Month: February 2020

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Uncategorized

Compliance for Podcasting

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Compliance is at the forefront of our podcast service and deliverables. 

All of our podcast and micro-influencer offerings can fit neatly into your compliance review and approval systems. We never publish anything without compliance approval. We produce 100+ podcasts every month. On average, less than 1% of our podcasts require compliance edits, and these edits are typically only required in the first few episodes.

 

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Listen to our podcast episode about how we make podcasting a compliance friendly marketing activity.

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Request Samples

If you’d like to review samples of deliverables please complete the form to the right and someone from our podcast production team will reach out to you.

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Categories
Webinar Resources

How to Market in the Expertise Economy

Like it or not, all advisors compete in the expertise economy. The trouble (opportunity) is that most advisors don’t understand expertise marketing principles, tactics, nor how to implement. 

Join Kirk Lowe, a leading-edge, thought-leader for financial marketing for 20 years now, and learn tips and strategies to effectively and efficiently market in the expertise economy.

Get ready to take notes and discover how to set yourself apart from other advisors, what no one has ever told you about how to become a thought-leader, and why being on social media is well worth your time – if done right. 

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

  • How to market in the Expertise Economy.
  • How to build a marketing strategy that will separate you from most advisors.
  • Which platform works best to share your expertise (book, blog, podcast, video).
  • What it means to be highly relevant (and where a niche comes in). 
  • Different tactics to promote you and your expertise.
  • And more!

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Categories
BLOG

What Is Social Selling? Here’s What Advisors Need to Know

When used well, social selling can be a powerful lead generation tool. But what exactly is social selling? Another marketing buzzword? Is it the same as social media advertising or social media marketing? 

Not really. 

Social selling is more than that. It’s the process of building powerful relationships with qualified leads on social media by understanding their needs and providing them with valuable content that helps them make informed buying decisions. You then become their go-to alternative when they are ready to buy.

Can you just post a few articles or share something that happened at your practice and call it social selling? No. Just like you do with your traditional sales approach, you need to build your social selling strategy and have clearly defined goals in order for it to work well.

How can you start building your social selling strategy? It depends on which social media platforms you’re using. For the purposes of this article, we will discuss LinkedIn and Twitter because these are the two main platforms we recommend for advisors.

 

LinkedIn

It is no secret that this is the best social media platform for advisors to find qualified leads and, after all, LinkedIn users are 11 times more likely to engage with professional content than users of any other social network. You can use these advanced prospecting techniques if you want to take a more focused sales approach, but you can also simply start with social selling by:

 

  • Joining the conversation: Engage with your existing contacts and join groups to meet new people. Like their posts, comment on them, and stay present. 
  • Expanding your network: Take full advantage of LinkedIn’s advanced search. You can use filters like job titles, locations, and more to locate the target audience you’d like to connect with. You can also leverage your connection’s network by asking them to make an introduction to someone you’d like to connect with
  • Building your credibility: Share articles that you have written and ask others to endorse you for your skills. These are two simple ways to tell others that you are knowledgeable about your industry. Don’t forget to join LinkedIn groups to meet likeminded people. 

Check out this blog for more on LinkedIn best practices.

 

Twitter

Twitter is the perfect tool for social listening, which is a crucial part of social selling as this allows you to monitor your audience’s behavior online. Twitter facilitates social listening by giving you the ability to create lists of specific people and brands that you want to keep track of. 

You can use Twitter lists to accomplish the following: 

  • You can build a list that includes your current clients and use it to engage in conversations with them and like their tweets.
  • You can create a list of potential clients. By keeping track of what is important to them, you can strategically offer them tools and information to keep them moving through your sales funnel.
  • And finally, you can keep an eye on what your competitors are doing. Create a private list that allows you to keep an eye on what others are doing, to help you adjust your own selling strategy.

 

So, is social selling the end of cold calling? Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing is certain: Combining traditional sales techniques with the latest available tech trends will give you a significant edge over advisors who are not doing the same. 

 

Categories
BLOG

Advisors’ Best Practices for Creating a Clear Message and Building an Audience

The two consistent elements to successful marketing have always been, and always will be, a clear message and a clearly-targeted niche audience. Eventually, you hope your message will become your brand with the people you ideally want to attract. 

WHAT COMES FIRST:
THE MESSAGE OR THE AUDIENCE? 

Your message and audience are interlinked and, therefore, should be considered and developed together. 

For example, if you are great at estate planning but prefer working with 45-55-year-olds, your approach to messaging for estate planning would be significantly different than if you were targeting a 65+ audience. For people 65+, your message might revolve around getting it right, saving taxes, protecting your spouse, and leaving what you can for the next generations. For 45-55-year-olds, you might focus on purpose, living a legacy, and using the ideas and planning strategies to achieve something now.  

CREATING YOUR MESSAGE

Your message should focus on what you want to be known for and what you deliver to your ideal clients: outcomes, experiences, and feelings. 

If you offer “holistic planning,” you need to not only ask deeper questions, you also need checklists and a story that proves your holistic approach doesn’t end after the first meeting. When your clients hear your message, experience a process, and enjoy the outcomes that reflect your holistic approach — that’s a brand. But it has to start with a better message because that’s how you capture your audience’s attention long enough to prove your credibility and engage them in your expertise. And that’s how you start relationships — with marketing. 

Your message moves into brand status when what your audience knows becomes their new expectation, and, ultimately, it’s when they talk about your product or service with others while using that same language as you. 

Nurturing a brand and message is a long-term commitment but when done properly, it will produce momentum and opportunities — outcomes that make it all worthwhile.  

If you need help defining your message, and ultimately your brand, I highly recommend this free branding guide. 

And here are podcast episodes that provide further insight into the creation and implementation of your brand:

 

 

IDENTIFYING & BUILDING YOUR AUDIENCE

The only way to build the right audience is to share your expertise and attract people to your thought leadership. This takes years, not months. Some of the most successful financial advisors and influencers have spent 10+ years building their audience and brand. Do not expect to compete with their influence in a significantly less amount of time — unless of course, you hire Top Advisor Marketing (shameless plug). 

Ideally, the audience you want to replicate most should be a vertical or identifiable group you can access and communicate with. If you don’t know how to identify your ideal client/audience, I recommend using this Ideal Client Profile worksheet. If you don’t know the value of having a niche or how to start creating one, start with these podcast episodes:

 

 

There are many tactics and tools to define and search for ideal prospects including targeting AI apps, social media advanced searches, or simply finding an in-person niche network such as a chamber of commerce with local businesses, a specific trade conference, or a center of influence.

 

TARGETING OPPORTUNITIES TARGETING TOOLS
Networking Groups

  • chamber of commerce
  • Hobby groups (runners, yachting, etc)
  • Trade associations or conferences
 LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator allows you to create search profiles to find, message, and connect with your ideal audience. 
Centers of Influence

These are typically people you want in your network because they know your ideal audience and add value to their lives. 

 LeadCrunch

LeadCrunch finds and engages ideal client/prospect lookalikes, making it easy for you to find new prospects just like the ones you’re already working with. 
Online Influencers

Getting your expertise (i.e. thought leadership) mentioned, published, and shared can have a huge impact on your exposure and credibility.

 CrystalKnows

Crystal enables you to know more about a prospect’s personality, interests, and values so you can connect better with them. 
Trade Media 

Getting your expertise (thought leadership) mentioned, published, and shared by an outlet that focuses on your niche audience can have a huge impact on your exposure and credibility. 

 AdvisorStream

This content aggregation and distribution tool uses AI to adjust content deployment and recommendations. AdvisorStream offers unique content from paywall providers without the paywall.  
  Seamless

Seamless helps you find everyone you need to sell to and it gives you emails and phone numbers. You can use hundreds of insights to build profitable relationships at scale and import directly into your favorite CRM.

 

Read these articles to learn about more AI tools:

 

Build your audience, share your message, and #BeYourOwnLoud:  

  • Discover and define your key strengths and your audience’s needs. 
  • Define your ideal audience by personality, age, interests, dreams, careers, family, education, fears, concerns, not just basic demographics and AUM.
  • Create keywords and phrases that introduce key concepts and points that are important to understanding your brand. Leverage those phrases and words in your marketing, processes, papers, articles, podcasts, etc. 
  • Develop a marketing strategy that starts relationships instead of only attracting leads.  Relationships are built on sharing expertise, leads are based on trying to sell. 

Leverage the tools and resources above to help you build relationships effectively. And if you don’t have time to do it right, find help.

Categories
Podcast Resources Onesheets Podcasting Resources Podcasting Resources VIDEO

Podcast Syndication

Are you curious to find out where we syndicate the podcasts?  This list outlines where we publish your podcasts and whether or not we can turn off the comments.

Categories
ADVISOR U

8 Podcasting Formats to Grow Your Audience Copy

Are you curious about starting a new financial podcast but feel overwhelmed with all the information online? Learn the basics of choosing the right podcast formats from podcasting expert, Matt Halloran, CEO of Top Advisor Marketing.  

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Categories
BLOG

Answers to Financial Advisors’ Top Podcasting and Compliance Questions

What’s keeping you from starting your own podcast? For many financial advisors, the resounding answer is “compliance!”

You might consider compliance to be “the business prevention department.” I used to feel that way. I can remember times when a client and I would come up with a great idea for a podcast only to get a lengthy delay for approval or, even worse, a big “NO” from compliance. 

What I’ve learned is that compliance is practically a non-issue if you know how to work within their rules. 

To help you learn the rules and clear away your compliance concerns, I’m answering advisors’ top questions about compliance and podcasting.

Let’s get to it…

 

Question #1: Before I record a podcast, do I have to submit a full script to compliance for their approval?

Answer: No, you don’t need to submit a script for approval. However, most compliance departments want to have an outline of what you will talk about before you record so they can guide you on which topics (if any) to avoid.

In your outline, include your main topic and then list your subtopics. A super organized outline is more likely to get your compliance’s stamp of approval quickly.

. 

Question #2: How do I archive a podcast?

Answer: If you use our done-for-you podcasting service, we will provide you with a transcript of each podcast episode for you to submit to compliance for archiving purposes. 

Giving compliance access to transcripts also gives them the ability to point out anything that they want to be edited out. Let’s say you slip up and say something compliance doesn’t like. They can then tell our editing team to edit out that section of the audio. If we can remove it and still make that part of the podcast sound smooth, we do it! If not, we find the best edit-point and take out even more — and compliance won’t complain about that!

 

Question #3: How do I get a podcast episode turned around quickly if I need to talk about something that’s timely?

Answer: Many of our clients podcast about current events or seasonal topics, like tax planning, Medicare, and new laws. If needed, our team can rush your podcast episode through editing and post-production so it can be released as soon as humanly possible. Hopefully, by this point, your compliance compartment has gotten into the flow of reviewing and approving your podcasts in a quick timeframe. 

Do keep in mind that podcasting isn’t a substitute for picking up the phone and updating your clients. For the most part, podcasting is for timeless, evergreen material. 

 

Question #4: How do I stop people from commenting on my podcast and potentially saying negative things about my company? 

Answer: Certain podcast channels, as well as YouTube, will allow you to turn off the commenting function. Since we have produced hundreds of podcasts, we know which players allow what level of listener interaction. We have the ability to turn off comments and ratings on different players for you.

 

There you have it — your answers to the top compliance and podcasting questions. I hope you feel encouraged to pick up that podcasting dream again and don’t let compliance-fears stop you!