Diana Cabrices (0:00): All right, this is great. What do you think, Olivia? Should we go ahead and kick this off?

Olivia Paxson (0:04): Let's do this thing.

Diana Cabrices (0:05): Okay, let's do it. So I'll get us started. First and foremost, again, thank you everyone for making the time. We know as financial advisors, you are busy, busy, busy. You could be doing a million things right now, even just as business owners, advisor aside, but you're choosing to be here to spend the hour with us. Clearly you're invested in growing your business, which is awesome. And there's so much potential for growth. So we're gonna talk all about how to win business with testimonial marketing today, compliantly. Yes, the parenthetical is key, as Derek mentioned in the Q&A box. And I'll just do a quick intro of myself, let Olivia introduce herself, and then we'll get into the content. So for any of you who don't know me or we're not connected online, my name is Diana Cabrices, I'm Chief Evangelist at Wealthtender. Wealthtender is an essential marketing platform for advisors, but we really focus on three key areas of marketing, testimonials, so we have a complete technology-backed system that helps you collect and promote testimonials compliantly, SEO, and media placement. So we're helping you get quoted in the media or contribute to articles. We have a cool Ask an Advisor article series. We've had about half a million people visit Wealthtender.com in the last 12 months, looking for advice, looking for an advisor, which is exactly where we feature you. I've been in the marketing space for about six, seven years now, working with advisors, but also in other areas of technology, succession planning, M&A, recruiting. I'm super passionate about advisors. For whatever reason, I think there's so much opportunity for you guys to evolve and to grow, and I'm here to help you. So I said I would keep it short, I really didn't, but Olivia, I'm gonna pass it over to you to introduce yourself.

Olivia Paxson (1:47): That's okay, we enjoyed it. I'm Olivia Paxson, I'm the founder of Lexicon Advisor Marketing. We are business development marketing for financial advisors. We customize your prospecting experience with our marketing systems. Now, we are a fully outsourced digital marketing department, but we specialize in the financial advisor systems that automate the prospecting experience, allowing you to build relationships with people without using all the hours in your day to do so. So we've been in marketing and content development since 2018, and marketing, as you know, is constantly changing and evolving, so has our business, and we're here today with the best offering that we have had so far, and we're excited to share that with everybody.

Diana Cabrices (2:35): Wonderful, awesome. All right, let's get this kicked off. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna clear out the responses you all left us, not because they're not important, but we'll make room for any live questions that come in. So we're gonna do a Q&A at the end, so feel free, as we're talking and things pop up in your head, go ahead and drop it in the Q&A box. Maybe we'll cherry pick along the way, but for sure, we'll have a dedicated Q&A at the end. We'll probably run to the top of the hour. If we can let you out even a few minutes early, we absolutely will. Again, we know you're very busy business people, as are we. So let's go ahead and start. I'm gonna go ahead and open this next slide up here, and in this next slide, we're gonna pose our very first question, and it's very important question to ask in this type of webinar, but why are testimonials important in financial advisor marketing? We're actually gonna talk even beyond financial advisor marketing, because they're important psychologically. I'm gonna kick us off, and then Olivia, I definitely wanna hear from you. When you think about the way people search for an advisor, there's usually some sort of emotional catalyst that has happened in their life. I inherited money, I lost a parent, I'm having a child, someone's going to college, I'm nearing retirement. These are all emotional catalysts where they need help. So that is really important to give them substance that's going to help them with that emotional side of making a purchase. See, a purchase is made based on logic and facts, but it's also based on emotion. So when you serve them up with stories, you've all probably heard about how powerful storytelling is, and truly, testimonials are your clients telling your stories for you. Nothing can really beat that. That's even more powerful than you telling that story. That's really touching on that emotional side. This is the same with like getting a referral, right? If their friend had something good to say about you, that's really gonna touch them right here, and they're gonna listen to that friend, and they're gonna move forward, and they're gonna talk to you. Word of mouth, the same. The factual is your education, your credentials, your years of experience, what you actually do as a service in your advisory practice. You bring those two together, and then you reach that hiring decision. This is why online reviews are so powerful. Libby, what else would you say just about social proof, if you will?

Olivia Paxson (4:54): Well, social proof is actually a concept that suggests that other people look to other people to determine appropriate behavior, especially when it comes to buying decisions. When people see testimonials, especially from people they can relate to or respect, it signals that that product is worthy of their time or their money. Also, identification and empathy. The customer can potentially identify with what the person is going through. So I always say in advisor marketing, we always wanna show the positive outcome of working with you. What is the problem that the client is having? How do you solve that with your unique services? And what is the positive outcome? How has their life improved? And social testimonials have that social proof. They build that identification and empathy, and they let the person future cast themselves in a work relationship with you. So they can kind of see, hey, I have that problem. Oh, he helped that, you know, this advisor helped him with that problem. And look, now he's thriving and he's not stressed out anymore. And he doesn't have this tax problem. I want that. And so it allows them to see that. And the reason that this works is because it's another person saying it. It's not just you, right? And that's something we're gonna get further down in the deck as well about where to place testimonials. But all of these things are backed by psychology in the way that we, as consumers, evaluate FAs and make decisions about partnering with them.

Diana Cabrices (6:22): I love everything you had to say. And if I could like take a word from that entire thing, it really was like relatability. You know, like I wanna buy something that I know is solving the same problem that I have for other people. I can relate to these people. You know, being an advisor or even a doctor, an attorney, you are in a position of power in a way, right? Like they are looking to you for help. So it's not necessarily that they're gonna find that relatability in you. They can, especially if you're telling your own story, but they're gonna look to who's in their purview of getting help and again, solving those same problems. So I love everything you had to say about that. There's also a lot of data, folks. There's data in the industry. There's data outside of the industry, but in industry data, which I really love to lean on. About a year ago, there was a survey and I think we're gonna be releasing another one, but this is done by a company called Bright Local. And it says 81% of consumers said that online reviews are important or very important when making decisions about financial services. So we know there's a ton of data out there that says, hey, a certain subset of people are actually gonna pay more to a business just because they have reviews or that's gonna be their final decision-making factor is do they have good reviews? Is it a three star? Is it a five star? But this data here shows just in this space that this is meaningful for people. It's important or very important. On this next slide, I actually have a quick video and hopefully it can play for all of you, but it is from an advisor. His name is Iyad Amari. He's a CFP and I interviewed him. Maybe this was about a year ago, actually. A little bit under a year ago. And he really wasn't doing anything with testimonial marketing, but it just so happens one of his clients left a review on Google. And again, he wasn't soliciting. He wasn't talking about it. It wasn't even in his brain. Compliance was a whole other issue, but let's hear what he had to say about the power of that one Google review for him.

Olivia Paxson (8:23): I got a client randomly from internet traffic that I wasn't, I usually don't get my clients that way, it's very difficult. And I asked them why they chose to call me. And the gentleman said, you had a really good review on Google. A good review, which I only had one. And this was before we were really allowed to, it was a random, it wasn't random. It was a client that unsolicited. She put a review on Google for me. And so just one review and he said, hey, I chose to call you because it was a really good review. And that was like, okay, I have to figure out a way to harness this. Cause I knew the rule was coming, the change was coming. I think it was November of last year. And so this was a couple of months prior to I was over the summer. And then when WealthHender came out with this process, it was only fitting that I took it upon a part of my marketing practice and you guys just made it real easy to do that.

Diana Cabrices (9:24): I just love that clip. You can tell there's a little even fear in his voice just because again, with compliance, like before the rule passed, but it just goes to show even just having one review is powerful. Now we want you to have more than one. We want you to refresh your reviews over time. Olivia, I know you know all about this with SEO and just being having relevant and recent content for Google algorithms, but love that video.

Olivia Paxson (9:49): Definitely, we're gonna get more into that too. Take a sip of water. So Diana, now we are convinced that we need testimonials in our marketing or maybe we've collected them. We don't know what to do with them. We wanna be compliant, obviously. So what are the most important compliance considerations that we need to consider either as an advisor or a service provider for an advisor to help them squeeze all the juice out of their testimonials in a compliant way?

Diana Cabrices (10:18): Yes, okay, so let's talk about this. Let's address the elephant in the room, as I like to say, because most of you are probably thinking, I'd like to do this, but what about compliance? Actually, I was impressed with how many of you said you're already starting the process. Man, the shift is happening, yay. Okay, but what do we need to consider? So I'm gonna go through a couple of slides here. First and foremost, your registration type matters. The SEC marketing role is specifically applying to SEC registered advisors. If you are a state registered investment advisor, then it really depends on your state, unfortunately. At Wealthtender, we're part of the National Association of Compliance Professionals. We work with companies called NASA to help move the needle for you. There are green light states that have completely said yes, kind of abiding by the SEC marketing rule. There are yellow light states that are kind of in the middle and there's some legislation happening right now. And then there's just some red light states. I do have a link that I'd love to share with you all where we can help you understand where you fall in that sort of red, yellow, green light. Nick just mentioned compliance hasn't been an issue at all. Nick, I love it. I love your compliance department. Whoever works with you there, that is good to hear. But for some of you, maybe you have some red tape there. Registered reps, there was actually already existing rules allowing testimonials for you. And the disclosures and the requirements are very similar to the SEC marketing role. I think where you start to see it differ is when there's talk about investment performance. That's very touchy, especially in the RR world. SEC registered investment advisors, again, the rule applies to you. So I'm gonna show you, what does a compliant review even look like? What is sort of the meat and potatoes of what you need to know? We need the samples, all the samples. Exactly. I'm a visuals person too. So this is a screenshot from a Wealthtender certified advisor review. Now we call it that because you'll learn a little bit later and why we partner with Lexicon is we really take care from the technological side, collecting the review in a very compliant and fail-safe way, if you will, which is why I love technology. But what you'll see here is that there are clear and prominent disclosures up under the review. So this person said, I highly recommend Allison. There's five stars, there's the review. And then below that, you see those bullet points. These bullet points are the disclosures that are required by the SEC. And they have to actually be very much the same size and not hidden in very light text, if you will. It needs to be the same as the review. What are they saying? These disclosures, I call it the three Cs, triple Cs. Client, is this person a client or not? So you can see relationship to financial advisor. Compensation, is this person compensated? Have they been compensated or not? Yes, you can compensate for reviews if your compliance department allows it. The SEC certainly does. And conflict of interest. So maybe this person's been a dear friend or you went to school together or they're a family member, right? Whatever the conflicts of interest could potentially be, it has to be notified. You also have a place for additional disclosures if necessary, but this can also be linked or hidden, but these three main ones need to be prominent.

Olivia Paxson (13:43): And I've found that that varies from compliance department to department, and what they really just want you to include and that's easy enough to find out.

Diana Cabrices (13:51): Yeah, you're exactly right. It always starts with your compliance officer, your compliance department, because even though the SEC has their rules, if you're not just a solo advisor shop, if you've got multiple advisors, usually it's gonna be a firm policy first, and that might differ from the SEC marketing role. It won't go against it. It just might maybe limit it in scope a little bit. All right, this is another thing that I wanna talk about. Me too. Yes, let's do it, Olivia. Olivia, do you wanna start and kick us off on this one or do you want me to?

Olivia Paxson (14:22): No, no, you go first.

Diana Cabrices (14:23): Okay, okay, okay. All right, so here's the thing. Google is our friend, right? It's gonna help us in a lot of ways. And at Wealthtender, we play with Google, like we play in the sandbox with Google. We think it's very important. Everything we do is also very much centralized on how you're gonna appear on Google. However, with reviews, there are things to know. There are things to consider. And some firms, again, are just gonna say no Google reviews at all. It depends. But there's a couple of problems with Google and Yelp as being your only source of collecting and promoting reviews. Not saying it shouldn't be a source, but as being your only source. First things first, on Google, you cannot solicit compensated reviews. You can solicit a review if your compliance department allows it, but you can't solicit compensated reviews. And again, the SEC allows for that. You also can't promote the review as is. If you go and say, look at my Google reviews, read all my five-star reviews on Google, especially if you get that in writing, technically you're out of compliance. Why? You're now promoting an advertisement. It's creating an advertisement that doesn't have those disclosures because Google doesn't require those disclosures. Exactly. There's also no anonymous reviews allowed on Google. Some clients want to remain anonymous, especially if they're high profile. They don't want to put their name on a review. The algorithm could delete legitimate reviews. I've seen this happen before. It's been a headache for some advisors. It's such a glowing review that the system thinks it's fake. So it deletes it. And then finally, if something were to happen, if a client or somebody angry, or I know, Olivia, you've got a story here, leaves a review that needs to be disputed, because you know this is untrue what this person's saying, it's going to be nearly impossible to get that removed from Google. So that's really difficult. Last quick thing I'll say, I'm going to pass it over to you, Olivia, with Yelp. And I know, you know, maybe not a lot of you are really all that caring about Yelp, but I want to add it in here anyway. Yelp doesn't allow you to solicit reviews at all. It's just a policy with Yelp. Again, you can't promote them on Yelp as is because they don't have disclosures. And similar to Google, the software might mark legitimate reviews as not recommended. So a headache for compliance. Great for exposure. Let's talk about the good side, Olivia.

Olivia Paxson (16:40): Yeah, so I want to say that let's talk about Google first. We don't really mess with Yelp very much, but as Diana mentioned, one of the downsides is that we can't use the testimonials from your Google review anywhere else. But there are benefits to having them. So you definitely, I think in my opinion, should have an automated system for collecting them. Remember, we can't cherry pick, so we have to give an opportunity for all clients to leave a review. But having an automated system that can collect them can cover those bases. Maybe a couple of times a year, you have an email marketing campaign that goes out to the current client list. And we're going to share with you an email template that you might be able to use. Our FA Accelerator program comes with this built in. So it's part of automating your prospecting systems. But let me tell you a story also about the bad actor reviews. I spoke to an advisor, not even a month ago, a prospect that told me I have one Google review. It clearly was not even meant for my business. It was like for concrete company or something. It was a bad review. Google, trying to get help from Google on that, just forget it, forget it. You are going to be, so he has one bad review for his business, which clearly when you read the review, isn't even for his business, but it's going to affect what people see. Oh, he has a bad review. Maybe they don't even read it, or maybe it affects his ability to show up in the search box. So because your reviews will help you come up in that sidebar box when people are searching for a financial advisor near me, they prioritize people with more reviews, they prioritize people with better reviews. And your Google reviews are going to help with SEO. So linking back to your website, bringing you to the top of the search engine results. And this is something also that is a benefit of working with Wealthtender because this can also help with your SEO and having these testimonials in a third party platform. But we'll get to that when we get to that slide. So we're not saying don't try to get Google reviews. They are helpful. Just be aware that there are pros and cons.

Diana Cabrices (19:00): Absolutely, totally agree. And you know what? While you were saying that, I thought I would just pull up a couple of quick examples here on Google. So this is, I searched for Emily Rassam. So usually like, again, if I'm a consumer and I just talked to Emily in a discovery meeting, the chances of me going to Google her business name are less likely than me actually Googling her name. And what pops up immediately is her LinkedIn, her website, and then bam, Wealthtender's right at the top. We have a really high domain authority because of all the content that we post. We're very strategic with SEO. And you can see her five-star reviews there. Another option is if, let's say, I were to search a firm name. So that box that Olivia was talking about over on the right, that is the Google business profile. It used to be called Google My Business. And rather in Cattrall, I think they're around 100, no, actually they're, I think about a $1 billion an AUM firm and they use Wealthtender and their compliance team does not allow for Google reviews. They happen to have one, thankfully it's five stars. But what you do see in this Google My Business profile is if I start to scroll down, you can also see that there's 110 reviews on Wealthtender. So Google My Business sees Wealthtender as an official review site. Again, we're getting a ton of traffic. So it's almost just a good way, not only to double down on your digital presence, but to also have that right here in Google My Business.

Olivia Paxson (20:23): I have another good example, which I didn't think of when we were talking before, but I have an advisor friend, Jason, who does financial planning for construction and contractors. So when I just Google right now, financial planning for construction, page one search result, Wealthtender article, looking for financial help for your construction business and it links to his profile. So, I mean, there's a lot of SEO benefits here, I mean, they weren't searching for his name, but they're looking for financial help for construction business. Wealthtender is what comes up. I love that. That is awesome. What did you type in? Financial planning for construction.

Diana Cabrices (21:07): That is awesome. Yeah, that is again, a huge SEO benefit of Wealthtender. If you like, you can go on Google and you can search the different domain authorities of find an advisor directories. That's essentially what we are. At our core, we're a find an advisor directory. But if you go and search that, you'll find against even find a CFP or what is it? There was like the XY planning one has a platform, financialadvisor.com. We're constantly ranking higher in traffic, but also in domain authority. So how high are we popping up on the Google search results, which is important. And we do a lot of these types of articles. We'll get really specific, divorcees, unexpected circumstances, or maybe it's like you're targeting Pepsi employees. So we have a whole article on, you're working with Pepsi employees. We can make it local for you. We do all these things. So thank you for mentioning that, Olivia. I love that you brought that up live. That's wonderful.

Olivia Paxson (22:10): And if you go down to the bottom of the page, there he is. So I mean, it's like, oh, hey, look.

Diana Cabrices (22:15): Yep, there's Q&A, Jason right here. Yep. So you can, when we were unlike other lead gen platforms, we don't gatekeep the content. So if you wanna book an intro call with Jason, right from our page, he needs to update his calendar. I'll have to notify him of that. You'll have to send him a little text. I will, but you can do that. You don't have to, you know, there's no gatekeeping here. This is going directly to Jason. We're not reselling these leads. Again, book the intro call. So thank you again for that, Olivia. That was wonderful. So let's go back here. So we've talked a little bit about Google and Yelp. And then I think there was a question. I think, Mark, we're gonna save that one for the end. It's a great question. Let's talk about the how, how to really get started asking advisors for a review from their clients. Olivia, I know you mentioned you have an email template. So I think you'd mentioned it's part of your FA Accelerator program.

Olivia Paxson (23:07): Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, it's an automation that we can schedule to go out multiple times a year to print client lists, even or even, you know, for new clients, maybe after a certain period after they've been onboarded to give a review. You know, we can set it up a couple of different ways, but I mean, it's even automated so you don't have to remember to do it.

Diana Cabrices (23:27): Okay, love that. That's the beauty of working with a company like Lexicon because, again, advisors have a lot mentally going on to keep up with. Marketing is one of those things that it's complex. There's a lot of moving parts. There's emails, there's launches, there's landing pages. It's just a lot to keep up with. It looks like Megan had a drop off. Megan, no worries at all. If you're still here with us, maybe not, but this is recording. We'll make sure everybody gets a copy of the recording. What I like to say first and foremost is talk to your compliance team, but don't be afraid to ask, right? 60% of consumers said they're likely to write a review after a good experience when the business follows up with a link in an email asking for review. So we'll talk about like when those good times to ask for, definitely after a client review meeting, but you do need to have archived in your systems communications that have gone out to all of your clients. The SEC does not want you to cherry pick your top favorite client relations and ask them for reviews. It needs to really be everybody that you work with. So you can ask your clients. You can also ask non-clients. They don't have to be a client. If it's an influential COI that you might have or KRC, and I know these terms are a little annoying, but your partners in your space that know you, that respect you, specialists in your niche, maybe CPAs, again, nonprofit orgs, they can leave reviews about your character. It's not necessarily just how you've helped with their portfolios if you haven't helped them, but it's about your character and them even being a partner to you and how that experience has been. Well, you'll get this email template. I'm sure Olivia, you might wanna share yours or a link to learn more about where they can get yours. This is just one, if you are using Wealthtender to get the compliant testimonial process started. And then I know Olivia, you've got one as well for Google. If your compliance officer allows for that, there's also a QR code that we generate for you if you don't wanna use just a link. We've had a lot of advisors use this template. They've said that it's been really helpful for them. Last thing I'll say, and then I really want to kind of turn it back to you, Olivia, to talk about strategic promotional placement because getting the review is just step one, guys. We want actually to people to see that review. We wanna help you amplify that review. Include a link in your email signature. If you have a newsletter or some sort of email comm that you're sending out regularly, add a section right at the bottom. Create an instructional flyer for your office with the QR code. Build a dedicated section on your website. If you go to Rather and Cottrell's website that I had pulled up at RIA, they not only have their reviews, but they also have it where you can leave a review. You click the button and it opens up the form and it submits that review through their Wealthtender process. Incorporate it into your client review. So as soon as you finish up with that, you send that follow-up meeting, summarizing all your goals with your client that you've set, ask for a review. You can even propose a charitable donation as compensation. So Mark asked the question, why would advisors compensate? Well, everyone's a little bit different. And compensation doesn't have to mean direct compensation to this person. It could also mean an Amazon gift card or some sort of nature like that. A lot of people are more incentivized with money. It's just how the world works, but you could also propose a charitable donation as compensation. All right, let's talk about where you shine with Lexicon. Olivia, where should advisors strategically feature their testimonials?

Olivia Paxson (26:54): Well, like I put in the promotional copy for this event, your website is not enough. There are lots of reasons for this. One of them being somebody might never make it to your website. They might not know about you at all because you're not doing a lot of awareness-building activities in your marketing. So unless you're driving traffic to your website intentionally through SEO, through links on social media, links in your social media profiles, links in your email, they might never be seen except by the 300 to 1,000 people who visit your website every month. And I mean, for advisors, in my experience, for mid-size advisory firms who aren't doing much marketing, 300 is about the average users per month, Google Analytics. That's not a lot of people. And that's even if you don't have a bad bounce rate, meaning people actually click through your website, right? Your homepage, just for side note, 85% of the people will never make it past your homepage. It has to do the heavy lifting. So for that reason, yes, we wanna have the testimonials on your homepage, but just letting you know that just because someone gets to the website doesn't mean they're even gonna see it. So there are a lot of hoops that really have to be jumped through to get there. So we wanna make sure that we're using the testimonials in a lot of different places because they are so powerful. A great place is on landing pages. So we specialize in making advisor funnels. And on the broadcast page that people land on initially, we really like to feature testimonials there. Gives people an incentive to opt in for your lead magnet, join your email list, or schedule the call. Inside your lead magnets, so at the end, we really like to say what our clients are saying about us, what our clients love about us, or whatever. And then, of course, your contact information. It just gives that extra push. In your social posts and profiles, and we're gonna look at a sample from Wealthtender in the next slide. But we also can turn those Wealthtender reviews into customized graphics that are branded specifically for your firm, with your firm's team members' pictures and such. And we can put them in your LinkedIn featured section. There's a lot that we can do. Sales emails and newsletters. These are a great place to, like Diana said, you can ask for your reviews through there, but also feature some. We don't wanna leave that opportunity out. Email is one of the most powerful lead conversion tools out there. So we wanna include them in there. Video and YouTube, and also marketing materials that you're gonna take to a conference, seminar, pitch decks, brochures. These are all wonderful places that we can include the testimonials to really pack a punch for your marketing.

Diana Cabrices (29:56): Beautiful. Let's look at that social review, or social example, excuse me. So let me- Yeah, go ahead. No, I know you mentioned you guys can create them. Talk a little bit more about that process. I know what we have here really is just to showcase from a compliance standpoint, how it needs to be structured.

Olivia Paxson (30:14): I mean, it would just be a matter of, I'm not sure if this is Waterstreet's branding or not, since this was an example from you, but we just have to make sure that we have our disclosures here. But we can make different graphics, branded in different ways that you like, for banners or social, organic posts, LinkedIn features sections, just that there's a lot of possibilities. Or like you have as an example here, a link or QR code to read all the reviews so they can be taken to, we have their Wealthtender profile or the page dedicated on your website to your reviews. And just, A, that drives website traffic if you're sending them to your website and gives you a chance to share them all rather than just one. So there's a lot of ways that you can structure it.

Diana Cabrices (31:11): Love it, yeah. And yeah, I think this is Waterstreet's branding. I know with Wealthtender, it's not like, this is not by any means our main offering, right? Our main offering is to help you collect it, get it on your profile on Wealthtender, which is having a lot of traffic lands there, feature you in as many places as we can, SEO. But I love what you had to say, Olivia. It's like, if you're linking back to the website, which we also have a feature that allows you to embed these reviews in a scroller on your website, Olivia's team can help make that beautiful, like get more of that website traffic. By all means, that's super duper important for SEO. So love what you had to say here. As you guys can see, there's so many different ideas. There are so many different channels. And I like to call these like channels of fruit, right? Like wherever people are going or landing, you wanna make sure that social proof is front and center. It is just marketing best practices. So let's talk a little bit about how together we can help advisors get started. Olivia, I know we've kind of already touched on this quite a bit in the webinar, but just, you know, why did we even partner? You know, what side of the house do we really support when it comes to marketing and testimonial marketing specifically? I'll kick us off on this one with just the Wealthtender side, Olivia, but with the Wealthtender process, it's quite simple. You have your profile. I showcased one a moment ago when Olivia was talking, but you have your profile. It's so easy to send a link or a QR code to your clients or even write on your Wealthtender profile. They can leave a review. That review, they're gonna put their name, their information. If they wanna stay anonymous, they can. They have to put an email address though, because you need to know who's writing it. That's gonna get sent to you via an email. So you're gonna get notified by email that you have a review. You're gonna review it in totality, and then you're gonna tell our system, with just a couple of radio buttons, clicked or not, and you can expand where you need to if those triple Cs, right? Is this a client or a non-client? Are they compensated? Are there any material conflicts of interest that you need to add here? Once you submit that, the review goes live. Now, if you're with a big firm, we can also enter another sort of step in this process here where it can go back to your compliance department first for them to review. But otherwise, you can review it. You publish it. It's now live on Wealthtender. It's gonna start getting picked up by Google. But next is where more of that magic is really happening. Yes, we can help with social content. Yes, we're gonna drive all the traffic and SEO to get eyeballs on the reviews. But really, after that, it's where the beautiful partnership we have with Lexicon, and you're working with Lexicon, where you can really go all in on just magnifying this review and all of your other ones in different places. So, Olivia, just a quick highlight on that point one more time, if you don't mind.

Olivia Paxson (34:04): Yeah, no problem. So basically, in our service to financial advisors, it's our job to accomplish three things. Build awareness, which SEO is a big part of that. Social media is a big part of that. YouTube is a big part of that. In other words, how are we getting people to learn about us? Obviously, Wealthtender, being a high-ranking domain authority website helps with the SEO. But then, building awareness in other areas. So let's take it from Wealthtender. Let's put it on social media. Let's get it in your emails. Let's put them on your landing pages. That way, whatever avenues we're using for step two, which is lead collection, we're using those testimonials to encourage people to take the next step, which would be maybe opt-in to your email list or opt-in to your lead magnet, or maybe it's directly scheduled a call. So we're going to take it from Wealthtender, where it's a great place to have it and grab it, know we're staying in compliance, but then working with a service department like ours who knows about the compliance rules and regulations and can make sure that we're squeezing all of the juice out of those testimonials in a way that's not going to get you in trouble. And then on the backend, we can use it in our email to nurture those collected leads into converted leads. In other words, getting those people that we've got to opt-in to actually become paying clients. We can use them in our hot lead nurture sequence, meaning the emails that we send to someone who's already had a discovery call. So it really covers all three areas from awareness to lead collection, to lead conversion, and just using those in each place in the funnel to drive them through and end up in your book of business.

Diana Cabrices (35:53): Love it. Win more business. Right, win more business. That's what this whole webinar is about. Marketing is a multi-step system. It's not a one and done kind of thing. So that is why it is so important where you can and where you should, you should look to partners. You should outsource. It's actually going to be the make or break in success and growing your business with marketing. Thank you for that, Olivia. And I think what you've built is fantastic. And if you haven't currently don't follow Olivia online, like you know, she's one of the most authentic marketers in this space. She truly shows up as herself and that's exactly what she's helping you do as well. I think it's one of those things where it's like, you know, you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? And Olivia and the team at Lexicon absolutely walk the walk. That's why we partnered with them. So love that you elaborated on that. Folks, we've done a lot of talking and now we want to really hear from you. Don't be shy, but this is where we have a live Q&A. And, you know, I'm going to leave this next slide up in case you do want to learn more about Wealthtender, about Lexicon. If you want to connect with Olivia or myself on LinkedIn, we're always posting helpful education on the marketing topic, all the different angles of marketing. I'll leave this slide up, but this is your space. Ask as many questions as you would like to. Any comments that you might have? Did you learn from this webinar? Was this helpful for you? Is there anything you'd like to learn more about in the future from the two of us on the front of marketing? So don't be shy, we'll leave it open.

Olivia Paxson (37:26): We do have a question that has been sitting there for a bit, but I'm going to defer to you because I know outside of our industry, there are ways to help people leave reviews, right? So there are some, I actually, we do some marketing for other service providers who service FAs. They aren't bound by the same rules. So we are able to do a little bit more. In their situation, what we do is we kind of frame, you know, we can ask them questions. Are you satisfied with X, Y, and Z? Are you happy with the way that we've done this? If so, you know, you can kind of frame it for them. I'm not very sure that that's appropriate, though, in the FA space. I'm not sure that that's allowed. So you should let us know.

Diana Cabrices (38:14): Yeah, totally. And you know what? I'm going to make sure that all of you who signed up for this webinar get this testimonial marketing playbook. And you don't have to get a physical copy. I keep one here with me because I'm just crazy about the topic, but I'll make sure you get a digital version. But here's what I would say here to stay safe in the world of compliance. Because yes, there's language around, you know, sort of writing a review for your clients and what that really means. And we don't want to get into any of that. I think what you said was perfect, Olivia. And that's exactly what I was going to recommend is it's all in the way you frame it. How have we helped you? You know, what's been one of the biggest benefits from working with me this year? Right, maybe you post three questions along those lines. We'd really appreciate a review. Here's a link where you can leave us one. So you're not telling them, you know, you need to say this. Yeah, exactly. Yep.

Olivia Paxson (39:10): So you're smart. You can kind of remind them what you've helped them get through. Or, you know, if it's, you know, were you happy with the way that we helped you manage your, you know, after you lost of your spouse or whatever, like that's pretty morbid, but you know what I'm saying? Yep, right.

Diana Cabrices (39:26): Well, hey, it happens. Yeah, like that sounds good. I would maybe be careful with like, are you happy with the investment return? Right, you don't want to get into all of that, but you're spot on with that. It's all in the positioning. It looks like we had another question here. Marco, thanks for coming. Thanks for joining us. So Nick asks, you mentioned that there are best times to ask for reviews after good meetings, for instance, how do we juggle timing this ask with asking everyone and not cherry picking? Great question, Nick. So here's what I would recommend. First and foremost, I would, the first step that I would take in starting to ask for a review is to send that one email template to all of my clients. Does it mean all of my clients are going to leave a review? No, 40% of them, 60% of them might not even take action on that one email, but now you have that archived for compliance purposes. And then what you can do on top of that is after you have these annual reviews scheduled with their clients, then you have that other email template that includes it in that follow-up email, again, where you're kind of recapping what you covered, the goals that you've set, et cetera. You also have it in there. So you've already covered the main base of covering everyone, but now you start doing it after each review. Some advisors, like depending on how many households you have, your team size, all of that stuff, some advisors will also just say, look, I've lined up all my client reviews, surge style over the next eight weeks. Everyone's getting the same email with the same request. So that's enough for the SEC. So it's really up to you how you want to structure that. But hopefully that helps.

Olivia Paxson (41:06): Yeah. And then Nick, you asked featuring reviews in different places. How does this relate to cherry picking rules? Cherry picking is really more like, you can't just ask your favorite clients. When we're talking about which testimonials we want to use in our marketing, we can choose which ones that we want to use. That's, we don't have to provide every review in every space that we put one review. It's more so just, you can't just ask some people and not everyone because you think Johnny's not as happy as Anne. You know what I'm saying? So that's where the cherry picking thing comes in. I think, did that answer your question?

Diana Cabrices (41:40): I think that actually did. I would add just quickly, what you do need to do when you feature a certain review is have that little link that leads them back to your other reviews. Okay. Yeah, but the cherry picking, you're right. It's just for the requesting really.

Olivia Paxson (41:56): And yes, we will provide a recording of the webinar to everyone that's registered, attendees and non-attendees alike. Yeah. Just give me a few days.

Diana Cabrices (42:05): Yeah. We're busy marketers, right? Mara says, if they aren't our favorite clients, might be time to look at why. Man, I could not agree more, Mara. And sometimes this, you know, it opens up. No, I don't wanna say Pandora's box because you'd be surprised. We have, I think around a thousand reviews on Wealthtender to date for across all of our advisors on the platform. And like 99% of them are five stars. I think there's two four-star reviews. So most advisors think, oh, I'm gonna get bad reviews. I'm opening Pandora's box. It's really not that. But I will say there can be situations where it's like, well, hey, you know, I wanna have a conversation with you about maybe where my expectations aren't being met. And what an awesome door opener to help correct, course correct with that client. That's my opinion.

Olivia Paxson (42:52): Don't let the client die on the vine. Take proactive, you know, and in a lot of cases, I feel like those conversations actually lead to better relationships than even previous ones. You know, it's like that psychology behind like, sometimes clients are more satisfied when you've messed up and you went above and beyond to make up for it than they were if you had just done everything perfectly from the beginning, because they see that you've gone the extra mile and that you care for them in that way. So, you know, I always think about that.

Diana Cabrices (43:25): That's such a good point. I've never even thought about it like that. I mean, it's science. Yeah.

Olivia Paxson (43:30): I'm not making it up. So much of marketing is, right? It's science, it's art. I wrote a book for someone once and that was part of it.

Diana Cabrices (43:37): Oh my goodness. You're such a rock star. That's awesome. Any other questions, guys? Olivia, I don't know if we would wanna cover maybe some pricing or anything else you think?

Olivia Paxson (43:47): Yeah, why don't you go ahead and talk about the Wealthtender fees and then I can kind of share with you about ours.

Diana Cabrices (43:52): Yeah, so if you're still with us and you go to wealthtender.com forward slash grow, then you will land on this page here. And there's actually an eight minute video from myself where I'm actually taking you through the full Wealthtender program. Testimonial marketing, again, is really one of our three main pillars here. And then learn a little bit more about what we do. But if you scroll down, then you're gonna see this section where we talk about our plans. This is why we make such a good partner with Lexicon. We are a very low cost system. We're not trying to charge you hundreds of dollars a month. We think what we do is kind of essential and important and sort of baseline, if you will. And then everything that Lexicon does is really freaking important. It's the ongoing stuff. It's also a lot of the fundamentals, the website, all that good stuff that you need to keep on an ongoing basis. Wealthtender is more like you set it up and you're good. And you can do the media placements when you want, but once you have that profile and you've got the reviews set up, then that's just gonna keep going to work for you from an SEO standpoint. We have a starter plan. You'll get that SEO optimized profile page. So I didn't really get to show you a whole lot of one, but this is like a, this is a company one. You can do a company one and you can do an individual advisor one. The company one has 111 reviews. You can even feature those on individual advisor profiles with ReviewSync, but it's got all sorts of information, a video. Who are we? What can you expect in the first meeting? Here's our advisors. Again, you don't have to have a firm profile. You can just have a single profile where highlights. We also backlink to website articles that you might have written. And so that's $29 a month. It also lets you open up and get those reviews. We'll feature you in a local guide, all that good stuff. It's $39 a month monthly, but it's 29 technically if you do the annual plan. Growth is just that next step. And that's where we add in the media placement opportunities. So we're again, featuring you in guides, ask an advisor series. You know, we have a partnership with MSN. And so for advisors who are talking to us with, you know, when we get these reporter alerts, we send them right to you. We also syndicate your content. And so we can get thousands of reviews, hundreds of thousands of reviews if you're lucky, but we're doing this every single week. And then finally, we have a final tier here. And this is really if you're interested in joining our community. So we do have a community. It's called Advisors Growing as a Community, the AGC. It was founded by Taylor Schulte, Justin Costelli, if you're familiar. They're two amazing advisors in the space, but this is all of Wealthtender plus the access to our community, which is a private online advisor community. We have about 150 advisors there today. And Olivia, we need to bring you in as a guest speaker at some point this year.

Olivia Paxson (46:42): Yes, I would love that.

Diana Cabrices (46:44): I'll stop on my side. Do you wanna share your screen or you just wanna talk through?

Olivia Paxson (46:48): I'm trying to bring up the deck, but my computer's being ridiculous. No worries. So I'll just talk through it. So we have a couple different ways that we help advisors. We can act as a fully outsourced marketing department. Generally, this is the best fit for firms who are between 500 million and 1.5 billion, starting at $10,000 a month. We also do a just digital advertising and email marketing program for 3,000 a month. And we have a organic growth model for also 3,000 a month. But we do offer a la carte services. So if you're just looking for SEO or you're just looking for email marketing, or you're just looking for help through your social media content, we also have that as well. If you are interested in seeing that deck because the prices are not on my website, just send me a DM on LinkedIn and I will provide it for you.

Diana Cabrices (47:43): Love it. That is awesome. And again, like this is full service. Olivia and her team are connecting all the dots for you. They're building all the email templates. They're connecting, they're creating the funnels, the different ads. There's so much going on there.

Olivia Paxson (47:57): Yeah, like I said earlier, really the three main goals are, how are we gonna build awareness? How are we gonna collect leads and how are we gonna convert them to clients? Those are our three main concerns. And there's more than one way to skin a cat. And it really just depends on where you're at with your budget and how much you want to put in of your time. So we kind of look at who you are, what your goals are, and then we can say, okay, how are we gonna accomplish step one? How are we gonna accomplish step two? And how are we gonna accomplish step three within the confines of your budget? And we make the best plans from there. And of course, marketing is always test and optimize, test and optimize. We're always looking at what we're doing and seeing how we can make it better because your success is our success. I take our reputation in the industry very seriously. So if I don't think I can help you, I will let you know.

Diana Cabrices (48:50): That's amazing. And you have a great reputation in the space. So, and that's what a great brand is, right? It's what people say about you when you're not there. So this has been great. Olivia, thank you for partnering with me on this webinar.

Olivia Paxson (49:02): You are fantastic. Thank you. When Brian suggested that we get together, I was like, this is going to be perfect. Yes. I love this journey for us.

Diana Cabrices (49:11): Me too. And we've been planning this since last year, guys. So hopefully you appreciated the content. It looks like some of you are leaving some really sweet comments about the content. And yes, we'll send you the replay. We'll send you the testimonial marketing playbook, the lexicon information. You will get it all. Just give us a few days and thank you all for coming. Yeah. Have a great rest of your week and have a good weekend. Bye everyone. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.