Has marketing fallen all the way down to the bottom of your to-do list? With a million things that need to be done for clients, marketing always seems to drop down the list as more current client tasks make their way up. But let’s be honest, marketing would get more attention if you were more confident that you could do it effectively.
On this Elementality, Abby talks with Jeff Morgan, Head of Marketing at Elements, about how his FIRE marketing framework can ignite your efforts. Discover how a process-oriented approach can make marketing easier and allow you to build connections with your audience that lead to long-lasting success for your firm as you create great content.
Podcast Transcript
Jeff Morgan:
The more relevant you are to their life, to their problems, and not just really generic, this is about being specificity. Right?
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
The more specific you are to the problem of that individual or that group of people have, the more effective the content will be because they’ll just be like, oh my gosh, this is just the thing I’ve been wondering about. You know?
Abby Morton:
Right. Well, and anyone can stay high level and really broad, and to speak to all Americans that have financial problems, but very few people can speak to the unique challenges of an architect and the problems they’re gonna have in their business, whatever it may be, which is why I like what you’re saying of the more specific you can be the better.
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, Abby Morton, here with Jeff Morgan, the man of marketing Elements. We’re so excited to have you back.
Jeff Morgan:
So excited to be here.
Abby Morton:
We are back in the studio today. I have to say working from home is great, but there’s just something about being in person and seeing people, I just love it. So happy to be back in the studio today with Jeff. We actually set a new record. Did you hear about the record, Jeff?
Jeff Morgan:
No, tell me.
Abby Morton:
We set the highest day download record very recently. And do you know who that was?
Jeff Morgan:
I don’t.
Abby Morton:
It was you.
Jeff Morgan:
What?
Abby Morton:
Did you know this?
Jeff Morgan:
I did not know.
Abby Morton:
We just released an episode recently, Jeff was feeling pretty good about himself, and he’s pretty famous. [laughter] And the more we’ve actually talked about marketing, the more I hear from advisors all over like, that episode you did about Twitter marketing, the episode you did about paid social, all those episodes we’re doing that marketing really seemed to be resonating. So we thought, let’s bring Jeff back into the studio, let’s give our listeners what they really want and what they need. So, I’m excited today we have a really great topic coming to you about marketing, more specifically about how to build an audience.
Abby Morton:
Building an audience and marketing, and as advisors are starting their firms, it’s probably one of the most important things. Right? And I think we hear that over and over and over again like, how do I do marketing? Where do I even start? How do I find people that wanna work with me? So, Jeff and I were collaborating a little bit, and this really seems to be something as well that he hears all the time. Right? I think you even have one-on-one sessions with advisors using Elements, and that’s what they tell you as well. Is that right?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, it’s definitely one of the biggest questions that I get from advisors when we meet is, how do I find my people and how do I get more people to consume my content so that I can drive more leads and get more clients? And so the beginning of marketing is all about finding your audience and starting to build a relationship with them.
Abby Morton:
So let’s start there, high level, what does it even mean to build an audience? Once people are saying that, what do they really mean? Let’s just get down to the very basics. What does that mean, building an audience?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, well, I think it all starts with finding your people. Right? Where does your target audience… Hopefully, you have a niche. Where do they live? Online or otherwise? So the audience might be people who listen to podcasts, it might be people who are on Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter or…
Abby Morton:
TikTok.
Jeff Morgan:
TikTok. Yeah. TikTok is the new one. If you’re going after millennials, that’s where you wanna go, or Gen Z’s.
Abby Morton:
Gen Z’s, yes.
Jeff Morgan:
Gen Z’s especially. I forget that millennials are getting old.
Abby Morton:
I do have to say, I am a millennial and I am on TikTok, and I have actually really enjoyed being on TikTok. So maybe millennials are there too.
Jeff Morgan:
Yes, I wish I was a millennial, [laughter] so that I could say that I was on TikTok, but TikTok is for young bucks like you.
Abby Morton:
We don’t allow Jeff’s generation on TikTok, we could come out.
Jeff Morgan:
I know enough about TikTok that I can market there.
Abby Morton:
Okay. That’s all we need. Right?
Jeff Morgan:
But I am not going to participate in TikTok personally, but yeah, so there’s a lot of different places where people consume content, and our job as marketers is to find out where they are and then to start to deliver value through that channel in a way that people will start to follow us, that we’ll start to be able to build relationships of trust at scale with people who are interested in our topic, in our product and our service.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. I wanna pause you there because I feel like that’s something that I learned from you when I came over to the marketing team at Elements, is how you can really deliver value and how you often said, well, I don’t wanna email them all the time, or I don’t wanna be in their Twitter handle all the time, isn’t that annoying? And you often said, Abby, but if you’re delivering good content, if you’re delivering value, if you’re delivering something that they want to listen to or they want to read, or it’s really helping them make decisions that they need in their life, they’re gonna see value in it.
Abby Morton:
And I love that you said you’re gonna build that relationship of trust with them, because that’s all that we’re trying to do as advisors, is help them understand that, hey, you can come and trust me, Abby as your potential advisor, and when that question or that problem comes up in your life, you think about Abby rather than someone else down the street. So I like that. I think that’s important to keep in mind, ’cause I always felt like, ugh, like scummy, they’re gonna be annoyed at me. And you help me reframe that thinking, it’s important and it’s relevant, and they want to hear from me.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, yeah, that is the key to good marketing is that you wanna think of marketing as building relationships and like any relationship, if you’re not adding value to it, the other person is going to be annoyed.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Morgan:
If it’s all about you, it’s unlikely to be interesting to anyone else, right?
Abby Morton:
Right. Totally.
Jeff Morgan:
‘Cause everybody wants their problems addressed, everybody wants their ideas acknowledged, everybody wants those kinds of validation in their life. And so if we’re trying to build great relationships, then we need to find ways to solve problems for people and to talk about things that they’re interested in.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, people only care about themselves, so keep that in mind as you’re creating content. What are your listeners or what does your audience really want? Okay. So we talked about finding where they’re at, obviously marketing wherever they are at, LinkedIn or Twitter, wherever it may be. We talked about helping to build that relationship of trust, but would you add anything else to this audience building and how to do that appropriately?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, well, I think that once you know where you want to build your audience, and that really is dictated by who your audience is, and we could get into how to evaluate that, but I think what I’d say, the primary thing that we need to do is figure out how do we deliver value, like we’ve been talking about. What is the key to doing that? And the answer has always been content, it’s great content. And what I’ve found is that there’s a really great framework that you can use to know how to evaluate whether or not your content is good and whether or not it’s going to build relationships well, and if it’s going to eventually lead to getting more leads and clients out of the audience that you’re building.
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
That framework I call the FIRE framework. So it’s an acronym. So FIRE stands for Frequent, Insightful, Relevant and Entertaining. And so those are the four things that your content needs to follow if you wanna build a great audience.
Abby Morton:
So does every piece of content like, okay, I created this theme, does it follow those four? Or do you just feel like overall it needs to kind of have that quality?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, I would say every… We’re talking about audience building content. Some people call it top-of-funnel content. Sometimes we call it nurture content, but this is content where the objective is to build a relationship, it’s not to get people to take action necessarily, it’s not necessarily… That’s direct response content. Right?
Abby Morton:
Yeah, let’s pause here, ’cause I think that’s really important is… [laughter] I’m laughing because in marketing you always talk about this funnel, you have the top of the funnel, the widest part of the funnel, and that’s what we’re talking about today, is the content building the audience. Starting very high level, it’s all about the end consumer of that content. We’re not asking a lot for them, like you just said a minute ago, it’s not about you as the advisor, it’s about what can you help your end consumer really want to know. But then as you move down the funnel, then you start bringing in calls to action, book a demo with me or come to this webinar, or you start bringing in things that are a little more… It takes a little bit more of maybe some trust or a little bit more effort on the end consumer side to want to engage with that content. And so today, with the FIRE idea and building an audience, it’s staying really high level. Is that kind of where your… Did I summarize that well? What would you add to that?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, yeah. A really great analogy story that I learned way back at the beginning of my career, it actually comes from Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing, is this idea that marketing is like dating, especially if you’re selling a really complex or expensive product, a considered purchase is what we’d say in the marketing world, and that you can’t just expect someone to want to marry you on a first conversation. So if you walk into a bar…
Abby Morton:
Come on, Jeff. [laughter]
Jeff Morgan:
If you walk into a bar, see that pretty girl across the room, walk up to her, get down on one knee and say, will you marry me? The chances of converting into an actual marriage, if we’re talking in marketing terms, the chance, your conversion rate is gonna be very low, right?
Abby Morton:
Yes, right.
Jeff Morgan:
It’s gonna be less than 1% of the women that you approach with that offer are gonna say yes.
Abby Morton:
And so let me just put that a little bit in marketing terms, what you’re saying is if my first piece of content is schedule a meeting with me and that they’ve never heard of you and never interact with you in any scenario before that, the conversion and then actually scheduling that meeting with you is going to be low.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, yeah exactly. So yeah, so you’re connecting the dots there with this relationship idea, right? ‘Cause if you go guns a blazin, you might get one out of 100 or one out of 1000 people to say yes, but do you really wanna marry someone that would say yes without knowing you? That might not be the right client or the right wife either, right?
Abby Morton:
Yeah.
Jeff Morgan:
And so developing a relationship and getting to know each other over time is really important. So what would be more effective is to go and start to find things that you have in common, walk up, offer something of value. Like, can I buy you a drink? And, oh yeah, and that kind of gives you the right to maybe have a little bit of a conversation with that person and see, what do you like to do? What do I like to do? Maybe we could do that together, let’s go get coffee, let’s go on a mountain bike ride together. And then you can take the next step, and the next step you have permission now to meet them and have a longer conversation, do something more fun with them. And then eventually, over time, if you’re compatible and you have things enough in common and that they really like the value that you offer, if you ask them to marry you, it could be up to 100% conversion rate. You can really know that they’re ready, and that’s the way that I chose to do it. I didn’t wanna ask my wife to marry me until I knew for sure that she was gonna say yes.
Abby Morton:
Right.
Jeff Morgan:
Some people go with the baseball game thing where they get down on one knee with maybe only 50% confidence, and sometimes that goes really wrong. [laughter] So I think in marketing we’ll often take that leap, like you do, like some people do at the baseball game, where we’ll ask people if they’re ready when only maybe 25% or 10% or 15% might say yes. And that’s in the marketing relationship building world, the right time to do it. It’s a little bit different if it’s a one-on-one relationship, but I love that just idea that when we’re marketing, it’s all about just building relationships, but not doing it one-on-one. Prospecting is building relationships one-on-one.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
Marketing is building relationships at scale, one to many.
Abby Morton:
Interesting. Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
And so you as the advisor are trying to build an audience of many people that you can build a relationship with at scale. And so that means that you need to produce content that speaks specifically to the audience that you’re trying to build. The relationship that you’re trying to build. So that’s what takes us back to this idea of the FIRE content.
Abby Morton:
One quick second before you go there, I just wanna add in, the dating analogy, I think also works because you’re gonna date someone for a really long time before you’re going to even consider getting engaged, right? Before you even consider to sit down and have that bigger conversation about “getting married” but it’s the same thing with marketing. And you have to have multiple interactions with that person before they’re likely to sit down and schedule that meeting with you. I think there’s some statistics that someone has to hear from you seven times before they’ll even sit down and have a quick conversation with you.
Abby Morton:
And so I think it’s oftentimes important to keep that in the back of our mind as advisors, is you can just put out one piece of content and be upset, or you can’t even do it for three months or six months and then be upset because people need to hear from you constantly, constantly, constantly. Over and over and over again before they’re going to engage. And so again, I think that is a great segue into FIRE, we wanna jump into a little bit more because that’s gonna help us understand how we’re creating that content, but making for sure that we’re staying relevant. That were doing it frequently. Okay, so let’s talk about the specifics about FIRE. So one more time, the acronym is.
Jeff Morgan:
Frequent. Insightful. Relevant and Entertaining.
Abby Morton:
Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
So first off, frequent. Let’s just talk about why frequent. If you think about building that relationship, if you only talk to someone once a month, how quickly is that relationship going to develop?
Abby Morton:
Yeah. It’s gonna take forever.
Jeff Morgan:
It might take forever, it never develop, they might get bored and forget you exist, right? So we need to be more frequent than that. And depending on the channel, so if it’s podcasting, it might be a little different than if it’s TikTok.
Abby Morton:
That’s a good point. Yeah.
Jeff Morgan:
But a general rule of thumb would be, you probably need to have a minimum weekly touches, so if it’s an email, newsletter, if it’s a podcast, probably weekly, at minimum. You could do daily content as well, but probably weekly works and it’s hard to produce more frequent than that for most people. If it’s social media, it needs to be daily, there needs to be at least one post on the channel that you’re trying to… Where you’re trying to grow the audience per day. Now, if you’re doing social media, do you have to do it on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter?
Abby Morton:
That’s great question.
Jeff Morgan:
All the same time? No, each one of those places is its own audience, and so you could just invest in one of those where you think that your audience is most likely to live. And kind of let the other ones sit without spending a lot of time building the audience there. So not to say that you can’t post one piece of content to multiple platforms and kind of do it more at scale, but the work of actually getting one audience to really start following you on one platform is probably where you wanna start and then you can expand out at really producing specific content for that specific platform, because even between Twitter and TikTok, you’re gonna post different types of content ’cause the people are expecting something different.
Abby Morton:
Right, right. Well, and I think the other thing too, depending on the platform, like we’ve even recently learned, longer, more thoughtful posts on LinkedIn tend to work a little better than obviously short and just very quick and insightful posts for Twitter or X. Whatever we’re calling it, right? So I think, again, it’s important to know the platform, what the platform want, what the algorithm of the platform is going to then produce, put you in the feed of other people, it’s important to understand all of that about the platform that you’re going to, which is why it might be nice to just start with one platform first.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, for sure. And like I said, you can do less optimized posts across multiple platforms with one, but I would have one platform in mind when you’re producing the primary piece of content. And then you can reproduce that for the other platforms, but not optimize for all of them at the same time. Okay. You probably aren’t gonna be able to get results on all the platforms if without a marketing team. You probably just need to pick one channel like a podcast or newsletter or social media, whichever one you feel most comfortable with. Because the other part of frequency is being really consistent.
Jeff Morgan:
You can’t like, go and fits and starts with marketing. It’s an investment. Just like in dating again, if you go on five dates in one week and then you wait for two months and then you call someone up and say, do you wanna go out again? The relationship has not advanced. Right? And they may have forgotten, they may have moved on, [chuckle] they may have other things going on in their life. And the same thing happens in marketing. So I would suggest that you pick the type of content and the channel that you feel most comfortable with so that you can produce content on a regular basis and don’t stop.
Abby Morton:
You’re gonna be in it for the long haul, like the long game. So think for sure you picked that medium you’re gonna be able to…
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Dentist advisors, for example, which is the RIA that Elements started in, we’ve been producing a weekly podcast without missing one week for like six years. So it’s…
Abby Morton:
And that’s like their sole driver of their clients that come in the door.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, it’s the primary one. There’s other ways that…
Abby Morton:
Sorry. I said sole.
Jeff Morgan:
They’re doing marketing, but yeah, I mean, it is the core content piece for all of the things that dentist advisors does in their marketing. So, they take one piece of content from the podcast and they use it as a hub. Like if you think of marketing content as a wheel, the hub is the podcast. And then from there they break up the podcast recordings into all other different types of content.
Abby Morton:
So, you have the hub which is the center, and then all the spokes are the different types of content. Right? So they’ll do different social media posts, they’ll do blog articles that are maybe a little bit longer, more thought through from that episode. What else would you say that they do that?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, it is like video clips, audio clips. Text from the transcript or summaries from the transcript for blog posts, email. They send out an email that highlights the podcast and uses it as a way to promote it, promote themselves, an email on a weekly basis. They create white papers around it. They use the topic for a webinar. All of the different types of content that they produce kind of start with the podcast is like the main generator of ideas. And then they iterate from there.
Abby Morton:
Okay. Great. So that’s the great way of how you do something frequent. Number one, you like it, you’re able to do it time and time again and making for sure you can do it time… Like it’s something repeatable. If it’s social media, you’re posting every day, if it’s podcasting or probably a newsletter, a blog post, that can be a little bit more on a weekly basis, but just understanding the frequency that you need to post that. Okay. So that’s the F.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Next, insightful. So the idea of insightful content is that you are trying to build yourself up as an expert and develop trust. So if you’re trying to get your prospective clients to trust your financial capabilities and thinking, then you want to say things that are insightful. You wanna say things that they hadn’t thought of before that make them start to really see you as an expert, as a subject matter expert. And so when you’re producing that content, you really need to think, am I saying something unique here? Am I saying something interesting here? Am I saying something that helps them solve a problem? And that’s really the core of it, is insight is a response to a problem that helps advance them through the problem solving process.
Abby Morton:
So I wanna pause you there because all those things you just said, like am I producing something insightful? Something that they care to learn about? Those words all make me feel a little overwhelmed. Like, no, I don’t have anything good to say as an advisor. Right? How do I as an advisor feel like I can do all those things that you just described of like, be insightful? ‘Cause I think we often get inside our heads and imposter syndrome and we just feel like no one wants to hear what we have to say. So, how do I get over that?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, I think that one of the ways that actually Elements helps in that area is that if you can have a structured way of thinking about topics and also a structured way of addressing common problems, answering questions, then it gives you an easy button to coming up with the things to say, what to say, how to be insightful. So most financial advisors feel really comfortable answering questions when they’re asked them. So that’s where I would start is, what are the common questions that I hear all the time from prospective clients or my existing clients? And if I have a niche, it’s even better because those questions, the best questions to answer in your content are the ones that really speak to your audience. So going back to dentist advisors as an example, student loan debt is like a huge financial topic for dentists ’cause they build up these huge student loan balances while they’re going to school.
Jeff Morgan:
And then they graduate. And now they’re like, well, should I pay off my debt or should I invest that into my practice or into my career or into the stock market? And that’s a huge question that every dentist needs an answer to. And we as marketers know that that’s something that will really resonate with our audience so that we can start there. Let’s answer a question that we hear all the time and we have the insights because we’ve been answering that question forever. And so that’s how you can be insightful. And the Elements scorecard is a really great way to answer that question in a unique way. So, you can pose the question, you can show a scorecard, so the situation, all of the elements of their financial health in one little screen all at the same time. And you can go through all their holistic financial health metrics and answer that question without having to say it depends, you know? And if you’re in this situation, this is how I’d answer that question.
Abby Morton:
Right. Well, and I like to even yes to that, doing a whole assessment, seeing the whole picture, but even just breaking down all of the elements and individually talking about those. Those are topics that you can keep in mind. I think something else, as advisors, we need to keep in mind that we know the stuff like the back of our hand. It’s not hard for us and we think it’s not new and it’s not insightful and everyone knows this, but we need to keep in mind, obviously that’s why we have a job is because everybody doesn’t know this. And we need to just keep in mind like, how can I educate my clients?
Abby Morton:
How can I help them know things that maybe they don’t know? Right? Using Elements scorecard, I even heard someone say like, go get your CFP textbooks and start like looking at the headings and the topics even in your book, in your textbooks, and helping educate people on those. Right? And I think that’s a good way to get out of your head and just keeping in mind like, your clients don’t know this. Literally making a list of the questions you get asked all the time and producing content on that. Okay. Cool. So that’s how you remain insightful. That takes us to R. Relevant.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. So relevant. So, you might think, well, what’s the difference between being insightful and being relevant? I think this really comes down to knowing your audience. So I touched a little bit on it. It’s easier to be insightful if you’re relevant.
Abby Morton:
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
Jeff Morgan:
And easier to be relevant if you’re insightful for your specific audience. So, if you have a niche like dentist advisors, you have a big advantage. This is one of the reasons why everybody in the industry is saying, pick a niche, pick a niche. Because to be relevant, you need to speak the language of your audience and in order to speak their language and to feel like you’re taking up residency in their head like, you want them to be like, this guy knows me.
Abby Morton:
I Love that.
Jeff Morgan:
This gal is there with me when I’m struggling. It’s like they’re sitting behind me [laughter] watching me and feeling my anxiety. You know?
Abby Morton:
Yeah. And the reason why is ’cause you’re using the words that they would use to describe their problems. Right? You’re talking about things that they deal with on a day-to-day basis. Like knowing what a cone beam is, knowing that you have a lot of student loan debt, and that you wanna open another office, knowing you’re trying to decide when to hire more staff. Those are all things I learned at dentist advisors when I was in their head. I could often say like, I know the questions you’re gonna ask five years from now. You’re not even thinking about them, but I know them because I’ve sat with people just like you and I’ve helped them through those same exact questions. And so I like that. I think that’s an important point of what are the questions that literally they’re thinking about and using their own language.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. So, the more relevant you are to their life, to their problems, and not just really generic, this is about specificity. Right? The more specific you are to the problem that that individual or that group of people have, the more effective the content will be. Because they’ll just be like, oh my gosh, this is just the thing that I’ve been wondering about.
Abby Morton:
Right. Well, and anyone can stay high level and really broad and just speak to all Americans that have financial problems. Right? But very few people can speak to the unique challenges of an architect and the problems they’re gonna have in their business, whatever it may be. Which is why I like what you’re saying of like, the more specific you can be the better. So, okay.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. So just one last thing I’d say, I talk to a lot of financial advisors that have selected the niche of millennials, and I would just say that that’s a good start. But you probably wanna get more narrow than just like, I’m speaking to millennials, because just as if you just think about how broad just an age group is, you know? How many different types of professions, socioeconomic situations, financial situations, all of the things that make us different are true across the whole spectrum of people in that age group. So it’s really hard to be specific. How do you be specific to a millennial? Well, you might know kind of the channel that they live in based on their age. Yeah. You could probably know that. And you might know some kind of general things about their situation, I guess based on the fact that they are not old and they’re not super young, like they’re kind of mid-career type people. But other than that you don’t know that much.
Jeff Morgan:
And even if you narrow it down to just like business, millennial business owners, it’s still a pretty broad category. So in my opinion and my experience as a marketer, I would much prefer to know either a job title or their profession and get it that narrow. Now you’re… The number of advisors who you’re competing against are way less, and the ability to speak to that person and their individual problems are way higher. So, just be careful when you’re picking a niche and you don’t have to jump all in and rename your business and update your whole website when you’re testing out niches. Just create a landing page, create one ad set, create one set of content, and kind of see, do you like this particular group of people? Do you wanna become one of them? ‘Cause that’s what you really need to do to be successful.
Abby Morton:
Yeah. Okay, perfect. So the last one brings us to entertaining. How do you be entertaining? I mean, I’m like, I myself as an advisor, it’s like I didn’t come into this business to be entertaining. Right? We’re all probably more of logical, right? We’re more math based, we’re more focused on the numbers and the data and the details rather than being entertaining. [laughter] So, how? Let’s talk, what do you recommend? Right? Someone who maybe is a little bone dry and just really likes digging into the numbers. What would you recommend that that person do?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So I go back to the dating analogy again. If you’re super boring and you don’t have any personality and you don’t share any of your, what makes you unique with that person, they’re probably not gonna want to continue in that relationship. And the same thing goes in building relationships at scale. People are typically on social media listening to podcasts to be entertained. That’s probably their number one goal. Number two, they might also want to learn something. But learning is like eating your vegetables, you know? Entertainment is like eating your dessert. And so we need to have a balanced diet in every piece of content, we need to try to find ways to be entertaining. And entertaining could mean a lot of different things. It could mean a little bit of humor, it could be mean a little bit of controversy. It could mean a little bit of maybe emotion, you know? Like how do we…
Abby Morton:
Being real.
Jeff Morgan:
How do we get emotion? And the best way to do it is to tell a story. People love stories and the framework of telling a story is really about like, there is someone with a problem and they’re the hero of the story. They go in search of solutions to that problem and find a guide. You are the guide, right? The guide proposes a plan and maybe tools to help that person solve their problem. And then they call that person to action. They tell them go out and try out the plan. Go out and do the plan. And they encourage them along the way. And then they really set up like what it looks like to win and what it looks like to lose. If you win, here’s the results. If you lose, here are the downsides. You don’t wanna do that.
Jeff Morgan:
And by telling a story in that way in every piece of content you could use that structure, then you will be entertaining. Even if you’re kind of dry personality like me. [laughter] I am the most boring person ever. But as I’ve kind of adopted this idea of storytelling in marketing I’ve been able to find a voice that is kind of fun to read or fun to listen to. And so I know that any if I can do it, any financial advisor can, but you need to have that structure. You need to make sure like, am I hitting all the important points of good storytelling? And again, I’ll go back, I don’t want to over pitch Elements here, but Elements is a great way to help tell that story. Using the scorecard when you’re creating content allows you to tell the story of someone’s financial life in response to that question.
Jeff Morgan:
So pick a common question for your… A relevant common question for your target audience. Use the scorecard to tell the financial story of a person that you’ve worked with. Or maybe if it’s just like a fake person that you created, and that’s based off of common situations that you find and then explain, just explain along the way how you could help someone. And that allows you to demonstrate your value really quickly. It allows you to entertain people, it allows you to be really relevant. It allows you to create content way faster than you otherwise would because you kind of have all these, all the components together in one place. And what we’ve found is that many advisors can pump out a scorecard assessment or a scorecard story type video or post in like 10 minutes. So imagine if in one hour you could produce six of those, and now you have content for the whole week on your social media feed.
Abby Morton:
Totally.
Jeff Morgan:
And it kind of hits the whole FIRE model really quickly, so.
Abby Morton:
I like how you just tie it back in right there. I love it. [laughter] One last comment I wanna make about being entertaining is, I think you said it well, is I think sometimes we see people, our favorite podcast host or our favorite newsletter that we read, and they’re really one way, they’re really witty or they’re really comical, or they’re a really good storyteller. And we just need to find our, like you said, we just need to find our own authentic voice. And I think people will resonate as long as you are being you, right? When you start to not be you and you try to be this… Like, I’m not a funny person I feel like, and so when I try to be funny, it’s just awkward and weird and just doesn’t work, you know? And so that’s okay, right?
Abby Morton:
I just need to be Abby, Jeff just needs to be Jeff and people will be drawn to you. Right? I think back to when [0:37:06.5] ____ started, no one thought that anyone wanted to read these extremely long detail oriented blog posts. And that’s why [0:37:14.4] ____ is famous. And there’s some guy listening to NPR and there’s some guy in there with a lisp. I’m like, this guy has a lisp. And he’s literally on a radio show, right? So it’s just amazing what people can be if they’re just authentically themselves. So shout out to just trying to be you. Because the more that you’re you, the more you’re gonna wanna be able to create the right content, the more you’re gonna be able to do it over and over again. It just all around is gonna feel better if it’s you. So, what final words would you leave to kind of wrap us up with building the audience, and how we need to do that using FIRE content?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. I think that just getting started is the most important thing. I think a lot of times when we start thinking about marketing and creating content and building an audience, it can feel very overwhelming, especially for someone who is super busy already. It’s like, where am I gonna find the time to do all of this? And how am I gonna get myself motivated to produce something over and over and over again for the next five years or the next 10 years. [laughter] And I’d say, well, it’s just like exercising. You gotta get out to the gym that first time and feel some endorphins from it. And then the next day it’s a little easier and the next day it’s a little easier. And pretty soon you’ve strung together two weeks of going to the gym, and now it’s starting to become a routine in your life and it’s starting to become a lot easier and you start to feel good and feel happy about the things that you’re doing.
Jeff Morgan:
And so what I’d say with marketing, especially producing the content required for marketing, is getting started. Create a routine, pick a time during the day every day that you’re gonna produce a little bit of content or once a week where you take an hour or two and produce that content for the whole week so you can schedule it out. And then, just commit to doing it over and over and over again and find the joy in doing it. And the more you do it, the easier it will be and the better you’ll become at it. And over time, like you said earlier, it is gonna take time to build the audience and then develop a relationship with the people in that audience so you can actually see the fruits of your labors. But if you’re patient and consistent, you can do it. We’ve seen a lot of financial advisors be really successful producing great content, building good audiences and during that into new clients. So, I would just encourage everyone not to feel overwhelmed and not to be scared about getting into it. Just go and jump in.
Abby Morton:
I love it. Such great advice. Just get going. I agree. I think you’re gonna be a little rusty or a little bad at the beginning, and the more you do it, the better you’ll get. And just keep going. Keep trying. ‘Cause you know, I like the saying like, 80% and done is better than a hundred percent and never done. We don’t need to go for perfection because we’re gonna be learning every day. And that’s okay. So thanks so much, Jeff. I think this was really helpful. Let’s keep this fire acronym in mind and we’ll catch you guys next time. Next time on Elementality.
Reese Harper:
I really see podcasting as a top of funnel. It can be really top of funnel fun audience building. It can also be middle of funnel technical like we do here a little bit more.
Abby Morton:
Sprinkle those in here.
Reese Harper:
Yeah. We might have a story here and there. You know, it’s not like totally dry, but the closer it is to the top of the marketing funnel, the more fun it can be. And the possible audience can be larger and the more you want it to be a middle of funnel, or bottom of funnel podcast. Closer, you’re gonna be covering things that are probably, in my view best suited for copywriting and short form marketing material. And I like leaving the podcast at an audience building kind of level. It just seems to be more effective.
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.