“The Essence of Strategy is Choosing What Not to Do.”
– Michael E. Porter
Ever feel overwhelmed trying to decide how to market your firm?
This week’s episode is for you!
Join 20-year marketing veteran Jeff Morgan and Abby Morton, CFP®, to learn about Jeff’s method for choosing a marketing strategy that has been proven to deliver exceptional ROI for your firm.
Want to do a deeper dive and ask live questions?
Register for our in-depth marketing strategy workshop on June 18th, where Jeff will walk you through the details of each step of his methodology and answer all of your questions along the way.
Transcript
Jeff Morgan: Why isn’t my marketing working? You know, like, or where do I start? You know, like, how do I decide what to do? And that’s what this workshop is really designed to help you with and hopefully just move you along and give you a framework that you can use to, like, develop that.
Over time
Abby Morton: Welcome to Elementality, everyone. I’m your host today, Abby Morton, here with Jeff Morgan. Hey, Jeff.
Jeff Morgan: Hey, Abby. How’s it going?
Abby Morton: Good. Good. I’m so excited to talk to you today. Jeff and I are bringing you a special podcast episode today and we are doing a little bit of a primer about a workshop we’re actually going to do in June.
And we wanted to kind of give you a taste of what we’re going to be talking about at that workshop. And all of this is focused around a quote that has really resonated with both Jeff and I. Uh, it’s actually from Michael E. Porter. He’s a Harvard Business School economist. Um, and His quote [00:01:00] is the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.
Now I love that quote because I think oftentimes we always think as business owners and just as human beings like being yes, saying yes all the time. Like you just think about saying yes all the time, right? And I love this idea and this concept of sometimes choosing what not to do or saying no is better for your business.
And more particularly what Jeff and I will get into today on the episode is, you know, in relation to your marketing strategy. So obviously there’s tons of different things you could do to market your firm. Um, and we just wanted to really help you figure out what is going to be right for your specific situation.
Um, what is really going to be the most impactful thing and how can you really make your marketing strategy work for you? And for the clients and prospects and leads that you want to bring into the into your door into your business Like how can we help you find those right people? So again, We’re talking about this at a high level, [00:02:00] help you get a taste of it, but we’re planning to do a two hour long workshop in June.
So June 18th, if you go to get elements. com slash workshop, you can register there. Uh, it will be, like I said, you’re going to come instead of just sitting and passively listen, we’re going to come get to work. We’re going to have worksheets there. We’re going to like really teach you. I mean, Jeff is like the marketing genius.
He knows what he’s doing. He’s helped multiple businesses grow and thrive with their marketing strategy. So. We’ll be super excited to come learn from you, Jeff. So with that, um, I think that’s, is that everything we wanted to hit on kind of at a high level, help them understand like what the point of this is and what we’re going to teach them today.
Anything I missed Jeff?
Jeff Morgan: No, I think that that was a great introduction. Thanks, Abby. I’m really excited to talk about this topic and to try to help advisors to establish a really great marketing strategy for their firm. Um, just jumping into it. I think one of, one of the reasons [00:03:00] why I think this is a really important topic is because when we think and talk about marketing, a lot of times we jump right into the tactics.
It’s like, Oh, what am I going to do to market my firm? I’m going to send emails and I’m going to do posts on social media. And I’m going to, maybe I’m going to do a podcast. And we really just think of it from a really tactical perspective. But what I’ve found is the key to actually getting the best results out of your marketing and to getting a really high ROI from the money that you put into it is making sure that you have a strategic plan behind the tactics.
So today, um, what I wanted to do is just give a high level overview of what would be included in a really great marketing strategy. Um, And then in the workshop, we’ll get into more detail about how do you [00:04:00] actually, um, complete that marketing a marketing strategy framework or template that will provide in that workshop.
So, anybody that attends the workshop will provide you with that template that you can use to, you can actually start to fill it out during the workshop and, but it will take you more time to, to complete it. But hopefully it’ll, it’ll put you on the right. Path to really, um, honing in on the right strategy for your business.
Abby Morton: Awesome. Yeah, no, I feel like this is what’s going to be really helpful. These are some of the things I think that are missing. I like that you talked about like the tactics, do a podcast, do a blog, do a, you know, do the thing. I think we always talk about that all the time. And so today we’re going to talk about, you know, stepping back, going higher level and like, what really is going to make your strategy work.
So yeah, with that, let’s jump right in.
Jeff Morgan: So, um, [00:05:00] to, to make things a little bit simpler, what I’d like to do is just break marketing strategy into four kind of. Main parts, um, and those parts that you should start with number 1 and you should end with number 4. So number 1 is really about why? Why am I in business?
Number 2 is who am I serving? Who are my competitors? Number 3 is what is my target audiences over pain? Um, what solution do I provide? What is my competitive advantage? And then the how is like, how do I define my budget? How do I find my people? How do I make them aware? Et cetera. So today,
Abby Morton: sorry, just to kind of go over that a higher level, it’s really breaking it down into why am I in business?
Who am I doing it for? What is like the problem I’m trying to solve? And like, then how am I going to solve that [00:06:00] problem? Kind of at a quick recap.
Jeff Morgan: Yeah, yeah.
Abby Morton: Perfect.
Jeff Morgan: So, uh, if you start at number one, why am I in business? So how’s that part of marketing strategy? What do you think, Gabby? Why, what if, would you have thought of why am I in business as part of your marketing?
Abby Morton: I don’t think, I don’t think it’s like something that easily comes to you or something you think of right off the bat, but when someone poses that to you as a question or as a why. I think it starts to make sense, right? If you’re passionate about what you do and you love the reason that you’re in business, you know, I want to help people make better financial decisions or I want to help maybe this specific niche, right?
Dentists. Um, and I care about them for whatever reason. I think that’s going to play into Your authenticity, your passion, incitement about what you’re creating, why you’re creating it. I think it’s not an automatic go to, but it really makes sense to [00:07:00] pause and, and put the why, like the intention behind, I think those things.
Jeff Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. And that’s, that’s why I put it as number one, because unless we know who we are and why we’re doing what we’re doing, it makes it really hard for us to know who we should serve. Um, what we can do for them and like how we should go about telling them about it. So I think in my opinion, the, the foundation of a good marketing strategy is really understanding your company’s vision, purpose, mission, and values first.
Like, why are we doing this? Like, what do Um, and then what are our goals? You know, like we’re doing this because we want to help people achieve financial confidence in their lives. Who specifically do we want to do that for? Right? Like, that’s kind of next step. Um, [00:08:00] but. If I know why I’m doing it and how I want to approach it, like with, with some value statements, then, um, I can like set some goals for myself as well.
It’s like, well, why, if I’m trying to help people achieve financial confidence, what’s in it for me? Like, well, I want to grow my business to this certain level. I, I, you know, because some advisors, they want to solo practice and they, maybe they’re going to have a pair of planner that works with them and an administrative assistant, but that’s their goal is like, to just have a great lifestyle practice.
Other advisors are, um, have a little bit bigger vision than that. And they’re saying, well, I really want to grow this thing so that I have, like, 10 advisors that work under me. And it’s going to be like a mid market kind of. Um, type of a practice others may say, well, [00:09:00] I want to like have an acquisition strategy where I like start small, but I’m going to like buy a bunch of other practices, roll them up under me.
I’m going to have hundreds of advisors and then I’m going to go out and I’m going to build software and sell and spin it out of our business. Right? Like that’s like,
Abby Morton: you know, all the advisors are thinking that last one, like, you know, they are. Right. I feel like there’s no advisor that just. There’s clients.
They always, we always go into bigger and barter and, you know, building the technology too. So, you know, those are all very, they’re all valid, right? They’re all equally valid. It’s just, what do you want? Right.
Jeff Morgan: And I think within our own experience inside of elements, we see those personalities of advisor personalities, right?
We know like re Harper, who, uh, is the founder of elements and also started dentist advisors. He. Is a big vision guy. He wants something big. He wants to build a billion dollar business if he can. And we know other [00:10:00] advisors like, um, well, I won’t mention their names, but like, that are just like, I’m happy with just like owning my little book of a hundred, 150 clients, and I’m going to go surfing every day, you know, Um, and both of those are great.
You just need to know who you want to be and how big you want to become. And then that really drives some of the decisions that you’ll make, um, with regard to how you’d market your business, you know, cause getting, you know, 10 new clients a year is a lot different than trying to get a hundred new clients a year,
Abby Morton: and
Jeff Morgan: you’ll just have a totally different strategy if you’re going for one over the other.
Abby Morton: I like that. I actually didn’t think like that would matter too much, but I think it’s a good point, right? If you want 100 to 200 clients a year to bring them in to grow faster, you’re going to spend way more money in marketing. You’re going to be putting way more content out there. Like the scale is just going to be so much bigger because that’s what you’re going for, rather than I mean, I was literally talking [00:11:00] to an advisor yesterday and he’s like, honestly, I want a small business.
I just want to let this grow organically. I want to grow through referrals and that’s really it. Like I don’t enjoy the marketing aspect. I don’t want to do the marketing aspect. So let’s just keep it really, really like toned down because I just, I don’t want all of that complexity. And so I think that’s super important to like, think about that from the beginning.
Totally.
Jeff Morgan: And then probably the last section of kind of like why, um, it’s, it’s a good time to do some introspection as well. So like, what are the strengths of my firm? What are the weaknesses of my firm? What are the big opportunities that are on the table? And what, what kind of is a threat out there in the marketplace to what I’m trying to achieve?
So, um, they call that a SWOT analysis. strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. And if you go through that, and so if you’re a solo advisor, that might be a really personal exercise, you know, where you [00:12:00] have to talk with people that know you well and help you to be objective about like, where are those strengths?
Where are those weaknesses? What should I focus on? Because what we want to do in our marketing is like really We want to amplify and build around what we’re good at and what we’re strong at. We want to de emphasize the things that we’re not so great at, um, and we want to take advantages of those big opportunities and, and make sure that we’re like building a hedge to protect against the threats.
So, um, When developing this marketing strategy or really business strategy in general, that’s a really important exercise so that you have a really clear understanding of, of what all your resources and tools and issues are that you might face.
Abby Morton: Yeah, no, I like that. I think that was really helpful. Really great explanation.
Cause at first when you said that, I’m like, why do I need to do a SWOT analysis? [00:13:00] What would be the point? I think you explained it really well.
Jeff Morgan: Okay. So number two. It’s really important that we understand who our target audience is, right? Who are we going to serve?
Abby Morton: This is, this is Jeff’s almost biggest pet peeve,
Jeff Morgan: but
Abby Morton: listen up everybody.
Jeff Morgan: I’m sure I’ve talked about it on the podcast before, cause it really is one of the things that is so important to your success as a marketer. Like, so if you’re going to grow your firm through marketing, which I define as one to many. Persuasion, right? 1 to many communication. So you as 1 advisor are going to go out and, like, communicate at scale, promote at scale.
That’s different than prospecting, which is the way I define that is that it’s you going out and doing 1 to 1. Marketing, right? So you’re going to go to a [00:14:00] networking event and you’re going to talk to 1 person and you’re going to try to persuade them that you’re the right financial advisor for them over time.
Or maybe you’re doing it through referrals. You have some existing clients, you’re asking them for introductions and you go and have 1 to 1 conversations with their friends or family members. So, when we’re talking about. Marketing, um, and building your business through marketing. It’s really important to know who it is that you are going to serve.
And that means you need to make that group narrow enough that you know where to find them. And that’s going to come up in the, um, steps in the future. So if you don’t know who they are, you can’t know how to talk to them in a really personalized way. Okay. You can’t know where to find them. So, like, what conference would they go to?
You know, what event would they go to? Can I buy a list of that, that, [00:15:00] um, target audience? Can I, um, find a networking group, uh, mastermind groups, uh, professional associations? Like, do they all congregate in one place? So like, I know how to do this one to many communication with them, how to find them.
Abby Morton: I think that I learned that at dentist advisor, like that was so important.
We were able to go to conferences. We are able to be on Facebook groups that were involved with tons of dentists. Like you just had all these specific avenues to reach that specific target audience. And as I’ve looked at other just niches, as, as you know, as you think about it and you hear niches across the board.
When, you know, when people just say, eyes are millennials, it’s like, well, how do you find millennials? It’s just too big. It’s too broad. And so I think that’s, furthermore, it’s scary and it’s nerve wracking to think that you’re limiting your group of people. But I mean, isn’t there some quote too, like when you’re speaking to everybody, you’re speaking to no one, right?
And so [00:16:00] you have to know, who you’re speaking to, um, whatever it may be, so that you can make those people feel heard. And you can use their language and say like, I, I love saying this at Dentist Advisor, like, I know the problems you’re gonna have, and I know how to solve those problems for you, and like, I know that I’m gonna be in your corner, because like, I’ve seen you, like literally, what you’re doing right now, I’ve seen a million times.
Like, I know that I’m gonna be, there’s no doubt in my mind, I can help you. And, but when you’re working with, 15, 20 different professions because you just serve millennials. It makes it a little bit harder. So,
Jeff Morgan: so like I’d add to that, that a true expert has the ability to pattern match. So
Abby Morton: what do you mean by that?
Jeff Morgan: What I mean by that is that if you work with. 63 different types of people, and each one of those people that you work with has a very different situation and has very different [00:17:00] problems, has very different career trajectory, has very different, um, you know, goals in their life and, and, you know, different levels of affluence and all the different things that could could impact the way that you give advice.
Then it’s very hard for you as an advisor to see the patterns across your entire, um, client base.
Abby Morton: Okay. Okay.
Jeff Morgan: And learn from those patterns. So that when you’re giving advice, you can give advice from a position of expertise and not one of just guessing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Jeff Morgan: So the patterns that the, it’s much easier to develop, uh, and to learn the patterns.
For people that you need to understand to give really good advice and to see what advice actually leads to the best outcomes. If you’re working with 1 kind of person, right? Or 1 [00:18:00] persona of people, rather than like, a whole broad spectrum of people. So, when I hear people say, like, I work with millennials, I’m like, well.
There’s millennials on food stamps and there’s one billionaires, you know, like those two and, and a huge spectrum in between. Right. And so, like, as a financial advisor, that isn’t narrow enough to make your, to give you the ability to define how, like you were saying, Abby, how you speak to those people, what their problems are, and then like, actually be an expert when you’re giving advice.
Abby Morton: Totally.
Jeff Morgan: Okay, so the other part of who, so it’s not just who am I serving, but it’s also who am I competing against. So, and this is something that I think gets missed a lot, is that, okay, imagine if your target audience is Millennials. How many, there’s 300, 000 plus financial [00:19:00] advisors in the United States, how many are targeting Millennials?
Abby Morton: I think
Jeff Morgan: 300,
Abby Morton: like a lot, I don’t know, not half, less than half, 40, 000, I don’t know,
Jeff Morgan: you know, like, uh, maybe, you know, it could be 10%, right? Like 10 percent are targeting millennials. That means that you’re competing literally against 30, 000 other advisors for the same Group of people. Now the target audience is wide, so you could argue, well, that’s okay.
There, there’s a blue ocean of, of opportunity out there because there’s so many, but I would say that you, why would you go into a place where you’re competing against so many other people? And there’s no real differentiation between you and your competitors, right? So the more, if you get more narrow, um, and understand who your target audience is now, maybe you take it from.
You’re the number of competitors in your space instead of 30, [00:20:00] 000 are like 10. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere, right? There’s 10 people, you know, it’s a viable, um, niche because 10 other advisors are running profitable practices around it, but you know, it’s not so broad and big and hard to, to differentiate because there aren’t a lot of people doing it, you know?
And then the other thing is to think about here is like the fear part of this. I know that there is a lot of fear about narrowing because it’s like, well, I’m going to have to say no again, going back to choosing the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. It’s also not who not to serve. And so.
If you, if you think about, um, how big does the target audience actually need to be in order for you to get the number of clients you need that you set your goal at. So again, like if you go back to number one, why did we set goals first? Because we [00:21:00] need to know when we set like what our vision for how big this thing needs to be.
Because if you’re trying to build a solo practice. And you want to have a total of 100 clients or 150 clients, um, at your peak, you know, and that that’s going to be your sweet spot. Then you don’t really need to have a huge pool of respective clients, right? You only need a hundred people. So let’s say if you get 0.
5 percent or 1 percent of the total audience in that niche, then you only have to have 10, 000 people
Speaker 3: that
Jeff Morgan: fit into that niche. So, That gives you just a sense for like dentists, for example, there’s about 230, 000 of them in the United States. That’s plenty big enough to build a huge billion [00:22:00] dollar RIA.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yep.
Jeff Morgan: So anyway, we’ll get more into that in the workshop, but I think it’s really important to think about like, what is, who are you serving and who are the competitors? Okay. So next, uh, next one is what? So Here, we’re talking about, um, the target audience more and trying to define, like, what is their most overt pain?
Like, what is the thing that a dentist, just as an example, is typically worried about with their finances? Or what is the challenge that they’re facing? What is the thing that you’re going to, that pain, that challenge, that problem, that you’re going to, Put at the top of kind of a pyramid of problems that they have in their life that you can use for your positioning, right?
Like we help dentists find [00:23:00] confidence in their financial life, right? Like, so the pain might be lack of confidence or not knowing if they’re on the right track. Like that’s one, probably most often the problem that you would face if you’re talking to accumulator clients. Might be different if, if your niche is with.
super high net worth people who are getting close to retirement, you know, that, that their challenge is probably different. But if you’re an accumulator, um, am I on the right track? Am I going to be okay? Like that
Abby Morton: doing the right things. There’s
Jeff Morgan: a lot of research around, but that might be the number one pain.
So there might not be a lot to Of research necessary to find that thing, um, in, in the case of financial advice, but important to define it.
Abby Morton: I, so I would argue like, I think every financial advisor could say that is their clients over pain. I mean, that’s [00:24:00] why we exist in the industry is because people have that pain.
Right. So. Yeah. I’m almost thinking you take it like to step two, right? Like, you’re right. If you’re building a period, what’s the most important pain? You probably would start with something like that. Where do I stack up against my peers? How am I doing? Am I on track? Right? I think everyone has those questions.
But like, then down from that, using the example of dentists, it would be, what do I do with my student loans? When do I bring in an associate? When do I buy this next piece of equipment? Do I buy my building or do I not? Right? And so I think you start high level, but then I think you go into knowing your audience again, right?
Which is what we talked about in step number two. So now in step number three, what are the unique pains that, like you said, the overt pains that your specific niche has, right? And, and then you’re going to go into this in a second. I’m going to lead you into it though, is, you know, how do you solve those pains and how can you uniquely speak to those as an advisor?
Jeff Morgan: Yeah, I love that. I love that. And I think [00:25:00] where my head’s at with like starting with that top, like top of the pyramid pain is that you just,
like on your, the homepage of your website, like just imagine like this in context and where you’re like writing messaging for your business. And you’re going to say like, you can’t list out, you know, the 12 different like sub pains that like create lack of confidence in my finance, my finance. My financial health.
And so you have to kind of like boil that up to the top level thing so you can say, um, uh, like in the dentist example, maybe you would say something like we help dentists. Achieve financial confidence, you know, or something along those lines. And then in your sub content and in the details on your page, you could ask, you could say, we help you with this [00:26:00] question and this question and this question, all the questions and pains that typically we see dentists have.
Um, but you’ve got to have that top headline and your top level, unique value proposition needs to like, have like a. Three words that describe what the problem is. And so you kind of have to start top, start high and then work your way down.
Abby Morton: Yeah, I love that.
Jeff Morgan: Um, but I, I totally agree with you that like, as part of this step, you would not only figure out the top, but you would figure out the rest of the pyramid of pain and solutions.
Speaker 3: So you’re,
Jeff Morgan: you’re pairing pain with really specific solution. And the more niche you are. The better you understand your target audience, the easier it is for you to find unique things that you solve. Um, and then the last one is really competitive.
Jeff Morgan: What is my competitive advantage? So again, like if you, just a quick thought [00:27:00] experiment, if you were to go to a dentist and you were to say, uh, two advisors go to a dentist, one focuses on millennials as their niche.
The other one focuses on dentists. The one that like this is a millennial dentist. Okay, the millennial specialist goes to him and say I work with people your age, and I really help them achieve financial confidence and the other one says I work with dentists, just like you every day. And I’ll help you achieve financial confidence like which one do you think you would pick.
Abby Morton: Yeah, I mean, I feel like every time you pick the specialist,
Jeff Morgan: it’s pretty obvious, right? Like you would always want somebody. And because people, even though they wouldn’t articulate it this way, people understand this idea of expertise, understand the idea of pattern matching, and they feel special when they’re like, this person knows, And understand my particular life.
Right. [00:28:00] Understands that it’s different than like somebody who’s a tech founder, you know, just very, very different careers, very different financial situations. Um, so that’s why it’s important like define what your competitive advantage is and oftentimes the best competitive advantage is just Being a specialist, right?
Everything else is pretty much the same. Like if you go to financial advisors, websites, you’re all kind of like saying the same thing, going back to this idea, like we’re building confidence and we’re going to, you know, do this normal set of things that the CFP taught me, you know, and that’s what we do for clients.
And everybody’s kind of like doing the same thing. Um, but once you specialize. then you can start to show that you do something different than your competitors. Okay, so next, how? So this is where you finally get into the tactics that usually we start with, right? [00:29:00]
Abby Morton: Step four. So as we discussed, it goes in order, right?
You’re defining why you’re in business, then you’re deciding who you’re serving, and then you’re going into, you know, what is that pain and how am I solving that pain? And now we’re deciding, okay, how do I do the kind of the things above?
Jeff Morgan: Yeah, so hopefully it makes it a lot, a lot more clear now that we’ve gone through steps one through three, why it’s so important to understand all that stuff first, because when, when it comes back to choosing what not to do.
We have to understand all the stuff that we just talked about so that we can say yes and no to the different aspects, the different tactics that we would use to actually execute on a marketing plan.
Abby Morton: Totally.
Jeff Morgan: So some of the things that will, we need to, that fall under how, how am I going to define my budget?
How much am I going to spend? You can make that decision [00:30:00] based off of your goals. You can back into your budget based off of the number of new clients that you want each year, knowing that there’s a certain amount that you will probably have to spend in order to get each client. That’s called customer acquisition cost, right?
So the amount of money that will take to acquire a new, a new client. Is really important. So you understand, like, do I need to go get a loan? Do I need to bring in an investor and I, or, or am I going to just do this on a boot, like a, um, a shoestring budget? I’m going to bootstrap it. I’m going to pull money out of my profit or out of my savings account.
And so my budget is really small and I need to make different decisions because my budget is. Yeah. And then you’re going to restrict some of the right things. Yeah. And the wrong things to do.
Abby Morton: Totally.
Jeff Morgan: Um, the next one, uh, how do I find my people? Okay. So you know who they are now? [00:31:00] Where do they live? Like, where do they, where can you get in front of those people to start, um, making them aware that you exist?
Right.
Abby Morton: And, and I think this one especially goes back into right, who am I serving if you’ve decided to. serve one group of people. But if you had originally started with tactics and just started posting on LinkedIn and then done this exercise and decided, Oh, well, my people don’t even hang out on LinkedIn.
And you’ve done all that work for nothing. Right. And he wants to do a bunch of work for nothing. Right? Like it again, makes all the work that you’re going to do more intentional because you know, you’re doing it for the right audience and the right place that will be consumed. Um, and so. And, and where they’re actually going to be able to hear what you have to say.
Jeff Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then imagine like, okay, I know I, my people are millennials. Hey, can you buy a list of millennials? Can you go to a conference full of millennials that the reason they’re at the [00:32:00] conference is because they’re a millennial? Probably not, you know,
Abby Morton: probably not.
Jeff Morgan: Could you, could you pick a social media platform?
Maybe the platform, but could you narrow down? Like, would you just have to advertise to everybody on that platform based on an age? Limiter,
Abby Morton: right?
Jeff Morgan: It’s just like, I’ve got literally like 30 million people that I’m advertising to on tech talk to find my millennials, right? Um, how, how precise and personalized can my message be?
If I’m, my message is going to 30 million people, probably not very, very narrow and defined, right?
Abby Morton: Yeah. On the
Jeff Morgan: other hand, if you say, well, I’m going, my people are dentists, well, now, yes, I can buy a list. Yes, I can find a professional association. Yes, I can find 50 different events that they attend every year.
Yes, I can find mastermind groups. Yes, I can. Um, [00:33:00] people are searching online for financial planning for dentists. Yeah, you know, Um, I can use a list to create a custom audience and a paid, uh, Facebook, uh, campaign, you know, like the yeses to all those things, um, come when you know who your target audience is,
Speaker 3: or
Jeff Morgan: otherwise it’s a no.
So now you just have to identify, like, based on who your people are. So if it’s not a dentist, maybe it’s a. I don’t know. What’s another niche
Abby Morton: and architect architects,
Jeff Morgan: right? Like, so now I just, I go by my list of architects. I could find their, I find their associations, their mastermind groups there, wherever they live.
Right.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Jeff Morgan: So next is. How do I make those people aware that I exist? We got to build awareness, right? Like, right now, they don’t know you from [00:34:00] Adam, so you really need to have a tactical plan for how you’re going to make sure that they know who you are after they know who you are. Your next objective is to build trust.
So, how am I going to build trust with these people that know I exist now? And then the next step is, how, once they trust me, how am I going to drive interest in actually exploring whether or not I’m a good solution to their pain that I’m talking about every day? And then the last one is how am I going to convert their interest in me into actual new business, like how am I going to convert them into a client?
What is, what is the tactical plan for moving them from that stage? To the stage where they’re actually paying me to provide my service for them. So all of that is, [00:35:00] you know, really encompasses a full marketing strategy. There’s a lot to it, right? Like, there’s a lot to a really great marketing strategy. It could, it takes a lot of time to develop the whole thing, but that’s why we’re doing a little bit longer workshop.
In June, so hopefully we could get into a little bit more nitty gritty details about each one of these areas and answer your questions and like coach you through some of the things that are a little bit hard, or maybe give you some really like specific examples of how we’ve seen things work or suggest doing in any of these areas.
Abby Morton: So one question that’s coming to mind for the workshop, we talked a lot today about like basically having a niche and not every advisor, as we know, has a niche. So is the workshop going to still be beneficial if you don’t have a niche?
Jeff Morgan: Well, we’re going to make you feel like you need a niche.[00:36:00]
I won’t lie. I feel pretty passionate that. Um, most advisors, unless you’re going with a completely prospecting based approach, need a niche. Like, if you’re going to market, you need to know. But it doesn’t,
Abby Morton: so I, when, I know we always talk about niches in terms of dentists and architects, like the profession.
I’ve heard advisors say like, my niche is, you know. you know, couples that make around this much money and they live about in this area and they do these types of things, right? Like, I mean, that can start to become a niche and maybe we can further help you define it. Now, yes, is it easier to say, like, I have a niche of dentist because of all the reasons we talked about today?
Yes. But I think you’re still going to get value out of the workshop. Um, knowing will probably will hopefully lead you into like wanting to niche down or try to get more specific. But I think, I think advisors who have practices, you have an ideal. client in mind that you try to serve and [00:37:00] that you try to reach, right?
And obviously, you have clients under your belt. So what you’ve been doing has worked in some capacity, right? We just want to be able to help, uh, take that marketing strategy to the next level. How can we make it improve upon it? I think we can still find some helpful ways to benefit you, even if you don’t have a niche as specific as like an individual profession.
Would you agree, Jeff?
Jeff Morgan: Yeah, well, I think that that the workshop will be valuable. Um, whether you have a really clearly defined niche or not. Um, I think that what I would hope is it will just help you to understand how important it is to know your audience. Right?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Jeff Morgan: That’s that’s going to be part of the workshop is like, really, really digging into.
All the reasons why it’s helpful to understand that from a marketing perspective like you may choose to stick with like a broad Um, a broad target audience and that’s great. Like all the [00:38:00] things still apply to you, but they’ll just you’ll face some challenges that other people that have a more clearly defined niche will not that’s that’s okay.
You know, like, there’s been plenty of advisors build great businesses around general. A general around
Abby Morton: millennials, right? Like they have lots of
Jeff Morgan: advisors have been have been successful with that, but our job is to help you to, like, make it easier. We’re trying to make it easier on you. What are best practices?
What are the ways that, you know, a lot of advisors feel frustrated about? Why isn’t my marketing working? You know, like, or where do I start? You know, like, how do I decide what to do? And that’s what this workshop is really designed to help you with and hopefully just move you along and give you a framework that you can use to, like, develop that.
Over time.
Abby Morton: Love it. All right. I think that’s what we have for you today. So we’ll [00:39:00] close with our favorite quote again, right? The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Jeff and I would love to help you come to our workshop on the 18th. We’d love to help you, you know, take what we have talked about today and really put it into action and, and really put some words behind kind of this guidance that we’ve given so far.
So don’t forget to register get elements. com slash workshop, and we hope to see you guys there. Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff Morgan: Talk to you soon, Abbey. Thanks.