Samantha Russell on Having a Digital Footprint

Show Timeline:

1:40 How prospective clients are utilizing social media to find advisors
5:35 The importance of digital searches to increase referrals
9:10 Tips and tricks to create a website worth visiting
15:18 What an advisor can incorporate to make their website current for prospects
19:35 Using calendar links to lead to a positive introduction
22:15 Samantha’s new project at Twenty Over Ten
25:25 Content marketing strategy to drive referrals
30:50 Top recommendations for advisors to work on first to update their digital strategy

Links:

Website:              https://twentyoverten.com/
Blog:                   https://blog.twentyoverten.com/
LinkedIn:            https://www.linkedin.com/in/samanthacrussell/

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referrable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. On this episode, we talk with Samantha Russell, who’s director of sales and marketing for web platform provider Twenty Over Ten. The common wisdom is that advisors need a digital footprint and the website is the hub of your digital presence, but did you know that it has a big effect on referrals as well? Samantha is at the forefront of web development and she knows what works and what doesn’t work. She’s also author of the article, The Digital Referral Shift, which describes dramatic changes in how referrals happen, and how they are increasingly reliant on a current digital image.

In our conversation, we described the role of digital presence in attracting referrals. Samantha describes the elements you need to have an ideal website. We review different ways to refresh the content on your site, and we’d describe the role of downloadable content and the importance of designing it in ways for prospects and referrals to engage with your site. Finally we describe an exciting new project at Twenty Over Ten that provides advisors with a system to offer content and capture visitors that otherwise might stop by your site but not reach out to contact you. We cover a lot of great ideas on how you can create a great first impression and carry the effect through to winning a new client. Here’s our conversation with Samantha Russell.

So Samantha Russell, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Samantha Russell: 
Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.

Steve Wershing:       
So first, let’s get a lay of the land. We’re going to talk a lot about what it means to have a current website and how that can affect referrals, but let’s back out of that and look at the environment. How are, not advisors, but how are prospective clients utilizing social media to find advisors these days?

Samantha Russell:
We’ll tell people, think about your own behavior or the behavior of many of the people that you know. Whenever you have a ping point, you need to find something. How do you usually go about doing it? Usually, we start with Google. So you need a plumber to come to your house, or you want to find the best restaurant in the city that you’re visiting, you’re going to go to Google and look for it. I know that, historically, a lot of advisors have said, “Oh. Well, financial services is different because you’re talking about your life savings and handing that over to someone so you’re not just going to trust anyone on the internet.”

And I can agree with that to a point, but I think what’s really interesting is that what we’re seeing is what we call the digital referral shift. And so what we mean by that is that rather than just texting a friend or waiting until a friend has a barbecue and asking them who they use for an advisor, investors are going to places like Facebook and posting and Facebook has like a recommendations feature where you can say, “I’m looking for a recommendation.” And you can ask your network or even a specific group of people so you can post in a local community group, I’m looking for a recommendation.

And you can say things like, “I’m looking for a financial advisor. Who do you use?” Or “I’m looking for an advisor who specializes in working with business owners to set up 401k plans. You know, does anyone have a good recommendation?” And then what happens is not only does you know the person who asked for these recommendations, see the results coming in as people comment saying, “Oh, this person or that person,” but everyone else in their network also sees it. So there’s such a higher exponential value to those referrals coming in.

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