Want a closer relationship with your clients? Well, you can’t get any closer than chatting in their ear while they cook dinner.
That’s exactly what podcasting lets you do. You can become as much a part of your clients’ lives as their own family. More and more advisers are creating great podcasts, building better relationships with clients, prospects, and even with people who are completely outside their circles.
Now, let me reassure you of one thing. I’m the last person on earth to say every adviser must launch a podcast. Ignore all the voices telling you to jump on the latest trend, and just do what’s right for your business. But if you’re thinking about it, here are three good reasons to consider diving into the podcast game.
1. Build more and better relationships.
Podcasting creates a connection with your audience like no other medium can. No one reads your blog post while cleaning the house. Nobody watches your videos while driving. Once a client or prospect subscribes to your podcast, you live on their phone, and that means you automatically pop up every time a new episode is released. They listen to you when they’re driving, walking, or working out. You literally become part of their lives and you have an opportunity to educate, inspire and engage meaningfully and at scale.
Plus, a good podcast feels personal, like a good conversation with a friend. Your listener can consume at their leisure and you build trust without having to be in person. Podcasting is an amazing medium for creating genuine connections in a way that no other channel can.
2. Create a ton of value and content with minimal time investment.
Podcasting generates a ton of content very efficiently. This is especially true if you record video at the same time as audio.
For advisers, creating content can feel like a huge time suck. With a podcast, you can spend just two or three hours a month recording an episode, then hand it over to your marketing partners to chop up into endless bites of snackable content. Use the long-form video to feed your YouTube channel, and the long-form audio for your podcast. Then edit down the audio into a short audiogram.
Next, download transcripts to create mountains of microcontent like blog articles, sales enablement tools, email newsletters and more. All of this can feed your prospect and client experience from a single recording session.
This is exactly how I leverage my time investment in FiComm’s New Skool podcast. I spend no more than 3 hours a month recording, but the output is limitless. The best part of starting with a podcast is that you are likely to get meaty, valuable insights for your content. That’s because you don’t have to obsess about writing or editing, you can just talk.
3. Instant credibility.
The fastest way to enhance your own credibility in a subject matter is to interview a top expert on a topic your clients may be interested in hearing from. Once you’ve had a conversation on your podcast with an expert on a topic like money and children, or interviewed an influencer like Carl Richards, you gain instant credibility to talk to clients about that issue. You can use the episode as a piece of library content to send out whenever the question comes up to add third party insights.
From a PR lens, you can leverage the interview to establish credibility with journalists looking for informed perspectives on a particular story. What’s more, if your guests have their own podcasts or YouTube channels, they’ll alert their subscribers to tune in and bring new eyes and ears to your brand.
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t the market oversaturated? What if you build a podcast and no one comes? There are over 30 million YouTube channels, yet new channels succeed all the time. By contrast, there are only about 1.5 million podcasts, and even more room to grow.
But to me, podcasts aren’t about reach or listeners anyway. It’s about creating content and adding value. I’ve never once looked at how many subscribers we have for the New Skool podcast. We produce that podcast because we want to facilitate meaningful conversations in the industry and use those conversations to drive awareness.
Like many financial advisers, I’m a business owner, and I understand the competing demands advisers face. Time is one demand. Creating thoughtful content is another. Podcasts solve for both.
FiComm is excited to partner with InvestmentNews for the first-ever Advisor Podcast Awards to recognize excellence in three categories: “The Client Happy Podcast,” for approachable, client-centered podcasts; “Walking the Walk: Diversity” category for podcasts that show how it’s done; and “Pitch Your Podcast,” where you can test podcast ideas that challenge the status quo. The submissions deadline is May 18.
You’re the best judge of what works for you. But if you’re looking for an opportunity to create great content, and get it top of mind for the right people at the right time, podcasting can’t be beat.
Megan Carpenter is CEO and co-founder of FiComm. She will be speaking at the InvestmentNews RIA Summit May 19, at a post-conference Podcasting Brainstorming Session.
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