Webinar Replay: How One Advisor Grew Exponentially Through Niche Marketing With Chad Chubb CFP®, CSLP®

In this webinar, Twenty Over Ten Chief Marketing & Business Development Officer, Samantha Russell and Chad Chubb CFP®, CSLP® founder of WealthKeel, LLC, take a step-by-step look at how Chad was able to grow his business exponentially by focusing on a unique niche. So much so that now he currently has a waiting list of clients!

Agenda

1. Switch From AUM to Subscription Fee
2. Go From Generalist to Singular-Niche Focus
3. Developing a Marketing Strategy to a Specific Niche
4. You can Start with a Handful of Clients and Grow So Quickly You Have a Waiting List

How Did You Go from a Generalist to Developing a Niche and How Did You Cater to That Marketing Strategy? (Chad’s Story) [3:00]

Before 2015, he had a great advisor that helped him along the way. He passed his CFP exam, formed WealthKeel, LLC, launched his website and started blogging.

In 2016, they really started to get into their niche. Philadelphia is a very medical city, so that’s where the interest started to kick-in. It was hard to market to that group, so they started at high-income professionals, so then they kept asking…what’s next? Where can they get to that is very “niche heavy?” 

With a niche, it makes expertise, strategy and pricing structure much easier, and they can see that since they used to be generalists. 

At That Time, How Many Clients Did You Have That Didn’t Fit That Mold And How Did You Navigate? [6:13]

The initial brand started as being a “guide” with the keel of a boat, so your financial planner is your keel and helps you from tipping over and losing track. When they were generalists, their website was based more on their branding. It was mostly “baby boomers,” and in 2016, they started with high-income professionals and then moved from there. 

It’s hard to write copy for the homepage of your website, and if you don’t have a niche, it’s even harder. You have to think, what’s going to resonate with them? What’s going to get them excited? 

What Is a Problem That Your Clientele Had and a Solution That You Can Provide? [8:38]

With a niche, you can get so specific, whereas, as a generalist, it’s very general and hard to narrow it down. 

You can let your clients know that you still know how to do all the aspects of financial planning and can provide good financial planning, but with this niche, they know very quickly. 

How Did You Get In Front Your Niche? [14:13]

They started offering free financial plans to some of the residents at Thomas Jefferson. They were going in and talking about:

• Student Loans
• Cash Flow

It was about building trust and was more about education rather than selling. CNBC let them write a guest column, which started to catapult that. 

He got Thomas Jefferson to allow them to do this because he knows the chief resident at the hospital. He did free financial plans for them, talked to them about student loans, sent them slides. 

It’s helpful to sit down with the correct contacts, buying them a coffee and asking them their pain points and going from there. 

He got the CNBC article by emailing someone over there and reached out and gave them a unique idea that doesn’t get a lot of attention, and he got to write a guest blog for them.

A site like CNBC has high domain authority, so this is the type of site that you want to get backlinks to. 

What Did You Start to See After the CNBC Article? [17:57]

He had someone reach out and tell them that the guest blog was very useful. That one event stated to solidify this is the niche that we want to focus on. 

That got them in contact with a physician in Arkansas and said this is what they teach, so this is great. This same person invited them to speak in Nashville. That evergreen content that he produced is now starting to really produce for them 5 years later. 

With content, you never know what might happen. You don’t need a PR firm to email journalists. If you go to a lot of news sites, there are sections that have a whole page about contributing content. A good rule of thumb is to see what the person pitching before has written about and be able to speak about that. 

Email them and say hey, I saw your piece, we actually have an interesting take on doctors and student loan debt. Make it really easy for them to get a sense of what your article is about and link back to that. 

HAROs (Help a Report Out) are a great way to connect with reporters and journalists, as well. 

It really helps if you have a blog that shares your thought leadership on those topics. 

What if You Don’t Have a Niche? [23:16]

You can just pick one and learn it and go from there. When they chose theirs, they know they wanted to work with peers who were in the same stage life of themselves. 

Ask open-questions:

• What are your pain points? 
• What do you worry about? What keeps you up at night? 
• Tell me about your life story

Nothing very specific, but just let them talk and they will tell you what worries them. Make sure you take detailed notes in their voice. 

SEO plays a very important role in this, so use the terminology an wording that your potential clients will use. Use the language that they use and keep that in your notes. 

When did you go from AUM focus to subscription focus? 

Did your choice of niche play into that at all?

For us, it came down to what made the most sense for their niche. We started to ease into the subscription model to Gen X and Gen Y, that model started to make sense. For $150 a month, we are going to go very in-depth and do all that we can. For us, flat fee subscriptions made the most sense. This is a good model for high income but not high net worth yet. 

WealthKeel uses flat-fee ongoing financial planning so a base fee plus household income plus household net worth equals the total flat fee. 

Does Your Flat-Fee Include Asset Management and Does It Change Based On The Amounts You Manage? [28:43]

You would be amazed at how many clients pay us to give advice and “keep eyes on it.” They want our input on a portfolio, but if they want to delegate it, we use a TAMP.  We have two tiers for household income and three-tiers for household net worth. 

What is Your Marketing Strategy? [31:18]

Can you talk more about getting involved with the organization and how you went about it? It was more or less about getting on their lists and then getting approved. It happened either from XYPN or Kitces Podcast, and they said they were getting 2-3 queries per week, so when he signed up it wasn’t like that early on. It was more or less they heard about it, then get into it. 

They put a lot of marketing dollars to The White Coat Investor, so find the individuals that are big influencers. Find the influences out there that are big names and spend time and money with them. 

The White Coat Investor and Physician on FIRE are two of the biggest traffic sources, so they produce a lot of content for them and put their effort there. 

Every blog post that WealthKeel writes is very SEO focused and when writing meta descriptions, they use strong keywords. They knew about it early on and put a focus on it and that has been a huge help. 

WealthKeel Weekly goes out every single week and the way that it is set up is that at the top of the age, they will say what they read this week and will outline articles that is worth their subscribers’ time. Either one they have written or curated around the web 

At the bottom, they often share a personal story. 

Can You Talk about the Evolution of The WealthKeel Weekly Newsletter? [35:50]

We have two separate lists – a prospect list and a client list – but they all get the same WealhtKeel Weekly content. 

Instead of just sharing the article, they also include a cliff’s note edition, with a few lines about what the article will be. Keeping a personal touch is very important. In moments like this too, it’s a good idea to have weekly content. They get more clients and prospects to respond on the personal side even more than on the business side. 

It’s best to keep it simple, and basically just puts aside one hour per week to send out content to his prospects and clients. When creating this brand, show the person behind the brand, rather than just the brand. This is what helps people to respond to you and remember you. 

What Are You Spending Right Now On Marketing?

I think we spent around $3,000 in his first year, but then they started to get a lot more involved in things. When you see the traffic and see something working, that’s where you should start putting your marketing dollars and most of your time. 

Right now, we are trending towards around 10% of their budget. The average advisor spends around 1-2%. 

Most of it goes towards the Whitecoat Investor. A big chunk also goes to Physicians on Fire. That’s about half of the budget, they have a content writer that helps them to get the blogs ready, they have their own eBook and then they have a marketing budget for their current clients, such as holiday cards, Uber Eats gift cards for new babies, giving back to charities, etc. 

If you aren’t going to write your content, you can pay someone, you can have somebody on staff. 

If you are on the Twenty Over Ten platform, there we have Content Assist, a content library to help advisors with content creation. 

If you don’t have a Twenty Over Ten Platform, you can go to Lead Pilot and sign up there for a 30-day free trial and get access to content. 

Make your content specific to your audience. Whether you are writing it yourself, editing the content in the library, you want to make it personal to your audience. 

If you want to learn more about Lead Pilot, you can download sample articles or you can book a time to speak with someone. If you create content you can start using the content right away, and we automatically make it free for 30 days.

For those of you interested in Twenty Over Ten websites, it’s a completely separate platform. Chad Chubb worked with us, so he has access to go in and add the blogs, make updates and customizations. 

Having a platform that allows you to make updates and changes is crucial, so you can just make small changes if you need to rather than having to start from scratch. 

Come to Twenty Over Ten and click showcase to get examples of how we set things up and work with clients. 

We are still offering the 30-day trial for Lead Pilot and a 50% discount for the first year. Click here to sign up and use the codes: 

Why Do You Have Two Separate email Lists? [50:31]

If we do have specific client news, we have two separate lists because of prospects and clients. The same content goes out to all of them, but it’s easier to break things down and separate everything. It helps with tracking everything, so if we do have specific items for clients, it will only go to them.

We highly suggest segmenting lists, so if you really get niche-focused, so maybe if you have a list that works a specific place, then you can really tailor your content. 

If you go to Leadpilot.io and you click Join a Webinar, you can sign up there or Schedule a 1:1 call and we can go over specific with you. You don’t need to be a TOT client, as they are two separate platforms. 

All of the content on Lead Pilot is posted on these branded landing pages, so you can have a brand separate from your firm, so it makes it easier to connect and it can be specific to you. 

Connect with Chad on LinkedIn or Twitter, and he can answer all of your questions. 

Go to Twenty Over Ten’s website and click learn more about Video Marketing From Start to Finish and use it to drive business to your company.