Jill Addison is the founder of FA Client Machine—a turnkey video marketing service designed to help financial advisors attract and retain more clients.
Today on Stay Paid, Jill shares video marketing strategies that will help you grow your business, regardless of the industry you’re in.
Key Points:
- When you follow up with video marketing leads by phone, you’ll close more deals.
- Consider the platform you’re using when deciding how to share your video content.
- You can benefit from a combination of paid video advertising and organic marketing.
Q: Introduce yourself to our audience.
Since I have a broad background in film and video production, I decided to start my own video production company. I’d get calls from people all over the nation, but I didn’t really want to travel—which meant I couldn’t really leverage those opportunities.
That’s why I decided to create my whiteboard video system. Financial advisors started to find me, so I decided to seek them out. I started doing webinar videos with them. Through these efforts, I partnered with a CFP. Together, we started our turnkey video service.
Most video libraries are subscription services. With FA Client Machine, you’re building an asset that you can use forever.
Some advisors we worked with wanted custom videos. Today, we offer our clients turnkey videos, custom videos, or a combination of the two.
Q: What are some of the ways you’re seeing your clients use these videos to drive retention and create leads?
Video is such a great tool because it’s so versatile. I always look at marketing and online advertising being two different camps.
Paid ads will bring you faster results, and they’re more expensive. Organic marketing is slower, and it’s more like building a relationship online by providing valuable content.
If your goal is to get as many leads as quickly as possible, we recommend using our videos as part of your paid advertising strategy. We help our clients do that through a partner.
With organic marketing, you’re going to spend more time, but it is less expensive than paid advertising. A lot of advertisers are new to digital marketing. We recommend those clients do paid advertising first, then use organic marketing to help cultivate those new relationships and convert them into clients.
Q: What are the topics you see advisors focus on?
The best topic is the one that you’re an expert in. You want to focus on whatever your niche is.
For our custom videos, we schedule a consultation with our script writer. We take information from the client and write the scripts for them, then create the video with royalty-free music and upload it for them. We try to make it as turnkey for advisors as possible.
Q: Do you have any recommendations for listeners looking to get started with paid advertising?
We actually just formed a partnership with a very established company. They’re incorporating our videos into their ad funnels. Our clients will basically get two marketing packages for the price of one. They’ll get a discount on the price of the package that’s equal to the amount they’ve invested in videos with us.
We tell our advisors that they need to follow up by talking to their clients on the phone. I talked to one of our clients recently who had done this whole advertising strategy with our videos with all these great criteria in place, but his call to action was “call me.” If his call to action had been for them to sign up for a lead magnet, and then he called them, he would’ve closed so many leads.
People are afraid to call a stranger. You have to take the initiative to call them.
Q: What do you need to have set up before you start this video marketing program?
The two main things are a website and email marketing. Your website is really the hub of all your marketing. You want to drive all traffic back to your website.
After that, I’d recommend an email marketing system. You’ve got to be bold with your email marketing. When you’re just starting out, you put everyone you know on your email list, and you hit them on a regular basis.
A lot of advisors don’t understand how much effort it takes to make it work. It takes a lot of people being able to see your content before you get a response. In many types of advertising, a 1 percent response rate is actually considered good.
Q: What are your thoughts on other types of video marketing?
The two basic types of video are talking head videos and animated videos. Animated videos have a couple different flavors (e.g., whiteboards, cartoons). Whiteboard videos outperform live action videos by a 4 to 1 ratio.
The biggest reason is dopamine. When someone recognizes an image in one of these videos, a burst of dopamine gets released. You’re actually hijacking people’s body chemistry to put them in a positive state of mind. All sales are justified with logic. You’re moving viewers further down the road toward buying.
There’s something about the whimsical and lighthearted nature of whiteboard videos that is disarming. When clients know that you’re willing to have some fun with this, it makes them more comfortable.
I do always recommend having at least one talking head video on your website. It helps build that know, like, and trust factor that’s so important to doing business with people. After the first one, I recommend that you transition into whiteboard videos for ongoing content that you send out every month.
Q: What are some of the strategies in your book, Financial Advisor’s 7 Steps to Video Marketing Success?
We recommend that you embed videos on your website. Google owns YouTube, which means embedding videos from YouTube helps you rank higher.
I also recommend that people put the words “1-minute video” in the subject line of their emails. That really increases engagement, because your recipients have at least one minute to watch your video.
When you’re sharing your video on social media, you should upload the actual video file. You’ll get higher views than if you link to it, since platforms don’t want you going to another website. Native videos outperform links.
Put a link to one of your videos in your email signature. I got about 2,500 views on one of my videos just by having it in my email signature for a couple years.
Q: Which routines have driven success for you?
Time management is a big thing for me. I have a sheet I print out every week with my top five goals for the week. Below those goals are some smaller and longer-term things. This helps me stay focused. I don’t have to constantly be asking myself, “What should I be doing right now?”
I’ll do this on a daily basis, as well. Sometimes, if I’m really ambitious, I’ll write down how much time each task is going to take. I’ll find that if I have about four hours of tasks booked, that’s about right, because four hours of other stuff will come up.
Q: What advice would you give to your younger self?
I saw this piece where they asked older people what they’d do if they could live their lives over again. Most of the older people said they wouldn’t do what other people wanted them to do. My younger self actually knew this. People always recommended I do this or that, but I went ahead and did what I wanted to do. I feel good about how I’ve lived myself so far.
Action Items:
- Take out your phone and create a video explaining who you are (keep it a minute or less). Put a link to that video in your email signature.
Connect with Jill:
Soundcloud
iHeart Radio
Spotify
Spotify
