, Aaron, and perhaps you've heard me talk about this on this show or in other places, is that anytime I hear advisors say, I do this and this and this, or I do this or I serve this person, it just signals to me that there's, there's a lack of focus there. And you can certainly build a business that way. It's not very predictable. Sometimes prospects show up, sometimes prospects close and turn into clients, and sometimes they don't. You've built a healthy business. So, you know, you've certainly proved that, hey, I can, I can do all these things and you know, sometimes they work and that's great. But, you know, you are trying a lot of different things. It's really hard to go and do in person seminars while also building a great paid advertising funnel while also recording YouTube videos, while also writing research papers, while also training and onboarding your junior planner so you can start to work on the business. So you kind of see where I'm going with this. And I think a starting point for getting focused and this is just truly, if you want, if you want to grow, if you want to go from 60 million, you said 500 million, but you'd be happy with half that. So you want to go from 60 million, let's say realistically, to 250 million. We have to get focused. And so a starting point there for getting focused would be who is our ideal client? And you've referenced, you know, retirees, pre retirees, taxes in retirement. But your website also has people who are saving money and growing their wealth and business owners and, oh, I could also work with engineers and I kind of have a minimum, but I kind of don't. So how dedicated are you or would you be going forward to saying, this is exactly who I work with, you know, this is how much money they have. These are their three or four or five pain points that I help them solve for. And I'm not working with anybody else?

[Aaron]

Yeah, you know, it's, it's really a great question. My website's pretty old and it kind of, it kind of works and maybe isn't optimal. I'm actually rebuilding it right now and doing a lot of, maybe not all of the things you just kind of referenced and targeting and narrow down the focus. Because the one thing that you picked up on there working and saving couples. You know, that client profile, it's a fish out of water. It, it just is, you know, but.

[Taylor]

Yeah, and by the way, this doesn't, sometimes this gets misinterpreted. When we start talking about websites. We don't mean you need to go, you know, destroy your website and start over again. A lot of these things are just changing some words around, right? Or hey, I've got these three or four case studies. I'm going to get rid of the ones that don't match my ideal client. So you don't need to go hire an agency and go spend $20,000 necessarily. Your website performs well. It's fast. It, it looks nice, it's presentable. A lot of this is just cleaning up some of the, the language and, and the copy on the website, which is a lot more affordable and a lot easier to do. So I don't want you to leave here feeling like you have a big website project. That's up to you if you want to pursue that. But the, the big core component, like the starting point of getting focused is can we dedicate all of our marketing and all of our client service to just one type of person and draw a hard line in the sand? And I'm curious if you're able and willing to do that and if you're not, that's okay. One of my really good friends just said, like, I don't want to do that. Like, I like helping all sorts of different people. I don't want to draw that hard line in the sand. So I'm just curious to hear from you, like, are you willing to draw that hard line in the sand on the marketing side?

[Aaron]

Absolutely. I kind of figure the website is a little bit of a catch all, but I am eliminating some of the aspects of that. The client profile in particular. I might grade myself a B in answering that question rather than giving you a yes or a no.

[Taylor]

Okay. And just, just a reminder that you know, your marketing and your website and your client service. These are all, these are all going, these are working together. So it's kind of hard to separate them because if I'm a retiree and I, I don't know, I stumbled across a YouTube video that was about helping me, you know, save on taxes and retirement. I'm like, I kind of like this guy. I'm going to go to his website and check him out. And then there's this disconnect between what you just taught me in this video and what your website saying. They go you know what? I saw this other, you know, guy or gal on YouTube who talked about retirement. I'll go check them out. And their website is just like, I help people just like you lower your taxes in retirement. They feel like that there's, you know, a better connection there between the content they saw and what they saw on the website. The other piece of this, too, is, is client service. It's going to be really challenging to go from 60 million to 250 million working with all different types of clients, because I've been there. I. I've been on that growth path. And it's really challenging to do from a client service standpoint. You certainly can't do it with one junior planner going to have to hire more people. So it creates a lot of operational inefficiencies. So again, you might say, that's fine. I'm okay going on that journey. I'm okay with, you know, a somewhat inefficient practice. But is it a really kind of core question? Because it will, you know, influence how we approach our marketing?

[Aaron]

No, that you. You're speaking right to me. That I, I've kind of felt some of those. Maybe not articulated them as well as you just did, but also on the client service, the one thing I've told my. My. My new guy here is I want to do one thing and I want to do it great, you know, and over and over. And I think that rhymes with what you're just saying.

[Taylor]

Okay, Kendra, what are you thinking?

[Kendra]

So when I started thinking about the 30,000 foot and where that pulls through marketing, kind of like a shoelace, we're kind of stitching up through the shoe here. It first starts with, who are we trying to attract? So play this out a little bit. If you were to choose one type of ideal client, you know, Taylor mentioned, you know, retirees with this amount of assets, et cetera, or some something like engineers ready to retire with X amount of assets, which path are you willing to go down with us here? So we could show you what clarity looks like from the top down in your marketing all the way through your funnel.

[Aaron]

Yeah. And that's part of something I need to articulate. I like. I, you know, you could say, I copy. I don't know if brilliant minds think alike. And we arrived at a similar business model. But, Taylor, I love, I love your focus. You know, it's very clear. I just visited your website, you know, a few minutes ago, just to kind of just remind myself. It's so clean and, you know, it just, it kind of reminds me of that, you know, straightening out the chair and Michael kits this photo or whatever that was, you know, that it's just like you've got a lot of details tended to that are still kind of loose ends on my side. So your question how dedicated? I think retirement is enough of a focus. I think I was kind of using the engineers analytical kind of backgrounds as sort of to corroborate that. You know, so it's kind of, it's not mutually exclusive. It's more if you, you're this but you still have to be a retiree, you know, it doesn't mean, you know, you're, you're 25 years old and an engineer and I'm going to take you. So I, I, I really do want to focus on the retirement broadly. But use, I just feel like my background lends itself to, to generating credibility with, with that particular demographic.

[Taylor]

I think that makes sense.

[Kendra]

When you say that demographic, are we talking about retirement or engineers?

[Aaron]

Oh, sorry, the engineers as well.

[Kendra]

Okay, again, you just re split. I'm trying to decide are we going down like retirement or engineers path? Because here's why this is really important and it feels like it isn't. But we're going to use who you target and then we're going to look at the channel that feels appropriate to you and then we're going to build an offer around that for that channel. So when you say something like I've been using LinkedIn or Google Ads or insert additional paid platforms, there's a lot of reasons why those don't work. But a tiny hinge that swings a big door that so many advisors don't see is right where we're at right now. This is going to change everything.

[Taylor]

Kendra, I will, I will jump in here and just add just because I know how challenging this is for advisors who are casting a really wide net. They're struggling with their marketing, it is terrifying to say I'm only going to focus on engineers going forward. So I just want to throw out one, one solution to combat this is to certainly get more clear on your website and your messaging. You know, I help people over a certain age who are in retirement or transitioning to retirement, you know, and I help them solve these three things. And if you don't want to pigeonhole yourself into just working with engineers at the moment, maybe you're just not, not quite there yet. This is where you can use case studies. You've got a case study about an engineer. You've got a case study about. I don't know, an academic professor who's retiring if that's, you know, a niche that you're interested in. And there's another case study about just a traditional mom and pop, you know, business owner selling their business and transitioning into retirement. I don't know. But you can use that engineer demographic as part of one of your case studies. So if you're targeting engineers and some of your marketing, they show up to your website, well, they see a case study that, you know, looks and feels very much like them.

[Aaron]

Yeah. So to answer your question, I'm sorry if I kind of go around about in my answers I have a probably a bit of ADHD that doesn't help me focus sometimes. But yeah, no, I'm not ready to focus only on engineers very much ready to do retirement. That's fine. I am cleaning up. That's in the works. But I was still just kind of thinking like, yeah, that's what the case study, you know, at least I call it client profile, you know. And Taylor, you probably recognize that, that, that stemmed from looking at, you know, listening to your stuff and looking at your website years ago. So thank you by the way.

[Taylor]

Yeah, of course.

[Kendra]

So Taylor, my thought after kind of narrowing in on that a little bit is kind of looking at which channel and then building a funnel. Is that kind of where your head's at or what are you thinking?

[Taylor]

Yeah, I think just for everybody listening and Aaron, of course I think it's worth revisiting the marketing funnel. We did a whole episode on this. But just really briefly, Aaron, I mean, what you ran into with LinkedIn and Google Ads is this, you know, wide misunderstanding of where different marketing activities fit into the marketing funnel. I mean, I hear this all the time, Taylor. I paid $20,000 to this SEO agency to optimize everything for me. They promised me the world and I didn't see a single client as a result. Therefore I fired them and now I'm going to go try something else. And expecting SEO to drive new clients is just the wrong expectation. SEO and paid ads like LinkedIn or Google is a top of funnel marketing activity to just bring awareness to you like, oh, Aaron exists. Aaron. Aaron is a person. Aaron helps people with retirement. The goal is not to pay for LinkedIn ads or Google Ads and necessarily drive a new client. I mean, remember we're in the business of asking somebody to trust us with their entire life savings. We're not just selling an ebook here or a course this is not a one time purchase. So we have to think in terms of this funnel and really set proper expectations with these different marketing activities. So we can kind of stitch together a funnel and what a funnel might look like if we're interested in paid ads and happy to go down that path. But I just wanted to share kind of out loud here and Aaron, feel free to ask any follow up questions or clarifying questions. Just kind of remind everybody that paid ads work. LinkedIn ads work, LinkedIn in mail work, Sales navigator works, Google retargeting works, all these things work. We just have to set proper expectations and understand where they live in the marketing funnel and then from there understand what additional activities do I need to add to my funnel that complements that other one.

[Aaron]

Yeah. So Kendra, you asked the question kind of where am I at? What am I thinking? I'm thinking now that I can do a bit more. I, I can focus on content generation. But also it's not just content generation. I want to tech take a step back and I think as you call it the marketing funnel, I want to look at different ways to fill it and you know, kind of like a horse race, put these things side by side. You know, I measure my time and putting together the video content, for example, or a research article. But I also, so if I have a dollar value on that and then I have statistics on, you know, what, how many clients or conversions and so forth, I'd like to have some more horses in the race. And that's where these other marketing channels kind of came in. I was just looking for. Everybody tells me, do what you love. I love creating content.

[Taylor]

Creating content is fantastic. We have to create content in some shape or form just so we can create an action item here for you and others that are listening so they can, you know, walk away with, with, you know, some sort of action item here. Creating content. Pick one single platform that you would like to commit to creating content on. Would it be writing, writing research articles or writing blog posts? Would it be doing more video or would it be doing more in person seminars? Like if you just had to choose one, which one would you commit to?

[Aaron]

Video by far.

[Taylor]

Okay, so if you commit to doing videos, how do you plan to attract people to these awesome videos that you're putting together?

[Aaron]

So, you know, I have an email list. Obviously I, I let everybody know when I do that I'm building some subscribers, you know, not, not in the numbers or same magnitudes as some of the other advisors out there. But I can see things are growing and I am going to plug in and one of the strategies with the videos is Sort of the slicing, the dicing and dripping them into social media, you know, as sort of teasers for the full video. Click here to kind of have a little bit more frequency or up the frequency. I'm a little bit on the low frequency side. Historically in the past six months it's mostly been just because I've been really busy. But that's not my problem now. Now it's just I want to create a few channels, videos being the number one, the top dog for sure. But if I can put set up a campaign, paid marketing, whatever it is, I want to start to compare kind of that success rate or conversion rates and at some point you just kind of don't care as long as it's profitable. Keep doing it. But I like to analyze everything probably too.

[Taylor]

Sure. Just keep in mind that it's going to be challenging to have real success with video if you're also trying to do other things. If you're also trying to keep up with writing academic papers or writing blog posts or experiment experimenting with paid ads. It's going to be really challenging. So we're, if we go down that path, we're just going to go back to throwing spaghetti at the wall. And sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. You mentioned video like immediately. Didn't, didn't. Taking more than a second to say that. The great thing is, is that you have a marketing budget and a lot of advisors aren't willing to spend money on marketing. And I can tell you that spending money on video is a requirement. So if you want to grow, if you want to use video to grow and you're willing to spend money, which you said you were, I think you're in a fantastic place. You just need to ignore everything else and you need to go take that marketing budget, that three to $5,000 per month and you need to go hire an awesome YouTube video agency strategist, whatever it might be. I'm going down this path right now. I've been going down it for the last nine months. I have spent well over $50,000 and I'm spending close to $5,000 per month. And it's literally the only way that I'd be able to take action and do video the right way and have success with it, there's no other way around it. So if you want to dabble, you can dabble. And if you want to experiment, you can experiment. It's going to be really challenging to see sustainable, predictable growth from here.

[Aaron]

That's an interesting angle because I've, I've always viewed my video production or video content as quote unquote free, just my time. But kind of putting that on steroids or like turbocharging that you're, you're saying it's makes sense or it's, you're just saying it's required a no brainer basically to really again, if you want to.

[Taylor]

Create educational content and throw it out there and it reaches some people and that makes you feel good that I don't want to take that away from you. If we want to grow and we want to use video to grow, I promise you, you have to hire experts. It is a beast to tackle video the right way.

[Kendra]

Well, and also, I mean I think about, you know, we have clients that we do this for and even something as simple as the packaging around the video is a whole piece because you know, there's a few different ways to put video out there. But let's just talk about for example, YouTube. The idea, the thumbnail and the title. The amount of time it takes me and my team behind the scenes to put together a killer thumbnail in title and packaging. It's totally bonkers. It is just, it's, it's a lot of work. And you know, we have an advisor with our agency that launch a channel and we have another advisor who's had her channel for a long time and they wanted to run these channels very differently. And the thing about video, for example, if we're talking like YouTube, the new advisor is actually getting much more success than the advisors have been doing YouTube for two years because we are working on the packaging and each of these platforms, they just have a lot of nuance and there is a lot of opportunity here. But you mentioned, hey, I want to put a couple horses in the race. And I would say I think you already have. So what if we were to try something new? And the other thing I want to kind of bring up is you said something a little while back I found really fascinating. You said events are actually a no brainer for me. They're driving business. You like to speak. So there's also a part of me that's thinking, hey, you know, YouTube and video, if you go down that route or just video, you can choose a different platform. But video or events. Because even when I go to your website, you've got events there. So when you're asking us about which horse should I put in the race, how does paid media work? I think we kind of come back to one. Some of the foundational elements which we already discussed around getting clearer on that ideal client, then looking at the medium, whether it's speaking or video, and then building the funnel. You know, to me, I think one of the most inefficient pieces of advisor marketing is be everywhere. Because for most advisors, they already are. If that was going to work for a lot of advisors, it probably already would have. So the biggest opportunity I see here to even get these different platforms working is narrowing in who you want to serve, how you want to reach them, and then how you want to build trust over time, which is just the marketing funnel.

[Taylor]

Yeah, really well said. And Aaron, I promise you, you cannot do all these things. You cannot run paid ad funnels and campaigns and do in person seminars and do video YouTube and write academic papers. Like yeah, I mean you mentioned a couple times and you told your junior planner, like I want to focus on one thing. And so you're going to have to choose one of these things. And each one of these things requires its own independ individual marketing funnel. And managing and maintaining and having success with one single funnel is a lot of work, but that's really all you need to have success. That's really all you need to go from 60 million to 250, even 500 million for that matter. It's gonna be really challenging to do all of them. So YouTube has its own funnel. I promise you you're gonna have to hire an agency to do that the right way. You mentioned in person seminars. Again, if we choose that, we got to push everything else to the side. You would hire an agency to help get butts and seats, those in person seminars. Go hire White Glove agency to get butts and seats and go teach those seminars. I want to go back to paid ads just for a minute, just because I know people are interested in them. I think I shared this on a recent episode, Aaron, a fantastic way to leverage paid ads with LinkedIn. Because remember, paid ad is just visibility. It's just awareness. It's not we're not getting a new client from paid ads is to host regular webinars. And you might say, I'm going to host a webinar every single week on Wednesdays at lunchtime or for engineers who are about to retire from these 10 companies. And you hire an agency to run ads in some way, shape or form on LinkedIn to drive engineers transition into retirement to your event page on LinkedIn to register for your weekly lunchtime educational webinar. And if you commit to that for six, nine months, I promise you you'll have success with it. And so we're gonna have to choose one. As you can see that how much work it really is. It's not just paying agency to run LinkedIn ads. It's like, no, I have to create a process for hosting weekly educational webinars. I have to understand who I'm targeting, what are their pain points, how am I going to educate them. And even once they start to show up, how am I going to convert them from those webinars to scheduling a meeting with me and then ultimately closing them and turning them into clients? So it's a long funnel to stitch together, which is why we emphasize we got to focus on one.

[Aaron]

Yeah, it's, that's interesting because it's kind of the opposite of what I was thinking about. How I was thinking about going is trying to put a few things into the race at once.

[Taylor]

But, but you are right, like in that example, you're not just paying an agency to run ads. And by the way, when you pay an agency to run ads, it doesn't mean that you just hand them over money and they do all the work for you. I mean, I think about it like when a client hires us, like they're very much involved in the process. They don't just pay us a fee and walk away. So, you know, you, you've got that horse in the race, you have this agency that you're paying and all the work that's required to get you onboarded the right way and develop that strategy. And then the other horse is, well, I've got these weekly webinars that I have to host and I have to create the PowerPoint present presentations and the resources and the follow up emails and, you know, list goes on. And then I have to create a really good sales process that's my other horse in the race to convert these people into actual recurring clients and convince them to hand over their life savings. So there are a lot of horses in just that one single marketing funnel.

[Aaron]

When I think about the middle of my funnel, you know, getting people into it is one thing, but how do you think about setting up when somebody first. I always say when somebody comes into my world, when somebody first enters my world, comes, comes into the funnel, I, I have, you know, say a stream of emails, drip emails, but at, at some point I don't have a lot. You know, it might last a month or two, but then they end up in. What I have is, I call it the black hole. It's just they really haven't responded. And that's fine. Sometimes people take much longer, obviously than A month or two, but I just have them on my whenever I put out a new piece of research, a new video or something notable. But I don't have filler in between there except for on social media. That's where I have the slicing and dicing of existing content to kind of have more frequency. Anyhow, my question I guess is how do you think about that sort of marketing as when somebody first comes into the world, they separate from what happens from there out to infinitum.

[Taylor]

Well, if you've got a solid marketing funnel, if you've got that paid LinkedIn funnel and you're hosting weekly webinars for engineers transitioning to retirement and you've got a good conversion process and sales process, then do, do you, do you need an email sequence for random people that stumble across your email list?

[Aaron]

That's always there, right?

[Taylor]

So again this goes back to like if you want to focus on email marketing, if that's going to be your funnel, then great, let's build a funnel around strictly email marketing. That means we're going to ignore everything else. We're going to ignore YouTube, we're going to ignore video, we're going to ignore LinkedIn, we're going to ignore in person seminars and we're going to build a funnel around email marketing. Now this doesn't mean you can never do email marketing. It's just like we have to create one funnel that actually works. And once that funnel works, we can say okay, how can we pour gas on this funnel? Oh well, we can start to build an email list from this funnel and build a sequence and nurture them. And so for those people that don't convert but they attended past webinars, we can continue to stay in front of them. So but that's, that's down the road. Sorry to jump in again.

[Aaron]

Something. No.

[Kendra]

Okay, so we've thrown a lot your way. Aaron and I know some of the way that the ways that we think about advisor marketing is very counterintuitive. I think the good news that I see here is you have a couple different platforms you feel comfortable creating on. Whether that's something like video or it's something like in person events. We, we don't want to think. Jo, wait, what are you thinking? You know, what are your kind of biggest takeaways or aha's from this conversation? What might you do differently after this?

[Aaron]

Yeah, so for sure it's, it's focus but I guess there's at a couple different levels. Number one, I, I would was already kind of move not kind of. I was moving in the direction of. Even the front tagline on my website says financial planning and retirement. You know, like it doesn't say financial planning for retirement. And that's my half step towards, you know, focusing on retirement. You know, if I figure it reads ambiguously and, you know, somebody's there for retirement, they'll see retirement, somebody's there for not okay, anyhow, I'm going in that direction. So. So that. That sort of focus on the client Persona. But the biggest message to me really is just say, hey, don't bother with putting too many irons in the fire. Focus on one and do it right. And I feel like I already have the answer. It's videos. And I. Yeah, I mean, like you just mentioned, you know, the amount of time and effort that go into these thumbnails. In the beginning when I was doing videos, it was an afterthought. But as I look around and I see how other people are doing it, I'm like, oh, wow. They have this consistent thing and that. It has text in it and it has something cat, you know, eye catching and it has them, you know, I was like, I got to kind of go in that direction. And that was another thing where I think focusing on that and doing it right, including all of that background thumbnails and everything, intro, outro, all that. Those are being more focused on the client, specific type of client and being more focused on the marketing. I don't know if you call it channel or. But funnel, whatever.

[Kendra]

Definitely I think that you're headed in the right direction there based on the conversation we had here. So here's, you know what I see based off the funnel that we, we rebuilt for you and where you could go next to narrow your focus. You know, first you're going to choose video as your medium and we're likely looking at something like YouTube videos. So your top of funnel is going to be your YouTube videos. Your middle of funnel could technically function. Those videos can technically function as middle of funnel. You might also later, once you get that going, look at some additional middle of funnel pieces for that. And then bottom of your funnel is just going to be your sales process. Knowing that we're driving people from YouTube, which is going to impact our sales process a little bit, they might not know you as well. So there's some nuances with how that funnel will work. And then from a high level, when we think about just the action items around building that funnel, we want to dial in who you want to serve. We want to get a Little bit more narrow there on the retirement client, their age, a couple of those big core problems that you want to solve. We know how you want to educate them, which is video. So if all these other marketing activities and to dos that you have on your list, I want you to just imagine taking your arm and sweeping them all the table. We're going to press pause on those and we're going to become a master at YouTube video. And that means there's a lot of nuance to that, such as the packaging, the, the ideas, the thumbnails, the titles. And as Taylor said, the next step is hiring someone probably to help you really start to put that strategy together. And I think as you start to get clear on who you want to work with, how you want to educate them through YouTube, and then how you want to build trust over time, I think that's going to start to point you in a more focused direction. And I want to remind you that, like, this problem is not unique to you. We see this with a ton of advisors and it's very counterintuitive. But if you've been doing all these different things and you're not getting results, I encourage you. Let's try something totally different, which looks like what we just talked about. And for the rest of you advisors who are also listening, if you're a little confused on what the marketing funnel looks like, we did a really deep dive on that in our marketing funnel episode. So make sure you check that out over there. And remember that less is more. More marketing doesn't always equal more results. The opposite is often true. More focus equals more results. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. To get the resources shared or sign up to join us as a guest on one of our advice line episodes, check out the links in the show notes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.