How Elite Advisors Win Trust in Volatile Markets with Samantha Russell

I want to start by talking a little bit about market volatility as a marketing opportunity.

But before we do that, and for the people that do not know you, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your experience helping financial advisors with their marketing strategies?

[00:00:38] Samantha Russell: Yes, absolutely. So I am the chief evangelist at FMG. I have been helping financial advisors with their marketing for almost 12 years now, specifically. And got into the business because my late husband and I had started a business called 20 over 10. Helping advisors.

It was acquired by FMG in the very end of 2020. And I've been the chief evangelist here ever since. And really that just means I get to speak at a lot of events and create a ton of content and videos teaching advisors what they should and shouldn't be doing. And I've personally worked and coached so many and seen firsthand, the results and the ROI.

And so yeah, I'm excited to be here and share some specific takeaways.

[00:01:24] Doug Heikkinen: All right. we're going to talk about market volatility first and how it creates anxiety for investors. How can advisors transform these challenging periods into marketing opportunities?

[00:01:35] Samantha Russell: I think the first thing to think about is, whenever we are not communicated with about something from the person we trust, what happens?

We fill the vacuum with noise from somewhere else, right? So everybody, you cannot open up the internet on your phone or turn on the TV without seeing something about the tariffs and market volatility and the economy, and are we going to go into a recession or not? Imagine that you are a client and you're seeing all this and your financial advisor doesn't send you an email, doesn't send you any content on it, doesn't do anything.

You are going to start filling that with noise from somewhere else. So I always say no one fires their advisor from communicating too much, but they might find a new advisor if you don't communicate enough. And it is a time where advisors have this opportunity to pick up other clients from firms that are not being as proactive.

There was a study from YCharts that found that by and large, across every level of wealth, high net worth to mass, affluent people want more communication, not less from their advisor. And times like this, that goes up even higher.

[00:02:46] Doug Heikkinen: Going a little deeper with that, what are some of the psychological factors advisors should understand about client behavior during market uncertainty, and how does this translate into their messaging?

[00:02:58] Samantha Russell: Yeah, so obviously when we don't know what to do. What do we do? We look at what everyone else is doing. Social proof is really, really, strong. That phenomenon of when we're not sure we look to what everyone else is doing. So I think that showing people things like charts, where it shows over time that when you've stayed in the market, even after there's these terrible downswings, that historically it does go back up. And when you show charts like, these were the worst days, and people who got their money out and kept it out and didn't get back in, they lost on average X amount of dollars. Because you want people to have the information they need because we're not thinking rationally in these moments.

We're using emotion. And so how do we override that emotion? You can show them. Charts and graphs go such a long way because a visual speaks a thousand words. When you just drone on and on, people start to tune you out. But if you can show them something like a chart or a graph it goes a long way.

So we at FMG have been really incorporating a lot of those visuals into the emails we're writing for advisors, all about the volatility for that very reason, because we know it works.

[00:04:13] Doug Heikkinen: FMG has five strategies to help advisors communicate during these times. So let's walk through those. The first one is proactive client communication.

When should advisors reach out to clients? Is there a perfect time? And you kind of covered this, but when is too much?

[00:04:30] Samantha Russell: Yeah, I think the main thing is, set yourself up so that regardless of what's happening in the markets, clients expect to hear from you regularly. So what is that regular cadence?

It could be every week on Thursday mornings. It could be every other week on Wednesday afternoons. I would say at a minimum it needs to be once a month in an email style communication that is sent to all clients and prospects, right? So you don't have to call it a newsletter, you can call it a check-in.

You can call it a weekly digest, a weekly blog post or insight. But some sort of communication that they're getting. And like I said, I think at a minimum it needs to be once a month, but we find that every other week or every week is probably the cadence that's the best for most firms. And when it comes to too much, I wouldn't be emailing people every day.

I think that's overkill. I think once a week is probably the most I would do on a regular cadence because that still gives you the opportunity, if there is breaking news, to send a one-off email and two emails in a week still doesn't feel like too much.

[00:05:32] Doug Heikkinen: Could you share some specific messaging do's and don'ts when communicating during significant market swings?

[00:05:39] Samantha Russell: The first thing is don't say nothing. I've seen so many firms on social media saying "we don't even need to check in with our clients because they're, they know we've got their back and we've conditioned them over time in all these meetings to not worry." Well, let me just tell you. People worry.

It doesn't matter what you've told them over time. Sending a message saying, "Just as a reminder, this is just a little market volatility check-in. Let's get the pulse of how everyone's feeling. I know this a stressful time. You cannot open up your laptop or your phone without seeing things about it.

Remember what our plan is." And just reiterating what they already know, right? Imagine when you're on a plane and there's turbulence. When the pilot says nothing, you feel more stressed. But if the pilot comes over and says, "Hey everyone, we saw this on the radar. We knew there was going to be some turbulence.

It's going to be bumpy. I'm going to put the seatbelt sign on. So just please stay in your seats and I'll let you know when you're good to get up again." You feel calm immediately. So that is absolutely the take I would have if I were the advisor. Think of yourself as a pilot, leading your clients through turbulent times.

[00:06:48] Doug Heikkinen: Let's talk about website content strategy and FMG certainly allows advisors to have active websites. Should they structure a dedicated market perspective section on the website for maximum impact?

[00:07:01] Samantha Russell: Yeah. So I think in a normal time we don't want clients going to our website and looking for updates on what the market is doing every day, right?

That's not what we want to condition them to do. We want them to be invested for the long run in all of those things. But in times like this, where we almost entered bear market territory and we've got, again, just things happening really fast. There's a lot of moving parts. I've seen some firms execute really well, and we do make it easy to do this at FMG to set up a dedicated page.

You can take it down after maybe things calm down, hopefully, in the future, but that would have a video of maybe your founder or someone from your team just walking through what's going on. What is a tariff? What does it mean? Breaking it down for people in a very easy to understand, easy to digest way.

And then you can add more resources to it. And we do have a bunch of resources. If you're listening to this and you're an FMG customer, we have resources that you can easily add to a page like this in our resource library. But I think just having a dedicated page that you can direct people to, so when you are emailing them, instead of just sending them an email, you can have a link to a page like this where they end up finding even more resources.

And this is what I think, you know, we talk about referability. Someone who's really stressed and they're talking about it with their friends and they land on a page like this, they could easily forward a page like that along to everyone they were just at the dinner party with last night talking about what's happening in the headlines.

So that's just one way to capitalize it on your website.

[00:08:30] Doug Heikkinen: What content formats work best for explaining complex market conditions to clients?

[00:08:36] Samantha Russell: I love video. I'm so bullish on video, but I think, again, we're talking about a highly stressful, overwhelming topic for a lot of people.

And so when you see someone that you know and trust. And you can see their face, hear their voice, get that reassurance, it really makes a big difference. It goes back to the example with the pilot. Imagine if you got a text on your phone that says, "this is the pilot and we're going through turbulence," but you can't feel, are they nervous?

Are they stressed? How are they feeling about it? But a video really allows that to come through. So if you can, I really highly suggest delivering that in a video format.

[00:09:15] Doug Heikkinen: So once advisors create a valuable market commentary or something to explain what things are, what's an effective promotion strategy to ensure it actually gets seen?

[00:09:26] Samantha Russell: Yes. I love, I mean I think we forget that with social media, I mean granted, you can 100% use this in multiple formats. Put it on that website page, send an email, put it on social media. But email is still the most effective way to reach the highest percentage of the audience you have, right? If you post something to social media, you're going to get anywhere from 1% to, at the very high end with a pretty viral post, maybe 10% of your total audience seeing it. Whereas with an email, especially when it's timely content, we see at FMG anywhere between 40% to 60% open rates. So I highly, highly suggest an email. And in the subject line of your email, put something in there like, "a video from Samantha Russell talking about what's happening in the markets," or "a video from our president and CEO on what you should know about the tariffs," whatever it is. And if it's going to be a video, make sure you say that in the subject line, that it's a video message for an even higher open rate.

[00:10:23] Doug Heikkinen: The third strategy that FMG recommends is webinars. So with Zoom fatigue being real, or not in my case, are webinars still effective for financial advisors? And what trends are you seeing?

[00:10:35] Samantha Russell: Not only are they effective, but the adoption rate from advisors is so low. So we did a study with Wealth management IQ not that long ago, I think about 18 months ago.

And we found that only about 20% of all advisory firms have ever hosted a webinar. Yet, there's been lots of studies from Nitrogen, Michael Kitces, that have found that events, and especially these digital events where you can repurpose them over and over again, are one of the most effective ways to not only engage the clients you have, but to generate new business.

And the cost of doing them is so low. You get on Zoom, you can talk about it, you can invite someone to join you. But when it comes to being effective, a really great way to do it is on LinkedIn you can set up an event landing page and then add your Zoom link as the location, and you can go through and invite people in your network so they're not only getting an email about it, but if you don't have emails and you want to generate new leads, hosting something on a timely topic, like what's happening, what people should know about market volatility, what's happening right now and how it's all coming together between the politics, the legislation, the impact on the markets. People want to hear about it, and you can invite them on LinkedIn even if you don't have their email. So that's such a great way to expand your network, and it doesn't just have to be around timely topics.

Let's say you work with a lot of tech companies in Silicon Valley, you can do highly targeted events for maybe just the benefits and compensation packages of specific companies and use LinkedIn advanced filtering techniques to invite people from those companies to your event.

[00:12:13] Doug Heikkinen: I was at a conference last week talking to an advisor, and he has a weekly open house where he invites prospects and clients to come talk about what's going on in the market and then have a Q&A. And I thought that was a fantastic idea.

[00:12:26] Samantha Russell: Absolutely. I mean, imagine too, there's people who haven't heard from their financial advisor in a year. I was just talking to my aunt, she was like, she's a teacher, was a teacher, her husband was a teacher.

They saved maybe a half a million dollars in their accounts over all the years. And they would get one email a year from their advisor saying, "it's tax filing time" and that's it. And she just had enough finally and was like, "who are you working with? Who do you recommend? Because we're stressed.

We're getting closer and closer to like really needing to access this money. And the markets are just completely tanking right now. What do we do?" And the lack of transparency. The lack of communication from her advisor is the thing that's pushing her. They didn't do anything wrong, but they're not communicating what they're doing right.

[00:13:12] Doug Heikkinen: I'm really looking forward to the answer for this next question because people ask me all the time, what content works on Advisorpedia. So what webinar topics have generated the highest engagement during volatile markets?

[00:13:25] Samantha Russell: I think at the end of the day what you deliver ends up pretty much being the same, but it's how, what's this, the title and the topic that gets people in the door and the description, right? So,

[00:13:38] Doug Heikkinen: Exactly.

[00:13:38] Samantha Russell: Something like, markets are so volatile right now. Should you change your portfolio? People want to know the answer to that. That would get people to come in the door. Or, we bring on a top economist to answer, are we going to enter a recession? We're all, everyone's going to end up saying the same thing, which is, we don't know if we're going to enter a recession or we're going to end up, we need to be invested for the long haul. But the way that you phrase the title is what gets people in the door or not, and it gives you an opportunity to show off your expertise, show how educated you are on the topic, and explain things in a way that makes people feel good.

I saw an interview Josh Brown did about this, I think on CNBC or something, and he was explaining the way that they communicate with their thousands of clients when stuff like this happens and how they get in front of it. And, it was an amazing clip. Everyone should go look it up because he really did a great job of explaining that there's not much that they change, but they articulate the small little tweaks because it makes people feel like that sense of, okay, they're on it. They're doing something.

[00:14:42] Doug Heikkinen: Yeah. You talked a little bit about invitations, but how can advisors position their webinar invitations to feel timely and relevant rather than just another virtual event?

[00:14:53] Samantha Russell: I think again, one of, I'm going to keep repeating it, but thinking about what is going to get somebody to say, yes, this is relevant to me right now. So think about the conversations you're having with your own clients and how, what kind of questions are they asking you? Use their own questions as the title.

So for instance, I'm hosting a webinar tomorrow and instead of saying, the top five ways advisors should think about using social media, it's how does an advisor actually get clients from LinkedIn? That's the question someone asked me. So that's the wording I'm going to use to title it.

So think about what your own questions are or your own clients are asking you, and use their language, use their questions as the title, and you will get such a higher attendance rate than if you try to make it sound smart or educated or how you would phrase it. Use their language to market to them.

[00:15:48] Doug Heikkinen: The fourth strategy is social media engagement.

So what's the difference between merely posting on social media versus driving meaningful engagement during volatile markets?

[00:16:00] Samantha Russell: I mean, posting is just, I think of it as if you were writing an article in a newspaper, right? So you're just educating people, you're sharing something. Engagement, it comes when, think of more like a Reddit or Quora where people can go and have a conversation, have a back and forth, and that's what we really want.

We want to facilitate that back and forth because that's where people start to see us as this trusted expert that they can go to. And I don't know about you. If I leave a comment on someone's post and they don't respond to my comment, I'm not very likely to comment again the next time they post. But if they do respond and engage with me, I'm more likely to keep interacting with them.

And we want to build that interaction up. So you want to ask questions when you post something. Don't just post it, ask a question, ask people to give you their opinion. Maybe you can ask something like, "what are you most scared about right now? What's keeping you up at night?" Whether you work with another advisor or someone at our firm.

"What are the kinds of questions you and your friends are having at barbecues and around the dinner party table or at the soccer field right now about the economy and the markets? Are there things people are saying that you wonder, is this true? Is that really how it all works?" And sometimes even giving people options, so, which of these four things is most stressful to you right now? A, b, c, d? And say, comment below with which letter, right? It makes it super easy for people to start engaging with you, and then when they say, okay, for me it's B, then you can respond and keep it going. Say, okay, why is it B? And why is this important, like the comments? Remember that on social media, the more comments you get on a post, the more people are going to see it.

So if Jane down the street comments on my post, and then Doug comments on my post, everyone in your network, Doug now has a chance to see that you commented on Samantha Russell's post and say, who's Samantha Russell? And wow, this is an interesting conversation and that's how you build that network. So that's why the engagement and the comments are so important.

And those are just some easy ways to get the conversation going.

[00:18:01] Doug Heikkinen: So which platforms are currently performing best for financial advisors trying to address market concerns?

[00:18:08] Samantha Russell: It's hard to make a blanket statement in the sense of, you need to be where your particular audience hangs out. So there's an advisor that I really good friends with, Thomas Kopelman.

He works again with a lot of, I used the example before, tech employees and people in their thirties and forties, and he has the most success by far over on X. But that, isn't most people. so if you just look at what's working well for him, that's not going to be the case for you. For a lot of people, LinkedIn is a really great one because it really is a professional network.

It lends itself to that. But the number of people who sign in every day and are active is lower. So your chances of everyone in your audience seeing what you post there can be a little bit lower. If you're working with a lot of young families, Instagram is a great one, especially to target women in their thirties, forties, and fifties.

And one I think that people kind of sleep on is Facebook groups. I see it all the time. I don't know if you are a member of any like local Facebook groups or your neighborhood Facebook group, but people will ask all kinds of questions there, like, hey, the markets are going crazy. This just happened in my local Facebook group.

"I need a new financial advisor. Who's someone you know and trust?" And then people will all give their feedback. So again, I think it really depends on knowing your audience, but LinkedIn is definitely the most professional and the people who use LinkedIn, while they might not be there every single day, we see the highest net worth and the high, the most mass affluent households, using LinkedIn.

[00:19:37] Doug Heikkinen: All right. The last strategy is family financial strategy sessions, and this one's incredibly important with the trillions changing hands over the next decade. So how are forward thinking advisors implementing family financial strategy sessions, and what results are they seen?

[00:19:53] Samantha Russell: Yeah, so there was a study from Cerruli that found that the families that really have a lot of wealth, they want their financial advisor to start including their children in the both education, the meetings, and understanding what's happening with family finances as young as 18 years old, sometimes even earlier.

And they really are hoping that their advisors, even if they're not saying it to the advisor, is taking point on including those adult children, getting them involved and helping everyone get on the same page. So we've actually developed, at FMG, a really great tool, called the Family Meeting Invitation, where it's an email you can send out.

We've got it all in the dashboard for you to use. But it basically just invites everyone to get on the same page to meet with you, to talk about where everything is, any important documentation. Maybe for the younger members of the family, where things are and what they would do if the older generation were to pass away.

And invites them to ask questions and get prepared. And then we even have a family legacy kit where, beyond money, you can talk about maybe what philanthropies are important or what legacies of the family do we want to carry on. Maybe making sure we never sell this one house on the cape because it's really important to us to keep it in the family name.

It's such a way to invite and start those conversations with the next generation. And again, we can use things like what's happening in the markets as just a way to start facilitating that and make it a very timely event.

[00:21:25] Doug Heikkinen: Samantha, great information for all advisors. As always, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:21:31] Samantha Russell: Thank you.

[00:21:32] Doug Heikkinen: To learn more about FMG and all the ways they help advisors, please visit FMGsuite.com. Please follow us for timely updates on X, LinkedIn and Facebook all @Advisorpedia. For everybody at Advisorpedia, our producer Tory Miller and the Power Your Advice podcast team, this is Doug Heikkinen.