For small RIAs with limited resources, how to market your services can be a daunting task. Where do you begin? How do you get prospective clients to read your content? For small businesses, knowing where and how to start on a tight budget creates obvious obstacles. But there are many things you can do to kickstart your marketing efforts that will deliver the results you want.
On this Elementality, Abby talks with Jeff Morgan, Head of Marketing at Elements, about how to start building an audience of prospective clients on a minimal budget. Choosing a channel—email, podcasting, or social media—where you can concentrate your content creation efforts is critical. And Jeff offers advice on how to develop a low- or no-cost strategy for each.
Podcast Transcript
Jeff Morgan:
And if you think of this as like a marketing funnel, I’m sure everybody’s heard about that before, but like the top of the funnel is awareness. People can’t engage in your content, they can’t like your content, you can’t develop a relationship with anybody unless they’re aware that you exist, right?
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
And if you think of this as like a marketing funnel, I’m sure everybody’s heard about that before, but like the top of the funnel is awareness. People can’t engage in your content, they can’t like your content, you can’t develop a relationship with anybody unless they’re aware that you exist, right?
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
So what we’re talking about today is like, how do you build awareness of your content, of your channel or your email list or your podcast on a $0 budget. That’s really what we’re talking about here now. If you’ve got money to spend…
Abby Morton:
That’s a whole other episode.
Jeff Morgan:
That’s another episode. There’s lots of ways that you can accelerate the process of building an audience if you’ve got a budget.
Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode, we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use elements to grow their business, and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Abby Morton:
: Welcome to Elementality, everyone. I’m your host today, Abby Morton here with Jeff Marketing Morgan. We’re gonna start calling you that. I like it. Is that okay?
[laughter]
Jeff Morgan:
Sure. I don’t know if that’s the most exciting nickname I’ve ever had, but I’ll take it.
Abby Morton:
It’s what everyone knows you as though. It’s like, your thing, is you’re the marketing guy, so it totally works. Whenever I talk to my husband about my co-workers, everyone’s like, Jeff from marketing, this person from this, this person from that, this guy from sales. Anyway, that’s always just kind of funny. You gotta give each other context, right? It’s important.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. I’ll be the marketing guy. I like it.
Abby Morton:
So today we’re gonna talk a little bit more about this idea of building an audience. It’s important to understand what to say, and we hit on that on a previous topic… Sorry, a previous episode. We talked about fire content that’s like knowing what to say, making for sure that it’s relevant and insightful to the audience. Go back and listen to that episode because it’s a really great one. We’ll try to put it in the show notes for you. So that’s about building an audience. And so today we wanted to come to talk to you about how do you get followers, right? How do you make for sure that the audience and the content that you’re putting out, people are resonating with, they’re following, they’re coming back to see you over and over and over again. So how would you kind of start this idea and this topic, Jeff, of how do you build followers?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, last time we talked about what to say, and that’s really important. It’s like real… Equally important to today’s topic, which is how do you get people to actually listen, right? [chuckle] So if you are in the middle of the forest and you teach a great lesson or you share some really fire content and no one’s there to hear it, like it doesn’t make any impact at all. And so today, really I think what we want to talk about is like, how do you actually get people to start listening and how do you get that audience to grow and get more and more people over time to listen, so that you can build relationships at scale with as many people as possible?
Abby Morton:
Well, and this is important because we’ve seen advisors who create really, really great content and it’s amazing, but yet no one is following them, right? Like, no one’s coming back to seeing what they’re doing over and over again, which then isn’t really converting into paying clients. And so the whole point of making sure people follow you and are listening to what you’re saying is that ultimately they’re becoming your clients. Like, that’s kind of the gist of the whole idea here, right?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. And I think that this topic is really for the people that have a really small audience or no audience at all today, and that they want to get that flywheel going. Because once you get a 1000 followers or 2000 followers depending on the channel that we’re talking about, then it starts to grow organically. But in the beginning you need that spark. You need something to get the initial audience going, so that you have somebody to talk to. And so you’re not just wasting away in the forest, right?
Abby Morton:
In no man’s land.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, exactly. And it can be really frustrating ’cause you put a lot of time and effort into creating great content, and your mom and sister and dog listen, and that’s it. And so you really… How do you expand beyond them is a really core question to how to make marketing, especially on a small budget work.
Abby Morton:
Okay. So great. So yeah. So then where do you start? Honestly, I’m a little oblivious here. Good thing we have you to kind of tell us what to do.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, the first thing that I would do, I think again, this goes back to the whole idea of niching down. Like, first we need to know who it is that we’re trying to talk to. Who do we want in our audience? One of the things that I’ve recently seen with an advisor is that they had this viral moment where something crazy happened to them and they posted the video and a series of videos online on Instagram, I think it was specifically about this incident, and like tied it into like financial planning, which was really kind of an ingenious idea. And they had like a million people see one of the posts or some crazy viral moment.
Abby Morton:
Oh cool. Yeah. That’s how you get famous, right? Is having a viral moment, right?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. The trouble was though that the people that were following him were not his target audience.
Abby Morton:
Wow.
Jeff Morgan:
So he got famous with the wrong people and it didn’t really help him to get new clients because he had that moment, and the rest of his content that he normally produces didn’t really resonate with that audience and so they didn’t stick around. They didn’t follow him.
Abby Morton:
So how do you know all this though? Like, how do you know he wasn’t targeting the right audience? Like, that seems like something really hard to tell on Instagram. You have a million people watch your video, but how do you know those aren’t your people?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, you might. There’s gonna be some percentage of those that are your people, but given the niche that he was working with, there was no way that those were all his people. There aren’t a million of them. So like, if you’re targeting dentists, for example, there’s 300… Roughly 300,000 dentists in the United States, and if you get or have a viral moment and like 2 million people watch, you know that the grand majority of those people are not.
Abby Morton:
Okay. So really you’re just saying like the math doesn’t really work out. Hopefully within your niche, and…
Jeff Morgan:
Well, and they didn’t stay. The biggest reason that that they weren’t his target audience is because he continued to share his normal content after that and they didn’t stick around. They didn’t follow him. They’re not… He didn’t really increase the number of followers that continually watch his organic content. And so we know just based on that, that it didn’t really have a lasting impact to have that viral moment. So the point though that I’m trying to make there is just that you want to make sure you’re talking to the right people. That goes back to our previous conversation about fire content. It needs to be relevant to your audience. So let just make sure that you are picking a channel, and by channel, we mean like the different ways that you can like distribute your content.
Jeff Morgan:
So it could be podcasting, it could be social media, it could be email, like those are kind of like your three big ones. It could be a blog. So what I would suggest is to pick one of those, whichever one you feel most comfortable with and then develop a strategy around it. So let’s just talk about each one and how I’d get going. So if it’s email, what you want to do is seed your audience by going out and buying a list. So it’s pretty easy to buy a list if you know who your audience is. If you don’t, then it’s hard. So if your audience is really broad, like just millennials, then you can search online for list of millennials, list of millennial email addresses, and you are going to get nothing. Right? Or if you do find a list, it’s gonna be really low quality. But if you go out and search for, I want a list of dentists, you’ll find that there’s lots of people that have built businesses around collecting dentists email addresses.
Abby Morton:
So I literally just Google, like, “I want to buy a list.” Like, maybe that’s how I could even pick my niche, is like, what list could I potentially buy? Like, dentists, I’m sure there’s doctors and physicians, maybe even more specifically vets, but do you have off the top of your head some other lists of things that you’ve looked into buying? I’m putting you on the spot here. Maybe you don’t.
Jeff Morgan:
Well, yeah, the best way to know if… Or a way to know if you’re onto something with your niches, if you can buy a list for it by searching for one. So it could be medical professionals, it could be any profession really. It could be computer scientists, it could be lawyers, it could be what I don’t know, dog groomers. It could be…
Abby Morton:
I like that. Dog groomers. It’s a good… It’s a new one.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. If they’re organized enough and they have enough common characteristics, someone else has tried to monetize this audience in the past by building lists, having conferences, professional associations all built around that. So financial advisors, for example, is another good niche, because you have conferences, you have professional associations, you have designations, you have ways to identify who a financial advisor is. And so you can search, I want a list of financial advisors. And guess what, there’s like a hundred different companies selling lists of financial advisors out there. And so that’s just a great way to get…
Abby Morton:
That’s how we found each of you, Jeff.
Jeff Morgan:
Yes. That’s how you’re…
Abby Morton:
Bought a list.
[laughter]
Jeff Morgan:
That’s how you’re listening to this today. So find a way to buy a list. When you’re buying that list, you want to make sure that you’re getting email addresses and that the more high quality lists are going to give you a guarantee on the delivery rate of the emails when you send them. So make sure you get a guarantee on the delivery of the email when you send out the first one or two emails that should be over a certain threshold. And you should only pay for people where the email gets delivered. So that’s the key thing when you’re like evaluating who to buy the lists from.
Abby Morton:
That’s helpful.
Jeff Morgan:
And you probably also want to ask them like, how did you collect this information? And when it comes to clients and buying lists, you… Emailing allows you to send emails to as many people as you want, but there are laws like CAN-SPAM laws that are all about your requirement to make it possible for them to opt out of communications. So you can send as many emails as you want, but you have to make sure there’s an unsubscribe link in the email.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
And you have to honor that, or otherwise you’re breaking the law.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
But if you’re buying phone numbers and doing outbound calling to that list, then there’s different rules for consumers than there are for businesses. So that’s another interesting reason why it’s good to be targeting business professionals of some kind or a profession, because you can call them without running into laws related to consumer phone calling and texting. So for example, we can text and call dentists like in an outbound program if we want, but if we were to go after millennials that have anything, any profession and we weren’t going after them based on their profession, but based off of just the fact that they’re a consumer, then we couldn’t call them without them opting into that. So just something to keep in mind in the technical side of things.
Abby Morton:
That’s helpful. And tell me like, how many people am I looking for on this list? Like, what is a good list size, and then tell me how much am I paying for this list, typically?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, it’ll depend on how valuable your niche is. The more affluent the niche, the more likely that the list will cost more. And the smaller the group of people, the more likely the list will cost more. So if you’re just buying a random consumer list, you might only pay like 10 cents per email address, ’cause their email address have been scraped from the internet, and they’re not a lot of value to that. But if you’re buying like physicians for example, like maybe even a specific type of physician, like an ophthalmologist, then you could pay anywhere from a dollar to $3 per record that you’re buying. And that’s why it’s important to get those guarantees in place for making sure that each email address that you’re buying is actually valid, and then you can deliver an email to it and you’re not paying like a dollar to $3 per individual when half of them or something or 20… Even the best list vendors, you’re gonna have like 10 to 20% undeliverable emails when you buy a list.
Abby Morton:
Okay. Interesting. All right. So with that then, buying the list helps you just like pick a good audience basically, is what you’re telling us.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Pick a good audience and then have the ability to start communicating with them. So email is a great way to get started because as soon as you have the list, you just need to get yourself an email deployment tool. There’s a lot of them out there. If you’re buying a cold list like that, that isn’t opted in, I would suggest going with a tool that’s specifically designed for cold email. So one example of that is Mailshake. So just search for Mailshake and it’ll come up. And it has all kinds of training and best practices for how to warm up a cold email list and how to make sure that you’re adding value right at the beginning so that people don’t opt out, ’cause as soon as they unsubscribe, you don’t have the permission to communicate with them anymore.
Jeff Morgan:
And so, you wanna be really careful about how you begin the relationship. Just like in our last episode, we talked about this idea of marketing is like dating, and you can’t just go up and ask somebody to marry you in the bar and expect them to say yes. Well, cold email is exactly like that. You need to approach people in a way that makes them feel like they’re not being marketed to. You want to go to them and add a lot of value in the first several communications. Free value, you’re not talking about your services, you’re like delivering something great. Like, Hey, here’s a great podcast episode that I produced or here’s an e-guide, or here’s an article that I wrote, or here’s…
Abby Morton:
And all these things are what’s relevant to the audience, it’s using their language. Again, you really need to go back and listen to that episode ’cause we dropped a lot of great tips in that episode. But again, if they can feel like they’re building trust, feel like they’re getting something out of what they’re consuming, they’re gonna continue to follow, you’re gonna be able to continue to email market to them. And that’s why, like you’re saying, that first couple of emails are so important that it’s all about them. And like you’re inside their head knowing what they really, really need.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. And what I’d suggest for those first few emails as well is to format them in a way that looks like a regular email. So it’s just like a text based email where…
Abby Morton:
Okay. Not like tons of graphics and…
Jeff Morgan:
Not lots of graph… Don’t make…
Abby Morton:
Not like well designed necessarily.
Jeff Morgan:
Remember, you don’t wanna be perceived as a marketer. You want to be perceived as someone who is adding value to their life. And that they want to continue to receive emails from because, hey, this first one, I got something really valuable to me from receiving this email. And the next one I hope I will again. And as you start to build trust, then you can start to be more and more markety, if that makes sense. You can talk more and more about yourself or about the value proposition that you bring to the table, but in the beginning, you want to just be really like… Just like it’s all about them, yeah.
Abby Morton:
Right. Okay. So keeping in mind all about them, building that out, would you say like you just write one email, send it, like what’s the frequency and how do I, do I try to write this cold email sequence back to back to back so it feels like it flows and works together, or do I not even need to put that much thought into it? Can they be like almost standalone emails?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, I’d have like a warmup sequence of emails. It’s like three to six emails that are really well-planned. Like, the first value I’m gonna offer is this and that builds on it with this and this and this. And so after like… And probably delivered on a once a week basis. In the beginning, you don’t want to be too frequent. I think over time as you start to build trust with your email list, then you can start to send a little bit more frequent email, maybe up to like two or three a week, as long as everything that you’re sending is really valuable. And you’re mixing in your calls to action, you’re mixing in ways to advance the relationship with people into your valuable content. So for example, like a dentist advisors, the RIA, that elements was spun out of, we send probably like three or four emails a week. So the first one is promoting our weekly podcast episode, and then we’ll send a webinar invite if they haven’t already registered for that month’s webinar. And we’ll send like a promotional email usually once or about twice a month so. All the things together will add up to like two to three, sometimes four, if they have reminder emails for a webinar or something they registered for.
Abby Morton:
So are those emails like what you would send to a brand new cold list? Or are you feeling like after they’ve started following you, or you feel like they’ve read a couple of your emails, then you’d put them into like, “Here’s my weekly podcast and here’s my monthly webinar?”
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good question. So usually what I would do is I’d start by warming them up with more emails that feel like a one-to-one message. Personalize, “Hi, first name, it’s Abby from Elements, we have this really cool e-guide that I think you might be interested in, take a look,” like really short, really succinct copy.
Abby Morton:
That’s the thing too, is like short and succinct. You would be amazed at how much time Jeff and I spend editing copy ’cause it’s just too long. Like, the shorter, the better.
Jeff Morgan:
Or use like a story format in that email where you’re presenting a problem that the hero of the story, which is your target audience, or your prospective client. And then you describe the problem that they have and try to get in their head, try to be really relevant to what they might be interested in. And then continue on with the story about, that’s why we’re here. We’re here to be a guide in some way, with a tool or education or content or some kind of advice in this problem that you might be having. And then after you’ve kind of described how you’re there to solve the problem, then you can like have a call to action to watch a video or to read the article or to download the e-guide.
Abby Morton:
So, I guess… Sorry, let me take a step back here. We talked about like buying this list and how this would be really helpful, but it also ultimately seems like you’re sending the people in this list to other pieces of content, right? Like, we started out at the beginning, how do we build followers, right? And so it seems to me like you almost need to start first building whatever that podcast or that newsletter or the e-guide. It seems like you need to have content created before you are just marketing to this email list, right?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah.
Abby Morton:
I’m thinking day one that I’m starting my firm. I’m not buying this list and sending a cold email campaign ’cause I need to have value to deliver to them. So I almost need to create that value first before I go buy this list. Is that…
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Yeah. And that goes back to that episode that we keep referencing. If you go back to the fire content episode, that’s where we talk about in detail, like how to produce great content that will really help you to build trust with your target audience. And so yes, these two things go together. Like, you have to have great content to build an audience, and you have to have some tactical understanding about where to get your audience started. And then once people start to say, “Oh, they really have fire content,” right? Then they’ll share it with their friends and there will be some organic growth of your audience after you get it kind of the initial ball rolling, if you will. But today’s topic is really about how do you get the first… If you think of it like a snowball at the top of the hill.
Jeff Morgan:
And you’re like packing it, and then you start it rolling it down the hill and it gathers momentum as it rolls down. How do you start that first snowball, how do you find the snow to get it started. And so buying a list to do it with email as a channel is the first kind of thing that we’re talking about there. So we probably hit enough on that one. Maybe we could just… Let’s talk about a… Let’s say you’re doing a podcast, how would you go about that? So dentist advisors just to maybe toot our own horn for a second, has a really great podcast. We have over 30,000 people that download the podcast each month, and that’s been a work in progress for like the last six years. We’ve delivered a new episode every week without missing a week for six plus years now. And so it’s really paid off and we’ve seen that organic growth with our audience. It started at zero. And went all the way to 30,000 people, and now it’s like the primary lead generator and consultation scheduling tool in our marketing tool belt. So it’s a great, great, great audience and a great way to build our business, but we had to start somewhere.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Like, how are you making for sure these people are subscribing and coming back, and like you just talked about that example of that advisor and they weren’t in his audience, they didn’t come back. So how do you ensure that happens? I feel like it’s out of our control.
Jeff Morgan:
Well, I think it is in our control, luckily. Now, some of your success is going to be related to how good is your content, how fire is your content, right? That’s why we started with that. But let’s put that aside. Let’s assume that you’re producing fire content which stands for, again, it’s frequent, insightful, relevant, and entertaining content. That’s what fire stands for. But how do you get the seed? How do you get the snowball? I’m mixing metaphors here, but how do you get that little snowball started at the beginning that will eventually roll into a 30,000 person audience or bigger. The way that you do that is primarily after you start publishing the content is by going to other people who have an existing podcast audience. Remember, it needs to be in the same channel that you’re working in. Find those people and do co-marketing with them. So, the best way to do that would be to be a guest on their podcast. And then when you’re a guest on their podcast part, your objective in that interview in to pitch your own podcast, right? So you’re in front of other podcast listeners.
Abby Morton:
Obviously, they like podcasting, right?
Jeff Morgan:
They like podcasting. They’re in the play. Because they’re listening to it, they’re in the right app at the right time to like go and find your podcast. So this is the perfect way to get more people following you or to give your content a shot anyway. So make sure that in your interview, that you include the call to action and a way for people to find your podcast. And you just wanna share value. You want that podcast interview to be fire, right? I mean, you wanna do frequent podcast interviews, you want to make sure that you’re insightful in those interviews, you wanna make sure that it’s relevant to the audience, right? So relevance in this case means that the podcast interviews that you’re doing are with people who have the same audience that you’re going after, right? You don’t want to be competitors with them, but you want to have some kind of complimentary offering or reason for talking to the same group of people. So if your niche is dentists, it’s pretty easy to find other podcasts that are targeting dentists. This again, goes back to why it’s important to have a great niche, ’cause you can find the podcasts that are related to you and then see if you can get interviewed on those podcasts.
Abby Morton:
Right. So to take that a little bit further, at dentist advisors, we would look at other professionals who were selling to dentists and marketing to dentists, right? So whether it was a software that the dentists use in their practice, whether it was just like an affiliation, like a woman’s group within dentists or new graduates within dentistry.
Jeff Morgan:
Practice consultants.
Abby Morton:
Yes, exactly. I think that’s, again, back to the niche idea, I know we talk about that all the time, but that’s how you can branch out to find people who are not directly your competitors but are still targeting that same audience that you’d wanna speak to. So just a couple of ideas there.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So the keys are use the same channel. Find the influencers in that channel that have an existing audience that matches up with yours, and then start to build relationships with those people and get interviewed there. And when you’re first getting started, if no one knows who you are and you don’t have any compelling reason, start with the small ones. There’s people out there that have 300 followers or a 1000 followers or downloads a month on their podcast, but that’s more than you. You have zero right now. And so if you have zero go with the people that have a hundred to a 1000 downloads. If you have a 1000 downloads, go to the people that have a 1000 to 5,000. If you have 5,000, go 5 to 10. And so you can slowly build up to the bigger fish. And so eventually, if you’ll be able to trade a interview on your podcast with an interview on someone else’s podcast.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, that’s what I was just gonna say too, is like that’s the best way to get on somebody else’s is to ask them to be on yours and try to have some reciprocal arrangement. ‘Cause without that, like it feel, it’s kind of hard, I feel like any other way.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Yeah. So that just means you gotta do your research on what’s the total ecosystem and what are the ones that are just getting started and have a small following, so that let you pair up with the people that are kind of at your same level. And over time you build up momentum.
Abby Morton:
Okay. That’s great. Okay. So we talked about buying a list, podcasting what else would you consider as a good way to build a following?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. So another channel that like is obviously a big one right now is social media. And then I’d break down social media into individual platforms. So each individual platform may have a little bit different tactically… It might be a little bit different tactically on how you build followers, and it can be more complicated, but I would say the same just in the very beginning, the best way to start getting your social media posts seen is to do something very similar that we just talked about with a podcast. And that’s to go out to existing influencers, people with existing audiences that match up with your own and develop an offline or a direct message type relationship with that person and see if you can get them to share some of your content and you’ll share theirs, right? Like, it’s a co-marketing type relationship.
Abby Morton:
That’s how all this is really working, is like you give some I give some, right? Like, we’re sharing back and forth, right?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. And sometimes if you don’t have an audience that they can leverage yet, then maybe you could give them something else of value. Right? Like maybe because remember the people that you’re going after are not your competitors. You’re not going to other financial advisors that have an audience and saying, “Will you share my content?” What you want is like the attorneys. So think of centers of influence prospecting. And it’s very similar, it’s just in a digital form, right? So find the centers of influence that have your same audience that aren’t directly competing with you and create some sort of a like an informal relationship with them where you can add value and they can add value back. And so maybe what that is, is that you say, “Will you share? Or promote my posts like once a week or just once or whatever you want, whatever you can get in exchange for,” and maybe you do a financial plan for them maybe…
Abby Morton:
I like it. Be creative.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. It doesn’t have to be one-to-one or the same thing that you’re giving up. Maybe there’s other value that you could give if you’ve got budget, you could pay them, right? “I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you’ll do this for me.” And the economics of that, it’s all just a value exchange, right? So you need to kind of find out from going out and doing some experimentation about what are people willing to trade? Often you’ll find that if people have smaller audiences, like if people have 2000 followers on social media or less, like somewhere between one and 2000, they’re not trying to monetize that audience. They’ll be really flattered that you are reaching out to them, and you can get started.
Jeff Morgan:
You can get a seed or that little snowball going with just like other people that are kind of in your same situation. And then, like I said, you can build up to bigger and bigger influencers over time. And I think that that’s the best way to get going. Now, there are some other tactical things on social media that you can do. Like, you can actually go and participate in conversations that you aren’t invited to. Like, it’s a public conversation, so maybe there’s an influencer out there that has a 100,000 people from your target audience that they’ve already accumulated to follow them, and they post something and now you can go comment on their post. And as you start to participate in the conversation, now sometimes you can post things in the comments that add value to the discussion. Right?
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
Like, “Hey, I actually created a podcast episode the other day about this topic that you’re talking about. You might want to go check it out.” Or, “I have a blog post,” or, “I’ve got an e-guide,” or maybe you even just say like, “I talk about this topic all the time too, over on my channel, and you just… ”
Abby Morton:
Or, “I have a different take on the topic. Like I would approach it differently.”
Jeff Morgan:
You could be controversial. Just keep in mind that you’re building relationships with the influencer and their audience, right? You don’t wanna piss off the person that could potentially really help you, you wanna add value to what they’re trying to do. Because it actually is valuable to them from an algorithmic perspective for you to comment on their posts. So if you like their posts, comment on their posts, as long as you’re not distracting from what their objective is, then they’re gonna love that you’re engaging, right?
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
But if you start to be ultra critical of them or be rude, like it’s just like any other relationship. Offline, you just wanna be respectful and like add value and don’t be negative.
Abby Morton:
Okay. That’s helpful. So really, it just feels like with all of these different channels and mediums it’s… I mean, at least at these early stages, it’s leveraging other people who have built an audience, who have built a business around your target market and creating relationships with them. Like that idea of centers of influence how can I help you and you help me, ’cause that’s gonna help you generate this following. But again, then the way that you’re getting following is you’re continuing to produce that fire content that when the audience does find you, they like what they find and they stick around, right?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah.
Abby Morton:
Is that how… ‘Cause I’m like, okay, I could be doing all this work, but then no one’s following me. But the way I’m ensuring that happens is then I’m continuing to post and show up in their feeds and engage with them in ways that then makes them wanna continue to come back. Is that…
Jeff Morgan:
Yep. Yeah. And if you think of this as like a marketing funnel, I’m sure everybody’s heard about that before, but like the top of the funnel is awareness, right? People can’t engage in your content, they can’t like your content, you can’t develop a relationship with anybody unless they’re aware that you exist, right?
Abby Morton:
Right. Right.
Jeff Morgan:
So what we’re talking about today is how do you build awareness of your content of your channel or your email list or your podcast on a $0 budget. That’s really what we’re talking about here. Now, if you’ve got money to spend…
Abby Morton:
That’s a whole other episode.
Jeff Morgan:
That’s another episode. Like, there’s lots of ways that you can like accelerate the process of building an audience if you’ve got a budget. And when I’m talking about budget, I’m not talking about a hundred bucks. I’m talking about, like if you have a 1000, 2000, $5000, a month to spend, like now we can accelerate the process of getting people aware that your brand exists, that your content exists, that you’re adding value to their… They could add value to your life because you can pay to play. But in the absence of that, and if you’re just like trying to do…
Abby Morton:
That’s not today’s purpose.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. We’re assuming that most financial advisors that are listening to this, like want to be able to get started on a zero to a very low budget. And that they want to just do it in a very organic, kind of like gorilla type style marketing way. And that’s what we did at Dentist Advisors. We didn’t have a big budget to promote our podcast in the beginning. In fact, we didn’t spend any money on it. It was all about just going out and finding people who were willing to talk to us on their podcast. And it just slowly, slowly built over the last six years into something that’s really great.
Abby Morton:
And again, it took six years for us to get to 30,000 followers. I mean, we’re not even close to anywhere near that with Elementality, but we’re two years in, right? It’s all about continuing to produce the content, coming back to it over and over again, and then yeah, reaching out to others, hoping to get on their episodes, doing some sort of a share so that you can really help each other out, right? Like you’re gonna help them get followers or you’ll send business to them, and they’ll send business to you. So, yeah. I think this was really helpful, Jeff. I think just kind of in closing final thoughts is as you were talking about all the different things to do, I was getting a little overwhelmed and so I almost wanna leave with the start of like just get going.
Abby Morton:
Just think about the next thing. You don’t need to think about this large five year plan. It’s like okay, what can I do this month? Who can I reach out to? Maybe you just start making a list of names, right? Just take baby steps so that you don’t get overwhelmed, because I think it can easily start to be overwhelming. You’re trying to serve your clients, you’re trying to do a good job there. You’re trying to be a good advisor, you’re trying to make sure the right processes are in place where they feel heard and needed. And then you have to go do this whole marketing thing and that is also overwhelming. So just start number one and just think about like, “Okay, what can I do this week? Or what can I do this month to help move it forward?” Would you add anything to that in our closing thoughts?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. I love that thought. Action… A bias to action is really important here. You’ll never have an audience if you don’t start somewhere. So I love that. The one other thing that I want to add to this as kind of an addendum is that the purpose of building the audience is to get clients, right?
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
And so we’ll probably do another episode about converting your audience into clients, but just a parting thought there is that the way that you do that, like the basics of how you do that are that as you’re adding value, as you’re delivering fire content to this new audience that you’re building, like you want to insert calls to action at the end of the podcast or the beginning of the podcast, or at the end of your email in a PS. Or maybe it’s in the social post. Like, not every social post needs to have it, but maybe in the comments, the first comment in the social post could be something like, “If you wanna learn more, schedule an assessment with me or schedule a consultation with me,” or whatever your next step is…
Abby Morton:
“Come to this webinar.”
Jeff Morgan:
Or, “Come to this webinar.” Whatever the next step is that where you go from building a relationship with someone by delivering like valuable free content, educational content, typically, to a place where you can start talking about how you solve the problems that you uncovered while you were delivering that top of funnel nurture educational content is really important. ‘Cause you’ll never get… If you just like are always giving free value and you never have the courage to ask the girl out on a date [laughter] right?
Abby Morton:
Right?
Jeff Morgan:
It might not be to marry me, but you need to advance the relationship where otherwise she’s gonna get bored and leave, right?
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
The same thing goes for you. It’s not worth it unless you can have over time start to get value for yourself out of this relationship that you’re building.
Abby Morton:
I like that. I think that’s a good point. ‘Cause again, you would always just be producing entertaining good content that’s delivering value, but if you never tell them where the link is to schedule the demo or to talk to you or to get more in-depth information, they’re not gonna do it, ’cause they don’t know what to do. So I think that’s a really good idea. We’ll come back with more information about that and dive into that deeper because I think that’s a good direction to go. So thanks for listening. Jeff, always a joy to have you and we’ll catch you guys next time.
Jeff Morgan:
Thanks, Abby. Talk to you soon.
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.
Angela Johnson:
We always start with the values exercise. Then from there we create a statement of financial purpose. Then we go through the elements and just talk through what’s happening, look at their assets and expenses, assets and debts. And then start to create some goals based on what they’re saying.
Abby Morton:
Yeah.
Angela Johnson:
From that and then next steps. And so I’m not telling them what they should or should not do. They’re telling me what’s important to them and then they’re realizing it as they’re saying it, that they’re not spending their money in alignment with their values.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about elements, go to getelements.com/demo. Elementality’s Executive Producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.