Samantha Russell: What Works Right Now in Financial Advisor Marketing

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Building a modern marketing engine that attracts your ideal clients in a world of algorithms, AI, and shrinking attention spans is no easy feat. But there is a way, and today's guest tells us how. Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Samantha Russell. Samantha is the Chief Evangelist at FMG, where she helps thousands of financial advisors sharpen their marketing strategy, create compelling content, and build high-performing websites that attract new clients. In today's conversation, Samantha shares what's working right now in advisor marketing, including how AI is transforming search and why answer engine optimization is replacing traditional SEO, and the biggest mistakes advisors make when they chase tactics before nailing down their strategy. She also explains how to choose the right social media platforms, why your email list still matters more than ever, and how a strong hook can make or break your content. We also talk about the marketing channels top firms are using and testing to grow their businesses organically, how advisors can build a system to nurture leads long after the initial contact, why human faces and personal stories outperform polished branding, and what to do if you're a smaller firm that wants to scale without being generic. With that, here's my conversation with Samantha Russell.

I feel like in the last few months, I have had more conversations with advisors about AI and how it's impacting the way clients find them today than in the last 2 years combined, even though ChatGPT has been around for a while. Advisors are finally starting to have clients come to them saying, oh, I went to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude and asked for a list of the best advisors in Philadelphia that work with women, and you were on the list. And those stories are becoming more real when it happens to you or someone you know. So AI is definitely a huge conversation in, I think, every element of business, but especially for advisor marketing. We've been talking a lot about AEO and answer engine optimization. Optimization instead of SEO, search engine optimization. And it's really transforming the way when you think about marketing. People haven't wanted to be sold to for a long time, but for a long time there was a lot of talk around inbound, right? So we want inbound leads, we want someone to go online, and we thought of like the funnel, the marketing funnel. And really, yes, there is still funnel, people come through, but instead of thinking of it like a true funnel where, okay, there's awareness and then they become aware of you and and you're solving some pain points and they're hearing more about you until you finally sell and close. Now it's almost, I think of it like a cloud where, you know, they're walking through this cloud and they might see a post of yours on social media. They might hear from a friend about your name. They might see an ad that you run. They might get an email from you. And we don't always know when finally somebody does come and book a time to meet with the firm, where they actually heard about us from first or what was the final touchpoint, because then a lot of times people will Google the firm name and they say, well, they found me through Google and that's not really the way that it's going. So AEO, answer engine optimization, is something we're talking a lot about because it is a new frontier in how people really are interacting digitally online and how they're finding firms today.

Yeah, and I definitely want to get into that, but one of the issues that I find with advisors is they're impatient. And what I mean by that is they're like, okay, I want to grow my business, I need to do some marketing, so I'm going to try this or I'm going to try that before they really think about the bigger picture strategy and figure out what am I actually trying to accomplish and then figure out what are the best tactics that are going to help me achieve that strategy. So, yeah, what would you say are some of the key things that advisors need to have in place, some of the foundational items about their business that they need to have in place before they go spending a boatload of money on budget marketing tactics.

One of my favorite things to say when someone will say, Sam, what marketing tactic should I use? Should I go all in on having AI bots find me, or should we start an Instagram account? Flip the question. Instead of saying, what marketing tactic should I go all in on, ask, what about my business is marketable? So for instance, we know that taxes are something that so many, especially high net worth clients that advisors want, they are sick of having to play the go-between sometimes between their CPA and their estate planning attorney and their advisor. And so if you're offering a tool that allows you to gain insight into your client's tax return and to pull out information and use it to help plan better, that should be something that you are talking about in your messaging. So Nailing your messaging first, what about your firm is marketable, who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and getting super clear on that obviously is the foundation. And a lot of people want to skip right over that and get to the tactics. So that is for sure number one. And then the second thing is thinking about where are those target clients hanging out? And don't try to be on every social media platform, running ads, doing all these things right out of the gate. Pick a couple lanes that you know are going to lead you to that audience and start there and really hone in on that. And there's, firms growing exponentially that really might only be using one channel but doing it really well. So yeah, first, what makes you marketable? And then second, choosing your channels.

Now, what about things like having your target market identified, having client personas created, having a value proposition, having a lead follow-up system? I've seen situations where advisors bring in leads, but they didn't have a backend system to effectively nurture and follow up with those leads effectively.

So true. Actually, one of my favorite questions when I start looking at what's broken in people's funnels is how segmented are your lists? And people will say, I don't, they have one list with every email.

They got money, I'm marketing to them.

Yes. Or they, I still, you would not believe it, see people who they don't even separate the prospects from the clients. They're just sending basically the same thing to everybody. So obviously at a minimum you want a client list and a prospect list, but then within that prospect list, Where did they come to you from? Did they come because of a seminar that you did on a specific topic? Did they come because of an ad that you ran? Are they over 55? Are they a young family? Breaking them up so that you can be hyper-targeted. It is definitely the follow-up from a lead and the amount of time it can take to really nurture that lead. I think to your point of people being impatient, if it doesn't happen right away, they, drop the ball. The thing you don't want to do is get a lead and ask them to book a meeting with you, and then they don't, and then you ask them again, and then they don't, and then you ask them again, and then you say, okay, they're not interested, so you let it go. Instead, you want to be nurturing them with relevant content related to what they're interested in or why they got on your list in the first place. And that is a massive mistake that people make because it's time-consuming.

If we go back 10, maybe 15 years ago, it seems like the website was central, meaning we always wanna draw prospects back to the website. Then we had the rise of all these social media channels from Facebook to LinkedIn to Instagram to TikTok to so on and so forth. And then it's like, well, that's where the people are. So now we're creating specific strategies for each of those particular forms of media. Are we going back to the primacy of the website again? With AI, or what role does a website play today? How important is it for an advisor to have a high-performing website in light of all these other media channels we've got out there?

Yeah, it's such a good question. I think if you just look at TikTok and how we had creators out there who had millions of followers and they weren't really on any other platform, and if that platform went away, even if it was just for a few hours, they, oh my gosh, there is my business gone in an instant. And it really reminded everybody of the importance of owning your own audience, having a website, having a newsletter, collecting those emails. And email is still the number one conversion tactic that people just don't realize. Collecting those emails and being able to drip on people really works best. So the website is so important because that's where you collect the emails. Obviously there's people who, you know, run Substacks or things like that and they don't have a website tied to it. But then you hear people saying they're mad at Substack about something. So I think owning your own storefront on the web via a website is so important. Important for owning your own narrative. And also, for— it becomes the hub where you house everything else, and it sends signals to all of the AI tools and to Google, which still does reign supreme, about who you are, what you do, and allows you to be found. Absolutely. I think we've been reminded recently that you don't want to put all your eggs in one of these social media baskets.

Yeah. And here at the Barron's Conference, I've been hearing a number of the leaders here talk about how, to your point, you don't want just one marketing channel. You don't want just two. These larger firms, they've got 6, 7, 8, 10, 12 different marketing channels, and they're constantly testing those to see which ones are performing. And then the ones that are performing, they're putting more money into them. The ones that aren't, they're experimenting with a different tweak to it to see if they can get it to work. But they really want half a dozen different channels to bring in new business.

And I think too, you know, I recorded a video not that long ago and I posted it, and so many people have said that was such an aha moment for me where I said you could have a great piece of content, but if the first line of your social post is terrible, think of it like a gate. If nobody is going— if they read it and it doesn't hook them, it's not working, then they're not going to go through the gate to read the rest of the content. The gate might be the subject line of your email. It could be the first line of your social media post, right? Because you have to click that see more to read the rest of it on LinkedIn or keep watching if you're on watching Instagram Reel. So there are firms that are abandoning things that are actually probably great content, but just because the hook sucks. So a great firm who's really going all in on this marketing growth strategy is going to say, okay, we have this one piece of content, let's test it with 10 different hooks. And see which one performs best. And maybe a certain hook does better on LinkedIn than another hook does on YouTube. I think that is really where, again, people, they're not seeing all of the different aspects that can go into it. You don't wanna start with your video with, "Hi, I'm Samantha Russell and I am the Chief Evangelist at FMG. And today I'm gonna talk to you about..." Instead, you get right to the point first, then you can go back and talk about why you're qualified. But having that strong hook And you know, we have what, 3 seconds to get someone's attention. It really is so important to test those.

Two comments about that. One is about LinkedIn and to your point, you have one sentence that you can see and then you have to click to see more.

Right.

And I was posting some stuff on LinkedIn and you had commented about one of my posts and you said something to the effect of, oh Steve, it's so great to see that you've, you get like right to the point and you're getting all these comments and likes on this post and You're really getting the hang of it. And I thought, oh, I appreciate that. Oh, coming from an expert for you. Good. But then the second thing about what you just said here was you can have a piece of content that might be great for one channel like LinkedIn. But I think what I see some people do is they take the exact piece of content and they try and post it on several different media forms without changing anything. Each channel has its own type of sort of format that really works. And so You can take that piece of content, but you probably have to tweak it a little bit if you're gonna tweet it or if you're gonna put it on LinkedIn or you're gonna Instagram or TikTok or what have you. So what are your thoughts about getting the core piece of content, but then customizing it for each media form to make sure that it's conforming to what works best on that channel?

Yeah, it's a mistake I see people make all the time is they spend, let's say, 90% of their time creating the content. And 10% of their time thinking about what's the subject line gonna be or the hook or the first sentence. And that is such a massive mistake because if you don't hook them, they'll never see what you spent all this time and effort on. So a great tactic, for instance, if you have a video, you create a long video or let's say it was like a video podcast, then you make shorter clips and you think about who is the audience, which way are they watching it? So you want vertical video if you're on Instagram. If you're on LinkedIn, you can do vertical performs there well, but still some landscape horizontal I'll record and it can perform really great there because we still see a lot of people on LinkedIn during the workday on their desktop because it's more of a professional network. You might then take that same thing and take a still shot of it so you're not showing the whole video and make an Instagram carousel where you have the top takeaways from that piece of content and there's still photos with text over them for Instagram carousel. So yeah, smart marketing is doing something once and then spending all your time, effort, and energy not going and starting from scratch to create content piece number 2, but repurposing what you already have. And when it comes to these hooks, you know, it used to be— we have all heard that you want to tell a story. Stories, what hook people in. But it's becoming so prevalent in the world of social media, especially when you think about that See More button, for instance, on LinkedIn. That is an indicator to the algorithm. They monitor how many people click See More. And so the higher percentage that click it, the more your post is going to continue to be shown to more people. So when you have a hook like, I used to always do X until I learned Y, people want to know, okay, what did they learn? How did it impact them? Or I never was good at this until I started doing this. Or the biggest mistake I ever made was whatever. Those are the formats that really work. So it's crucially important to nail that.

I'll call this a pet peeve of mine where when it comes to marketing, people think I create a piece of content and then I get one of these automated systems where I plug my content in there and then it just like automatically spews it out there. And I think that somehow magically this content's gonna be out there and everybody's gonna engage with it. I don't have to do anything about it. And like most of the content that I personally put out, I literally, maybe this is not efficient, but I'm literally posting it myself. And I'm immediately responding when someone comments on it or whatnot. I know you're in the business of helping people automate their marketing. So tell me, how do we think about you personally being there, posting this stuff, engaging in real time versus using technology to maybe do some of that for you?

Yeah, and it's definitely a balancing act. I think one thing people don't realize is that the way these social media algorithms work I always think of like, when you think of like old CIA shows where they had like the red lines connecting this suspect to this murder and everything, that's what the social media algorithms are doing. So if I leave a comment on Steve Sandusky's post, the algorithm says, oh, there's a thread there. And then if you make one back to me, they say, okay, there's an even stronger thread there. And the more we do that, the stronger that thread gets. So then the next time I go to post, the odds you're gonna see that are incredibly high. But think about what I first said. Even if you never leave a comment on mine, just the fact that I'm commenting on yours, it's connecting us. So a great strategy for anybody trying to grow and be found by the right people is to think about who do you want to see your content. So if I was a financial advisor and I'm targeting physicians in Philadelphia, you can schedule the content. But before my content is scheduled to post, let's say I schedule it for 9:00 AM on Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Between 8:30 and 9, I would make it a habit to pull up the platform on LinkedIn, let's say, and I would look at hospital systems in the Philadelphia area, who works there, find those people, and go leave comments on their posts so that now when my post goes up, those physicians are seeing it, or those hospital administrators are seeing it. You can search content types, hashtags, for instance. But the other thing that does then is, let's say Patty Smith is one of the people I went and left a comment on, and she has no idea who I am, she's going to say, who is Samantha Russell? And she's going to click on my profile and go and see who I am. And if I'm not trying to sell her anything, I'm just engaging in a conversation, that person goes, oh, that's interesting, I wonder why she left a comment. And it just creates this intrigue, right? So getting in the habit of what we call priming the algorithm by doing this is really crucial for growth. And I always say, if you've never commented on a stranger's post before, you're doing social media wrong. You don't want to get in this habit of being in an echo chamber where you're just engaging with the people you already know. We wanna be expanding our networks. Go find 5 people who are second or third degree connections. Another great thing you can do is let's say you, Steve, are my target audience. I can pull up your account, whether it's on Instagram, on LinkedIn, and look at all the people you follow or you're connected with and say, oh, these are some of his friends, acquaintances. I'm gonna go comment on their posts because I'm not connected with them already, but they're in Steve's network. So that's another great way you can find those people.

Yeah, and that just really points out how you've gotta spend time doing this stuff, right? Some of it you can automate, but at the end of the day, you've gotta be out there commenting and make the comments specific, not just a generic, oh, this was a great post. I was like, okay.

So true. I always, one of the analogies I give is in the old days, you'd go to the local chamber of commerce and maybe hand out business cards or you'd go to a luncheon or a cocktail event. You would never walk in the room, hand your business card to a bunch of people and leave, right? Or let's say you had a great piece of content back then in a newsletter. You wouldn't walk in the room and hand the newsletter to everybody because it was great content and leave. That would be weird. It's weird to do it on social media. So social media is supposed to be helping us replicate online the conversations and interactions we have offline. So instead, what would you do at that event? You'd walk up to people, you would say, oh, I like your sweater. Oh, you went to this college? That's so interesting. My son just applied there. Or, oh, you're from Boston? What about those Celtics? Whatever it is, you should be doing the same thing in those online communities. So another really important thing are DMs. A lot of advisors just send salesy DMs, but instead you can be really proactive by, again, doing all those same things I just said could be written in a DM. Oh, we're both in finance, we both live in Boston. Something about the Celtics, right? It can be very simple. You don't have to overthink it, but it's about just recreating those conversations and treating people like people.

Yeah, I'm just having the conversation. I want to go back to the hook for a minute. So you're a master at social media. So one of the things I notice is let's use LinkedIn as an example. Many of the images that you post on LinkedIn are pictures of you or your family or in a business situation or what have you. Versus pictures that don't have you in it. What's your thought on a platform like LinkedIn and let's say X of having pictures of you as the advisor in most of them or half of them or a quarter of them versus some other picture? How important is the picture itself to go along with the hook to really attract people to want to click see more?

Yeah, it's such a good question. And I know a lot of people are uncomfortable they don't wanna put a picture of their face on their social posts. But what does psychology tell us? It tells us that human beings are very attracted to faces from the time we're babies, and we do not form connections with businesses and logos. We form connections with other human faces. Also, there's something called the mere exposure effect, which tells us that just by merely being exposed to something, we are more likely to report that we like it. So you ever hear a song on the radio and the first time you hear it, it drives you crazy? And then the more you hear it, the more you start to be like finding yourself singing along to it. It's the same way just by being exposed to things we report because the familiarity breeds liking, basically. So what we're doing here when we have somebody's face associated with a business over and over again is we're tapping into that mere exposure effect, that likability. But also people will remember you more because they have seen your face over and over again. So no, it doesn't need to be every single post. But if you think of the businesses that even in our industry that are growing the fastest and that everybody knows, they are usually businesses where people can identify somebody in the leadership at the top. They know their face and their name, and that is not an accident. And so choosing somebody within the organization, optimally maybe more than one person, you not all your eggs are in one basket, that is regularly in those posts or sharing tidbits of information on video is so crucial for allowing people to form those connections. And if you don't want to be on video, I think it actually is maybe even great to know it can just be a picture. It doesn't have to be a full-fledged video if you're not comfortable with that.

Let's talk about some of the different channels that you're seeing are effective. And I think another mistake advisors can easily make is they see, oh, I see this advisor is crushing it on YouTube, so I'm going to start a YouTube channel.

Yeah.

Or this person's got a podcast and it seems like the podcast is doing great, so maybe I'll do a podcast. What's your advice to people to get them to think about which form of media should I try as opposed to just trying to copy what other people are doing that seems successful?

Yeah, obviously the first one is just where do your clients tend to gravitate? So we have a lot of people who are seeing other advisors being all over LinkedIn and then they tell me that pretty much all the people they're working with are about to retire.

And they're not on LinkedIn.

They're not on LinkedIn. That is a place where people who are, you know, in the working years are. And if you're either already retired or about to retire, you are not spending a lot of time there. So that would not be a good choice. I'm really bullish on video just because if we look at the statistics from the 9-month-old baby whose parents give them a phone with clips of video on it to watch at the dinner table, all the way to the 95-year-old who's watching the symphony orchestra or TikTok videos. People watch video. I think we're up to 1 hour and 54 minutes on average per day on phones in the United States. So we are just consuming an insane amount of videos. So I'm very bullish on video. And then where you put that and how you clip it will depend, right? If you want to really focus on young women in their 30s to 50s, Instagram would be a great place to be. I know one advisor, Thomas Kopelman,. He has grown his business exponentially on Twitter. Well, X, sorry, now of all places. And I used to really be like, oh, that's where you connect with journalists and industry people. But he really targets tech executives in Silicon Valley and they are there and he has grown his business massively there. You need to think about where does your audience spend their time? And sometimes it's surprising. My mom just turned 68. Her and her friends, all they do all day long is send each other TikTok videos. And because a lot of these videos get repurposed to platforms like Facebook, And then if you want to watch the whole video, you have to click it and then it'll say, oh, you need a TikTok account. You just might be surprised. So you need to ask. I think one of the things is to do an audit and ask your clients specifically where are they spending time. And some of them might be a little embarrassed maybe to tell you that they are on TikTok.

I don't know. My mom's pretty hip to be on TikTok at 68.

But the numbers are showing that the way that these channels are getting adopted is not— it's not always intentional. My grandmother-in-law, she's on Instagram just because she wants to see pictures of the grandchildren. So again, you just— I think asking is a huge part of figuring out your strategy.

Yeah. And one of the ways I think about that too is I think of 3 circles in terms of what kind of marketing you should do. So one circle is what do you love to do? So we talked about video. If you don't like your face on video, then don't do video. Even if you think everyone else is super successful, if you don't like it, you're not—

it's terrible.

Yeah. So number one is what do you love to do? And then number two is what are you really good at or what can you get really good at? Because if you love something but you may not be good at it yet, you're going to take the time to get good at it. And then the third is to your point as well about where can your best clients be found? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on YouTube? Are they on Instagram? So where those three circles intersect to me is the sweet spot. What you love to do, what you're really good at, and where your clients can be found. Where those intersect. To me, that's where you put your marketing efforts.

You said it way more eloquently than I did.

So what platforms are you seeing seem to be working today? And I know it's going to vary, but is there anything— you mentioned video. I 100% agree with that. I think for me personally, like, I spent more time on YouTube in the past year than I think in all the previous years combined. So I'd say watching sailing.

Okay. Your new hobby, right?

Yeah. But you want to know. But I— yeah, but I'm I'm watching all kinds of stuff on YouTube. Yeah. And we've got a theater room and nice chair, and I'm like, it's cool at night after a day at work. I'm like, I'm just gonna chill out with a glass of wine and watch some video stuff. So true.

It's been fun. YouTube consistently is one of the— I think it actually still is the— if you look at the Pew Research, and I never know if it's Statista or Statista, but they will report on what are the most used social media platforms by age group, and YouTube is always is number one. And I think it's just because, A, it's such a powerful search engine. People go there, they type things into Google, and they end up on YouTube. And then when you watch one video, it just feeds you the next.

It doesn't give you time to go to the bathroom in between videos, right?

And you get such real content there, right? So Google did a study a year ago where they asked people, you know, what are the top reasons why they watch different video? Not the production value didn't even break the top 10. It was nothing to do with are these professional actors? How great is the lighting or the camera? It was all about is the content interesting? Does it inform me? Do I feel an emotional connection with the people teaching me something? That's why it works so much. Again, we're looking for that, that human connection. And when you ask like what works for people, I could tell you a story of success pretty much for every platform. I know an advisor who's using Facebook groups to connect with pickleball players in Tennessee. Another advisor, Isaac Priestley at Cordon Wealth, he uses LinkedIn every month. He runs an event like a webinar, digital event, and he sets up a LinkedIn event page. Then he uses the advanced LinkedIn filtering to identify employees at particular companies and then invites them to come learn about different benefit options and how he can help them. And that's really successful for him. We already talked about Thomas on X and how he— what he does is he writes these really long threads So each part of the thread will give a very succinct kind of takeaway, and he uses that to inform people. And then at the end, he always has a call to action of how you can work with him. So I think sadly, when you think of what's working, you really can find success on, to your point, any of these platforms. It's figuring out what you like to talk about, just like you said, is where is the middle of those three circles intersecting?

So you mentioned Thomas Koppelman and X. So X has changed a little bit in the past 6 months to a year since he—

Yeah, I'm not on it barely at all anymore.

Yeah, I'm not either. And I'm curious how that's— is that continuing to work for him? Has he made any adjustments or is like it's smooth sailing for him?

I haven't asked him specifically in the last couple months, but maybe like 6— so at the last feature proof, he was saying it was still working really well for him. Yeah, I do think we've seen him— I don't want to say exodus of people leaving the platform, but people are— not everyone's logging in and as active as they once were, but there's not a good replacement either. I don't know if you've tried out Threads or some of the other options. I haven't found any that are as sticky yet, so I'll have to follow up with him on that. But I do know he started repurposing some of that same content on LinkedIn because he knows that is another platform that works for that audience.

And that's high risk, as we were talking about. If you just got one channel that's like 80% of your new business comes from one channel, there's a big risk there if that one channel isn't your own website that you fully control.

So It's so true.

So true.

And I think again, social media is like the sexy thing that everybody talks about, but when we really look at conversion, it is email and dripping on people over time that, you know, the numbers don't lie. That is where you see the highest conversion. And when it comes to how do you then get new emails from people, like what lead generation works, we're seeing events really perform well. And when I say event, I don't just mean like hosting a dinner. It could be something, an online discussion or a LinkedIn Live or a— I don't even like to use the word webinar because it seems so dated— oh, online workshop. If you have something really valuable to talk about and it's very targeted towards a specific group of people and they're going to get benefit and they can ask you questions live and things like that, they will show up. So it's finding the sweet spot of how do you market it? How do you get in front of those people? Those are working events paired with then following up via email works really well for a lot of the advisors I work with.

Yeah, I 100% agree with that. I've been saying for decades, get the email address. If nothing else, get the email address because people tend to not change their email addresses all that often. Another thing related to that here at the Barron's Conference, QR codes are everywhere. Yeah. And so You know, the speakers are saying, hey, there's a QR code on your table. Just go ahead and scan that in and you can sign up for my newsletter. Do you see many advisors using QR codes?

I don't. And I think they 100% should. It's funny, they were popular for a hot second, like a decade ago. They went away and now they're back. And there's so many different ways. I mean, we— whenever we put on an online workshop, the last slide will always be a QR code. Another thing we do that actually works really well for anybody listening, if you run webinars or events, you can say, Hey, we don't wanna bombard everybody who's here asking if you wanna do X, Y, or Z, but we'll put up a poll. Do you want our team to contact you to talk to you about X? And it's just a follow-up of whatever your presentation was about and let people opt into the poll and that will allow people to raise their hand. That has been really successful for us. Another thing I use is called Textiful. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. So if you're doing a presentation, you can say, do you want these slides texted? 3, 3, 7, 7, 7. You can put it in there. And then when the person texts it, it'll say, we just need your name and your email and we'll get these slides to you. So they give you their name and their email, and then you say something like, great, the slides are on their way to your inbox. Would you also like to get our— maybe it's 10 things about X, whatever your kind of value add is— and be added to our newsletter? And most people will say yes, but you're automating all these questions ahead of time. Compliance can approve them. There's not a compliance concern. And then now you also have their phone number and email address, so that's also really powerful.

Yeah, so you mentioned earlier answer engine optimization. So that's different from search engine optimization. So what is answer engine optimization?

So if you think about the last few times you've gone and searched for something, right, the searches of the early internet days were something like burger restaurants. Now we would search, we would say, hey Siri, what is the best burger restaurant in Orlando, Florida near the JW Marriott Grand Lakes? So our searches have turned to questions and they're very detailed questions, and often we're using either a voice assistant or an AI tool to ask them. So answer engine optimization is creating content that that is optimized for the way that we now are looking for information. So there's some things that you wanna think about. Number one, a lot of the way we used to write, let's say a blog post before, we might say the top 5 things to consider before claiming Social Security. And number one might say timing, number two, and you'd have like statements for each of the headers. Now it should be a question and then the answer. So the more you can format your content to be question and answer based, the more you're gonna optimize it for these tools. The second thing is that especially AI tools and Google local search, they wanna give the searcher the best possible results that they know are legitimate and the people who are gonna be the biggest experts, especially for service-based queries. So if someone says, who are the best financial advisors near me that specialize in working with tech entrepreneurs? Reviews and testimonials are the way that these AI tools and Google know that you're legitimate and that other people like to work with you. So even though that I know is still a sticky spot for a lot of people, their compliance team hasn't approved them using Google Reviews or testimonials yet, even though we have the new SEC rule, we are finding that search engines and the AI tools don't care. Those are the results that they're giving.

Yeah. And this idea about changing your, a lot of your content so that it's really asking a bunch of questions. I've also seen a lot of the heavy content providers create a table of contents at the top of their blog post. And the table of contents is basically a series of questions related to that particular topic. So to your point about answer engine optimization, they're asking all the questions that are really relevant to that particular topic so that the search engines are going to say, oh wow, this looks like a really comprehensive post because look at all these questions that they're answering. Here's the table of contents. And then you click on question number 3. Drops you down to that paragraph. Yeah, like an accordion. And those seem to be working really well.

And if you think of when we even go to Google and you ask a question, right, it gives you those snippets at the top. AI snippets. You'll notice that it's usually a question and then the snippet itself is pretty short. So when you're structuring your own content, you want to format it the same way. And then a trick I like to say is whatever your topic is, you write your first couple of questions and answers and then go back and search it. And look at the people also ask questions and take every single one of those questions and include it in your blog post. So, just rephrasing it different ways is another kind of hack.

Yeah, and, you know, what I love about all the things you're talking about here is there's so many good ideas here, and the reality is it's an effort to market. You can't just set it and forget it kind of thing. It's like there's so many things that you can do, and a lot of these larger firms, they've got the resources, whether they've got the in-house people to do it or a combination of in-house and outsourcing some of it. And that's why they're getting the lion's share of the new business because they're taking the time to do all this stuff. If you're listening to this and you're a smaller firm and you're serious about trying to go or grow organically, you gotta put some time and effort into it. Yeah. And you know, you can use firms like FMG, but— That's right.

Yeah. And now what I was gonna say is though, at the same time, we're in the Wild West and it's becoming a big equalizer because it used to be you could pay your way to the top of the search engine result in the ads. Well now, the way that AI delivers answers especially is there's not these ads at the top. You're—

I'm still seeing all the sponsored by, so—

No, I'm saying if you're searching ChatGPT or something else, and I know ChatGPT isn't always good about sources, but if you're on Perplexity, for instance, it will tell you where it's pulling it from. And even on Google now, I guess they have the little link next to each snippet, right? And you can see where it's coming from. So if you have one great blog post that answers a very comprehensive question you could be getting a few leads a month just of people that are highly specific to your niche who have this very specific question. Even before AI, there was an advisor we worked with and he had one blog post, can capital gains push me into the next tax bracket, into a higher tax bracket? And in one month, I remember looking at his analytics, he had 30 people land on his website from that query. 30 doesn't seem like a lot, But 10 people booked a meeting. So it's not about, again, depending on your growth goals and the size of your firm, but if you're out there listening and you're a smaller firm, 10 people from one blog post in a month is amazing and a huge conversion rate. And you could see some real ROI just going all in on providing as much value as you can around that one topic.

We've been talking a lot about high tech. Now let's talk about low tech, which is referral marketing. Now, that I don't think is going to go out of style anytime soon, but I've been hearing a lot of people talking at the conference here about how historically, we all know referrals have been typically the number one way that advisors get new business. But now they're saying that as women end up inheriting more of the wealth, women tend to live longer than their husbands, generally speaking. And women tend to do things differently than men from the standpoint of if a woman is making a referral, they're not just going to immediately reach out to that person. They're going to do some research, so they're going to go online. And so what some of the speakers were saying here is you've got to have a very substantial online presence because the way that people will find you in the future is going to be different than just word of mouth. That'll still be there, But much more of it is going to be, what does your online presence look like? We've talked a lot about that. Do you see that as well, or what's your take on the future of referral marketing?

Yeah, 100% do. And I think that it's already shifting in the sense of if somebody is starting to think about finding a new advisor or finding advisor for the first time, they're asking more than one person in most cases, and they're not necessarily going to go and research the heck out of 10 people. But if they get 2 or 3 names, names, they're going to start Googling them. And this is where, again, something like LinkedIn— LinkedIn is amazing with SEO with individual names or businesses. So if someone searches you and then your business, usually your LinkedIn is one of the top things on the page of the results. And so if somebody looks at you and they look at somebody else that they referred to, and let's say I'm a woman and my husband recently passed away and I own a business So I know in my mind like what I'm looking for help on, and I go to one website and I see this person saying, we help businesses, families, and individuals with financial planning. That's pretty bland, pretty generic, generic. And then I go and I look at their LinkedIn and they just have a recent market update. But then I go to this other advisor and it says, we help, you know, women who've experienced the loss of a spouse and who are going through transition, or we help businesses with succession planning. And tax strategizing, and I immediately self-identify and say, this business helps people just like me. That's at the end of the day what you want all your marketing to do, is to make somebody look at it and think, this person or this business gets me, my problems, what I'm going through, and they've helped other people like me. And a good thing that you can do is in all of your marketing, stop talking about yourself and talk about the problems that would lead somebody to find you. So I always tell people, do an audit of your messaging. How much do you say I or we've been in business for 30 years? We are the top advisor in the state of Pennsylvania. We've helped clients do this. And instead say, do you struggle with this? Do you wish you had somebody to help you navigate X, Y, or Z? Do you find yourself wanting A, B, and C? And allow them to say yes. So just switching that language from I or we to you-focused language can be so big on when somebody is referred to you saying, yes, they get me and they help people just like me.

And you're making such a strong case for niche marketing in terms of identifying who can you best serve, who are you best structured to do a great job with, who do you like working with, and then focus all your marketing efforts on that. Because as you just said there, when someone lands on your website or they see your blog post and they say, oh my gosh, they're speaking directly to me, they know exactly what I'm thinking, they know exactly what I need. Whereas a lot of advisors will get a little scared and say, oh, I'm just going to do some generic stuff because I don't want to like turn away any potential clients. You're never going to grow fast if you're just generic, because no one's going to be interested in you. It's as I heard earlier today, it's take a stand on something, stand for something so people can get behind you. We want to believe in something.

Right. If you think about when a reporter's out there looking for a quote, they don't want everyone to agree.

They don't want you to invest for the long term and diversify.

Exactly. —put me to sleep—and think of a magnet. I always use this analogy: in order for a magnet to work, one side, yes, attracts, but the other side has to repel. If you're repelling no one, you are attracting no one. Like, that is just the way that it works. And when it comes to having a niche, I get it, but I've seen firms really use creative messaging to make people feel this firm gets me without getting so hyper-specific. So for instance, There's a firm I know and they work with people who've already retired or just about to retire. That's a really—

that's pretty much everybody—

big population. But when you go to their website, it'll say things like, are these the kinds of things you're currently looking for help with? And then they've listed it out in a way where the person's going to go, yes, yes, yes. And it's really things we've— it's like people who write horoscopes. You can read it and be like, they get me, they know my personality, but it's actually pretty generalized and you could always say, yeah, I'm like that sometimes. That's what this marketing messaging's all about. It's, yes, if you are very specific with your niche, that's great. But if you're a larger firm and you have a lot of advisors, you can on your website just use language to your advantage to make people say, yes, these are the problems that I want help solving. And then let your individual advisors have their own voice, whether it's through their own emails or through their own social posts. You can accomplish both.

And along with that, you can also have separate pages on your website that target specific niches as well. And so if you want to target people that have stock options in closely held companies, you can have a separate page for that and you can be known for that page. Because correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Google is going to rank pages as opposed to websites. Yes. Is that—

100%. And the person I've seen, we just built a website at FMG for somebody and they know the, plans for every university and college. 403(b) college. 403(b) in the state of Florida. They have a page on their website where it says how we work with universities and colleges or something like that. And then you click on it and it shows you every college or university. And then you can say, yes, I work here. You click it and it'll go into depth of your 401(k)(b) options. They have case studies for how they've worked with other people in similar situations, which that's also a great tactic to use. You really wanna help somebody envision what the outcome will be. And so case studies are also a great way to do that.

In terms of coming up with the copy for your website, I've heard another marketer say to me, your best copy is gonna come from your ideal clients. So think about the words that come outta their mouth. What are some of the common words or phrases that they're saying? And then put that on your website. Yeah. Because hey, this is what my ideal clients are saying and I'm going to attract other people if they use the same language.

So what are your thoughts on that? I think one of the things that's really interesting is we always, from the time we're kids, want to sound smarter when we write. So when we're submitting a paper in 8th grade English or 12th grade English, you want to use bigger words and sound really smart. It's really hard to unlearn that, but good marketing actually is written more at a 6th or 7th grade level. So there's actually a tool you can use called the Flesch-Kincaid score. You can go to put anything into Word doc and under tools, click it and it'll give you your Flesch-Kincaid score. If your writing is at a 9th, 10th, 11th grade level, it is way too— I don't even say advanced because obviously people could understand it, but it's not easily digestible. And we're talking, we have seconds to get somebody to understand our message before they leave. So the most visited pages on your website are your homepage, your about, and then the contact or get started page for advisor websites across the board. So start with those pages, rewrite the language. So again, it's what's in it for the customer, what's in it for me mindset we all have. And then use that Flesch-Kincaid score to make it really easy to understand. And to your point, don't take the questions that your clients ask and rewrite them for how you would ask them. Keep it really simple. There's a great marketer I love Harry Dry, and he has a company, Marketing Examples, where he just posts great examples. And there was a plumber, and somebody wrote in and said, hey, can you come over and help me install my dishwasher? I would try to do it myself, but I'm scared I'll flood the place. And that person took that message and they turned it to the homepage copy that says, we help with every plumbing problem that you could have. So if you need help installing that dishwasher, we'll come over so you don't end up flooding on the place. It was so simple, but it shows the point that like, don't overthink it. Actually, the more complicated we make it, the less it's going to resonate.

Yep. So use their language. Any things that advisors should avoid here, or big mistakes that you see advisors commonly make when it comes to marketing?

I would say number one is not having a plan. So if I'm in a room giving a speech and I'll say, how many of you know what emails are going out Next week, maybe 50%. Next 2 weeks, a month, either the number of hands goes down. You want to have a plan because what happens is your business starts to grow, you have all these other problems that seem more important, and then the marketing falls away. And so the consistency is crucial. Also, like we talked about before, figuring out who's going to be the face, who's going to be the person that people can connect with, and really making sure that's part of your strategy so that it's not just a logo and a business but that there is this human element to it. Those are probably two of the things I would say come top of mind right away.

Excellent. Samantha, people want to connect with you and learn more about what you're doing. What would be the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, so you can go on LinkedIn. I'm Samantha C. Russell. If they go to fmg.com on the website there, you can find my email and all of our contact information. And we actually right now have a 2025 marketing guide. It's 31 pages long. But it's broken into all the topics we cover today— social media, email, client communication— with really great practical, tangible tips you can implement for every one of those different areas. Excellent.

Samantha, thanks for being on the show. Thank you so much. All right, that's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms, and for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast. Take care and be safe.

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