Guest: Samantha Russell, the Chief Evangelist at FMG, where she helps thousands of financial advisors sharpen their marketing strategies, create compelling content, and build high-performing websites that attract new clients.
In a nutshell: The desire for growth can make even the most disciplined advisors act impatiently. With such a wide variety of marketing tools available and such rapid advancement in the digital space, it’s tempting to try a little bit of this and a little bit of that instead of creating a big-picture strategy and working backwards to identify the best tactics for achieving specific goals.
On today’s show, Samantha Russell shares what’s working right now in advisor marketing, including how answer engine optimization is replacing traditional SEO and how your content strategy needs to adjust.
.Samantha Russell and I discuss:
- The biggest mistakes advisors make when they chase tactics before nailing down their strategy.
- How to choose the right social media platforms.
- Why your email list still matters more than ever.
- How a strong hook can make or break your content.
- The marketing channels top firms are using and testing to grow their businesses organically.
- How advisors can build a system to nurture leads long after initial contact.
- Why human faces and personal stories outperform polished branding
- What to do if you’re a smaller firm that wants to scale without being generic.
. Quotes:
Samantha Russell on the rise of answer engine optimization:
“In the last few months I have had more conversations with advisors about AI and how it’s impacting the way clients find them than in the last two years combined. Advisors are finally starting to have clients come to them saying, ‘Oh, I went to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude, and asked for a list of the best advisors in Philadelphia that work with women, and you were on the list.’ And those stories are becoming more real when it happens to you or someone you know. We’ve been talking a lot about AEO (answer engine optimization) instead of SEO (search engine optimization), and it’s really transforming the way you think about marketing. Instead of thinking of it like a true funnel where there’s awareness and then you’re solving some pain points and they’re hearing more about you until you finally sell and close, now it’s almost like you’re walking through this cloud. They might see a post of yours on social media, they might hear from a friend about you, they might see an ad that you run, they might get an email from you. And when finally somebody does come and book a time to meet with the firm we don’t always know where they actually heard about us first, or what was the final touch point? AEO is the new frontier and how people really are interacting digitally online and how they’re finding firms today.”
Samantha Russell on the keys to conversions:
“ Social media is the sexy thing that everybody talks about, but when we really look at conversion, it is email and dripping on people over time that you know. The numbers don’t lie. That is where you see the highest conversion and when it comes to, how do you then get new emails from people, what lead generation works, we’re seeing events really perform well. And when I say ‘events,’ I don’t just mean like hosting a dinner. It could be an online discussion or a LinkedIn live or an online workshop. If you have something really valuable to talk about, it’s very targeted towards a specific group of people, they’re going to get a benefit, and they can ask you questions live and things like that, they will show up. So it’s finding the sweet spot of how do you market it, how do you get in front of those people? Events paired with following up via email works really well for a lot of the advisors I work with.”
Samantha Russell on the biggest marketing mistakes advisors are making:
“Number one is not having a plan. If I am in a room giving a speech and I say, ‘How many of you know what emails are going out next week?’ Maybe 50%. Next two weeks, a month, the number of hands goes down. You want to have a plan, because what happens is your business starts to grow, you have all these other problems that seem more important, and then the marketing falls away. And so the consistency is crucial. Also, figuring out who’s going to be the face, who’s going to be the person that people can connect with, and really making sure that’s part of your strategy so that it’s not just a logo and a business, but that there is this human element to it.”
