This is a transcript from the Marketing for Advisors Podcast. To listen, please visit mfapodcast.com and every episode is easily available and free to listen.
Hello, this is Don Anders, and welcome back to Marketing For Financial Advisors. There are a few different ways to kind of look at webinars. If you're looking at it to get new leads in, webinars are a subpar avenue of getting new leads kind of into that sales funnel unless you're going very niche. We have an advisor who works with Honda and he does webinars and has a lot of success with it. We work with the Florida Retirement System, we do webinars and have success with it. If you do Boeing or Lockheed Martin or companies like that and you know about their plan, those can be very good presentations.
But here's what you want to do. You want to, if you're going to do those niche presentations, you want to make it for them. You don't want to make it generic. You want to make it for them. If you're going to do a Boeing webinar, you better know about the Boeing retirement plan. Don't go in there thinking, "Well, I'm just going to talk about social security and taxes. It applies to everybody." No, they want it to feel like it's for them and if they feel like it's for them, you'll get a bunch of new leads, the webinars will be successful and you'll get appointments because people will feel like you know their situation.
The way I kind of equate it with niche marketing is it's kind of like a surgeon who specializes in one type of surgery. If you have that issue and you need that surgery, do you want to go to a surgeon who can operate on anyone in any situation or do you want to go to the person who does that one thing over and over and over again? You want the specialist. Same thing when it comes to retirement planning. If you can be that specialist, you'll do much, much better.
Also what we've seen work are specific job titles like for doctors or for lawyers or for business owners. Those can work as long as you know how to market them correctly. That's a whole different thing, but those can work.
The other way to go about webinars and what I think is the most consistent and the best way to do it is to nurture your existing leads. So kind of to walk you through our marketing cycle, the way we get most of our leads is from live events, so live seminars, live workshops, classes. We do that mainly through Facebook and LinkedIn and they register and then they show up.
Now when you do it online, you're looking at between 20% to 60% of people are going to show up. A lot of times people will say, "Well that's terrible. I don't like that." Well, those 20% to 60% are still a lot cheaper than you're going to pay through mail or TV or radio even just for the show rates. But then what I have in addition to that is I have 40% to 80% of people that now I can start dripping on for basically free. I can put them in my drip system, I can start sending them emails and Facebook ads and YouTube ads and I can start engaging them and it doesn't really cost me anything.
What we've seen is for your existing prospects, but also your existing clients, webinars are fantastic. What'll happen is somebody comes to one of our events, they may or may not become clients. It doesn't really matter to me. And about a week later they're going to get an email from me that says, "Hey, thank you so much for coming. Oh by the way, we've put on a lot, we get a lot of questions about Social Security. Here's our presentation on Social Security." About a month later they're going to get another drip, now there's other drips in between, but then you get another drip that says, "Oh, do you have information? Do you want information on taxes and retirement? Well, we have an upcoming webinar on that." And then so on and so on, Secure Act. And if something big comes out, something timely, we'll add that in there as well.
But what I like, we talked about automated versus live, I like those automated webinars. I have webinars that have been running since 2017 that are still producing leads because people get in the sales funnel and those webinars are a great way to, it's virtually free once you pay for the software and set it up. It's a great way to get them out of that sales funnel.
General webinars will do well, Social Security, taxes, but they'll only do well to your list. They're not going to do well for the general public. I've seen now after this whole Coronavirus crisis has popped up, I used to never see people marketing for webinars. I was one of probably three or four advisors that I know that was consistently doing it and getting leads out of it. And all of a sudden, because I'm a financial advisor, I get all these ads on Facebook for other financial advisors, and usually it's, "Hey, work with our CPAs," or, "We can fill up a seminar," or, "Use our process," or, "Use our IMO or a broker-dealer." You usually see those types of ads.
Well, we go on lockdown, the whole Coronavirus thing happens and then all of a sudden every single ad is, "Use our webinar, our proven webinar system," and these are companies that I've never seen before, or if I have, they were never talking about webinars and all of a sudden they are webinar experts.
Realistically, what they're actually doing is they have a theory and they're testing it out with your money. They're charging you four or five or six thousand dollars and they're testing out to try to get new leads. And I have not seen where it actually makes sense from a marketing budget to prospect to appointment to client ratio to pay big dollars for these webinars to get new people.
Now, if you have a webinar system that is built to reengage your existing list, so for us at Advisors Platform, we do it to reengage your existing list. And we have seen extreme success with it. I'm talking campaigns upwards of 60, 70, 80 appointments, not attendees, appointments out of these campaigns because they're already familiar with your name.
Now the other thing that you have to think about is, especially now with the Coronavirus, the financial crisis, look at your inbox, go to your email and look at your inbox. And if you're the type of person who deletes them all the time, you might want to let it build up for a day. But I counted over the weekend how many emails were talking about webinars and it was over 50% of the emails were talking about a webinar that they had upcoming. And most of those talked about COVID-19 or the Coronavirus.
My recommendation is you have to stand out. Now you might say, "Well, you're saying
don't do, you're saying do webinars to your list, email your list or text your list and everyone else is doing it." Well yeah, if they know you, they'll click on it. So I didn't click on any of them except for one, and it's the IMO that I work with. They sent out a webinar and I clicked on it, I watched it because I'm familiar with them, I trust them, I like them, and I want to watch that. But coming from anyone else, I'm not going to click on it. And especially if it says coronavirus or COVID-19, I'm tired of hearing about it. So my recommendation is you want to go with the trend, but you want to go with the trend on the upward slope. You want to be the first one to tackle a trend.
We did a COVID-19 email last year at the beginning of March and it was fantastic. Now people are just fatigued and they don't want to hear about it anymore. So remember, trendy and timely can be fantastic as long as you're the first the party. If you're not the first to the party, don't feel bad, just attack it at a different angle.
In summary, which presentations work? Number one, you want to be timely but not cliché. Number two, if you can be niche, that's a great way to get new leads. And number three, general is good, but general is only good for your existing list. And also please make sure you're not being a Guinea pig with your marketing dollars for some other marketing company. I would highly recommend thinking twice before you give a ton of money to somebody charging four or five, six thousand dollars to build out your webinars without any kind of proof in the past. Now if they're building out webinars to reengage your list, in my opinion, that's kind of a no-brainer because all you need is one or two really good cases and it pays for itself significantly more. But just be careful about people who are promising a ton of new leads off of Facebook or wherever else to webinars because I think it is extremely unproven.