The Influential Advisor

079: Words That Win: Turning Financial Expertise into Client-Attracting Language with Hillary Gale

• Paul G. McManus

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Episode Summary:

There's a significant gap affecting nearly every financial advisor: the disconnect between their expertise & their ability to communicate it in a way that resonates with prospects. Hillary Gale, a former linguistics professor turned copywriting expert, shares insights on how advisors can transform their marketing through better messaging. She reveals strategies for identifying language that connects, having conversations that convert, and creating content that actually brings in business. From conducting "voice of client" research to crafting compelling lead magnets, Hillary provides practical frameworks for advisors to stand out in a crowded marketplace.


About the Guest:

  • Hillary Gale founded Moneta Copy & Content after transitioning from academia, where she earned degrees in applied linguistics & taught university-level writing courses. Her background in teaching freshman writing classes gave her valuable insights into writing for specific audiences, which she now applies to help financial advisors craft messaging that resonates with their ideal clients.


Key Concepts Explained:

Voice of Client Research: Hillary recommends asking strategic questions to potential clients (not just existing ones) to understand how they talk about their financial anxieties, goals, & what they want in an advisor relationship. These insights can then be threaded into marketing copy for more powerful connection.

Beyond Demographics to Psychographics: Instead of just targeting "pre-retirees with $X in assets," Hillary suggests niching down based on personality characteristics, life visions, or specific goals. This approach helps advisors stand out & attract clients they genuinely enjoy working with.

The "Blue Ocean" Opportunity: Hillary discusses how to move beyond the crowded "red ocean" where most advisors compete for the same clients, to find unique positioning that connects with specific audiences. She cautions against arbitrarily selecting niches (like "medical professionals") without a genuine connection or expertise.

E-Books as Lead Magnets: Hillary explains how e-books (typically under 50 pages) can serve as powerful lead generation tools when they include interactive elements like worksheets or action items. She views them as complementary to physical books rather than replacements, with e-books being free entry points & physical books offering deeper engagement.


Practical Takeaways:

Gather Client Language: Incorporate questions into your discovery & onboarding process to collect prospects' exact language around their financial concerns. Hillary suggests asking "Why did you reach out to me right now?" during call booking to gather valuable insights.

Move from "Me" to "You" Perspective: Avoid promoting services from your perspective ("why you need life insurance"). Instead, lead with client perspectives, pains, & desires using their language, then connect solutions back to your services.

Find Your Natural Audience: For podcast guest appearances, look beyond financial shows to podcasts where your ideal clients gather. Hillary shares an example of an advisor who works with first responders appearing on firefighter podcasts about wellness topics.

Compliance Workarounds: Most compliance concerns can be addressed with simple word substitutions (like "pursue" instead of "achieve") or by focusing on storytelling approaches rather than promissory language.


Connect with Hillary:

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

Support the show

Speaker 1:

If you're like most advisors, you pride yourself on delivering excellent financial guidance to your clients, but there's a challenge affecting nearly every advisor. I know that few are equipped to overcome the gap between your expertise and your ability to communicate it in a way that resonates with prospects. Our guest today knows this reality all too well. Hilary Gale not only spent years studying the science of communication as a linguistics professor, but she's also dedicated her career to helping financial advisors bridge this exact gap. What started with a simple insight that advisors often struggle to translate their knowledge into client-attracting language has evolved into a methodology that's helping advisors across the country transform their marketing results With the right words. She's showing advisors how to identify messaging that connects, have conversations that convert and create content that actually brings in business welcome hillary to the show.

Speaker 2:

How?

Speaker 1:

are you doing? Thank you, paul, I'm doing good. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, so I really enjoyed being on your podcast several months ago, so I'm excited to have you on my podcast. As a fellow marketer for financial advisors, I know that we're gonna have a lot of fun on this podcast just geeking out and talking about concepts that are near and dear to our hearts, also super important for financial advisors to grasp so that they can become more effective in their marketing. And, as we get started, just kind of love to know a little bit about your background. Who are you and how did you get to the point you are now helping financial advisors with their copywriting, branding, marketing and things of that nature.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely Well, I'm Hillary Gale. I own Moneta Copy and Content, which is a copywriting agency for financial advisors. But we really come from a strategy standpoint. So every project that we write is built on a strategy that we do first to make sure that it's going to connect with the clients and things like that.

Speaker 2:

Before I got into this and before I started my agency, my background is actually in academia. I did an undergrad and a master's in applied linguistics, so I was really studying to be a teacher students of English as a second language and so I really had this strong research background. I really enjoy researching. I really enjoy answering questions and finding the best way to do things. So I ended up teaching at the university level for five years. I taught the freshman writing classes like English 101 that everybody kind of hates, but it gave me a really great background in understanding how to write for audiences and what the power of writing for a specific audience was. So as I was teaching this, I was also kind of absorbing it myself and really kind of taking those lessons to heart, and so that really prepared me, I think, to go into marketing, because when the pandemic hit in 2020, I had already been thinking about leaving teaching for various reasons.

Speaker 2:

When the pandemic hit and my job security was on the line and things were changing in the teaching profession so much, it was kind of my green light to say, okay, I'm going to go all in on working for myself. I really want to work with financial advisors. I had always had an interest in personal finance and my dad's a CPA, so I had grown up having these conversations about finance in my life and so I'd always been really interested in what are the best decisions that I can make with my money, and so I was interested in working with people who do this every day and who help people make good decisions with their money. I was like if I could get paid to write about these subjects that I would be researching anyways, that would be amazing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can relate to a lot of what you said. I started my own marketing agency back in 2015. In 2016, my very first financial advisor came to me and at the time I knew nothing about financial advisors, but since I personally love working with them I've worked with close to 500. And just in that process of talking to them, getting to know them both of us without that formal training, it's I feel like I have a PhD in the mindset of financial advisors, especially when it comes to not what they do day to day in terms of their actual core work, but in terms of what their pain points are, what their desires are, all those things that really get into how you and I help them achieve those things and overcome those things so that they can build their practices. You said that your father was a CPA. Now, when you say financial advisor and CPA, to me those are a little bit different.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they're like oil and water, right, and I do actually think, the more that I've worked with financial advisors and the more that I've talked to my dad about the work that I'm doing, I actually think he's kind of a special CPA. He is a very forward tax planning minded CPA and he likes to help people think about their lifetime tax liability, which I think is something that financial advisors do so often. And the friction I see happening between financial advisors and CPAs is oh, cpas are always just looking backwards. Right, they're always just looking backwards and they're not really thinking about the future and things like that. But my dad always was and he just retired. Actually, as he retired, I was interviewing some of his longest standing clients to put together a little video for him. It was amazing to hear the impact that he had on their lives. I really feel like he was more of a financial advisor to them than just a tax preparer.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I think that's awesome. So I definitely have a carve out for CPAs by training, but also our forward thinking. I think that's its own category of.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love it when I see CPAs who also have a CFP designation.

Speaker 1:

It's like the best of both worlds. And so tell me about your typical client. Why do they come to you? What is it that they're looking for help with?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so my typical client is usually someone who is the owner of their practice and they're looking for help with. Yeah, so my typical client is usually someone who is the owner of their practice and they're really the only one, and they might have a small team, maybe like a client associate or someone just kind of helping them with the administrative tasks, but they're really doing everything themselves and wearing all of the hats, and so they usually come to me because they are marketing themselves and they see all these other advisors out there creating content online and really showing up and getting some awareness, but they just don't have time to do it all themselves. Or, if they do, they're posting, probably on LinkedIn, all the time, but that's all they're doing, and so they're not seeing a ton of booked discovery calls from just posting on LinkedIn.

Speaker 1:

To be fair, if you post on LinkedIn, you'll get at least 10 impressions, right?

Speaker 2:

Right, I know right, but I see advisors who they're posting on LinkedIn and they are getting lots of impressions and they're getting tons of engagement and people love their stuff. There's one in particular, actually, that I spoke to just earlier this year. He has this great following on LinkedIn and he was almost a little bit embarrassed to share this with me. He was like people tell me all the time that my marketing is so good, but I don't actually get a ton of book discovery calls from it. So a lot of people are coming to me trying to fill in the gaps and asking is there something else I should be doing? Is there like a better strategy? Because this is working in this way, but it's not working in the way that I really need it to Do the advisors that you typically work with.

Speaker 1:

do they have a lot of headwind when it comes to compliance, or are they able to do those things fairly well?

Speaker 2:

I would say that most of the advisors I work with, initially they're worried about compliance, but they don't actually have as much headwind as they think they will, and that's actually something that I always say. We include two rounds of edits One is for you to tell me what you want to change, and two is for compliance to tell me what they want to change.

Speaker 2:

I don't get hardly any pushback from compliance and I think people are always surprised by that because I do help them write copy that's very story-based and that's talking about their experiences with their clients and things like that. If compliance comes back with changes, for me it's usually just a word or two. I never have a problem and there's always even if they do have a problem with we don't really like you to do case studies there's always a workaround that they're willing to concede on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no, I do a lot of. I help advisors write books, which is long form content. Same thing. It's like they're typically worried about compliance. I think just more. I think there's like a fear of compliance. It's not necessarily every interaction they have. It's like fearful and it's disturbed the nest and haven't come after them. But that's been my experience too. Is that even in some of the more strict compliance environment, actually it's a few words and it's funny oftentimes because it's like superlatives. It's like sometimes you can't say maximizer If it's like really strict maximizer. Maximizing these words is like really Until you get down to okay for this compliance department. These are the kind of parameters and once you get those dialed in, it's pretty simple.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it really is. And and I like for each one of my clients, who all have different compliance departments, I keep a little running list for them of these are the phrases that your compliance really flags and really doesn't like. Compliance departments are not all aligned on what they're okay with and what they're not okay with. A big one for me that I learned really fast in my career as a copywriter for financial advisors is just swap out the word achieve for pursue. It's not like we'll help you achieve the retirement of your dreams. We'll help you pursue the retirement of your dreams, and then they're happy.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think there's one that stands out to me and I think it's pretty common. It's like you can't say that you're an expert, say that I have expertise in.

Speaker 1:

To me it's just so funny because in my case, I help them write books. In your case you can help them write eBooks. And it's typically you think, okay, if you're an author, you're an authority. By extension, you have you're an expert, right. It's like the whole notion is like showcase your expert status, your expertise. The sirens start going off. I was gonna say at this point it's a little bit of a game, but I think for you and myself, once you can, understand.

Speaker 2:

It's just kind of funny at that point. Yeah, who comes to mind whenever I talk about compliance? There's actually two advisors that they haven't been clients of mine but they've been on the podcast and they just have such good compliance success stories. Number one is Aaron Buchner. Do you know Aaron Buchner? Okay, so he's actually in Canada, his firm is called Cactus and his tagline is prick free financial advice, which is pretty controversial. And so he went to his compliance department and he was just kind of like this is my brand when he waited to hear what they would say. A few days went by and then he reached out and followed up Is there any problem? And because he had the firm name Cactus, to go along with the tagline that he wanted to use, they were like we get what you're trying to do here, you can do this.

Speaker 2:

And then the other advisor that comes to mind is Dave Armstrong of Monument Wealth Management. Do you know Dave? No, Okay, he's also a great advisor. And he's another one who kind of toes that line of controversial. I wouldn't use this word to describe him, but some people might see it as unprofessional. He's not afraid to use four-letter words in his marketing because that's how he talks normally and he wants to attract clients who are comfortable with that kind of language. And so, with his compliance department, he told me compliance wants to prevent you from making promissory statements. I don't really care how you say the other stuff, though.

Speaker 2:

And so I think there's just a lot more freedom than you really think there is If you just go to compliance with your ideas and see them as a partner who's just trying to protect you, not someone who's trying to prevent you from being yourself.

Speaker 1:

No, definitely. So one of the things that I've learned in the years of studying marketing and copywriting is that good marketing is meant to both attract your clients and then the second part, which most people overlook. But it's also meant to repel people that you're not meant to serve. And so just in the first example about, I think, you said don't be a prick or something like that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, prick free financial advice, you're going to have one or two reactions. That's awesome. I want to work with this person. Oh, that's unprofessional. And the funny thing is that both reactions so long as it's working at some point. If it's like it's not working, it's like why am I not getting appointments?

Speaker 2:

If it drives your appointments and the people that show up are like your people, then that's awesome, and I asked Aaron because he, prior to doing this rebrand, he was working just under the advisor. His firm's name was I know it was last name and he was attracting clients, but he wasn't really finding a lot of joy in his work. He felt like he wasn't really able to be himself and so I did ask him after you did this rebrand. Obviously this sets you apart from a lot of advisors. His branding is like bright orange, like it's very vibrant.

Speaker 1:

It's like okay, this, and then like the other 99%, which do you want?

Speaker 2:

So I asked him is your calendar just like filling up with booked calls? It's not that my calendar is just like all of a sudden filling up with all these bookings. It's not like this magic bullet. But the people that I work with, or the people who are attracted to me and that do find me, they're so similar to me, they're quirky and they're out of the box, and so I find myself really enjoying client meetings a lot more and things like that. And he said I know that all of the efforts that I'm making right now, they will compound. So he totally expects his calendar to continue filling up with bookings. But I really appreciated his honesty. But it wasn't this magic bullet just because now he does really stand out from the 99%.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think, just to break it down, it's really two things. One to what you said, he's attracting the right fit clients, the people that he naturally there's a mutual attraction there, and then, in terms of filling up, that's a secondary thing. That's really about traffic and awareness and different things, and so as long as you see that the process is working, then go and scale it. It's having the right brand in a vacuum isn't going to do you any good if no one sees it. But once you see that element is working, now you have to think about how do you scale it and really create the awareness so that you can attract more of the people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. What he told me was people who are offended by my brand and my tagline. I don't want to work with them anymore.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I have my own process so dialed in and I teach this to my clients by extension, but it just works exceptionally well. Let's get into a couple other topics that I would love to hear your perspective on. Most of my discovery calls with an advisor, I ask the all important question who is your ideal client? Now, this is typically before they've established a brand, like you discussed, but it's oh well, it's pre-retirees, because they're the ones with the money and they're looking for planning. And there's this whole book out there called Blue Ocean Strategy and it's the whole idea that, versus the red ocean, where everyone's competing and it's very difficult and you find a niche or a target audience that is less competition, how do you guide someone from, I think, more of the norm, which is oh, it's a pre-retiree 55 to 65-ish income of this level, assets of this level that's my ideal client to something that creates more of a blue ocean opportunity for them?

Speaker 2:

First of all, I think it makes sense that advisors want to work with that type of client because, like you said, those are the clients that have the money right. Those are the clients that have the retirement accounts that they're able to transfer over to an advisor. They're not stuck in a 401k anymore or they won't be for long. So I get it why so many advisors say that's their ideal client. I like to help advisors drill down and niche down further in a way that really makes sense to them. It doesn't always for every advisor make sense to niche down into a specific industry. I think I see a lot of advisors saying, well, I target medical professionals, and for some advisors that's absolutely right, but for others that doesn't make sense. To say, well, I only work with people in the tech industry or whatever it might be. So I like to help advisors figure out, explain the reason.

Speaker 1:

I know where you're going with that, but just to be very explicit, say why that is not effective.

Speaker 2:

Good question. So again, I think it can be effective for the right advisors. But if you're saying, okay, well, I'll drill down to medical professionals because I know they have money to invest, but that's the only reason. And it's not that you already work with a lot of medical professionals. It's not that you enjoy working with medical professionals, it's not that you have some specialized expertise that can work with medical professionals or something in your background that's going to help you connect with them emotionally, right? If you can't say I'm doing it for one of those four reasons and I'm sure there's others then it's not a good niche decision to just kind of pick one out of the ether.

Speaker 1:

So I totally agree and I've done this long enough my 10 years where originally this was, I think, a mistake of my part, just when I learned this whole concept was oh, you have to have a target audience and pick one, and no, because people will do just what you said. It's like, well, medical doctors, they got some money. It's like great, and then crickets, and it's like just what you said how many doctors do you work with? None, maybe one.

Speaker 2:

Right, right, exactly. That's not going to end up attracting that subset of people to you anyways. You have to be a little bit deeper.

Speaker 1:

And the second part is why do they?

Speaker 2:

want to work with you. Yes, that's such an important piece of the equation and why would they want to work with you? What are they going to get out of working with you? And so I think there are some things you can do to look at your current client base and drill them down a little bit further. I like to call it if you're not going to niche down by demographics, you can niche down by psychographics and you can start to build an ideal client profile, let's say, based on somebody's personality, characteristics or maybe their vision that they have for their life.

Speaker 2:

All want to sell their house and live on a houseboat for the rest of their lives. I don't know why that is coming into my brain, but if you have a bunch of clients, that's their particular dream, and you know that there are other people out there who have that very particular dream, and that's what you help people achieve. That's one way that you can kind of start to niche down and talk to a specific subset of people that you really enjoy working with and that are going to see oh, this person can help me do exactly what I want to do.

Speaker 1:

Just from my experience and perspective, it's ultimately, the reason for that is that you need to stand out. How are you different from other 99 people? And then two you need to know where to find them. Right, hey, I work with XYZ, but where are you going to do your marketing? Right, you have to know whether it's online or in person, or to find them. And at that point you start getting more and more of them. They start talking and then your close rate goes way up. What people really want is that, even if you know, to me there's two problems. Problem number one getting enough appointments. Problem number two closing those appointments. Yes, Especially when it's an online environment. This Number two closing those appointments. Yes, Especially when it's an online environment. This is different from referrals, where there's transfer of trust, all those good things, but just again, over the years, I've seen enough where getting the appointment is only problem number one.

Speaker 2:

Closing is number two. Yeah, yeah, and you are going to have a much easier time. If people have already seen you online and they see themselves kind of fitting into what you do, they're already like I know I want this thing and this guy said he could help me get that thing.

Speaker 1:

And, by extension, he understands us right, right when it is. He's also a houseboater, even if my problems, which is really, to be fair, it's all more or less the same stuff, but you can speak the language, you can resonate, you can build rapport Right right and I kind of regret using that as an example I have no idea why that popped into my head. I'm going to steal that. Who are your people? The house putters.

Speaker 2:

Are they house putters? You know why. I was talking to an advisor a few weeks ago. I was helping with a rebrand and he was telling me about one of his clients that he helped do this. So that's why it popped into my head, I think.

Speaker 1:

What's interesting. I was talking to a client and we were talking about getting him on podcasts as a guest, and what I've discovered is that it's not ideal to go for an advisor, it's not ideal to be a guest on podcasts on personal finance, because they don't really stand out. If all the guests are personal finance, then it's probably more DIYers.

Speaker 1:

You can get some value, but by the same token, it's not going to have as much value as if they're actually on the podcast, where their ideal fit people are. And so this is a little bit of a just in my head. I'm like, okay, how do we do that? Who's the audience? Really, it's pre-retirees. This was a guy that was a CPA turned advisor, similar to your dad, and just in asking him questions, one of the things that came up was that he and his wife like to RV and just drilling down a little bit, we got into the conversation. There are enthusiasts, organization groups, podcasts et cetera about that lifestyle. Yeah, and if he has a genuine passion for it, he has the ability to genuinely connect with those people. But it becomes like this almost subset, because now if, going on that podcast as an advisor, other people are talking about lifestyle, they're talking about other stuff that is important to our viewers, but they're not talking about personal finance. But all those people have questions about personal finance.

Speaker 2:

Yes, this makes me think of another advisor that I just talked with. He works with first responders in his community. He works with police officers and firefighters. My husband is a firefighter so I connected with him and you're demonstrating right there.

Speaker 1:

It's like, because you have that connection, suddenly you go from just vanilla. I have this expertise, so we can connect like that Exactly.

Speaker 2:

We have this passion for this community Right, and so I want to talk to you. There's all these podcasts out there for firefighters that are about like mental health and all these things to do with firefighting. I'm sure it's the same for police officers too.

Speaker 2:

And if you can have an advisor go on one of those podcasts. That's not financial advice for firefighters or whatever it might be, but you're the only advisor there talking about financial wellness, when everyone else is talking about mental health and physical wellness and things like that. You're going to get clients from that.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. By extension, you then have the ability to break it down further into their I call it tribal language, because then you can talk about the specific problems that firefighters face, and whether it's retirement or their pension plan or this, that and the other, and you can use case studies of other firefighters that you've helped. And so now they're starting to relate because every other financial advisor out there is just some suit in an office that, whether they have an advisor or not, they don't really connect very well with, and so you immediately stand out as one of us. Right, you're instantly one of us, and so it has so much more impact.

Speaker 1:

And I think, just by extension now this gets into, I think, the core ideas behind copywriting. Right, because it's really, I guess, a very simple way that I would describe it. It's how do you get into the head of ideal clients so that when they either read what you write or listen to what you say, they're thinking how did you know that? Have you been following me around watching me? How do you know that? You seem to know my thoughts? So, just from your experience as a copywriter, how do you either help with your services or how do you guide advisors to be able to write that compelling messaging or craft that compelling messaging that really does break through and grab the attention of their ideal clients.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, you said it you wanna get into their head, right, we wanna get as close to into their head as we can, and so I find the best way to do that is to ask them.

Speaker 2:

So if you have a subset of clients that you are working with that you would love to work with more of those types of clients, or even if they're not your clients, but they would make an ideal client they're just people in your network that if you can ask those people to answer a few questions for you that you put strategically together to try to get into their head and to hear how they're talking about their financial anxieties.

Speaker 2:

Hear how they're talking about what do I want in the future? Hear how they're talking about what they want in a relationship with a financial advisor. If you can get those words from them and then you can thread those into your copy and your marketing, that's going to be a really powerful way to connect with the people, and I actually just released a podcast episode it's called Voice of Customer Research With advisors. I like to call it Voice of Client Research. Advisors always say I don't have customers, so if you can do this type of voice of client research, that can be a really powerful way to get into their heads and to basically stop guessing at what it is that they're thinking and saying and actually get it on digital paper so to speak.

Speaker 2:

There's pros and cons for surveying your clients that you're working with or surveying people in your network who embody your ideal clients. I actually prefer you to survey people who aren't actually your clients because they're still in that pre-client mindset, whereas the clients that you have they may have been working with you for a few years, they may be in a totally different space than they were before they became your client, and it's those people who are still in that pre-client mindset that you're trying to reach with your marketing. So, whenever possible and that's also easier from a compliance perspective Sometimes, depending on your compliance department, they have a problem with you surveying your clients anonymously, because if anything comes up, they want to know who said that. Do we need to address any problems, things like that and I always think you're going to get better answers if you can survey people anonymously so that they'll be as honest as possible. They're not going to feel embarrassed about anything that they're sharing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and to your point, if it's your own client and hopefully you've been doing a good job and they love the work and it's like what are your pains and problems? Nothing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, that's what you want to hear, and they're like, oh, this is awful.

Speaker 1:

It's like, oh, my goodness, it takes a little bit of bravery. I've started much more proactively soliciting client feedback early on and quickly knowing that it's just, that's the way you get better Right Just actually solicit feedback, honest feedback from everybody.

Speaker 2:

And this is something that you can build into your discovery and onboarding process. You can start to gather this kind of slowly, so you do get insights from people who aren't working with you yet or so early in the relationship that their pains are still very top of mind. So that's another way. If you don't need to gather all this information right now and you're willing to just do it slowly, you can build in a little follow-up question with people that have booked a discovery call with you. Or if they are booking a discovery call with you, say through Calendly or Acuity or something like that, you can ask them a question why did you reach out to me right now? And then you can start to gather their answers. This is their words, this is what they're looking for. I'm going to use this in my marketing.

Speaker 1:

Yep, I call it insights interviews.

Speaker 1:

I'm a big advocate of it.

Speaker 1:

Back in 2016, I had my very first financial advisor client, did tremendous success with them, and then his producer group wanted to know what's going on here, and so they invited me to speak, and this was my first time to really branch out beyond this one individual who had a great relationship with, I felt, from his perspective.

Speaker 1:

I knew his challenges, but how representative is that of everybody else in terms of how they think? And before the speaking event, I had the opportunity to interview the executive director of the group, and this is a couple hundred top performing insurance producers and I asked just for 30 minutes, and what invariably happens is that when you ask people thoughtful, good questions, they're like oh no, we have all the time in the world. Yeah, 90 minutes later, all recorded, I still have it. This is a guy that was basically the leader of these 200 plate people have been in the industry forever, and so he just dropped nugget after nugget and that really informed me and made me that much more effective when I went to that speaking event and just really allowed me to really navigate that much more quickly.

Speaker 1:

I'm a huge fan of what you're describing in that approach.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I will say too, coming from an academia and research background, at first it was uncomfortable for me because I wanted the data to be perfect. I wanted to make sure that there was a process that I was following. And, yes, those are good things to do, right, to make sure that you are getting several perspectives, but it doesn't have to be so scientific that you don't do it at all If that's a barrier for you. Sometimes, just getting like these small insights from asking questions or from interviewing someone for 90 minutes, that can give you a ton of great stuff to work with and a ton of insight, I suppose, into your market.

Speaker 1:

It helps to solve what I see as one of the biggest challenges that many people face is that too often we go to market from a me perspective, meaning that as an advisor, I want to promote X, y, z. How do I make this compelling to the audience that I'm promoting it to? But it's fundamentally couched in a me perspective, right? The reason you need life insurance, this is the reason you need an annuity. This is the reason you need managed money, whatever it is.

Speaker 1:

But it's too much from their perspective and what, and so it's fundamentally a disconnect, whereas when you do the insights interview, what you learn is how to approach it from their perspective, the pains and the desires that they have and what is the language that they use to describe that, and then ultimately, what you do.

Speaker 1:

You want to connect it back to what it is you do, but you want to lead with their perspective, and it's not just copywriting. What I've found is that I've been a student of copywriting for a while now, but the better you get at this, it just makes your communication better. So the better you get at writing, the better you get at speaking, the better you get at whether it's in larger groups or whether it's just one-on-one and something that you do every day. As you sharpen the skills, everything gets that much more effective. For someone that's like I don't want to be a copywriter or hire someone. Still, there's a process to it and it's understanding your ideal clients, and I think, from a persuasion perspective, nothing beats being able to understand the conversation that your ideal client's having, because then, when you can start asking questions and articulating that and they're naturally drawn out, that's where your conversions go from wherever they are to skyrocketing.

Speaker 2:

Right. As a former writing teacher, I just could not agree with you more. I think that there's so much processing that happens when you're writing these things that it does bleed into the conversations you're having with people and the emails that you're writing to clients, or writing your own content, at least on one platform, or at least for a few months, or whatever it might be. There's so much to be gained from that, even if you don't want to be a copywriter long-term, which is totally fine, but there are so many benefits to just immersing yourself in the writing for a time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I guess, as we start to wrap up, that leads to the question so when people work with you, where is that balance? Do you do it for them? Do you do it with them? How do you help financial advisors with their copywriting? What's your approach as a company?

Speaker 2:

So we do it with them. Sometimes, depending on how much time the advisor has and how involved they want to be, we'll do it for them, but I see the most successful projects happening when we do it with them. So, whether it's ongoing content that we're writing with you for your email newsletters or your email sequences, or whatever it might be, I need you to at least record a Loom video for me with all of your word vomit thoughts, and I can take those and I can apply copywriting principles so that your thoughts and your zone of genius and your knowledge will connect and resonate with your ideal clients. Some advisors prefer to speak their thoughts, which, honestly, I really like because I think the thoughts are richer. Some advisors prefer to just give bullet point lists, and that's totally fine too. It's all of your thoughts and all of your knowledge, but we take it and we apply copywriting principles to it so that it resonates emotionally.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, definitely. I like the word vomit, yeah, yeah, that's my favorite approach. A couple more questions that I want to touch on. Ebooks, my case I'm a publishing company, slash marketing agency, the short book formula. We help people primarily create physical books and, by extension, we can have a Kindle version, it can have a audiobook version, etc. But we start with really a physical paperback book that's generally typically 12,000 to 25,000 words. So when I hear ebook, I'm thinking, okay, it's like a smaller, more concise book that probably someone can download as a lead magnet. So talk to me about what is an ebook and what's the value of an ebook for an advisor and, by extension, how does that, from your perspective, is different from more of a paperback book?

Speaker 2:

Yep, so you're absolutely right. The ebook really functions as a lead magnet to build your email list. I usually recommend to advisors about a big ebook project and he was asking me could this be a revenue driver? Could I sell the ebook? And my recommendation was I wouldn't use it as that. There's so many ebooks. It's going to take so much marketing to sell an ebook right, even if it's only $2.99 or $3.99, that I would rather you give it away for free and build your email list so that you can nurture the people on your email list into becoming clients or down the road if you decide to turn your ebook into a physical book, and now you have this email list and this audience of people that you can email about the physical book launch, whenever that happens, this is a great asset for your business.

Speaker 2:

So the ebook usually is much shorter than a physical book would be the longest ebook project that I have worked on with someone. After it was designed it was 50 pages long as a PDF and so that's the longest that I've worked on. Usually I recommend they're a little bit smaller, because you do want your audience to actually download the ebook and read the ebook so that they get something out of it. They build that trust with you. They want to keep coming back to you for more information, things like that.

Speaker 2:

So another thing that I like to do with ebooks to make them more engaging and more likely to actually be read is I like to build in some interactive kind of workbook style either tasks or reflections or action items or things like that so that it becomes really engaging in that way. So I would say I know you can do that in a physical book as well, and a lot of great physical business books do have those components, but with an ebook I think they're an absolute must. I think if you want people to actually open up that PDF, once they download it and use it, you're going to give them some things that they can really apply what you're talking about in the ebook to their own lives.

Speaker 1:

That's the idea behind the short book formula with a physical book is that ultimately, in a similar way, it's a book that can be read cover to cover and, I say, within one to two hours. The ebook, I think, is going to be shorter than that. But the whole philosophy behind what I do is that it does you no good to write down this tome of all the wisdom you've gained over 20 years and 300 pages. First of all, you'll never do it right. Let's just be honest. You're not going to do it unless after you retire. Then it doesn't really serve the purpose of growing your business.

Speaker 1:

And even if you did do it, the problem is that very few people are going to actually read it cover to cover. And whether it's an e-book or whether it's a short physical book, I think we agree that the fundamental thing is that for it to serve a purpose, it's to actually get your ideal reader, slash, prospect, slash, client to take the time to read it cover to cover so that they consume the message. I like the word pre-suited by the message, because you're pre-framing these things and so when they come talk to you, they're like this is what I think You're like. Huh, that just so happens to correspond with what I think Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Yes, this is great. Yes, I love that. I think that somebody having both an ebook and a physical book is actually a really smart strategy, because you have a way for people to get your information for free and then, if they really like what you have to say, which hopefully they do I want more information from this person, so I'm going to buy their actual book. I wonder what's in their paid physical book.

Speaker 1:

That's exactly right, and that's actually how I create what's called a flip book, which is a version of an ebook which is instead of a PDF.

Speaker 1:

It's a little flip thing that people can do, but essentially the reason we do it is that you can use it as a lead magnet. I just don't know how many people are going to actually sit there and read it this way, and so that's where you need to increase the odds of them consuming the message, which is physical books. But then again, how many people read physical books? People are more likely to listen to you on a podcast talking about your book, yes, than actually reading your book, and then, if they're super motivated and they're like, wow, that was awesome, then they go read your book. But it's just funny, right, because you think, well, do I do podcasts, do I do books? Do I do eBooks? It's like, well, you know, what you need is a core message, yes, that resonates, and then you just need to get it out there as many ways that people take the time to consume the message so that it can do its job.

Speaker 2:

This is me from Science Friday on NPR. When all these scientists are talking about their books, I feel like I know so much about you and I have all these books on my library hold list that I'm probably never going to read, but I love hearing people talk about their books.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so where can people learn more about you?

Speaker 2:

One other thing that I will say about the eBooks is a lot of times, if you're thinking in your head, I think I'd really like to write a book someday and you haven't found Paul yet, which you will, if you're listening to me, it just doesn't feel possible to you yet Start with an eBook, because I think that can really lay the foundation for what your book is going to turn into, and it's a lower lift for you to start kind of experimenting with what you want to say, what you want to teach someone, what you want your message to be, without committing to the full process of writing a full on book, and you can write as many eBooks as you want to right, you can write an eBook and then the next year, discover something else and you can write another eBook, and so it's a good way to play in the process before committing to your physical book that will hopefully be an asset to your business for years.

Speaker 1:

So now, of course, for self-interested reasons, I'm going to say the opposite Start with the paperback book. Yes, either way is fine, yeah no, you're right though.

Speaker 2:

Either way is fine, and there's no one right way and I think that's the beauty too, for advisors is whatever feels like the lowest barrier to you, as long as you just get started doing something.

Speaker 1:

That'll agree on it Is that, whatever it is, you need to do it.

Speaker 2:

Exactly. Yeah Right, we should start some office hours, paul. But for anyone who wants to find me, I'm always on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn name is Hillary P Gail Mia. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. My website is monetic copycom and I have a podcast called the finance marketing podcast, so if you want to pop over there and give it a listen, I have enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 1:

It's always fun for me to geek out with a fellow marketer for financial pros. I've enjoyed the conversation and I hope our audience, if they're still with us, would indicate that they enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you so much for having me, Paul. This was really fun.

Speaker 1:

All right.

Speaker 2:

Bye, for now Bye.