Marketing in 2025: How Financial Advisors Can Turn Challenges into Opportunities with Samantha Russell

 
[00:00:25] Samantha Russell: Hi there. Thank you so much for having me. 
[00:00:28] Doug Heikkinen: So let's start at the top. What are some of the biggest marketing opportunities you envision for 2025 for advisors? 
[00:00:36] Samantha Russell: Yeah, so obviously, you know, everyone hates the answer that it depends on who you're trying to target and what you're trying to do.
But if I had to pick one or two that would apply to everyone, I would say video, especially short form video. If you are making a podcast or you are doing longer form video, you can shorten them into clips that you share. And then the second one would be events. So, it's interesting the rise of AI and the proliferation of kind of, I don't want to say cheap content, but content that anyone can write with a prompt through an AI bot has made it so that people are really, really drawn more to authentic conversations and experiences. And we're seeing such a rise in events and people wanting to attend events, both online and offline.
But we're seeing a really, really good ROI from events for the advisors we work with. 
[00:01:27] Doug Heikkinen: That's really interesting. Let's talk about the FMG 2025 marketing guide. What is it and how are advisors using it? 
[00:01:35] Samantha Russell: Yeah. So back in the summer last summer, 2024, our team was doing an offsite and we were thinking, we were talking about all the different ways that we help advisors.
So we help them with social media, with events, with ongoing email and text communications that you drip on, you know, warm leads or your current clients. Your website. There's so many different things we help with and that really make up that marketing funnel. From the top of the funnel, just becoming aware of your firm down to converting. And people get overwhelmed, right?
If you're a financial advisor, marketing your business is a huge part of growing, yet it's not what you became an advisor for. And so we wanted to take all of our advice, our most practical, tangible tips that we really know move the needle when it comes to producing results and put them in one place and make it so that whether you're just starting out and you need some of those foundational elements or you've been doing this a while and you just want to sort of level up, there'd be something in there that you could walk away from and implement in 2025.
So that is the genesis of the guide. We just released it, about a month ago, and it is broken into those sections, as I mentioned. And with each section, you have, again, your foundational things that everybody needs to take care of. And then as you get those under your belt, there are links to both videos and online tutorials and other further reading that you can really level up and go even deeper.
And then each section ends with a quick short form video from me, giving you really easy to implement, walk away from the guide and do it right then and there tip. 
[00:03:06] Doug Heikkinen: Let's cover some of those areas that are in the guide and start with the website. How can advisors optimize their website so it communicates their unique value proposition effectively, which is something that very few do.
[00:03:20] Samantha Russell: Yes. I would say if you're listening to this and there's one thing you should go do right now, go pull up your website, and look at it and say, does it pass the five second test? So when someone lands on your homepage within five seconds, can they tell who you are, what you do and who you do it for and why it matters.
So everybody's looking at any content with the, what's in it for me mindset, right? Nobody really cares what you can do. They care what you can do for them. So that is why we always hear, you should have a niche. Really, it just comes down to the language and messaging. If you even go back and look at how many times are you saying we or I or our. So our team has this many years of experience.
We do this. We do that. I do this. Versus, you have this problem and here's a solution we provide. You're worried about this. We can help take care of it. Your family needs this. And we are here to help. When you change your messaging to you based messaging, you will be astounded at the difference of the response you get from the people reading your website.
[00:04:22] Doug Heikkinen: And that's audience focused messaging? Is that what you're talking about? 
[00:04:25] Samantha Russell: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, if I'm a single mom, and I have three little kids, and I'm working full time, but I'm also worried about, I don't want to pay too much in taxes, and saving for my kids' colleges and all those things.
Somebody who specializes in working with women. Women, unfortunately my husband passed away, so if they're a widower if I land on their website and it's speaking to me directly, I'm going to be much more likely to want to work with that advisor rather than just what we see all the time, which is our team's been in business for 30 years and we help individuals, families, and businesses.
Well, that's everyone. And, I always tell people with messaging, think of a magnet. In order for a magnet to work, it has to repel in order to attract. If your message doesn't repel anyone, it won't attract anyone either. 
[00:05:12] Doug Heikkinen: Can behavioral science techniques fit into a website? 
[00:05:16] Samantha Russell: That's right. They do.
[00:05:18] Doug Heikkinen: Amazing. So let's move on to social media. So social media is changing and you've grown your LinkedIn network to more than 42,000 people. How did you do it? And what tips can you share to advisors who want to grow their network? 
[00:05:31] Samantha Russell: Yeah, so I think the first thing would just be a really simple thing, which is share things that help people. And if you're crystal clear about who you help.
So everybody who goes to my LinkedIn page sees I help financial advisors market their business better to grow organically. It's very, very easy to see that every post is related to that. My headline says that, my featured banner image at the top of the page. And so it's really easy. Versus if you just have, like, CEO of the wealth mosaic.
Well, what is the wealth mosaic? What, who's, what does it mean that you're the CEO? What do you do? You want to be really crystal clear about how you help people. And then the content that you should put out should also be very, very explicit in every single post should provide some sort of takeaway that is going to be helpful to people.
Now, the only caveat would be social media is also about being social, so you can have the greatest posts in the world. But if you don't take the time to engage with other people's content, you're gonna get nowhere. So for every one thing you post on social media, you should be leaving comments on at least five other people's posts.
And that's per platform. So if you post one thing to LinkedIn, you gotta leave comments on five other LinkedIn posts. If you post one thing to Facebook, leave comments on five other Facebook posts. And don't just do it on your friends, but let's say you wanna, you're an advisor who works with physicians in the Philadelphia area.
Go type in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, and look at other physicians that work there and what are they posting, and leave comments on those people's posts, right? So people who are not even connected to you yet. I always say if you've never commented on a stranger's post before, then you're really doing social media wrong.
[00:07:12] Doug Heikkinen: Okay, we've talked about zero click content before. Remind our audience what this is and why it matters. 
[00:07:19] Samantha Russell: Yeah, so remember I just said, with every single post, you want to be giving away something of value right there in the post itself. The old way of doing social media was you'd say, hey, I have a blog post I wrote that's going to help you minimize your taxes.
Go read it. And people have to click off the platform to read that blog. Well, nobody clicks off anymore. And the algorithm wants to keep people on Instagram or on LinkedIn or on Facebook. So they don't want you to click off either. So they prioritize what we call zero click content, which means somebody can read the content and get the main takeaway without needing to click off to understand it.
So what that looks like in practice is, let's say you do write a blog post and it's five things to think about to not overpay taxes this year. Instead of linking to it, you would actually take those five takeaways and put them in the post itself, maybe with a line or two explaining each. Now, this is important because somebody doesn't ever have to click to get, your expertise and the takeaway.
But the main thing it does, it allows people to have something of substance to leave a comment on. And remember how I just talked about how comments are so important? They are the currency of social media. The more comments you get, the more the algorithm will show your posts to more people. So when you actually do that zero click approach, somebody now has something of substance that they can respond to.
And you're so much more likely to get comments on your posts when you post in that zero click format. 
[00:08:44] Doug Heikkinen: Great. Let's move on to client and prospect communications. Is there a magic number of how much advisors should be communicating with clients and prospects in your view? 
[00:08:54] Samantha Russell: So there's a really interesting study that YCharts, if you're, if everybody listening is familiar with YCharts, did, where they, over the course of multiple years, they asked clients how often is your advisor communicating with you versus how often would you like them to be?
And what they found is that not only do clients want more communication from their advisors, but the number one biggest reason why someone was considering leaving their advisor was because they felt like they were not being communicated with enough. So let that sink in. The number one reason, right? You really don't ever hear somebody say, I'm firing my advisor because they communicated to me too much.
That does not happen. They might say, if you send them too many emails, they could say, Hey, I'm, you're getting, sending me too many emails. We got to cut back, but they're not going to get rid of you because of that. So we find the sweet spot really to be once a week. And if that's too much to handle, obviously we at FMG make it really, really easy because we have a whole platform and content team where we actually can do that for you, take care of the weekly communication. But at a minimum, it really should be every other week. Once a month is now just too infrequent. We used to recommend that sometimes. But it really should be every other week in order to stay top of mind.
And so that can look a lot of different ways, right? It could be a regular newsletter you send where you round up three things going on in the news and kind of give your take on it, whether your client should be paying attention to it or not. It could just be one topical thing you talk about. But that regular communication where people come to expect, they see your name in their inbox at least every 14 days, really, really makes a difference.
And we hear from advisors all the time who will say, hey, I, I had somebody that was on my email list, they were a prospect. This just happened, this woman, she works with small business owners. Somebody had been getting her emails for five years and just reached out to her and said, hey, I just sold my business, I got a million dollars in liquidity and I've seen all your emails for years, I'm ready to work with you now.
So, definitely at least every other week is really a good sweet spot. 
[00:10:58] Doug Heikkinen: At the top, you mentioned events, which really kind of surprised me. So why events and let's dig a little bit deeper into what's the biggest opportunity you would tell advisors to lean into here? 
[00:11:10] Samantha Russell: So I think it's always going to be dependent on the firm.
So certain firms more than others. But the thing with events is it allows you to do two things. Number one. People are hiring an advisor often because of the relationship, right? We know that inherently, it's not like buying a product, a pair of jeans. This is somebody they're going to trust with often their life savings, their retirement future.
So they want to know that they can trust you. They want to know that you're smart. They want to know you're going to make good choices and they don't have to constantly be monitoring you. Events allow them to get to know you in a very low pressure way. So if you host a online webinar, someone can listen in, they can see your face, hear your voice, pick up on all of those nonverbal cues, as well as hear you talk about something.
That you are an expert on and it gives them a sense of really getting to know you. And it's such a great way for an advisor to generate referrals. Because we all know that so many advisors still want to grow through referrals, but if you just hope and pray that your clients are going to talk about you, then your growth strategy is a hope and a prayer.
But if you host events, that are great events, whether it's because they're great information, right? Everybody's really concerned right now about scams, especially with the elderly or, A. I. making it even easier for people to call and make it sound like your kid or someone's calling you.
People want to know about that. So if you can get your local FBI agent, that's a really popular one we have a lot of advisors doing, to come on and say, we're going to talk about all the scams out there right now. What you should be aware of what to do. If you get this phone call or this email, how to know, whether it's true or not.
You send that out to your clients, think about how much more likely if you say, okay, you, here you're invited to this event. And then three days later you follow up and say, we're having such a great response to this event, we're going to allow all of our clients to extend the invitation to two, either friends or family members.
How much more likely is someone to, aka, refer you in that instance? Versus, just say, Hey, if you like working with us, tell your friends about us. Right? So the events are such a great referral opportunity as well as all the other things that I mentioned. 
[00:13:22] Doug Heikkinen: Does the marketing guide provide some guidance to advisors, like putting on your first webinar, does it give them some suggestions of how to start?
[00:13:30] Samantha Russell: Absolutely. And not only do we have guidance, we have an entire event checklist in there. Everything from the pre event planning to how to design your registration and landing pages to get the most sign ups, how to promote it. A schedule of promotion and then even like logisticals, like what to do on the day of the event, how to make sure you're getting the most contact information from all of the people once they're there.
So everything you need to host a great first events in the guide. 
[00:13:57] Doug Heikkinen: All right, let's move back to video. You mentioned video is great because it's authentic, but it's scary for people. People don't do it well. All you have to do is like, scroll through LinkedIn and you'll see good ones and you'll see not so good ones.
So what's the guide here? 
[00:14:12] Samantha Russell: So I would suggest if you're really unsure about video, one of the things you can do, just to kind of start and dip your foot in the water, is, if you, let's say have a client and you're, you did a meeting with them and you're sending them a meeting recap, rather than just send them, your notes hop on a quick you know, loom or V there's all different tools where you can record yourself and your screen, or you can just record yourself and sort of walk them through what it is you talked about and what the follow up points are.
So you get used to with low hanging fruit, right? They're already your client. They know you. This isn't gonna make or break whether they continue working with you, it's just a nice value add to them to be able to see it. That's a really great way to start because you'll get used to the technology, you'll get used to hearing yourself be recorded and listening back to it.
If you need to try editing it, that's a really, really good place to start. But let's just say you're never going to be the person who's putting out videos on social media. Maybe there's another person on your team who could be. Or maybe you feel comfortable interviewing someone, you just don't like doing a talking head video.
So, once a month you could interview somebody else and ask them questions, again, with the content being beneficial to your client. So if it's a local CPA or a state planning attorney, you get the idea. I think really the key is we don't want to just put out video for video's sake and have the video be crappy.
We want it to be good and helpful. So those are some tips to get you started. 
[00:15:36] Doug Heikkinen: All right. Where can someone get a copy of this incredibly valuable guide? 
[00:15:41] Samantha Russell: So we will put a link in the, or give you a link that you can put in the show notes. You can also just go to FMGsuite.com and it is linked under our resources tab.
So either way you can find it either on our website or in the show notes of this podcast. 
[00:15:56] Doug Heikkinen: All right. Samantha, thank you so much for joining us. You can find Samantha about anywhere on social media, but it's great to have you. 
[00:16:03] Samantha Russell: Thank you so much. And I hope everybody gets the guide and if they have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on social media.
LinkedIn is probably easiest, Samantha C. Russell, and I'm happy to answer any questions you have. 
[00:16:13] Doug Heikkinen: Great. To learn more about FMG, please visit fmgsuite.com. Please follow us for timely updates on X, LinkedIn, and Facebook, all at Advisorpedia. For everybody at Advisorpedia, our producer Julia Smollen, our engineer Tory Miller, and the Power Your Advice podcast team, this is Doug Heikkinen.