Guest: Dave Zoller, CFP®, owner of Streamline Financial Services in Warrenville, IL. Streamline currently manages over $450 million in assets for 250 client households.

In a Nutshell: Digital marketing isn’t about trying to strike lighting and “go viral,” although that certainly helps! The advisors I’ve talked to who have mastered YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook. email, and other channels turn clicks into clients through consistency, rigorous analytics, a personal touch that connects them to their audience, and yes, some luck of being in the right place at the right time.

On today’s show, Dave Zoller and I discuss how advisors can get started with YouTube marketing or optimize their existing channels. We cover everything from ideation and workflow to Dave’s meticulous process for steering ideal clients towards that first phone call.

Interestingly, Dave’s biggest problem is his lack of advisor capacity to serve all the qualified leads that reach out to his firm. If the prospective clients don’t have $1.5 million or more to invest, they don’t get on an advisor’s calendar. So, if you are looking for a sweet advisor role, reach out to Dave–he’s hiring!

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Dave Zoller and I discuss:

  • How Dave and his partner built Streamline and learned to complement each other’s skillsets.
  • What inspired Dave to start his YouTube Channel and the step-by-step process he uses to grow his channel.
  • Best practices and a sample tech stack for getting started with YouTube and other digital marketing platforms.
  • How to appeal to YouTube’s algorithm so that your videos reach a wider audience.
  • Converting viewers into leads, and then clients.

Quotes:

Dave Zoller on the importance of consistency, focus, and delivering value:

“Very few advisors have a knock-the-lights-out YouTube video. It’s more about consistency. The ones that are successful, they’re speaking to one person and one core problem. For us, it’s retirement. After 10 months or so of every video being retirement, you look at the demographics on YouTube analytics and 70% percent are over 55. So YouTube figured out, ‘Okay, this guy is speaking about this, and who we’re going to put the videos in front of is people over 55.’ You have to have something good to say, and then you have to learn how to say it well, whether it’s to a small audience or if it’s to a broad audience. And it might be slow going. We have almost 72,000 subscribers, but when we were at 150 subscribers, that’s when we saw consistent growth and consistent people reaching out, about one a week. And that was a lot. So you don’t have to have thousands of subscribers to have success here. You just have to help people before you ever meet them. That’s the key thing.”

Dave Zoller’s three-part framework for a successful YouTube video:

“Packaging, meaning the title and the thumbnail, is the most important thing, because if you don’t have something that is worth clicking on, then no one’s going to see the good content inside and the helpful information that you’re trying to give. Then, within the first 45 seconds or so, you’ll want to answer one of those questions that comes to mind after looking at the title or thumbnail. There’s going to be questions and skepticism in the person’s mind. You want to answer that right away so that it fulfills the need that they’re looking for. But then give them a few more reasons to stay. So you give them the answer and then you say, ‘If you’re thinking about this or wonder what happened after this, I’m getting to that soon.’ That’s part of the framework, those questions, skepticisms that people have. ”

Dave Zoller on the mindset of a successful YouTube marketer:

“I don’t have any competition on YouTube because there is no other me. So some people are going to hate watching me because of how I sound or my tone or whatever it is. They’ll watch me once and never watch again because they don’t like me. But then there’s other people that will like it. A lot of it has to do with your mindset around looking like a fool. It’s hard for a CFP® who’s been doing this for 15 years, being at the top, and feeling like, ‘Oh, I know a lot. I’m a CFP®,’ to go back to the starting point of looking like a fool on YouTube, not knowing how to communicate and just having zero views and all of the negativity that comes with that. So going back to the beginner’s mind was a really important piece of this. And then also just thinking of it as a point of service versus trying to receive something. I had the point of mind of, ‘I’m going to try to serve somebody that I’m never going to meet and probably will never reach out to me and give them something helpful in these videos.’ That was a lot more motivating than, ‘I’m going to post this. I hope I get a lot of views and a lot of people reach out. If nobody reached out, that would be demoralizing.’ So I went for the generosity tract versus, ‘I hope I get this stuff from it.'”

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