The 52: Start with the Top of the Funnel

Start with the Top of the Funnel

I have noticed that many highly analytical advisors prioritize bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFu) marketing activities, such as client testimonials and website tools like calculators or assessments (e.g., Riskalyze), to convert leads into clients. These are important parts of the funnel, but if you are anxious to get new clients, I recommend starting with top-of-the-funnel (ToFu) marketing instead. This type of marketing focuses on attracting and educating potential clients and includes presentations, content distribution (e.g., blogs, videos) across various channels, and SEO strategies.

The logic is simple: You need to first attract visitors to your website. Only then can you improve your marketing process by focusing on BoFu activities that will convert them into clients. When you concentrate on BoFu activities first, you may have a great system for converting prospects, but there may be no prospects visiting your website to convert.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by humans.

The 52: Unlocking the Power of Naming: The Benefits of Hiring a Naming Company

Unlocking the Power of Naming: The Benefits of Hiring a Naming Company

I often receive requests to help advisors come up with a new name for their company or a new service offering. Despite appearing simple at first, naming can be a complex and challenging task that takes months. If you are serious about naming a company or service, I recommend hiring a company that specializes in naming. They can help you with:

1. Strategy development: The company will collaborate with you to create a comprehensive naming strategy that reflects your brand values, vision, and target audience.

2. Creative name generation: They will generate a list of potential names that are memorable, meaningful, and suitable for your brand.

3. Trademark research: The company will conduct a thorough investigation to ensure the desired name is available and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights.

4. Linguistic and cultural analysis: They will analyze the name for linguistic and cultural appropriateness, ensuring it is appealing in different markets and regions.

5. Brand positioning: The company will help position your brand by creating names that evoke specific emotions, values, or benefits.

6. Domain name availability: They will check the availability of domain names for your website and suggest alternatives if your first choice is unavailable.

7. Trademark and legal support: They will provide help with trademark registration and other legal considerations related to naming your brand.

At Kaleido, we don’t offer naming services, so we recommend Tungsten.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by humans.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

With its 11 Oscar nominations, Everything Everywhere All at Once has been on my mind. Not so much the movie since I found it hard to understand—the title is what caught my attention. This phrase is a fitting description of many financial advisors’ marketing strategy. The idea is that you can maximize your chances of reaching potential clients by being present in multiple places and in multiple ways. However, this scattershot approach can be problematic for several reasons:

1. It can be costly and time-consuming to implement a variety of marketing tactics. If not executed effectively, you will end up wasting time and money.

2. You may find it difficult to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts when you spread your resources too thin. You’ll find it hard to make informed decisions on how to allocate resources.

3. You may not effectively target your ideal clients by trying to be everywhere and appealing to everyone. This can lead to a low conversion rate and a lack of return on investment.

Instead of trying to do everything, everywhere, all at once, consider doing a few things, in a few places, consistently well.

Written in collaboration with artificial intelligence (ChatGPT). Edited by a human.

The 52: Maximize Your Marketing Efforts by Minimizing Low-Value, High-Time Activities

Maximize Your Marketing Efforts by Minimizing Low-Value, High-Time Activities

As a financial advisor, it's important to ensure that your marketing efforts produce tangible results. You don’t want to waste your time on low-impact activities that make you feel like you're doing something but, in reality, are just busy work (e.g., unfocused networking or constantly tweaking your website). Instead, focus on strategies that will drive real growth for your business.

Remember, time is a valuable commodity and should be invested wisely, just like you do with your money. By minimizing low-value, high-time marketing activities, you can maximize your return on investment and see real results in your business.

The 52: Standing Out in the AI Era: Humanize Your Educational Content

Standing Out in the AI Era: Humanize Your Educational Content

With the ease of generating educational content using artificial intelligence, it’s important to make your content stand out. One effective strategy is to humanize it by incorporating humor, opinion, and real-life examples. For example, you can add a touch of levity to your articles or videos to make them more engaging. If humor doesn’t align with your brand, consider sharing your personal opinions on a topic to add a unique perspective. Additionally, incorporating anonymous real-life stories or situations that reinforce your subject can make your content more relatable and memorable for your audience. By adding these elements, you can offer readers and viewers a more personal and engaging experience than what they can get from AI-generated content alone.

The 52: Different Roles, Different Marketing Pieces

Different Roles, Different Marketing Pieces

If you have different client types that you serve, you probably have different marketing pieces for each one. For example, you probably have a different brochure or webpage for widows than for business owners.

But do you have different pieces for the different roles in the client relationship? For example, do you have one piece for the spouse who is leading the charge and one for the spouse who is burying their head in the sand about their finances? Do you have one for the older widow who is suddenly in charge of her money and one for the child who will ultimately act as the power of attorney?

Often, there are multiple people involved in the decision to hire you. Customize your marketing materials for each role in the relationship to address their concerns or questions in advance. This will help you avoid any one person in the relationship derailing the opportunity to work with you.

The 52: Offer the Value-Adds That Actually Impact Your Niche

Offer the Value-Adds That Actually Impact Your Niche

In November, Kitces.com published the article “101 Things That Advisors Actually DO To Add Value.” Since then, I’ve been observing online conversations and having discussions with advisors who skipped over the article and jumped right to the chart of 101 services. The advisors I spoke with were enthusiastically planning to add as many of these services as they can to their practice.

The problem is many advisors missed the lesson the author was trying to convey. In his conclusion, Adam Van Deusen states: “Ultimately, the key point is that while there are more than a hundred different ways advisors can add value to their clients’ lives, advisors who are able to go deeper for their ideal target client have hundreds more ways to do so.”

He continues: “In fact, by crafting an ideal target client persona and shaping their service offering around the value adds that most apply to these clients, advisors can not only enhance their efficiency, but also better differentiate themselves from more generalist firms, potentially leading to more efficient marketing and greater client growth in the long run!”

The lesson of the article is not to offer as many of the 101 services as possible to a broad set of clients. The lesson is to offer only the most impactful services to your niche. Your operations will be more efficient, your marketing will be easier, and you will be happier.

The 52: Business Books to Read in 2023

Business Books to Read in 2023

This year, I read more than 50 nonfiction books, most of which fell into the categories of business and marketing. In celebration of the last business day of 2022, I thought I would share the ones that left a memorable impression.

The 6 Types of Working Genius by Patrick Lencioni (Amazon Rating 4.8 out of 5)

I’ve taken a lot of assessments in my career, and this book offers one of the simplest I’ve come across. It will help you quickly identify the strengths (geniuses) and weaknesses (frustrations) in yourself and your team. With this information, you can restructure your team so people do what they are best at, and you can hire for the areas where you have gaps.

Selling Is Hard. Buying Is Harder: How Buyer Enablement Drives Digital Sales and Shortens the Sales Cycle by Garin Hess (Amazon Rating 4.5 out of 5)

I stumbled upon this book as I was evaluating publishers for my upcoming book, and I’m so glad I found it. While written for companies that sell B2B services with complex sales cycles, the suggestions for improving a client’s buying experience are relevant to all service businesses. For example: Have different marketing materials for the different roles a prospect serves (e.g., one piece for the elder parent and one piece for the caregiver child). If you are an innovator by nature, this book will give you lots of ideas to implement in your practice in the new year.

Write Useful Books: A Modern Approach to Designing and Refining Recommendable Nonfiction by Rob Fitzpatrick and Adam Rosen (Amazon Rating 4.6 out of 5)

I read this book for guidance on how to make my upcoming book more helpful to advisors. If you plan on writing a book for marketing purposes, this is a must-read! And even if you aren’t, you’ll find lots of great tips on making the content you create more, well, useful.

The 12 Week Year: Get More Done in 12 Weeks Than Others Do in 12 Months by Brian P. Moran (Amazon Rating 4.7 out of 5)

This book changed the way I think about developing marketing plans. Annual plans are out of date before you know it and rarely get implemented. If you follow the techniques in this book, 2023 will be your most productive and impactful year yet.

$100M Offers: How to Make Offers So Good People Feel Stupid Saying No by Alex Hormozi (Amazon Rating 4.9 out of 5)

Read this book if you struggle with how to add more value to your clients and charge higher fees for your service. I especially recommend it to advisors with hourly, project, flat-fee, or subscription-based fee models. The author will provide scalable ways to increase your value and fees without increasing your workload. With nearly 10,000 Amazon ratings and an average rating of 4.9 stars, I’m not the only one who thinks this book is magic. In fact, I can’t wait to read it again in 2023.

Happy new year!

The 52: The Long-Term Consequences of ChatGPT

The Long-Term Consequences of ChatGPT

Last week I presented the short-term opportunities I see for ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that solves problems to questions you pose.

While I believe early adopters of this technology will see tremendous benefit in the short term, I predict it will present negative marketing consequences in the long term for generalist advisors—even those who don’t use it.

The ease with which ChatGPT creates content means that there will be more of it. And everyone who uses the AI for content will be conveying the same information. The result? It will be even harder to get noticed through your content marketing.

Another issue is that if a prospect can get their question answered using ChatGPT, they won’t need to do a Google search. This means content on your website that once attracted prospective clients will no longer be as effective.

If ChatGPT or a similar technology becomes ubiquitous, you’ll have to create content that AI can’t easily do in mere seconds. So it will be even more critical to differentiate yourself by positioning yourself as an expert in a niche.

Marketing influencer Seth Godin summed up the impact of this technology in his blog, stating: “Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”

The 52: The Short-Term Opportunities of ChatGPT

The Short-Term Opportunities of ChatGPT

If you follow the news closely, you’ve probably heard the buzz about ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that solves problems to questions you pose. If you aren’t familiar, read “Here’s What to Know About OpenAI’s ChatGPT—What It’s Disrupting and How to Use It.”

ChatGPT is exciting from a marketing perspective because it can create original content in a matter of minutes. For example, I asked it to “write a 750-word article on the taxation of RSUs,” and it produced a great article in less than two minutes.

From testing ChatGPT, I found the articles it wrote on general topics to be quite good. For advisors who use canned content, this technology may be an acceptable, if not superior, alternative.

I believe there is also a window of opportunity for early adopters of this technology. Advisors who use it can create large volumes of content quickly. That means more original content on their website, which can increase their search engine rankings. It can also mean there is more content for these advisors to share and get noticed on social media. This window of opportunity reminds me of the same windows I observed with advisors who were early adopters of social media, SEO, and Google reviews.

While I see great opportunity for advisors who adopt this technology in the short term, I predict there will be serious marketing consequences for all advisors in the long run whether they use the technology or not. I’ll discuss that next week.