S2 EP01: Video Marketing for Financial Advisors with Greg Rollett

Greg Rollett: 02:31
And so building a brand that people can find, that people can relate with and that people can say, you know what? I kind of like this person, that's really smart business. And so I do believe that it's a shift for a lot of guys in the financial industry because it's not what they've done. I work with a lot of guys who've been doing seminar mailings for 10 years now, 15 years now, and it's become a comfort zone for them. And so trying to get them to think about digital, getting to think about social, getting them thinking about a different way of marketing is a shift for them. But man, when you get it right, and I know you see this every day with the people that you work with, when you get it right there's nothing like it.

Greg Rollett: 03:14
You can turn it up, you can turn it down. You can just market to the people you want to market to. You can re-target them, you can follow them, you can send them videos so they know who you are. You know, quick tangent there... One of my advisors, he called me yesterday and he was just like, "Man, this guy came into the office yesterday and he knew the titles of all 50 of my videos on YouTube. And he had watched them and studied them and you had notes, he had like a notebook." And I was just like, "Yeah, that's what happens, you have fans now." People that come into your office who are actually excited to work with you, not like a lunch that your buddy set up and it's like a referral who isn't really a referral, but they feel bad and they had to meet with you. These are fans who are like, "You can really help me."

Greg Rollett: 03:53
So man we can go a hundred different directions-

Patrick Brewer: 03:56 Yeah, for sure.

Greg Rollett: 03:56 But if you look at what people are doing, how they're spending their time and where they're giving their attention, you need to be there as an advisor. And it's not going to work with stock photos. It's not going to work with quotes from Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar that you put on your page because you hired some social media agency that just throw up content. It's got to be you because that's what we do on social media.

Patrick Brewer: 04:18
Yeah. I mean it's really perfect for a financial advisor, because most advisors, they don't want to be pushy. They don't want to be seen as a salesperson. They want to be taken seriously and develop and cultivate expertise so that they can be seen as the trusted advisor. And I feel like what video allows you to do is share your beliefs, share some stories and personal experiences, subject matter expertise to first establish yourself as an authority and then as you said, to build that celebrity status and get people that are actually like raving fans that come into your office and actually know what you do. And you don't even need to tell them. You don't need to arm wrestle them during the discovery meeting to buy your services because they're already pre-framed and almost pre-sold by the time they get into your office.

Greg Rollett: 04:56
Exactly. And you know, let's be real for a minute and then this might hurt a lot of people's feelings who are listening. But there's no real difference between what you do and what the guy does down the street and what the guy two blocks over does, and the girl in the town next to you, is you're all selling very similar products and services. And I get it. We're all unique. We're all special snowflakes, but at the end of the day, the consumer doesn't know the difference. He wants to find somebody who he can trust to put his money in the market or in an insurance product or in some kind of a vehicle that's going to get them a return. Right? And so if there's really no difference in the product, because the market is the market is the market, right? If the market's going up, the market's going up.

Greg Rollett: 05:33
The only real distinguishing factor, the only real USP is you. It's you- it's who you are.

Patrick Brewer: 05:40 Yeah, absolutely.

Greg Rollett: 05:40
It's who you are. It's your personality. Do they get along with you? Are you a dog person? Do you like dogs, well, talk about dogs. Are you super into sports in your community? You know I'm into super weird stuff. I trained for American Ninja Warrior and I do archery and I'm taking my kids to Comic-Con on Thursday this week. I'm into super weird stuff. And I talk about that stuff in my emails, and in my videos. And guess what other weird people who like that stuff, write me back all the time and they're like, hey man, have you tried the same [inaudible 00:06:06]? Have you ever done this or that? And like, like attracts like, and that's what you want in your world anyway. Like if you're a golfer, talk about golfing.

Greg Rollett: 06:13
The only thing that distinguishes you from everybody else in your marketplace is you, it's not your products. It's not having better features. It's not having an extra policy link thing. None of that really, really matters. What matters is getting them to buy into the fact that you're the person that can help them solve the problem that they have.

Patrick Brewer: 06:31
So a lot of financial advisors are... they have mindset issues around creating video. They're either scared of doing it, they're scared of saying the wrong things. And then also they want to make sure that the production quality in the way that they're put out into the marketplace resonates with who they feel, how their brand needs to be perceived in their mind. What have you seen work in the video space for financial advisers? Are we looking at like really kind of highly produced content that's designed to build their brand? Is it more kind of authentic? You got your iPhone and you're talking about different topics related to your life and your interests. What have you seen working and what order should an advisor kind of be introducing stuff like this into their marketing?

Greg Rollett: 07:13
I love this and feel free to stop me at any point because I can go off.

Patrick Brewer: 07:16 No. It's good.

Greg Rollett: 07:18
I think one of the biggest reasons advisers don't do video is exactly what you said. They're paralyzed by all the things that they believe are out of their control. They don't have the right camera. They don't have a professional set. They don't have a videographer in their office. They don't know how to edit. They don't know how to do all of these things, but they forget about the core reason why they're doing video in the first place. The audience. It's not about you and this is what freezes, we bring a lot of people here into our studio. We also do virtual video production where I kind of interview people over Zoom and Skype and get the video that way. And the biggest thing that paralyzes people is they think it's about them.

Greg Rollett: 07:52
It's about the way that I look or the shirt that I'm wearing, or there's one hair out of place or I said the wrong thing or I screwed up. It's not. It's about the person on the other end who's going to consume your videos. If you actually genuinely care about them, then they will forgive you for all the little inadequacies you have around technology, around the fact that one hair's out of place, around the fact that you said, um, six times. I have never been watching a video, and Patrick, I'm sure you too, you're like, oh man, he said um four times in this video, I'm turning this off. That's never happened in the history of videos, right, of watching content. So if someone really did care that much, you probably didn't want them as a client in the first place.

Greg Rollett: 08:33
So you need to stop thinking it's about you. It's about them and actually serving and caring about your audience, your marketplace, the people that you want in your world. So that's the thing number one. Thing number two is just because you have a phone in your pocket that has a video camera doesn't necessarily mean that you should use it, right? And I say this all the time, but if you want to look and sound and feel like everybody else, then you're going to look and sound and feel like everybody else. And that is not where that you want to be. I always want to be positioned one step above what everybody else in my marketplace is doing. So everybody is doing selfie videos. I don't want to do a selfie video because now I'm just like everybody else and I'm put in the same bucket. Oh, he's just another advisor. Just another planner doing selfie videos. Not Cool. Right?

Greg Rollett: 09:16
So if you're going to do phone videos, there's nothing wrong with that. Get little things that are going to enhance your video. That doesn't have to mean spending thousands of dollars on gear. It could just mean cleaning your office.
Patrick Brewer: 09:27 Yeah, it would just be a good point.

Greg Rollett: 09:30
Clean your office, you don't need McDonald's wrappers in the background when you're telling somebody where to take his million dollars in his 401K and how to convert it over, right? So clean your office, have a nice set. But the other thing is if you can create familiarity with your office, will then when someone comes into your office, they've already been there before. It's called transportation. My partner, Nick writes about it in these books, story selling is, if you can take people into your world, if your first meeting with a new prospects is in your conference room, films and videos in your conference room, you've got a cool whiteboard in there.

Greg Rollett: 10:02
Get people familiar with the space and there's little things that you can do to enhance the space. Natural lighting, open up some windows, grab a ring light from Amazon. It's like $100. There's really cool microphones. I'm using a microphone called a Movo, M-O-V-O for my cell phone right now, it's like $39 on Amazon. So you don't have to go and spend all of this ridiculous money and learn this technology. Just make what you already have. Just enhance it a little bit. And I think that's going to be really good. There's another thing going on, if you're on Facebook, you're probably getting ads barrage from gurus and experts telling you to go live. I actually think going live for most people is a mistake for many different reasons.

Patrick Brewer: 10:42 Yeah. I agree.

Greg Rollett: 10:42
The first is that it's weird and awkward for the first 20 to 30 seconds of a live video. Are we on yet? Are we live? Is anybody there? Can you comment? And so it might work in a live setting, but the majority of people are going to watch your video later because they're not going to see alive. So the first 30 seconds are a waste of space. They're going to move on and go to the next video. I would rather much have a controlled environment where you get to the point, you have an opening that grabs people's attention, you get them to point and then you get out, right? Rather than 30 seconds of awkwardness.

Greg Rollett: 11:13
There's this weird thing when you're alive and there's only one person watching. That's weird for most financial advisors. That's not a normal setting. So I don't advocate going live. I think the best way to do it is to over the course of a month, come up with a bunch of different questions that your clients ask you, come up with articles that you might want to put commentary on. Maybe there's a couple of things you saw on Facebook that you wanted to add your input to. Maybe there's just a couple of hot topics, like something changed in the tax laws or a summer's coming up. So there's some summer things that you want to talk about, have this big list of topics and then once a month, pick four of them, five of them, eight of them, and film them all back to back.

Greg Rollett: 11:51
It's going to be much easier for you to get creative and to get in the zone when you can batch record them. I do video pretty much like every day I'm posting brand new video, but if I had to be creative every day, like it wouldn't happen. Right?
Patrick Brewer: 12:03 Yeah. [crosstalk 00:12:03] possible.

Greg Rollett: 12:03
And there's always something that's going to come up. There's always something that's more important, like a client fire that I got to put out or this happened, or my kids need to be picked up from school. So if you can dedicate an hour once a month to actually produce the videos, and for most people, I really do recommend one video a week, so that's four videos a month. And if they are a minute to three minutes each, that's what, 10 minutes of recording and if you do that once a month, now you have one video this week, one the next week, one the next week, one the fourth week, and then you repeat. And that is actually a system that most financial advisors can sustain. Going daily, you can't sustain that knowing that it's really hard to sustain that, especially if you're going from zero. So I know I threw a lot of things out there-

Patrick Brewer: 12:45 No. It's good.

Greg Rollett: 12:45
... but hopefully there was some actionable, tangible things for everybody. When they're thinking about putting video together.

Patrick Brewer: 12:51
No, absolutely. I think we've covered a lot of ground there. So let's kind of dig into maybe some of these topics. So if you're a financial advisor and you're thinking about content produced and let's say you've got a list, what's the next step? Do you recommend them creating an outline? Do they go the teleprompter route and they just start reading off the teleprompter? Do they just go off the cuff and kind of have a loose understanding of what they want to say? What have you seen be effective for people that are kind of ramping their video production?

Greg Rollett: 13:16 Yeah, that's a great question. There is going to be obviously a gray area here because of our good friends at compliance. Some compliance departments are going to want people to be completely scripted. Some are going to go into allow you to be looser as long as they have it outlined and you're staying within perimeters. Some of you have no compliance and you don't have to worry about that but-
Patrick Brewer: 13:34 For now anyway.

Greg Rollett: 13:35
But that's going to be one of the variables there. But for the most part a strict rule of thumb is if you don't have to have it scripted, I do not recommend scripted. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that everyone listening to this did not go to journalism school to learn how to read off a teleprompter. Right? And reading off a teleprompter is super awkward because your eyes shift from left to right, if you don't know how to read them correctly. If your eyes shift from left to right, you look super shifty. If you look shifty on a video, you lose all the trust with the marketplace.

Patrick Brewer: 14:05 Yeah, no credibility.

Greg Rollett: 14:06
You don't look worthy. You look like you're always thinking about what to say. So you're like, all right, cool, I won't use a teleprompter. I'll just memorize it. Well, good luck with that, right? Because now your eyes are actually looking in the back of your head. Trying to think of what the next thing is. And you look even worse than if you're reading off a teleprompter. So what we have people do is we have a really cool outline that we walk people through every single video and it's super simple. And I'll kind of go through that outline here. The first is really coming up with the big idea or the big concept for the video.

Greg Rollett: 14:36 A lot of people go wrong here. You have to think about what does my marketplace need? What's my marketplace want? What is something of value that I can give to them? And when we talk about video online, I think a lot of financial advisors try to do too much in one video as opposed to breaking it up and multiple videos. So they'll do something like, here are the 14 ways to save taxes when you are getting ready to create a retirement account. Who's got time to look at-

Patrick Brewer: 15:00 Nobody.

Greg Rollett: 15:01
... 14 different things in a video, right? And now the video is like 26 minutes long, which nobody has time to watch. So instead, can you break those 14 different ways to save taxes in your retirement account into 14 different videos where they're each a single big idea, a that's now going to give you more videos so you have more content to put out onto these networks, into these different places as opposed to just one video. And then each one has that one big idea because that might be the one hook that gets them to actually pay attention to you. If you're relying on just one video to get people's attention, you're going to lose, because people are busy, they're not going to watch that video, they're going to [crosstalk 00:15:37]-

Patrick Brewer: 15:36 They're not going to remember either.

Greg Rollett: 15:38
... whatever it is. But the more frequent you can put out stuff, the better. So that's the thing one. One big central idea for your video. The second thing is the opening or the hook of the video. You have to grab people's attention as quick. It's why I don't like doing Facebook lives. He talks about it earlier. But how can you get someone's attention right off the bat in the first three seconds, five seconds, 10 seconds. And it's not by having your logo be a giant starburst for 14 seconds, because you want this cool animation to start the video.

Greg Rollett: 16:06
Again if I'm still waiting for your logo to spin on the screen, I'm out and I'm going on to watch the next video. Get to the point, tell people what's in it for them as quick as possible. So an opening or a hook.

Patrick Brewer: 16:19 Awesome man.

Greg Rollett: 16:20
So that's the opening or hook of the video. And then you go into the content. How we do the content is we keep it really simple. Three things that support your big idea. So that could be three ways to take advantage of something. That could be three steps. That could be a stat, a quote in a story, which is three bullet points. They're going to help trigger something off your mind that is going to give you some talking points with the video. Again, you shouldn't be talking about anything that you probably haven't talked about every day for the past year, five years, 10 years, 20 years.So just three supporting facts, not five, not a hundred, three supporting facts.

Greg Rollett: 16:52
So again, it could be three steps, it could be three tips, it could be a story of fact, a stat, it could be three stats, but three things that support. And then finally the last thing, and this is mission critical, is a call to action. If you actually get someone to watch your video and they get all the way to the end, you are doing them a disservice if you don't tell them what to do next. Now that could be as simple as, hey, if you know somebody else who is having the same problem, why don't you tag them in the comments or share this video or comment with the number one takeaway that you had. A better call to action would be, hey, if you like this video and you want some more ways to help you plan for retirement, make sure you go to Greg's awesome retirement site where I'm going to show you a 30 minute video that walks you in depth how to do this as well as a bonus copy of my book and Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?

Patrick Brewer: 17:35 Yeah, for sure.

Greg Rollett: 17:35
Always make an offer. If you actually got someone to stop and watch your video on whatever topic you're talking about, don't let them just go onto the next cat video, keep their attention in your world and take them on to the next thing. So big idea, a big opening or hook, three supporting points and a call to action. You do that, that should take you a minute, two minutes for every video you do to outline it, go ahead and shoot. And that's a really good game plan for you.

Patrick Brewer: 17:59 Love it, man. Let's talk a little bit about distribution. So let's say you create these great videos. You've got the outline, you've got the hook, you've got the offer at the end. What are the distribution channels that you're seeing be effective for financial advisors? We talk in Facebook, we talk in Linkedin, email marketing, where are they distributing these videos to get maximum benefit?

Greg Rollett: 18:19
Awesome. Love it. So I'm a big fan of what I call the everywhere effect. The more places that you are, the more opportunity you have the people to trip, stumble, fall into your contents. Sometimes it's intentional. Sometimes you know some platforms might not get you to anybody, but they might get you one guy at the end of the year and it was worth putting the stuff there. So I always start with kind of my core places for financial guys right now is and there's reasons behind these three places. One is Facebook and Facebook, a because of the sheer volume number of people that are on there, and b, because of the advertising capabilities to you to go into Facebook, give Zuckerberg some money and for a penny, two pennies, three pennies, you can get your video seen by your ideal prospects. Like there's never been a better opportunity for you to give somebody money and have your content seen than on Facebook right here, right now, today. So that's place one.
Greg Rollett: 19:10
Place number two, Linkedin. Most advisors, especially with compliance, they allow you to post on Linkedin and they kind of leave you alone on Linkedin for the most part. So that's a great place going in and sharing it both on your feet and also into groups that you're a part of, whether in your local community or local business owners, things like that, a second grade place. And the third place that's kind of overlooked for a lot of advisers is YouTube. YouTube specifically for keyword search. Whether that's a local keyword, whether that's again, like how to generate income after you retire. Whatever those key words are because Google owns the YouTube, and so when people are getting on Google and searching, they come up and find your videos. Great way for them to see you.

Greg Rollett: 19:51 S
o the three core places for advisors today, Facebook, YouTube, Linkedin, ancillary Twitter and Instagram are great places. But for most advisors, especially if you're going after more of an older affluent crowd I would... It doesn't have to be a high priority.
Patrick Brewer: 20:07
Well, what are your thoughts on branding? I mean, let's say that we've got... So, the way the adviser landscape breaks out, you've got your smaller adviser teams, sometimes Solopreneurs, and you've got maybe two to five people on one team, siloed. And then you could have up to 15, 20, even 30 advisors as part of a company brand. Are we talking doing videos for the company and trying to reinforce the team? Are you thinking emphasizing the personal brand of each advisor that kind of rolls up to the company? What do you feel is the most effective way to do it? To brand the company, or brand the person?

Greg Rollett: 20:40
This answer might be a different depending if I'm talking to the actual advisor or to the team leader. If you're an actual advisor listening to this, I am always going to advocate for you to build the brand around yourself. Right? The Patrick Brewer brand is the most important brand for Patrick. The Greg Roulette brand is the most important brand for Greg because I might change teams, I might change brokers, I might change FMOs, I might change whatever that is. I might go decide to sell hotdogs in five, 10 years, right? But if I've built the Greg brand, if you've built the Patrick brand and people know you, like you, trust you, you can shift the product that you're selling much easier than you can if you were under a company or a branded name. So I am always going to advocate for the advisor to build the brand under his personal brand because you can always change that.

Greg Rollett: 21:28
Look, I've changed my product services and offerings so many times over the last 10 years and I'm going to change them again. When Facebook and... I'm a marketing guy at the end of the day, and if Facebook says that they don't like video anymore, that video is terrible, well I'm going to figure out something else to sell and the Greg Roulette brand is going to be able to do that because people have trust in me and that I'm the guide. So same thing with you and your marketplace. So I'm always going to advocate for you to build that. Now, if you are a team leader, obviously you lose some control when you do that. And we guess, would it be nice to have it all housed under one Facebook account? You're building all the data under that, but there's ways to get around that.

Greg Rollett: 22:05 On YouTube, you can have playlists where you're bringing in other playlist into your channel. There's cool things you could do on Facebook as well to build like one kind of master advertising account. And, it's a little more advanced, but at the end of the day, that individual brand is the most important thing to that individual.
Patrick Brewer: 22:24
Hey Model FAs, I know that you're enjoying this episode. I wanted to talk to you about a program that we're releasing. It's called The Model FA accelerator. It is an intensive experience where we're going to bring you to Austin. We're going to help you solve the biggest problems in your practice, how to pick a niche, how to build a consistent marketing strategy, a sales process that actually converts and how to scale it and ball up. So if you're curious about that, go to www.modelfa.com/accelerator. Book your call and we'll talk to you.

Patrick Brewer: 22:55
What percentage of advisors would you say that you talked to are receptive to the idea of creating the relevance, building the trust through video versus just wanting kind of the next shiny object as far as driving leads and just getting people in front of it.

Greg Rollett: 23:07
It's a great question. So at the end of the day, what all of us want for all of our businesses, this is me, this is probably you too. And all the advisors listening is, we want clients at the end of the day. I don't think we necessarily care how we get clients if we didn't have to shoot a million videos. If you and I didn't have to do this podcast, like we would much rather be sitting at our house like doing nothing or hanging with the kids or whatever it is that is creating content all day. But I believe that the more that you invest into your personal brand, the bigger you build your personal brand, the more media that you create. When you become a media company, everything else becomes easy. Everything else becomes easier. I mean, just look at, and we all love to hate them, but like Dave Ramsey, he will outsell all of us because guess what? He's on the radio five days a week, three hours a day. That's 15 hours a week.

Greg Rollett: 23:57
I don't talk to my wife for 15 hours a week, right, just because I'm doing all these kinds of things. So his listeners will buy into his concepts. You will never change a Dave Ramsey fan's mind to go against what Dave says, because he has built that position. He could sell anything to you. Guys like Glenn Back, guys like Howard Stern, now on the TV world, I'm a big Ryan Seacrest's fan of what he's built. These fans that they have, we'll go to war for these people. And if you truly understand that concept, you will have unlimited power as an adviser. You can start building your team, because you're going to start attracting the best advisors who want to work for you because they're attracted to your magnetic brand.

Greg Rollett: 24:38 You're going to have all these clients who are fighting to get with you. You're going to have... like there's so much opportunity that comes. The sad reality is, I think you hit the nail on the head, is a lot of advisors are just like, okay, videos, cool, I guess I need to do video. I heard this podcast from Greg and Pat and they said I need to do video and I guess I'll do it right. And if you're looking at it that way, it doesn't matter if it's video, if it's Facebook ads, if it's Linkedin generation of leads of some sort or Twitter magic or a new seminar system, if you're just a shiny object seeker, you're just shiny object seeker. And that is not the way to build a business.
Greg Rollett: 25:14
That is not the way to build a legacy. That is not the way... You're always going to be chasing the next thing. And that is to me, that's just a terrible way to live and run a business like you and I were talking right before we hit record. Like all these guys that are on the hamster wheel is because they're shiny objects seeking. But when you buy into this concept of, I'm going to build a brand and I'm going to build it as big as it possibly can get, the byproduct of that is unstoppable.

Patrick Brewer: 25:37
Yeah, I agree. I mean, so from your perspective in the marketing industry, the reason why I'm in the marketing industry is because I was just sold a bunch of Hogwash five years ago. And eventually it annoyed me to the point where I've learned everything and then just doubled down and pretty much built out my knowledge across every single platform. How do advisors know who to trust? Because one of the things that we've seen, I'm sure you've seen this in this space, you got people that were maybe two weeks ago selling refrigerators at Lowe's and now they've been trained by a marketing guru on to be the new expert on financial services. And it's just hard for these advisors who are working with clients all day. They're trading the portfolios, they're handling financial planning, and now they need to figure out how to grow their practice and they got some guy coming out of and tell them they can bring in 10 to 20 leads a month.

Patrick Brewer: 26:22
So what factors do you feel an advisor can use to differentiate between who can actually help them move the needle and who's probably just selling them some type of prescriptive advice is not going to pan out.

Greg Rollett: 26:35 I think it's really similar to kind of the breakdown that I just gave, is look at people's track record. Do they have one video or do they have a hundred videos? Have they really built a brand and solidify themselves in this space? Or do they have a click funnels page that they just threw up yesterday and they're generating leads on it? That's kind of part one, part two is like attracts like, like trust your guts. Like I've... There's something to just trusting your gut on a situation. That doesn't mean that you get on like a consultative call and you get sold a bill of goods. Right? But there's something to, do I like this person? Do I trust this person? Do they have the same values that I do? I'm a dog lover, they're dog libre.

Greg Rollett: 27:16
I talked about affinity points earlier in this [inaudible 00:27:18]. There is something to trusting your gut. So first is, just looking at the person, do they... I've seen, and you mentioned it like some of these guys who maybe they throw up a Facebook page and they're running some ads on it and I go to their page and they got six followers and they have zero posts and all they're doing is running ads. That's not someone who I think has been in this industry doing things, getting results for people. It doesn't mean that they need millions of followers, even my page, I think I got like 5,000 fans on Facebook. Right? So I don't think it's necessarily numbers of like vanity metrics, but if you check someone like you out or check someone like me out, I got posts going back years, like I've been on this thing for a long time. Lots of track record, lots of history, lots of social proof.

Greg Rollett: 28:01
And then also demonstration I think is huge. Are they doing what they're selling? So like for me, I talk about video and doing these snackable videos and advertising these videos. That's how people get into my sales funnels. So when I get them on the phone there's like, how do you know this thing works? I'm like, "Because you're on the phone with me right now." You saw a minute video that I put on Facebook, you linked over and watched us 30 to 60 minute webinar. You booked a call with me, you got some follow ups, you got a text message and now we're talking on the phone and I'm like, "Are you a busy guy?" And he's like, "Yeah," I'm like, "Brand works." You know? And so it's like demonstration that it actually works. So there was a little bit of I don't think there's a clear cut answer there but-
Patrick Brewer: 28:40 Yeah, no, it's good. That's really good feedback.

Greg Rollett: 28:42 [crosstalk 00:28:42] do your homework and at the same time like trust your gut. Like is every marketing thing that you ever signed up for going to work? Of course not right. Is My service right for everybody? No. I have clients that sign up and after four or five months, this isn't for them, you know?

Patrick Brewer: 28:56 Yeah.

Greg Rollett: 28:57 But at some point you also can't be scared to spend money in order to grow your practice. You can't be scared because you got burned once that you're going to keep getting burned. It's the old adage of if one tire blows out on the highway, you got the shotgun, you shoot the other three, no, you pump air back in the tire, you put the spare on and you get another tire. And so I've gotten burned before, I'm sure you you just mentioned it, you've gotten burned before, but it didn't mean that we didn't get back up-

Patrick Brewer: 29:23 Oh yeah, get on the horse.

Greg Rollett: 29:23
... we didn't go back up and take another swing, try something else out, find another person. So don't be scared because you were burned once that, that everybody's terrible. There's a lot of terrible people out there. We're not all terrible.

Patrick Brewer: 29:33
Oh for sure. For sure. What so what else do you find is working for you on the marketing front? Is it mostly just the video marketing and kind of pulling people through and kind of building that intimacy, that connection through video and then positioning the Webinar or some other conversion tool on the back end? Or is there anything else that you found works really well that you could share with the audience?

Greg Rollett: 29:52
Yeah. So I'll kind of break down what we're doing internally, and then also what we're doing for some of our advisor clients is I believe that to a cold audience, people that have no idea who we are putting video up on Facebook and spending money on Facebook, giving Zuckerberg my money to put my video in front of as many people in my target audience as possible. And spending as much as I can possibly afford to spend to do that is the best investment I can spend with my money right now today. Because what that does, is it takes this person who has no idea who I am, I put a video in front of them and they either watch it or they don't. And the ones that do watch it now are not cold anymore.

Greg Rollett: 30:32
Now they're now they're probably lukewarm. I wouldn't call them warm yet, but I now know that this person saw three minute video and they watched 50% of it, 75% of it, and now I can start sending him more stuff. I can now send him an ad to watch a webinar. I can try to get him to get a free pdf or a special report. I could get him to just straight book a call with me. And guess what, I don't just use one of those mechanisms. I use all of them. I think that's the thing that people are looking for this golden [inaudible 00:31:00] tell me the one thing I need to do and if I told you how tomorrow for me is a phone call, day sales calls all day long. And you know those people got, some of them got reports, some of them saw Webinars, some of them booked straight to call, some of them got text messages, some of them got messenger bots, some of them somehow just found my website.

Greg Rollett: 31:19
All of it in aggregate is what's working. And then I think that scares the pants off of most financial advisors because they're just like, "I just want to send a piece of mail and go to a seminar and talk and then people show up my office." And I'm like, "Man, that works, and that's still kind of works," but I don't ever want just one channel, one opportunity, one way of getting clients. I want a hundred ways that all generate one lead, right? Jay Abraham taught me that once, he was like, "I don't want one marketing channel that gets me a thousand leads, I want a thousand marketing channels that all bring me one lead because if one of them breaks, I still have 999 leads coming in."

Patrick Brewer: 31:55 So important.

Greg Rollett: 31:55
And so I've all of these different things out there, but I do believe right now, cold audience to turn them warm, videos, advertise them on Facebook and then re-target with everything in your arsenal that you possibly have is working. The other thing that's interesting this is kind of a side thing that is probably one of the coolest things, text messages. I know this isn't rocket science, but we use a service. I have no affiliation to them called Salessmsg. And they allow you to send like text message blasts out, but then when someone replies, you can now get on a one on one conversation with them. So you could send a text to everybody who opted in for your reports or saw your webinar or whatever it was and send a text and say, hey, do you have any questions about tonight's presentation? And that will send the text to all, let's say a hundred people, and 20 people reply and they're like Patrick actually had a question about this. And then you can engage with them right there in text message.

Greg Rollett: 32:46
I'm closing more deals via text message. And these aren't the kids, these aren't some millennials, these are to 55 to 65 year old professionals, attorneys, financial advisors real estate agents, chiropractors, that would rather text that than jump on the phone, than open an email. And so text messaging, if you're not using it, such a cool, cool mechanism to close deals today.

Patrick Brewer: 33:10
Where are you picking up the phone numbers you do in that for like Webinar registrations? Are you doing it once they get in your CRM? How are you generally texting-

Greg Rollett: 33:16
I am asking for it all the time, always now. So we do it two different ways. One is we have a free plus shipping offer, which I think is just one of the best kinds of offers. If you're a financial advisor and you have a book to run a free plus shipping offer, we'll give you the book for free. All you got to do is pay six bucks for shipping or whatever it is. So obviously when they become a customer, when they're filling out that form, they give us the phone number. For webinars and things like that, we ask for it right on the registration page as not required. If they give it to us, great. If they do not give it to us, we ask again on the confirmation page and we say, hey, we'd love to send you a free bonus training video if you just give us your mobile number. So we're trying to get it there.

Greg Rollett: 33:58 I now this is in just all of my emails. Every email that I send out ever in my PS, I have a graphic that says, "Have a question about working together, text me at 321-351-3363. And so every email communication I send out, it's just kind of little half attempt to get people to engage. Every time I send that email out, I get someone that texted me, hey man, I actually had a question about working with you. And they'll text you before they'll ever book a call or jump on anything. So we try to integrate it in as many places as we possibly can.
Patrick Brewer: 34:29
Yeah. Messenger and text right now are huge. I mean, I probably close like 10 to 15 sales in the past couple of months just through Facebook Messenger, big deals. Even partnership deals for RIA, start in Facebook messenger and progress obviously from there. But I think you hit the nail on the head. It's like you can't just have one piece of bait in the water because if you're just relying on direct mail to get people to a seminar and you're not building relevance, you're not building audience, you're not getting people's attention and building intimacy, that's just going to get more expensive because there's just too much noise.

Patrick Brewer: 35:02
I've seen like an acceleration in the amount of noise that is in the marketplace over the past two to three years, and I'm sure you're seeing the same thing. It's just like people need over the next three to five years to double down on finding the thousand raving fans, they're true fans, and I'm just not seeing it for some reason in the advice industry. I'm seeing an over reliance on lead generation, on the Shiny Object Syndrome. And it's too bad, but there is a huge opportunity and it's funny you outlined one of the best strategies that advisors can use today and that is the cold audience Facebook awareness approach where you're based off video views and just building that level of getting their attention first and then just building that level of connection and then making them an offer, because if you just make them an offer without them having any context of who you are, the chances of them accepting that offer are going to be low, and the cost is going to be higher.

Patrick Brewer: 35:53
So I appreciate you sharing that with our audience on the podcast.

Greg Rollett: 35:58
Definitely. I love that and I just to end cap that, my favorite word in marketing is, and, I do seminars or a Webinar, you should do seminars and a Webinar, should I run Facebook ads or Linkedin ads? You should run Facebook ads and Linkedin ads and do text messages and, and it's not, or every, every like strategy call I had with an advisor is like, "I want to get rid of seminars and just do this." And I'm like, "Well, that's stupid because you're making six figures a year doing seminars, how about you do seminars, and you do this and now let's make 700 grand this year instead of 400 grand." We're all looking for this for replacement, and to me it's, and, how can I do a Webinar this week and turn that Webinar into a pdf, and turn that into a couple of different videos that I can put on Facebook and like and is my favorite word. It's not either or it's and.

Patrick Brewer: 36:48
Well, if you can just focus on one thing, get that leverage, make it scalable and then build a team around it to keep the process going, to remove yourself from the minutia of it, I mean, I know advisors who have hired actors to give presentations on retirement planning,[inaudible 00:37:01] legitimate actors walk in with a script and talk about retirement income planning and the challenges that retirees are up against. And they do a lot better than a financial advisor because the actor has been trained to give that presentation and that's what they do.

Patrick Brewer: 37:16 So I mean there's definitely ways where you can run seminars without actually having to be there present, giving the seminar. I think a lot of advisors are stuck in this mentality that they have to be the ones doing everything. But if you create the right systems and processes, you can remove yourself from it and then you can get the and factor going where you just layer Facebook on top, you layer Webinars on top. I think the big challenge, having consulted with hundreds of advisors at this point for the past 10 years, the big thing is just overwhelming. It's like where do I start, right?

Patrick Brewer: 37:47
Where do I start? Do I do it on my own? If I don't, who do I trust? How do I hire them? Those decisions are really at the top of mind of today's financial advisor and most advisors depending on how they're affiliated some are doing obviously a lot more commission-based business selling annuities, life insurance, so they can afford to plow a bunch of money into the front end of the funnel to load up the pipeline. But other advisors who are more, let's say focused on being experts CFP, CFA, CPAs, building independent practices, their monetization models different. They're getting fees on the back end of those relationships so they can't plow quite as much money into the front end of the funnel. What's your advice for where people should get started?
Patrick Brewer: 38:31 So let's say they maybe are doing direct mail seminars right now. They could jump on a call with Greg and they're like, "Greg, I don't know what I'm doing here, do I learn this myself? Do I build a media company? Do I outsource components of it, what's my first step?"

Greg Rollett: 38:44
Yeah, it's a great question. And the answer is, either you have money to spend or you have time to invest, money to invest or time to invest. You have either one or the other and you're like, "Well, Greg, I don't have time and I don't have money." Well, you've got to find one or the other. There is no way around it. There's no way to slice the cake in a different way. So if you have money to invest, I think that it's finding people, human beings who can accelerate the things that you want to do. Whether that's hiring someone like me to do your video production, hiring someone like you to get their systems align and really helped them create the marketing systems in their business, hiring someone to physically run the ads or hiring a sales person to do the sales so they can focus on marketing.

Greg Rollett: 39:29
So if you have the capital, the capital should be invested in human beings who can accelerate you much quicker. If you don't have human beings, well then guess what? From 10 o'clock at night to midnight, you got to figure out how to run a Facebook ad. You might have to go into a Adobe premier, or I movie or something and learn how to do this stuff. And if that is the case just know that the stuff you do today is probably going to suck. But if you do it a couple times, it probably is going to get better. If you look back a big guy kind of in the video space Gary Vaynerchuk, a lot of people know him now. You can't escape Facebook or Instagram without finding him-

Patrick Brewer: 40:06 His pounding hard.

Greg Rollett: 40:07 [crosstalk 00:40:07] but if you go back and watch his first episodes ever that he posted on YouTube, Wine Library, episode one, he was awful.

Patrick Brewer: 40:14 Yeah. He was terrible.

Greg Rollett: 40:15
It was not watchable, how bad that it is. And guess what? Episode two was better than episode one. Episode five got better, episode 20 got even better. Episode a hundred. It's constancy and consistency. So going back to kind of my model, if video is something that you really want to do, how you can actually do this, whether you hire me or not is kind of that strategy of, all right, what are the things that I want to be known for? I want to be known for creating income in retirement. I want to be known for saving people money on their taxes. I want to be known for social security. I want to be known for insert whatever that it is.

Greg Rollett: 40:49 Again, over the course of the month, write down ideas, right? Write down ideas, put it... I use Evernote. If you use a piece of paper and a notebook, don't care. Write down ideas, once a month, spend 20 minutes shooting those videos, right? You've got 20 minutes. That's a lunch break, that's coming to the office a little early. That's waking up like 20 minutes, right? And those videos, can they be iPhone videos with a ring light? Yeah. For your first video get it done, get it out. And now you have an entire month's worth of video done that you did in 20 minutes, right?

Patrick Brewer: 41:19 Love it.

Greg Rollett: 41:20 Maybe you outsource the editing, maybe you just have say you go on fiber or you go on-

Patrick Brewer: 41:24 Upwork.

Greg Rollett: 41:24
... whatever the freelance sites are these days and you have somebody, you pay him 200 bucks to edit the videos. You might not have the money to hire me, but you can go spend $100, edit four videos, right? Do that start there. So again, you either have more money to invest or more time to invest, but you've got to pick one. Otherwise you're going to drown.

Patrick Brewer: 41:43
Love it, man. Love it. Great Advice. This is a fantastic dialogue. I really appreciate all of your insights and a willingness to share. Greg, I know that you had mentioned that you had something that potentially you could offer to the listeners of the show, believe it was a blueprint or something that was going to walk them through that framework that I believe we had discussed a little earlier in the episode. Are you still willing to offer that up to the audience?

Greg Rollett: 42:05
Yeah, totally. Again we, I think we talked earlier about like how to hire the right people and I'm someone who practices a lot of what I preach. A lot of not everything.

Patrick Brewer: 42:13 We try our best.

Greg Rollett: 42:15
One thing we do have is a really cool free video planner. So if you'd like that outline that I shared with the big idea, the opening, the hook, the three points and the call to action we put together, essentially it's a journal that we will ship to you. It's a physical planner that we'll send to you. It's free. All you got to do is pay shipping and handling. I think it's like six bucks at the time that we're recording this, don't quote me on that because we price test a lot. But it's like six bucks. We'll send it anywhere. And there's video trainings that walk you through how to use it.

Greg Rollett: 42:40
And it also comes with 52 weeks worth of video ideas and prompts. So if you're like, "I don't even know what to talk about," I got you covered. 52 weeks worth of video ideas and prompts. And you can grab one at ambitiousvideoplanner.com. Again, ambitious video planner.com. Grab one. I think you'll dig it. And you'll also see some of the cool stuff that we're doing in marketing. You're going to see, as soon as you purchase one, you're going to get a text message. It's like, "Hey man, thanks for buying this. We'll send it to you in a couple of days," with a big picture.

Greg Rollett: 43:07
You'll start to see how some of this stuff works. And it's just a really cool experience. I think when you find good marketing and you follow it, you study it and roll with it. So yeah, man, I'd love to give that to anybody who's listening here today. That'd be really, really cool.

Patrick Brewer: 43:20
Great. Thanks man. We appreciate that. And thanks again for coming on the show. I really appreciate it and enjoyed our discussion. So look forward to having you on in the future.

Greg Rollett: 43:28
Definitely man, thanks a lot for having me. It's fun.

Patrick Brewer: 43:30 All right, Greg, take care.