Phil T.:

Thanks everyone for jumping on live and for anyone watching the video. Today we have Guy Freeman with us and Guy has been a financial planner for ten years and now he is doing a lot of advertising, Facebook and Google advertising and has seen some significant growth in his business over the last four years. We’re just going to really get some good tips.

No worries at all.

Just give us a bit more of an idea about your financial planning business. Also, I’d really love to know how you’ve actually grown that business through advertising.

Yep, so essentially My Wealth Solutions was started just at the end of 2011. Previous to that, I had just my small book of business, I guess you could say. An old school friend of mine, Ben Budge, who some of you might know, was in a bit of a transition period with his other business and he had his financial planning qualifications so we decided to join up and start My Wealth Solutions.

Did you hire internally or you went through an agency?

Through an agency. Really, it was a one [man 04:07] consultant. Look, as I said, it probably wasn’t best practice. We started generating leads pretty quickly from ranking on the first page of Google for some key words. Then, when a few of the Google updates come through, we actually dropped off the face of the Earth for six to twelve months, so it’s something to be careful of. You want to be doing the right stuff, because you go from generating leads and generating revenue to being nothing but overnight, essentially.

Yeah, cool.

Just to give you an idea, when we started generating leads, within about three years, we were able to generate over seven figures just from the online stuff. I think we came in at a good time and were able to be sustainable up at those levels on first page for a lot of key words. We continue to work on it, but as I said, things have changed a fair bit since we first started, too.

You mentioned, “Up to seven figures.” I’m a super numbers geek, I love asking other advisors about … What was your growth in terms of your top line of revenue growth? Predominantly, what percentage of that growth would you attribute to either SEO marketing or paid marketing?

Each year since we started, we’ve grown by … The first couple of years, it was close to 100%, year on year. Now, we’re still sitting at 50% growth on our revenue. Initially, it was predominantly the online marketing. It did take us a little while to start building some of our COIs and, then, to start actually giving us leads. Whereas, initially, 100% of that was online, we’ve now got it to about 70% online, 30% from accounting practices now.

That’s massive. There wouldn’t be many advice businesses out there generating 70% of their leads from online marketing.

Yeah, I guess we probably persisted where a lot of other people wouldn’t. I think we were really lucky to receive some leads pretty early on in the process of paying someone from a consulting point of view. We saw how good it was to be able to … You literally wake up in the morning and you have inquiries in the inbox. You give them a call and, although, from a conversion perspective, it’s not as high as getting an accountant lead, because of obvious reasons, someone’s coming purely over the internet, we just love that end.

How much were you spending in the early days? If we’re looking at some of the newer advanced businesses or advanced businesses who are turning over a lot less, how much were you spending as a percentage of your revenue back in the early days on the actually paid advertising, not even on some of the agencies?

To give you an idea exactly, we’re paying $500/month to the consultant and then, from a paid advertising, about $1,200 we were averaging on a monthly basis. That’s the numbers there. We always found that the SEO, the search engine optimization, leads were a lot better than the paid, but we figured if we’re only spending $1,200/month on paid advertising and we got one client out of that, the numbers from our return-on-investment point of view looked awesome as well, so we continued on with that.

Okay, awesome. You said you still get around 60-70% of your new leads through online? How are you getting them now? Is it more SEO or … If you’re not paying for them, how are you getting them?

The way things have progressed is that search engine optimization is important, so the way that you structure your pages, you’ve got to have things like meta-descriptions. You want to make sure that your page titles are all relevant and all those type of things are good. People linking to your sites is still really important, however, where we’ve seen more and more growth from is being able to produce some really good content in a really quick, easy way.

If you’ve got any questions, guys, anyone who’s watching, feel free to write the questions, we’ll get time to ask them later, but I’d love to get into a bit more tactical details about how you do it. Who have you got writing that content, because we’re actually looking at doing similar stuff with the XY Live stuff … Clayton’s running all that, he’s the boss of all that … Doing video and writing content as well. How do you actually do that tactically in your business?

Initially, it was getting professional content writers to do that in terms of writing articles. A really simple way to actually get some good content topics is to … I used the example of someone wanting to retire at 60 years old, just start typing that into your Google bar and you’ll notice that four or five suggestions drop down underneath that. What those suggestions are are what people actually are typing into Google to find out those questions. The longer that phrase is, the more specific and more relevant you can actually be.

Awesome. You said, you’re a seven-figure business. How many staff do you guys have?

Yeah, so we’re continuing to grow actually. We just employed another para planner this week, so we’ve got two power planners in the office. We’ve got four people who help us out from the admin side of things, so they’re all full-time. Then, there’s myself and Ben who are the advisors in the business. Ben’s been a predominant advisor and I’ve been advising as well, seeing new clients, and taking more focus on the online marketing side of things to generate the leads.

You got eight people, you’re turning over a million bucks a year or plus, so how much content are you actually producing every single week or every single month? Are you doing five videos a week or is it more just one video a week, one blog, and one other piece of content? Just give us a rough idea about your side of the business and what content you’re producing?

Yeah, but when we were actually really cranking, it was about one piece of content per week. We found that was enough to keep in touch with people, keep in front of people, and to keep generating leads at a fairly significant level. A really good tip, actually, is that what we’ve found that has worked really well for us and we notice when people come in from the online marketing, is to get your Google business page set up properly. I don’t know if people have seen that before, but you can claim your business on Google and when they type in something that’s specific, let’s say, ‘financial advisor Brisbane,’ the map is one of the first things that comes up on the page. The higher up on the page, the better. Google Business is actually one of the best ones to do.

I was going to say, that’s an amazing tip. How easy is that, for every advisor just to go through their client base, type in, “Who is @gmail.com?” Then, just send them a quick email and say, “I’d love you to review the business page and you pay them for it. How easy is that?

So easy, yeah. It just continues to build that little bit of trust all the way through, because if you’ve got somebody who’s searching for an advisor online … As I said, the trust thing is a lot different if they’re coming from an accountant, I guess. You’ve just got to be doing small little things along the way. We’ve sent up some things through … Where we have that process where they find us through Google, whether it’s SEO, paid, whatever it is, then, when they come to our website, you’ve just got little things that help the trust.

Probably unfairly, let’s be honest. He was up against me…..

That’s right. There could have been a few gift vouchers floating around for that, as well, possibly. Then, once people actually do make contact with us, then, you’ve still got to continue building the trust. We’ve set up some automation through our online marketing software, so we use Active Campaign, so it’s an email marketing system that you can automate emails to people as soon as they make an inquiry, then we start building their trust. We start telling them about our investment beliefs, introducing them to the team, letting them know what to expect at the meeting.

We’ve got to throw it over to questions. Clay, you can run this if you’ve got any other questions that you’ve thought of throughout the thing and we’ll just run through  questions.

Yeah, yeah. I’ll just start with … Guy, first, thank you. Second, you’ve got all these people coming to your websites and you mentioned something about an opt-in. I wanted to ask, are you growing emails out of it?

Yes, definitely. It’s a huge thing. Initially, this wasn’t something that we did very well at all to begin with. You’re spot on with that, because your email list is an asset to the business at the end of the day. We were going straight for the jugular, I guess you could call it. They’d come in for an appointment and that was how we were generating inquiries. Not everyone is going to be at that stage where they’re ready to do that. However, if they only visit your website once, then, you’ve really only got that once change to capture any sort of detail from them.

You’ve got content going up, let’s call it retirees and young people to make it really simple … You’ve got two streams going out that are drawn to a landing page in which they’re offered a lead magnet applicable to their demographic and they join an email database, then, infusionsoft or something kicks in and sends them on the process and all that’s automated.

I paid for a subscription, but haven’t done it.

It’s just really good to hear that someone’s doing it. Okay, I’ve got a couple of questions from … First one’s from Jenny, “Can you tell us more about your client base and how do you make sure that the content suits who you’re talking to?” I guess you sort of mentioned that before when you said you’re Facebook advertising specifically to that demographic. Is that how you’re doing it?

That’s part of it. That’s right. When you’re producing content, our client base is very predominantly … We’ve got younger people, I guess that’s the sort of people who were initially searching on Google, but it’s amazing the types of people that you do get making inquiries from your website. They’re predominantly young people. I’d say the sweet spot is really between that 25-40 years old.

That’s a great one, which then sort of answers the question from [Marc 26:08], who asked, “What type of plan’s coming through?” You’d say generally the younger clientele.

We’ve got what we call our “foundation of wealth.” They’re really those people who are looking to save for a house and looking to get control of their finances and get their foundations in place, so get their supers sorted out and get a bit of personal protection put in place. Then, we’ve got our “pathway to wealth.” Those guys are looking to start accumulating wealth, so they might have a bit of equity in their home or they’re got a lump sum there that they want to invest, whether that be in shares or property, as well as obviously setting their foundations at that time.

Okay, is it just higher percentages between …

I’ll take roughly around 70% for the pathway to wealth, 20% for the foundations, and 10% for the wealth management. Just on that, again, it’s what we’re focused on.

Final question … I’m sorry.

It’s amazing … It’s probably something we’ll begin focusing on soon. If you really want to focus on wealth management clients, we’ll produce some really good content and then go find ways to syndicate it and put it in front of those people. Facebook is now probably our preferred platform, I guess, even other than Google ad, because just the amount of people that are using it and the platform’s actually really, really easy to use and really easy to boost up the content that you like, as well.

Great. Final question with three minutes to go and then, I’ll let Phil wrap up here, is from James, “Are you using a social media publishing tool such [inaudible 28:18], Hootsuite, something like that?”

Yep, we are using Hootsuite. The important thing around that, as well, is to have a message for each one of those platforms that’s a little bit different, because you’ve got different people using them predominantly. If you can change your message just slightly and, again, always be driving them back to your blog, your own thing that you own, you don’t … That’s exactly the same for any other publishing contenting out there. Don’t publish your whole article on Facebook or have a video that’s fully on there. You want them always coming back to your blog, because Facebook, you can easily press play for a video and keep scrolling through your feed or read an article, for example, when what you’re really wanting them to do is come back to your website and then start engaging with some of your other stuff there. As we were talking about before, opt-in in some way, so you start building that list and then, you can start offering them different things throughout the process, too.

Great, sounds really good. I know your point on making sure that you’ve got a different message for different platforms. I know Jenny Brown is a stickler for that. She gets annoyed at any advisor who just pumps out the same stuff on all of the different platforms, so just a shout out to you, Jenny. I remember getting told off by her once.

What we’ve actually done is … That strategy of publishing content quickly and easily and then being able to boost it, and the other thing I didn’t mention was the remarketing stuff that’s available now where you can follow people around different websites, that’s become really popular and actually increases your conversions, usually. What I’ve done is put together a small cheat sheet for everyone that’s actually come on today. So, I think I can … If I just stick the URL there and then say … You might have to enter your email address in that one and you’ll get sent the cheat sheet of each stage and what it looks like and the best ways to do that and the platforms that we use to make it easier and as simple as possible.

Awesome. That’s so good, super helpful. We can hear about marketing stuff all day long and I know I’ve dropped many of hours trying to learn about this stuff and actually not doing anything, so what you’re doing is really great and really helpful. Thanks everyone for coming. We are right on-time and we want to be really respectful of everyone’s time and make sure that we finish exactly on the dot. Thanks, Clayton, for coming and filling in for Ben Nash, and thanks to Guy for coming in and teaching us all that you’ve learnt to get your business over seven figures.

No worries at all.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. We’re going to be posting a video on Youtube and we promise, I know I said it last fortnight, but I promise we’ll do it this fortnight. Finally, Clayton’s gotten around to doing the stuff that we needed to do. Look out for that in the coming days. Thanks every for jumping in and we’ll see you next fortnight.

Oh, yeah, really good. We’ve got Brenton who has started … He’s a financial advisor, has been for about 15 years and he’s built a financial services company that’s about to be listed and he’s quite a fantastic entrepreneur. There’s going to be some really cool stuff next week, next fortnight, as well.

Make sure you look out for that guys and we’ll put up a [live 32:37] session that you can join in over the next few days. Thanks guys! Bye!