Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Samantha Russell
Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referrable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we talk with Samantha Russell, who’s director of sales and marketing for web platform provider Twenty Over Ten. The common wisdom is that advisors need a digital footprint and the website is the hub of your digital presence, but did you know that it has a big effect on referrals as well? Samantha is at the forefront of web development and she knows what works and what doesn’t work. She’s also author of the article, The Digital Referral Shift, which describes dramatic changes in how referrals happen, and how they are increasingly reliant on a current digital image.
In our conversation, we described the role of digital presence in attracting referrals. Samantha describes the elements you need to have an ideal website. We review different ways to refresh the content on your site, and we’d describe the role of downloadable content and the importance of designing it in ways for prospects and referrals to engage with your site. Finally we describe an exciting new project at Twenty Over Ten that provides advisors with a system to offer content and capture visitors that otherwise might stop by your site but not reach out to contact you. We cover a lot of great ideas on how you can create a great first impression and carry the effect through to winning a new client. Here’s our conversation with Samantha Russell.
So Samantha Russell, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Samantha Russell:
Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
Steve Wershing:
So first, let’s get a lay of the land. We’re going to talk a lot about what it means to have a current website and how that can affect referrals, but let’s back out of that and look at the environment. How are, not advisors, but how are prospective clients utilizing social media to find advisors these days?
Samantha Russell:
We’ll tell people, think about your own behavior or the behavior of many of the people that you know. Whenever you have a ping point, you need to find something. How do you usually go about doing it? Usually, we start with Google. So you need a plumber to come to your house, or you want to find the best restaurant in the city that you’re visiting, you’re going to go to Google and look for it. I know that, historically, a lot of advisors have said, “Oh. Well, financial services is different because you’re talking about your life savings and handing that over to someone so you’re not just going to trust anyone on the internet.”
And I can agree with that to a point, but I think what’s really interesting is that what we’re seeing is what we call the digital referral shift. And so what we mean by that is that rather than just texting a friend or waiting until a friend has a barbecue and asking them who they use for an advisor, investors are going to places like Facebook and posting and Facebook has like a recommendations feature where you can say, “I’m looking for a recommendation.” And you can ask your network or even a specific group of people so you can post in a local community group, I’m looking for a recommendation.
And you can say things like, “I’m looking for a financial advisor. Who do you use?” Or “I’m looking for an advisor who specializes in working with business owners to set up 401k plans. You know, does anyone have a good recommendation?” And then what happens is not only does you know the person who asked for these recommendations, see the results coming in as people comment saying, “Oh, this person or that person,” but everyone else in their network also sees it. So there’s such a higher exponential value to those referrals coming in.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting.
Julie Littlechild:
Can I just ask a follow up on that? Because one of the things that I wonder about is if we always think about when people are looking for an advisor, and I wonder if often they’re just looking for advice, if you know what I mean. So sometimes it’s like, I need a new financial advisor. I’m really not happy with the one I want, but I wonder if some of the things that they’re searching for is more like “Are we going to be okay?” Or “Should I be investing in my business?” Or “How do I teach my kids about money?” Or do you think that that that’s also a referral opportunity in this case?
Samantha Russell:
Oh, absolutely. I think the one you just mentioned about teaching kids about money is a really great one for a lot of middle-aged folks who are probably in that accumulation stage of their wealth journey. And they have kids and they may just have all of their retirement funds in their company 401k. And the first time they’re really going to start thinking about looking for outside help is when it comes to their kids. Because oftentimes we take saving for our kids’ college education even more serious than we take our own retirement. And so that’s a really great point.
The, I actually did a interview with an advisor recently who specializes in corporate executives and he found that the biggest way he was getting his ins with all of these new clients was offering one time project based planning for them. Because they would find him online but they weren’t ready to hand over all of their assets. And by offering that project-based planning, he was able to build rapport, build a relationship. And then I think he said it was like 65% of the people that went through the planning process with him ended up becoming more of a full comprehensive client.
Steve Wershing:
Maybe that could be a whole podcast episode right there. Just that idea. So it sounds like it’s not only, so, I mean, I’ve heard a lot of advisers say we’re not really that concerned about our website because people don’t search for a financial advisor. But now the referrals is actually shifting to that as well, it sounds like.
Samantha Russell:
Yeah. And, I mean, to your point, I don’t think a lot of people are just going to Google saying find an financial advisor near me. They’re searching things like, “Can capital gains pushed me into a higher tax bracket?” And then they’re finding the answer. And it could be on your website a blog post you wrote or a video you post it that gives them the answer.
Steve Wershing:
Well, and not only that, but I would suspect, I mean just based on what I see on my own Facebook feed that once you put something in like can you recommend a financial advisor that every ad in the right bar is going to be for a financial advisor for the next week.
Samantha Russell:
Very true.
Steve Wershing:
And so let’s forget about search for a minute. You know, if somebody searches for recommendations and one of clients who happened to be a friend of that person says, “Oh, well you should talk to Samantha. She’s an awesome financial advisor.” They’re still going to see all those ads and be tempted to look at all those ads as well as following up on that link that your client.
Samantha Russell:
And this is another reason why claiming all of your social profiles is so important. You know, I don’t think everybody needs to be active on every social media channel, but you do need to claim them all and put some thing there that is professional that shows who you work with. Because when let’s say Susan Moore goes and asks people for a recommendation and she says, “I’m going through a divorce. I really need to find an advisor who can work with people in a situation like me and help me do some planning.” You want the people that are your friends to be able to just tag you or your business, not have to put your name and your address and your phone number. Make it really easy so that when they start typing Facebook just find your business and lets them tag you. And that is also really crucial. So that’s another reason why it’s so important to have these social profiles for your business.
Steve Wershing:
Well, not only to make it easy to find you, but this is actually an experience we had within the past month where we started working we were working with an advisor and we went to search for them on the internet even though they had told us they don’t have a website. And we turned up a Facebook page that was for their business with their address and their phone number and a not quite profane, but a little blue kind of cartoon somebody had pasted in the banner. And exactly not the kind of image you want people to be finding if they go to search for you.
Samantha Russell:
Yeah, that’s exactly what you pointed. I mean a lot of times there is, you’ll get these notices from Facebook or Google saying, is this your business? Claim it. And so there is an opportunity unfortunately for people to do things like that. And think about how many names are similar even beyond like the scammy part, but how many Lighthouse Financials there are. Right?
You don’t want somebody going to the wrong one and seeing things that aren’t representative of your business. There was actually a study that the bank of New York Mellon and Pershing did together in 2018 and they reported that one in three investors of this survey of 1,000 investors that they did had went to an advisor’s Facebook page and then have that one in three that they looked at over 50% of that group decided to not work with an advisor over something they saw.
Julie Littlechild:
Do you think, Samantha, that this digital referral shift is driven by the tools that we have available or do you think this marks a fundamental shift in how we communicate and collaborate and share ideas just enabled by tools?
Samantha Russell:
I think it’s the latter for sure. I think our phones have become an extension of our bodies. If you listen to Elon Musk he says we’re not far off from them being a part of our human bodies. But I think we go online for everything now. And in that same study I just referenced, they did divide up the investors they surveyed into like the under 40, 40 to 64 and 65 and above and asked them “How do you research advisors online.” And those 65 and over only 18% reported using Google as a way to research advisors. But those 40 to 64 more than a third said they use Google primarily, and then under 40 it was 73%. So this trend is just going to keep marking upwards over time as people embrace this more and more and as a generation of people who’ve been conditioned to be this be their normal grows up.
Julie Littlechild:
So if we’ve got a lot of people who are finding their way to the website. Let’s assume for a moment it’s the right website and not Steve’s example. Let’s talk a little bit about what they see there. Because, I mean, and we’ve certainly done research that shows this and we’re not alone, that whether someone’s referred or however they find out about you, that’s where they’re going to go. So what do you think investors need to see when they get to that website? What do you think is most important?
Samantha Russell:
Yeah, that’s absolutely a great question. I 100% think, and I know it’s sort of like beating a dead horse at this point, that you need to be hyper niche focused. And another way of thinking about it is just hyper-personalized, right? So I believe this next decade is really going to mark hyper-personalization in all marketing. It’s really the only way to cut through the noise and get your message heard.
And so if somebody does get a list of five people that their friends have told them, “Oh, I use this person. Oh I go to this person.” Whatever that pain point is that they particularly have when they land on your site, you want to be the one that explicitly speaks their language and shows them that you solve it. That is more important than anything else. Now the way that you do that is crucial too. And that you could have some copy that is written really well and says all the right things.
But if it’s 10 paragraphs long, no one’s to read it, right? We don’t read a website the way we read a book. We scroll and we scan until we see something that catches our attention. And then we stop. So having your site be your homepage specifically, be less about a lot, a lot of texts and instead about honing in on a few key points of who you are, what you do, and specifically who you do it for. So your your target audience. And then also where you’re located. Because a lot of advisors are still very geographically specific. Those are the four things you want to focus on and writing it in a problem, solution format. So what is the problem that your target audience has, the groups of problems that your ideal clients would have and that is your niche audience. And then what is the solution that you provide to those problems?
Steve Wershing:
And Samantha, do you have a thought about using micro sites or landing pages so if you do retirement planning for example having a page about rollovers and a page about Roth IRAs and a page about something so that if somebody is searching for that and they find that they can do more of what you were just talking about in terms of a really specific message.
Samantha Russell:
Yes, absolutely. I mean it’s one of the reasons why our tool… At 20 over 10 we have a tool where you can add as many landing pages as you want. Because we really believe in the power again of that personalization. And even just writing things again to be in that language that when somebody lands on that page they can just self qualify. That they see it and they think, “Oh yes this person gets people just like me.” I mean I saw a page that our team created recently and it was for a group that focuses on physicians and medical professionals. And they wrote, “We treat your financial health with the same level of care as you give your patients.” Right? So just using language that’s going to help somebody really resonate with you.
Julie Littlechild:
And so we’ve got the target, the message, the pain points and how specific do you think… Well, let me back up. Do you think part of the problem is we’re often not niche focused and therefore it’s hard to identify a set of pain points that is really going to resonate. And do you have any recommendations for those advisors who perhaps don’t have a really specifically defined niche?
Samantha Russell:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And it’s one I’m asked a lot. I always say, think about who your ideal client is, who you most like to work with, and start there. If you don’t have a niche already. You don’t need to kick off the roster. Everybody you have that doesn’t fit that demographic. But just as Steven you mentioned before, you know you can start to think about building out landing pages to attract the kind of person you do most want to work with as you work towards getting more niche focused.
I mean that’s a really great way… That’s a really great place to start at least. And so often we’ll find too that the niche doesn’t have to be the same profession, everybody in the same profession or even at the same period of life. It could be other things that go more into like behavioral psychology focus even. That you just have to hone in on. There may be something that a lot of your clients have in common that you just haven’t really thought about it in that way yet.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting. So, let’s talk about the websites a little more generally, Samantha, if an advisor is wondering whether or not they, they, their website is current, is really up to date, what kinds of things should they be looking at or what would you look at on an advisor site to tell them, “Yes, this looks like a current site or no, this looks outdated.”
Samantha Russell:
Yeah, great question. So some of the basic stuff like technical perspective, does it load fast? Is it mobile responsive? Does it have an SSL certificate? So if you go to a site and it has HTTPS, the S stands for security and it is got a security certificate on it. Those are all things that are important, not just to your end user who’s on your website. You don’t want your site to take 10 minutes to load or they’re going to leave, but it’s also important to Google and it will make you rank higher.
Then beyond meeting those minimum technical requirements, you want to have a good flow. So we suggest no more than five main pages. You want to really direct the traffic of where people should go first and then next, and then you know ultimately where they land.
Having a calendar link right on your home page so that whenever somebody is ready to book a time or they just want to talk to you for 15 minutes, they don’t have to go digging for a way to get in touch or fill out a whole form. They can just choose a time. You know, we find that most people when they are ready to talk to somebody, it’s there waiting in line to pick up their kid from school or they’re sitting on the sidelines at soccer and they don’t want to call you or email back and forth. They just want to get on your calendar and book a meeting. So having a calendar link is also really important.
And then of course, going back to what I mentioned before about the copy, having the copy be well-written to be focused on your niche audience and using their language and their pain points is important. But then the design of the site should also be in sync with that. So if you’re targeting a younger demographic, don’t have pictures of people, all that are retirement age. And the images, you know, our research has shown our brains actually process imagery 60,000 times faster than text. So a bad image on your homepage can say so much more than what the copy itself says. So you really want to choose your images wisely to reinforce the message that you’re trying to share.
Steve Wershing:
I’d like to go back to that calendar thing just for a minute because I think that is so important these days. You know, we are being trained by Amazon and all the other big tech companies that not only do we want it right this minute, but we can get it right this minute. You know that even Amazon with prime and all that has gone to a put this in your cart or buy now choice. And so many websites for advisers that I see is it says contact us and there’s a form that gets sent and at some point somebody in that office is going to email back and that’s not the experience people are looking for. Can you address that at all?
Samantha Russell:
Yeah, and I think we inherently know this too, that oftentimes needing help with something financial is not your favorite thing to book a meeting for. So you want to get people to get that meeting booked when they are at that very frustrated point or when they finally did it because they couldn’t be that person that doesn’t end up booking or you email them and then they… It’s a whole another year before it actually happens. So that’s really important.
We actually did a study of our… We looked at 216 financial advisory firms that each had their own website, about 75% or 20 over 10 websites the other quarter weren’t. And we looked at where you’re getting the most leads. And of those that reported, getting six to 10 clients from leads from digital marketing a year or 11 or more. So they were the highest a number of clients coming from digital marketing leads per year. The thing they all had in common was that every single one of them had a calendar link above the fold on the homepage.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting.
Samantha Russell:
Now they were doing other things. Yeah, above the fold. They were doing other things. But I think that that’s should be now like a bare minimum requirement honestly for a website in 2020.
Julie Littlechild:
I think it also opens up the opportunity to do a lot more communication. Like for example, if you book using Calendly or any of these tools you can automate the response. So you can begin to tailor your message. You could send a response with a video link in it that begins to personalize it. You know, there’s so much that we can do to make it feel… And make it feel personal.
And there’s nothing to stop you from picking up the phone to confirm the meaning and create that personal touch. But I think we lose all that when we rely on the links.
Steve Wershing:
Well yeah, and just to sort of refine that or build on it a little bit, Julie, and Samantha, maybe you can speak to this. So what I’m used to seeing with a lot of those calendar Calendly kinds of links is that you’re not actually scheduling a meeting necessarily. You’re scheduling like a introductory phone call that both parties can decide if they want to move on from there, which I think would cause a lot less freaking out of advisors if they knew that they weren’t opening themselves up to having somebody show up at their office. But just at least to get a phone call so that they can develop that rapport. Am I thinking that the right way Samantha?
Samantha Russell:
It’s so funny, I can’t tell you how many times our design team here… Because we meet weekly and talk about what’s going on. And when we first really started pushing hard for the advisers we were working with to get these calendar links on their sites, so many of them were really nervous to say, “I don’t want a bunch of bad quality leads booking.” Or “I don’t want sales people booking.” And we said, “Well what’s the worst that can happen? You put the meeting link up there and you get some bad meetings, you always can take it down.” You know, it’s not permanent, forever. And so we’ve never once had somebody asked to remove it. People are just floored by waking up on a Monday and seeing that tomorrow at 3:00 PM they have a potential person who wants to meet with them that’s on their calendar.
And I think you can do it in a way that funnels people there appropriately. Just as you said. And we actually have seen it rolled out lots of different ways. You know, you can have every… If you have three advisors on staff, you can have like a general meeting link and then somebody chooses which advisor. Or maybe they self qualify first to say I’m a business owner or I’m not running a business but I’m an entrepreneur or whatever it is. They can kind of self categorize and then they get a different person to work with them based upon what they chose. So there’s all kinds of customizations you can do with these now that again, allow for that personalization just as you mentioned Julie.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting. So Samantha, you folks have a new project rolling out with lead pilot and with it has lots of new capabilities and I would love it if you would share with our audience a little bit of what kinds of functionality is available there.
Samantha Russell:
Yeah. So excitingly enough, this is probably the first time I’m talking about it recorded. That’s not just like a one of our internal sessions with our clients.
Steve Wershing:
We like to be on the cutting edge.
Julie Littlechild:
Well you’re committed now.
Steve Wershing:
No getting out of it.
Samantha Russell:
Your audiences, you’re the lucky ones. So in February we’re going to be at the T3 Advisor conference out in San Diego and we will formally be launching this product then. We’ve been working on it for about two and a half years actually behind the scenes. And so over the last four plus years with 20 over 10 as we’ve worked with advisors on their websites. We just kept having people come back to us to say “You’re helping me capture all this traffic once it gets here, but help me get more traffic to the site. You know, how do I manage social media? What do I do for email? What about driving people to specifically adding pages. Can you give me ghostwritten blog posts?”
You know, they wanted all this additional thing things and we didn’t have a service or a platform for it. We could just give them advice. And so we’ve been diligently building out a inbound marketing platform is really what I like to think of it as. That encompasses a one stop shop that’s really a turnkey place where an advisor could go to manage their online presence. So you can manage and schedule social media posts. You can handle all your email marketing there, segment your list as we were talking about how important that hyper-personalization is. Every single person that interacts with your email, you get such robust analytics. So you could see, okay Julie is reading every article that I sent her on social security but she’s not opening any of the ones that I’m sending her about cryptocurrency. Or whatever it is that you are sending.
And so you can start really being hyper-specific in your communications. You have the choice of uploading all your own original content. But we also have a content library that has written by our team that has editorial style content. And then we also have included videos like 60 to 9 second quick videos on different topics and infographics as well as interactive content like quizzes that get people again just to be more engaged with you online. And all of this is deployed to these branded landing pages that reinforce your company through your logo, your picture as the advisor. And then the point is to capture their information. So there’s different ways that we do that capture through the quizzes, through popups, through sidebars, newsletters, all different kinds of CTAs that are included in the platform.
Steve Wershing:
And for those who don’t know CTA stands for?
Samantha Russell:
Call to action.
Julie Littlechild:
So a big part of that is obviously the content it sounds like. Well it sounds like there’s a few different things going on. First of all, the integration between the site and the and the CTAs and the being able to personalize and then the content itself. So, excuse me. How important is it do you think for advisers to be thinking about a content marketing strategy, particularly as it relates to referrals?
Samantha Russell:
I honestly am of the belief that the way that in the last, like 10 years ago it used to be you couldn’t, you wouldn’t fathom ha not having a website, like having a website was bare minimum. I think producing some sort of content is now the bare minimum. Even if it’s just once a month, you have to have something that is up to date and relevant that goes beyond the static pages of your website where you can give more of a preview of how you dive deep on certain subjects and show your expertise. So I always tell people don’t worry about constant output. While it’s important, you know to stay up to date and regular… And when it comes to your website even just doing it once a month, it’s fine. As long as it’s a good piece.
And what kind of content you do, it doesn’t matter to me. If it’s a podcast, a blog post, a video, if it is something that’s other than written text, like a video or a podcast on your website, you just want to make sure you also include the transcription because Google cannot crawl the video or the podcast. So you need those written transcription texts in order for you to get that SEO, search engine optimization bang for your buck.
Julie Littlechild:
And how much of that do you think needs to be created by the advisor or personalized versus curated?
Samantha Russell:
The once a month piece that I’m mentioning is… I’m talking about something that is either written by you or like we offer at 20 over 10 a library where you can take a piece that we wrote and you can completely customize it. So if it’s something like five tips for first time home buyers, you could change it to five tips for first time home buyers in Austin, Texas.
And then add a paragraph at the beginning, you know, “Over the last 20 years working with home buyers throughout Austin, we found these neighborhoods are always the most desirable.” And then add in some other info. So that when someone’s reading it, they again are reading something that is hyper-personalized to them and their location and isn’t just regurgitated. People can tell you know whether or not it’s kind of canned content or not. So that I think is important.
But curation definitely comes into play when we’re going back to the idea of a social media strategy. So you most definitely should be curating content and sharing links that are relevant that you’ve found online or things you’ve read. A lot of advisors that we work with, will do a cool strategy. We do it at 20 over 10 too, where it could just be once a month, it could be every Monday where you pick a few articles that you’ve read that you think would be great for your audience and you share them as links in a blog post on your site. And then you also tag those people when you share that blog posts on social media, so you’re tapping into their audience, their followers, they’re often likely to comment on it or we share it. So the curation becomes much more important for social media.
Steve Wershing:
Two other things I’ve heard that I’ll throw in here just because I know content creation is a big commitment and it’s rightly intimidating to a lot of people. But the whole idea of curation really enables you to do so much more. And it does not have to be about investments or the markets. Just like you were pointing out about first time home buyers and those kinds of things. You know, if you have a geographic footprint, you know quote other people in your market, like attorneys who published an article in the local business journal or somebody else local so that not only do you get that local flavor, but then when you tag them in that post, then they may broadcast to that to their network as well, exposing you to that whole new group of people in your town. Are there other like tips that you can offer us in that direction?
Samantha Russell:
Yeah, that’s such a great point. I think your point is exactly spot on. So think of it more just as whoever you’re trying to connect with, think about things that they would be interested in. So for instance, we have a group, it’s a small town out in, I think, Iowa, and I can’t remember the name of the town now, but let’s pretend it’s like Annapolis, Iowa. So they have a post every week and it’s What’s Going on in Annapolis. And then they have the dates, right? And there are people that subscribe to their social media accounts just to see the list of events going on in the community.
And they tag all these other accounts. They write a blog post up with the links out. It’s such a simple thing and you could hire an intern to do this for you very, very easily. Don’t overcomplicate it. The whole point is providing value, whatever that means for your audience. It’s going to be different where you live. They live in a small town and so they’re just trying to connect with those community members.
Steve Wershing:
Okay. Well so I’d love to keep talking about this. I love this whole topic and Samantha you guys are 20 over 10 are doing such great work about it, but we do need to wrap it up. So we are recording this right at the very end of the year. If an advisor has updating their digital strategy on their new year’s resolution lists, what would be some of your top recommendations for what they look at first?
Samantha Russell:
Definitely like all the points we mentioned before about what makes a modern website go back to that. And do an assessment there. You know do you have just five main pages. We call it the five second test. If you’re wondering what the five second test is and whether your site passes, if you go to blog.20overten.com which we can link to. We have a five second test there you can take on your website to get an assessment.
But if your site isn’t passing the five tests, you got some work to do. Make sure you got those social… The SSL certificate for security and then thinking about when somebody’s landing on their site, are they immediately going to know the problem that you’re helping people just like them to solve. So it shouldn’t just say your path to financial freedom like hundreds of sites I see every week it should say something specific about them and how you help them.
Steve Wershing:
That’s awesome. Well Samantha, that’s great and there’s so much more. Maybe we can have you back someday to continue talking about some of this. In the meantime, if people wanted to find out more about what you guys do or find you on the socials, where should they go?
Samantha Rusell:
Yes, so we are at 20 over 10 all spelled out. T-W-E-N-T-Y-O-V-E-R-10. On Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Definitely check us out there. We also have a really robust blog. We post five times a week. It’s blog.20overten.com. And we post every month a webinar that we do that you can listen to that’s an hour long conversation on topics just like these .as well as interviews with other advisors asking them what’s working for them with their digital marketing strategy.
Steve Wershing:
Awesome. Well Samantha Russell, thank you so much for joining us on Becoming Referrable it was great to talk with you.
Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on becoming referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferrable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.