Cracking the Code: How to Design a Scalable Advisor Marketing Program That Drives Growth

But, really, what we are here to do is to talk about how to design a scalable adviser marketing program that drives growth. And I don’t think we could have two better people to talk about that than Shannon and Susan because they’ve both done it before with great success. So, ladies, we are really going to just pick your brains today, and also get to show off, some of the ways that FMG makes it so easy to do. So why don’t we get started by just really setting the stage? Susan, do you wanna start here?

Yeah. Actually, I mean, Shannon, I’d love you to tell everybody a little bit about your firm, and then we can, you know, segue into what made you wake up one day or probably multiple days and have passion around building an adviser marketing program.

Absolutely. Well, RFG, we are on a mission to help independent advisers build their business without compromise by driving organic growth to create enterprise value.

So I think one of the key things, and hence, we’re gonna be talking about marketing is when someone asks you what you do, have your ninety second spiel, your mission statement right at your fingertips. We are a platform that serves independent advisers, so we wrap around them all the services that they need, compliance, technology, investment management, coaching, talent development, as well as marketing growth services.

So we, we we come at it in a a mindset of wanting to be the premier destination for independent advisers who want to build their business, who want to drive organic growth, and who wanna create enterprise value.

Awesome. And I think I met you for the first time. I think it was at a wealth management dot com event maybe, like, three years ago, but I think it was soon after you joined RFG. You’re pretty early in the game. Maybe tell us a little bit about, you know, as you joined and what you were trying to accomplish and how marketing fit into that.

Oh, it’s, it’s so fun to take that walk down memory lane. So I joined RFG in twenty fifteen, and the company was founded in two thousand and three. So we call it RFG one dot o, was a super OSJ, hundred percent custody at LPL, really delivering, you know, the majority of the value proposition came from reselling what our what LPL had to offer. And we had a much more innovative and disruption disruptive vision for what we believed would really allow and empower independent advisers to have not only the tools and resources they need to deliver an exceptional client experience, but to be truly, like, thriving in their businesses, to be energized by their practice and what they were building.

So RFT two point o was born in twenty fifteen. We tore the entire house down to the ground. We built it intentionally from the ground floor up to deliver this suite of services through our platform to independent advisors.

We did a broker dealer change in twenty eighteen. We became multi custodial, and we focused in on how do we have the most robust concierge growth focused services in the business. And we took a little bit of an innovative approach to that because we recognized that in order for growth to scale and for advisors to be able to tap into that elusive organic growth, it has to touch every facet of the business. So you can’t, on one side of the equation, talk and think about and architect this incredible marketing strategy if it’s out of sync with your technology, or it’s out of sync with your investment management, or it’s out of sync with your compliance department, all of it needs to be curated in an ecosystem.

And since those early days of building RFG two point o, we’re now in the three point o chapter, really turning up the heat and taking it to the next level. It has been about that seamless integration of wrapping the services around the adviser and recognizing that a successful marketing strategy is dependent upon the totality of that ecosystem working together. It can’t just be a a bolt on or an add on or an afterthought. Mhmm. It has to be intentionally curated into everything that the adviser is doing if their goal is, which our advisers share this as a goal, if their goal is organic growth and driving that enterprise value over the long term.

Awesome. Alright.

So organic growth is on the mind of pretty much every adviser at the top and every firm.

You know, one of the unique things about this workshop that we’re doing is, you know, Sam and I do a lot of these, presentations, and we’re generally talking to individual advisers about marketing best practices. And this is really our first opportunity talking to firm owners, and those that may either be part of an ensemble all the way up to potentially an enterprise looking to grow and scale for multiple advisers.

So if we hone in, I totally get, you know, organic growth and everything is a very, interdependent ecosystem of lots of different elements. But if we focus in on marketing, what were you looking what were the pain points that you were looking to solve for in a marketing program for your adviser?

This was a big unlock for us was there was a fantastic Accenture study that was released several years ago, and it talked about what are clients looking for in their adviser. And if you ask an adviser this question, you might more often than not get a very technical answer around investment returns and financial planning and, you know, all these things. But the Accenture study said, this is what clients are looking for in their adviser. Number one, do you share my values? Number two, do you get me? And number three, do I wanna spend time with you outside the office?

And we distilled that study down into a an overarching principle that really guides our marketing program and ultimately led us to partner with FMG and build our marketing platform. And it’s very simple. People connect with people.

And one of the most powerful realizations along that, you know, that that kind of processing that we were doing, that thought processing that we were doing, is that advisors have an incredibly powerful why.

Every single adviser is called into this industry. At least all the ones that I’ve met, all the ones that we serve are called into this profession because they want to be of service and help people. There’s always a story behind why they decided to get into the business, why they are energized by the work that they do, why does this matter. And that is just, like, absolutely tailor made for a marketing program and for a marketing strategy.

But advisors are so buttoned up and locked in, and it’s not necessarily their superpower. They don’t necessarily feel comfortable designing a marketing platform and a program. How do I post on social media? How do I build my website? How do I have a consistent stream of content? How is my nurturing campaign with prospects and clients reflective of my why, reflective of my values?

And so often, I think, you know, compliance shuts down advisors Right.

Because they tend to get too technical. When in reality, most marketing needs to be more emotional in nature. So we have this epiphany around people connect with people. And what we wanted to do and and we’ll get into it, Susan, because I really wanna tell the story about why FMG.

What we wanted to do was really unlock that and make it easy for our advisers to tap into that very simple fundamental principle. This is all about people connecting with people. And if we can help advisers tell their authentic brand marketing story, help them share their values, help them demonstrate why they get their clients, and how and why they wanna spend time with them outside the office. It felt like a solid gold kind of situation and was somewhat innovative and different than the way the rest of the industry was thinking about marketing and marketing as a growth service.

Yeah. I mean, I I think, you know, I built a program for advisors at, Centerra Financial Group and and advisor group now, and the challenges were the same. It was you know, I totally agree. It’s about presenting yourself authentically, but there are are a lot of studies that one thing that can differentiate an adviser because we know there is a sea of sameness out there with the way advisers describe themselves is also providing education and content. And that content marketing being really critical.

Mhmm.

But, like, it’s a lot of work, and they just are like, can you just Sam and I say this all the time. You know, we’ll coach, we’ll coach, and then I’m guessing everybody on this call would be like, that’s great, but could you do it for me?

Can you do it for me?

Uh-huh. So describe what you were you know, I’d love to hear why you chose FMG. And, you know, if you were to describe the marketing program that you’ve built really in, you know, the nuts and bolts of what it does for people, what you’ve built on FMG.

Take us through that.

So one of the we did an exhaustive, RFP process. We looked at every single vendor, in our industry as well as several that were outside of our industry.

And for us, it’s it’s table stakes to have this ability to fully integrate into our technology ecosystem, so into our CRM. So we have that as a, you know, as a disqualifier.

If anyone wasn’t able to do that, then we we eliminated them out of the gate.

And then what we what we needed to do was build a custom You’re on Salesforce.

Right?

That’s that’s correct. We’re on Salesforce. So build a custom engine on top of a powerful chassis because we wanted immediately to be able to offer advisers the the the the mechanism by which to film video, to create custom content so that they could have unique, branded, authentic, socially, like, exciting content to share alongside what I will call the more common, like, evergreen prepackaged content. So it’s important to have that as a library in their back pocket, but we wanted to build on top of that library and have, have all of this, like, skills and tools and resources for video, for custom content, for equipping them with the prompts to be able to feel confident on sending out a three week long nurturing campaign ahead of Mother’s Day or thinking about how they’re going to distribute via video an introduction to their team when they’re onboarding a new client.

So we wanted to be able to address both existing clients as well as prospects, do it in a way that is customized and leaning heavily on video. And then on top of that, which was really, like, I think some of the magic of what we’re creating, is we wanted to be able to build in the same way that you all have built your library of evergreen content that you’re feeding to advisers. We wanted to sit on top of that and build resources for our advisers and campaigns and just you know, we call them toolkits. Build toolkits of marketing content that we’ve created that’s customized in our adviser’s voice that they’re able to then use so that you have this kind of trifecta of resources addressing and answering that question of, well, can you just do it for me?

Because if you have the FMG evergreen content, you have this bespoke library that RFG is creating in response to requests from our advisors, and then you have this engine to be able to do highly customized and personalized to the advisor in their brand themselves. That’s a powerful way to approach this whole marketing ecosystem for them.

And one of the things that I think you hit on that I just wanted to point out is that, you know, what’s re can be really problematic when you’re thinking about building a marketing program that you can use as both a recruitment tool but also satisfies the needs of everybody that’s already on board is that people are all over the board of what they feel comfortable doing, if they wanna get on video, if you’re listening in. You know, a lot of you might be hearing video video and think, like, I’d love to record more video, but I don’t feel confident.

And so I think one of the things that’s really, important when you’re thinking about building out a program like this is one that will make everyone in that ecosystem happy. Right? So the people that are like, I I don’t have the time or bandwidth. I really need to use the turnkey solution where I’m not gonna personalize it that much right now and make it my own all the way to the people who are like, we already internally are making all these videos and putting ourselves out there, and we wanna really customize everything. And so I think people are really pleasantly surprised, Susan. Mistake me if I’m wrong. When they come and they look at partnering with us, that that is exactly what we can do.

That we can or they’re you know whether the advisers that they’re working with are really kinda newbies to marketing and they don’t have the time One zero one up to graduate level.

Yep.

Yep. And then it so it allows everyone to be consistent. Because what you don’t wanna do, if you’re listening to this, is build a program that’s setting people up to feel like they’re failing right out of the gate because they can’t hit those milestones of Yep. Doing whatever it is that they need to do.

We want them to feel successful. Yeah. From a behavioral psychology standpoint, I think in marketing, like, one of the things that I really try to coach people on is just get it out there. Right?

Be consistent.

When you if you don’t look back at your first iteration of your first video or your first social post and sort of cringe a little, like, oh, that wasn’t that great, then you waited too long.

Just the last one I did. No. Right.

It’s a little iffy about the first version.

So, Sam, you’re so right. And, you know, something that we do specifically on this to your point on consistency is when we’re we we the the engine that we’ve built is called Pathfinder. So when we onboard advisors into Pathfinder, we help them go through the FMG content and identify, like, this is something that connects with me. This resonates with my client experience and my brand, and you can, you know, simply subscribe into it.

So now you’ve kind of checked the box. Like, I know that content is gonna be going out. And then we’re always creating just as a baseline our market commentary from our chief investment officer as well as our commentary from our chief behavioral officer. So you’ve got the FMG evergreen content.

You’ve got, you know, timely market commentary.

You have content from our chief behavioral officer really on the human side of money. And so at a very low lift, you now have pulled out of the FMG library something that really speaks to the adviser and that they feel their clients will really benefit from. And then these two other automated campaigns that you can just set it and forget it. And then you can start, you know, layering the custom content, and you build from there. It is the I think one of the best pieces of advice, and I think one of you gave it to me, is, like, you don’t have to be an expert on day one. Like, this is wading into the water very, very gradually and getting your feet wet and becoming comfortable with it.

Yeah. And I think, you know, not everybody probably even knows how the FMG platform works for enterprises.

So I think one of the challenges that enterprises have is how to scale marketing support. You have lots of different advisers. As Sam said, they’re at different stages of sort of their marketing expertise and comfort. You wanna build coaching around something, but you’re you can’t customize marketing strategies for every one of your advisers.

So what our platform does is enable as Shannon said, it enables you to have a marketing automation platform that you can private label. So Shannon and RFG, they call theirs pathfinder. You create a brand around it, a strategy, and a philosophy of marketing around it, and then you can put your own content on the platform to enable advisors to distribute it as is or to edit it and then complement it with the FMG library so you’re not completely dependent on your own writers for everything. So that’s just a little bit of background, but tell us how it’s worked and maybe some success stories to help the audience kind of envision, you know, how you know, when you rolled it out, what was the reaction and maybe, you know, what were some early adopters, you know, feedback?

So it’s, here’s what I will say, and I think this is, like, fundamental setting the table, is that we’re in a in a market environment right now. You know, I was just at the Tiburon conference a week ago, and they were sharing the organic growth numbers in our industry for twenty twenty four.

Not good.

One point four percent. Like, it’s going the opposite direction that we would expect it to be going considering and I think we all agree on this. We are in a bull market for advice. There are more people who are seeking advice.

There is a tremendous amount of value that advisers bring to the table of being a financial life coach. So we’ve got this organic growth, you know, problem that the industry is is trying to solve. So, you know, we recognize that we wanna help our advisers grow double digits organically, and that is a focus of our resources. So as we were thinking about designing a marketing program with FMG, creating this chassis, being able to roll this out to our advisors.

We had in our minds, out of the gate, we wanna support organic growth. Where are the biggest hurdles to that? So here’s where I’m just gonna walk through why I think we’re in a one point, you know, six percent organic growth environment, is that when you look across the board, the majority of advisers are spending maybe one percent of revenue on marketing.

And most of that is in this very kind of ad hoc way. They’re putting into the bucket around marketing. Like, I’m meeting with a COI.

I might be doing a tie in event. But it’s not it exactly. It’s not an intentional strategy. So you’ve got low single digit organic growth. You have the majority of advisers not investing in you know, high growth company is gonna spend eight to twelve percent of revenue on marketing growth services. So there’s just a big gap there.

So when when we talk to our advisers and they’re they wanna grow organically by double digits, They had the same problems that I think probably all the advisors on this call have, which is do it for me. How do I invest in this? Where do I invest in this? What can I do?

So So we wanted to wait and very, very slowly with them. So we built the underlying chassis. We have the tools to be able to do the custom content. And then we started with just some some frequently asked requests that we had from advisers.

The very first one was about events. Like, can I do a better way of promoting my event, following up from my event, capturing feedback from that event, celebrating it with clients and prospects that might not have been there? And that to me, when you say that, that seems so obvious.

But it’s But complicate I mean, it’s it’s But it’s complicated.

Easy. It’s, yeah, it’s it’s hard without technology.

So how The percentage of advisers that are hosting successful events as a prospecting tool is incredibly low, yet we know it’s one of the best ways for lead generation.

And digital is such a great way to do it because you can repurpose them. I mean, obviously, in person, they both work for different purposes. Free time.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, because, ultimately, like, what is an event? People connect with people. Like, they they can feel it very tangibly.

So we’re like, alright. Let’s let’s start just to helping our advisers and teaching our advisers how to have a more systematic approach to event planning and follow-up. So that was kind of one of the first toolkits that we bought. Then that that we built.

Then we have our female focused recruiting, and prospecting initiative, Strong Her Money, which is designed to empower women to live financially fearless. So we support our advisors to have intentional conversations with their female clients to build bridges to the next generation, and then also use it as a prospecting tool to really capture those assets that are in motion as a result of death or divorce or, you know, just show up in a way that makes sense to be able to speak authentically to their female clients. So we created a toolkit around women in finance. And this is campaigns that are are women you know, not women in finance.

We call it women in finance. But this is these are campaigns for stronger money. So you’re looking at what are the drip marketing campaigns that you can just Yeah.

Show And I have a question too that I you.

I hear you.

Would be so helpful for everyone listening is, like, when you talk about, like, a email drip campaign. Yeah. Can you give us, like, very specific, like, how if somebody’s like, yes. I wanna do that.

How often are those emails going in, and do they just set it up once and it just is automatically sent out to that list and they don’t need to, like, keep going in and and doing it? It. Right? Like, they they activate the list.

They activate the campaign and Okay.

So that’s a great question. And let’s take a really, like, easy example that every adviser does, onboarding a new client.

So a drip marketing campaign associated with onboarding a new client is you just go to your whiteboard and you think, how do I wanna communicate with this client when they’re coming in the door? So best practice for our advisors, record a video, introduce yourself, introduce your team. So that’s email number one. We’re excited to meet you know, we’re excited to serve you. This is our team. This is who we are. So that email, every time you onboard a new client, that’s the first email that goes out.

The next email and this is, you know, adviser to adviser specific. Everybody has their own way that they like to onboard clients and serve clients, but I’m just gonna give a a an example here of one that we use.

All be customized in Exactly. It can all be customized. Clear.

So you do that first one. You’ve recorded this video one time. This is me. This is our team.

We’re really excited to work with you. And the beautiful thing about TikTok is this doesn’t mean you have to, like, hire a production studio and do hair and makeup and, like, it’s gotta be this, like, razzle dazzle. Like, the clients just when they see you on video, they feel like they’ve met with you in person, and you have a higher click through and open rate with video. So I’m here.

I’m holding you know, I got my phone set up in my office. We’re excited you’re here, you know, blah blah blah. Send out that video. The next one is we schedule all of our client meetings via bookings, Microsoft bookings.

Here’s how you use the scheduling link. This is how you get in touch with us. So that’s email number two. Email number three.

This is our calendar of client events for the rest of the year. We can’t wait to be with you. We’ve got our summer barbecue. We’ve got our holiday party and toy drive, and then we’re gonna do x y z.

So now every time you onboard a client, you they’re just opted in to this this drip marketing campaign journey.

And you can do that for prospects.

You can do that for segments. So the female clients in your book, the wine lovers in your book, the dog owners in your book. And all you’re doing is you’re going to your whiteboard and you’re asking yourself, if I was gonna sit down at my computer, if I had all the time in the world, and I was gonna sit down at my computer, and I was gonna send a personalized email to let this client or prospect know that I was thinking about them, what would I like it to say?

And then that’s your that that and that’s the brainstorming session. I want this. I want this. I want this.

Okay. Yeah. And then you build it in in Pathfinder, and now you subscribe your clients and prospects to it, and you set it and forget it. And you don’t worry about it again.

Yeah. And what you know, again, to to hit on one of the major challenges, certainly, I know I had when I was trying to build a program was the scaling part and the fact that many advisers don’t know where to start and don’t even want to take that first pass. And so I thought what would be magical is to provide them with ninety percent of what they need and let them customize it. So, I know at at Ozaic, they have they’ve private labeled, the FMG platform. It’s called my CMO.

And there’s a new client onboarding campaign in their library just like yours, and everybody can just tweak it. It probably work I mean, a lot of advisers just use it as is. But one of the main strategies when you’re building an adviser marketing program is, one, you need the tech to enable you to scale the distribution, and you need it to make it easy for advisers to execute, and you need it to be easy from a compliance standpoint. So Right.

That’s really some of the three main things that I think FMG helps enterprises do is content library on a marketing automation platform enables you to put your own content, advisors can access, and then it automatically routes your compliance, making that even an extra benefit. But taking this new client onboarding campaign as an example, any enterprise that’s interested in creating a scalable program can decide what content do they wanna develop and put on the platform that advisors can use as is for some that wanna just take the easy way or see it as ninety percent and edit a little or some middle see it as fifty percent and edit completely.

So talk about your strategy for developing that content library. Because I think everybody on this call is thinking, okay. I probably many don’t have a big team. Yeah.

They’re, you know, probably, like, feel a little overwhelmed with that concept. So how did you did you start slow? Did you need to hire somebody? What was your content library strategy?

So we have made a big investment in this. Like, I will, you know, just acknowledge what it is.

Unfortunately, marketing has a tremendous, I think, ROI in driving organic growth for an adviser, helping them convert prospects, helping them helping them deepen those client relationships.

But it is not something that you can have the mindset of, I’m just gonna, you know, I’m gonna invest one percent of revenue. It has to become a priority. You can’t simultaneously say, I wanna drive organic growth, but I’m not willing to make the investment. As a platform company that prioritizes independence and helping advisors build enterprise value, the single biggest factor that is driving enterprise value is what is your organic growth.

So for us to make a significant investment in both the team as well as the technology to support our advisors to do that, it was worth doing. So it is you know, everybody’s gotta find their way on how do I feel about organic growth? Is it important to me? Do I wanna amplify my authentic brand value proposition both to my clients and to my prospects and take advantage of what I think are some very exciting digital tools and a way to build that trust equity in your prospects with your prospects and in your clients more than just meeting with them face to face or receiving that COI.

So we did build a whole team that wraps around and delivers our marketing growth services.

We took it one step further. So for us, we help advisers when they join RFG.

We, out of the gate, build their entire brand. So their their DBA brand, their website, their my why videos, their social media posts, so that when they go live and they stand up in independence and they’re in front of their clients and in front of those prospects, it looks like not only does it look like they’ve been in business for a long time and they they feel trusted and they feel like there’s longevity there, But immediately that they have that credibility in place of you are reflecting in those eight seconds that I am looking at your social media posts or your website or your video. You are reflecting the trust and integrity that I already have in you and why I’ve selected you as my adviser. So building that that profile and that experience upfront.

And then on the back end, we build marketing growth plans for our advisers that are customized and aligned to the way they wanna grow. So some advisers wanna grow through education and educational seminars and events. Some advisors wanna grow through podcasting and digital media. Some advisors wanna have a very robust SEO strategy, a COI strategy. So it ends up like, mark there is no shortcut. I think the biggest short that you can have is a powerful chassis and platform mark marketing automation platform like FMG.

And then you invest on top of that to be able to customize the experience for your firm aligned with how you wanna deliver that experience to your clients and how much you want to kind of buck the trend in the industry and and generate double digit growth.

Yeah. It’s actually about yeah. No. Go ahead, Susan.

I was just gonna say for anybody everybody that’s on the call, we have developed an enterprise marketing guide or playbook, an enterprise marketing playbook, which will take you through the whole process that Shannon is outlining, which talks about, you know, how do you choose the right platform for your objectives, but also what is the right staffing model given your objectives? What is the right budget? How do you create a cost benefit analysis that you can use to internally sell this investment? Because it will be some investment.

And then a a business case template that you can use because the other thing is always, you know, taking it either to your c team or your board to get the investment and then also taking you through best practices that we’ve seen for rolling it out, driving adoption, and measuring success. So Shannon’s talked about a lot of those steps.

And some of you know, so Shannon, they’ve done an a plus plus plus job, and they’ve really invested in wrapping services and coaching around the platform.

But there is just like the advisers can go from one on one to, you know, grad graduate school, we have enterprises at various sizes that, you know, can pivot on this. They can honestly do a program with one person, you know, developing content all the way to providing much more robust services. And it all depends really on, you know, where you want this to fit in your value proposition and how important it is and so on. And a lot of firms will start one place and then grow from there. So back to, like I know advisors and firms love to hear case studies. So, Shannon, can you give us an example?

Actually, before you do that, Susan, why don’t we just do a quick poll because I think this is a a good time to ask Aubrey if you can put it up. If you’d like to learn more about how we at F and G specifically, if you’re in charge of growth and you’re in charge of getting marketing tools in the hands of your advisers and it’s something you’re struggling with and you’d love to know how we can help you design a scalable program like RFG has built, or, you know, just just help you with your marketing.

Let us know. And if you check yes, please, we’ll see that, and we’ll be able to get in touch with you. Everyone will get the playbook regardless. So, Susan has a lot of insider secrets from her years of building these programs that she shared in this playbook, which is really helpful, like you said, even templates of taking it to the c team and getting, you know, some scripting for getting it approved with budget, which I find to be one of the most challenging parts.

So yes. I’m sorry. So, let us know. But, yes, go back to your question.

Well, actually, I’m gonna, pivot because, Shannon, I’m guessing you also had to, you know, create budget for this.

Oh, yeah.

And I’m guessing the budget started at x, and then you have to show a little bit of return, and then you can ask for y. Maybe take us through not the numbers, but what what were sort of the mandatory investments that you made out of the gate in terms of staffing and platform, and where have you grown since then?

It’s, you know, it’s like anything. I think you’re a hundred percent right. You you start where you are. You take an audit of how integrated are we on the technology side.

Because one I think one of the biggest mistakes that firms make is thinking that marketing can be the sidecar that’s running over here without it being integrated into the rest of their ecosystem. And that becomes just such a significant point of friction for advisers. FMG does a great job of this. So, you know, they worked with us to be able to integrate this into our tech ecosystem, into our Salesforce.

Because, otherwise, if you’re saying, alright. You gotta log out and you gotta log in and go to this different CRM and do these things. Like, it’s just it’s too overwhelming for advisors. So I think the first step is really that audit of where are we in our tech ecosystem, what CRM are we using, what are our workflows, and how does marketing really supplement that and then provide this additional incredibly important, you know, textural layer of deepening that client experience, driving that client retention, driving that organic growth number, and and helping firms ultimately retain the clients and assets that they have and then capture the assets, that are in motion, whether it’s from the generational wealth transfer prospecting, you know, life events that are unlocking that opportunity.

So this really was you know, this has been a multiyear endeavor.

So when we started, it was, you know, a tech you know, we’ve built a fully integrated tech ecosystem. So that for us was table stakes out of the gate. And then once that was set, we layered on top of it and went through this very extensive due diligence process to find a marketing automation. I call it a chassis, a marketing chassis, in order to build the custom content on top. So we’ve grown up and grown our skill set alongside, like, FMG has been continuously innovating. And what you know, I wanna give one example of something that we’ve done that’s been really successful.

And then part of where this is headed and this is why marketing is not a, like, static state.

This is always evolving. This is the technology is evolving. The messaging is evolving. Your level of confidence and comfort, video invitation, like, that stuff that you work up to over the series of years.

But we’re at a really and I would I think it’s important for you guys because you’re doing a lot on this front. We’re at a very exciting moment because AI is about to pretty dramatically enhance everything that’s happening in marketing from content creation, video creation, graphics, the ability to engage in LinkedIn, the ability to have more client customization, segmentation, that is all, like, the very tip of the spear of some of the most exciting innovation that I think our industry is ever gonna experience.

Yeah. And, actually, Sam, I don’t know. Can we do can we pull up some of the stuff that we’re rolling out? Are you sure? So, you know, to to Shannon’s point, you know, when you’re determining which type of program you want to build, and they’re really as I said, there’s lots of different flavors. You’re really choosing between whether you want to do a selling agreement with someone like an FMG where you’re offering a discount on behalf of your advisers, you negotiate a discount, and you’re and you’re creating maybe some coaching and some support around using a platform. That’s sort of the minimum that has the least investment.

Next step up is is private labeling it, creating your own brand, and adding some of your own content.

And that can be as little as a market commentary from your, you know, chief economist or your chief investment officer to all the way to potentially doing, you know, email drip sequences, COI content, social media content, event content. And so it really just scales from there, and you staff according to how much support you wanna provide.

AI is going to make this so much easier. And what I love about AI is it enables you to scale your content so that you’re writing let’s say you write that, you know, new client onboarding campaign, an adviser can apply their voice print through AI to customize it. So every one of your advisers can be using the same content, but using AI to personalize it. So, Sam, do you wanna take them through this demo?

Yeah. So, within FMG, we have a couple different tools that, we’re very excited about. So this one is one where within the email platform, you can see how it got there. I just clicked email and then send email.

And we have this tool, this AI content builder called First Draft. So you can put in here, you know, what is the purpose of the email. Is it to build relationships? Is it to follow-up with the client, to get them to schedule something?

But, you know, for our purposes here, we’re talking a lot about content and educating people as a way to market to them. And then we have these different types of writing styles. So we’ve kind of preloaded them based on the biggest buckets we see advisors adopting in terms of their personality. Right?

Everything from the custodian. I’m I’m really just, you know, the reliable professional you can count on, very professional, maybe a little bit more buttoned up, all the way to, you know, somebody who’s got some folksy wisdom, maybe tell some dad jokes.

We’ve got different different personalities in here. So and you could play around with them, obviously, but you can pick, you know, one that you think might fit your personality, enter in your prompt. And we do know, right, if anyone here, and, actually, I would love to know in the chat. Tell us in the chat. Do you feel like you’re pretty you’ve gotten better with using prompts with AI, and how often are you using it to help you with writing? Because I know I don’t know about you, Shannon.

Susan and I use it all the time to help us All the time.

With all different types of things. Right? Coming up with ideas, whether it’s an email campaign or event series, whatever.

But then so you put the product like, the name of this being first draft because that is exactly the way we want everybody to think about AI, and that’s why we built this in the platform.

Not to be the final draft, the first draft.

Okay. This is not live yet. This is a preview, but it’s called preview.

Yes. You should definitely mention that. If if people are looking for it in their Yeah.

Thing. They’re like, where is that? I think, hoping to roll it out in q two.

Are we in q two? We are in q two. So we’ve still got it. Yeah. By the end of q two.

The end of q two.

Yes. Thank you.

Okay. And, actually, I don’t know I should know this. If you have to put in here, I’m a financial adviser. I think our AI system was built assuming everyone is a financial adviser.

So. So used to writing that that, I’m gonna put that. So I I made the prompt not detailed. Right?

So you want your prompts to be as detailed as possible, in order for them to be to be better. But let’s just say I read this, and I’m like, yeah. It’s pretty good, but just like you use any other AI tool. Right?

You can just ask it to rephrase it.

You can ask it to make it shorter.

Good. And FYI, Sam has helped train all of our AI, so it is definitely guided by the best in the business.

And what you can see here is we’ve already got the holds for where the CRM will input your client data. So, you know, pull in their name, their contact information, your name, all of that good stuff. But you can rephrase it. You can add emojis.

You can change the writing style, to, you know We’re using. Little different, different, type of so this one now has Thanksgiving rolls around. Right? It’s it’s just a completely different phrase.

And you can even say make it more professional, make it more, folksy, whatever you want. And so what’s great about this, though, is that once you have, you know, your your message, you can also, give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down so you’re training it in your particular voice as Susan mentioned, and it will remember that. So as time goes on, it is just gonna keep getting better at sounding like you right out of the gate. So this is just one of the AI tools we have, that the individual advisers who are logging into the platform can use.

We also have some new tools coming out for enterprises as well that incorporate AI to make their jobs easier as well. I don’t know how much we wanna talk about those, Susan.

I think I mean, I I think first draft is something that also in enterprises, we think about one of the one of the, I think, barriers to, you know, enterprises delivering a marketing platform is content development.

And, you know, feeling like, oh my gosh, we’ll never be able to develop enough content. This will enable a very, you know, lean marketing team within your firm to develop content that multiple advisers can use and personalize.

So I think this is just game changing Yeah.

Both for the enterprise and firm, but also for the adviser. Then what happens is depending on your brand strategy at your firm so Shannon supports independent advisers who use their own brand and continue to build their own brand. There are other firms we work with where there’s a master brand, and all of the advisors are using the master brand. It works both ways.

Every advisor creates their template, which is sort of their branding for their email, links their social sites, links a website if they’ve got their website, and that branding can be determined by the enterprise, whether they’re flexible and it can be whatever the individual adviser or DBA uses or whether it’s the master. And then this email goes out from that adviser, and it automatically routes through compliance because I’m sure there’s somebody on here saying, well, what about compliance? Yeah. It just routes through compliance like any other email would, and we have actually AI software that is scanning it to make sure that it’s compliant and flagging anything that might be an issues, which makes compliance’s life even easier.

And talk about how compliance has played into this, Shannon. Making things easy from a compliance standpoint for marketing, I think, is as powerful as almost anything.

It is absolutely critical. And I’m so glad you all just shared that AI tool first draft because I think that it’s almost looking in the rearview mirror to talk about the cost of building marketing teams and what the investment that we’ve made in the last couple years is gonna look very different from the investment in the future. Like, there’s just gonna be you can take a team. You can give them so many more resources with AI, and you’re able to have that much more throughput, that much more creative, you know, firepower.

So it’s a situation, you know, to Susan’s point, whether you’ve got one dedicated marketing resource or a team of fifteen supporting marketing, you’re gonna be able to leverage that in a very, very powerful way. And that’s we are I mean, we are at the starting gate of what we’re gonna be able to do here. Okay. So compliance.

This is one of my favorites because I think it’s a great the the single greatest says that, Shannon.

No one’s It can be a great differentiator.

If you make that it is the single greatest cop out for why I can’t do marketing.

Yeah.

Totally. Clients won’t let me. And here’s why. No adviser should be wanting to talk to their client about their most recent stock picks, promising them any kind of future performance, doing anything in any kind of marketing context that is highly technical, and that’s where compliance has a heart attack. It is not where advisors need to be focusing their creative and marketing energy. People connect with people. Tell me you are and show me that you are authentic brand value proposition.

That means you’re telling stories. You’re sharing about your experiences.

You’re you’re talking about your favorite lasagna recipe or the run that you had in Central Park, and it inspired you to share a quote that your grandfather had told you when you were eight years old. That is what people want to hear from their adviser, and compliance is that is more than within the very bright lines of compliance. So the integration with compliance and having those tools and leveraging some AI tools there was part of that, like, table stakes for us. If it isn’t integrated into our CRM, if we aren’t able to build custom video and custom content on top of it, if we can’t have a streamlined workflow for our compliance, it it didn’t make it to the final cut.

These are some of the key reasons why we partnered with FMG. Compliance has got to be able to process through a high volume amount of marketing materials, especially at a firm like RFG, where our advisors are leaning in to their authentic brand value proposition and doing a lot in a very highly customized way. You can’t be coloring outside those lines. So compliance won’t let me, is just either the firm the enterprise level firm is being lazy and trying to micromanage down to the lowest common denominator and stifling that that connection with the clients as well as that entrepreneurial spirit, or the advisor is being lazy and defaulting to, like, my go to and comfort zone is talking about technicalities in the market.

And I will tell you, every single client feels the same way. Why would I pay you if I’m expected to be the expert in the financial markets?

Yeah. I know. I have debated. I’ve I can’t count the number of times I’ve talked to advisers.

They they love a weekly market commentary. It’s one of you know, it’s a popular, popular piece. I’ve tried so many times. I feel like you can stop sending that.

Like, it’s just reminding the client to look at the market, and they you want them just to trust. You know, they’ve delegated to you. They they want you to do that for them, and they’d really love to hear about, like, you know, right down here on this page, financial scams for seniors to avoid. Right.

That that they’ll read. That’s a forward.

Like, look at what is the best selling, you know, personal finance book of all time or at least in recent memory is Morgan Housel’s the psychology of money. It’s just a book full of stories about people’s personal experiences.

That’s right.

So a hundred a hundred percent. In the interest of time, ladies, because I’m in charge of keeping everyone on track here, we only have a few minutes left. And I know we’ve given away a ton of stories ourselves, Shannon, of how you guys have really built this program to support your advisers.

Susan, I don’t know what it if there’s anything that we didn’t get to cover that you wanna make sure that we end on, or anything you wanna show from FMG, but we should do that now if there is.

I, you know, I just I’m thinking about for most of the people that are on this call, if they’re thinking about building this scalable program, and there is an investment as Shannon says. And then, of course, you’re thinking ROI. Like, I’ve gotta show that it works. Shannon, if you could just speak really specifically about how do you show that it works. I know I used year over year revenue growth of those that were engaged, and I defined what I’ve meant by engaged versus those that weren’t. And I and I saw tremendous variation between the growth of engaged versus the growth of not. How do you measure the success of the program?

You have to be data driven as it relates to marketing because the numbers can get too large, too quickly to not have that out of the gate. I think one of the most helpful things and this is if I was gonna say some advice that I’ve learned the hard way, is that identifying that framework upfront Yep. Of how are we going to evaluate that ROI, you know, or some of this like, the benefit of having this conversation today is everything has come so much, you know, that so much farther along than it was when we started building Pathfinder, you know, now five years ago.

So we have the benefit of, like, you all have taken this platform to a whole new level. But understanding what is that framework for us, we are tracking at, you know, at a at a more micro level because we’re trying to help our advisers learn from each other. So when you look at and and revenue growth is a great one. We’re looking at organic growth.

So that is one of our key, you know, key metrics is looking at organic growth and then dissecting it even further to identify and isolate what is translating into the highest growth. Is it coming from events? Is it coming from educational seminars? Is it coming from podcasting? Is it coming from a combination of these different things? So that is and the the thing about it, we have one of our cultural attributes is to iterate to excellence, and that just means having a mindset that there this is not carving in stone. There is no finish line.

There is no, like, you know, at last, and we’re done, and it’s perfect.

Marketing is all about iterating to excellence and having that adaptive mindset around what is working now, what is in what is working and driving organic growth is also contingent on what is fueling the advisers to feel as if they’re thriving.

You can’t enjoy marketing if you’re doing something you hate. Like, if you absolutely hate educating, you’re gonna not be successful running an educational workshop series. If you and your heart of hearts are called to educate, I will tell you that is one of the most powerful ways that you can drive organic growth well north of twenty percent. But you’ve gotta look in the mirror and say, does that give me energy?

Does that not? So that that calculus around what is the investment has to be very data driven in terms of either revenue growth, organic growth. You’re measuring it. You’re measuring each of those different channels that you’re leveraging to identify what is working is what is not and then optimizing towards that.

And then you just have to recognize that so much of this is is a work in progress.

It’s it is not as straightforward as implementing, as a a piece of financial planning software or AI tools for estate planning or AI tools for note taking. Like, marketing has much greater depth and nuance to it. But when it is harnessed, it is the x factor to be able to drive organic growth, which is the number one driver of an adviser’s enterprise value. So it’s worth it if that is ultimately your your goal. If your goal is to create a firm that has enterprise value embedded in it, then you need to have a thoughtful and well executed marketing plan to help you, to help you really unlock that that that future valuation.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. You have, like, just a wealth. I’m sure everybody would love to pick your brain. But, thank you for sharing that, and we love working with you.

And we’ll continue to watch RFG thrive, under your leadership and, obviously, with marketing being a big part of your value proposition. I’m I know that’s why you are successful, and everybody can see just the passion behind it. It is, there are a lot of ways to build an enterprise marketing program. And I think if everybody takes away, we have some takeaways from Courtney.

Thank you so much. That was amazing. To write that up, we are going to send out an email that summarizes some of the key takeaways, and we will share the enterprise guide. And I know I, as well as Sam and the FMG team, would love to talk to anybody that just wants to pick our brain about ways that we could do, a program that would fit your goals, which we know are unique as all of us.

So anything anything to add, Sam, or we let everybody go? No.

I would just say that, yes, thank you to everybody who joined. And, one of the last things Shannon mentioned was, you know, having that data. And I think one of the great things is that we give you the data both at the enterprise level and the individual level because it really can be used to, motivate the advisers to adopt the marketing. So when they see that their peers are using it and getting x number, forty percent open rate on this campaign and their per the post that they did that had a personal element brought in two new leads.

You know? The data doesn’t lie, and it gets people snowball. Totally. Exactly. So we do provide you with both the enterprise and individual data, which is really, really fantastic when you’re, trying to get adoption going.

So thank you to everybody. We’d love to talk with you. I hope everyone enjoys the start of the weekend tomorrow, and talk to you ladies soon.

Thanks.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Everybody.