S2 EP04: Using Voice Technology to Build Irresistible Advisor Brands with Emily Binder

10.07.19 | 0 Market

My guest today is Emily Binder. Emily is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and founder of Beetle Moment Marketing, a voice-first consultancy based in Austin, Texas. Applying over a decade of experience in running successful marketing initiatives from startups to Fortune 500 brands, Emily helps her clients advance their brands by capitalizing on new technology.

Marketing practices change fast. Voice technology is emerging as the next component of successful marketing strategies. From voice-first SEO to capturing the content-distribution market with smart speakers, advisors have an opportunity to make headway and connect with their clients now. 

In this conversation, we discuss how financial advisors and planners can use their greatest tool, their voice. In her work, Emily focuses on voice technology including  AI and voice assistants, branded audio content, and social media. In this episode, Emily helps advisors explore the possibilities of connecting with clients through using voice-activated tools like Alexa and Google Home through flash briefings and podcasts. In order to do that, you need to differentiate your brand — and to tell a compelling story that’s concise, informative, and easy to access 

Don’t miss one of our favorite moments, when Emily invites our listeners to not be left behind the advance of voice technology. She compares it to the move from desktop to mobile. As clients shift away from typing, tapping, and swiping to use voice-activated searches for information, you will want your firm to show up at the top of the search results.  

If you’d like to get more tips and ideas from Emily, you can subscribe to her weekly podcast, Beetle Moment Marketing, and to her daily Alexa Flash briefing called Voice Marketing – Daily Beetle Moment. Both are excellent resources for financial advisors to build a practice that’s relevant and irresistible to clients.


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Resource Links
Beetle Moment Marketing Blog
Beetle Moment Marketing Podcast
Emily’s Flash Briefing: Voice Marketing – Daily Beetle Moment 
Market Moment Flash Briefing
The Compound Show
Connect with Emily

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Emily Binder: 00:06 Podcasting is fantastic, been doing it for eight years and the medium is so powerful because we respond to sound and voice better than any other sense. It's our natural first universal language. Our brains process it faster than the blink of an eye. And that comes from literally when you're in the womb. Your mother's voice is your first sensory experience. So if you want to be in a relationship with your client or your customer in an intimate way, voice is the way.

Patrick Brewer: 00:38 Welcome Emily Bender to the Model FA podcast. Thank you so much for coming in this afternoon. It's good to see you.

Emily Binder: 00:43 You're welcome. It's good to be here.

Patrick Brewer: 00:45 Awesome. Super excited. We're going to be ... We've got a value packed episode for everyone here. Emily is, as I mentioned, a specialist when it comes to voice search, pretty much anything voice marketing. And she's got a great marketing background prior to specializing in voice. So we're going to talk through some fun topics related to voice, which frankly I'm not an expert in, but we're all here to learn. So we've got the foremost expert for financial services on voice marketing. So Emily, super excited.

Emily Binder: 01:11 Yeah. I'm happy to be here. It's a really cool area and it's brand new. This is something that people are starting to talk about. Consumers adopting smart speakers have done so faster than any other consumer technology of all time. So you're reaching nearly a 50% adoption rate-

Patrick Brewer: 01:29 Wow-

Emily Binder: 01:29 ... in under five years. Far out pacing smartphones. People love these things for a good reason.

Patrick Brewer: 01:34 What are they primarily using the voice search for? I mean is it to find a specific product? Is it to just turn music on? Do you have any data? You don't need to give me hard statistics, but are you noticing any just rules of thumb on how people are utilizing voice? Are they searching for services, products? Are they just using it to say, "Play my favorite song Alexa"?

Emily Binder: 01:52 Well, early technology, simple use cases of course. The main things people ask are weather, time, play music as you guessed.

Patrick Brewer: 02:00 Yep.

Emily Binder: 02:01 But voice search, voice shopping has actually tripled year over year. If you look at the holiday season on Amazon, the revenue coming in from people ordering things on Alexa. And by the way, everybody mute your Alexa device. We're going to be dropping that name a lot. It tripled year over year. I mean, the writing's on the wall. It's $80 billion predicted by 2023 in voice commerce. This is something, as a marketer, I do work with RIAs and I'm in the finance space, but I do CPGs, I do some telecom stuff too. Basically any industry needs to be thinking about this, just as you think of SEO. It's the new SEO essentially with 30% of searches being done by voice next year, that's the prediction, that's a third.

Patrick Brewer: 02:45 It's pretty crazy. I assume that when you search for something on voice, it's not, "Alexa, give me the 20 top recommendations for financial advisor." It's going to be, "Alexa, find a financial advisor near me," and you're going to get one recommendation. Is that the way it would work or is it going to be kind of a Rolodex?

Emily Binder: 03:00 That's a great question. And essentially it's the top result. It's position zero.

Patrick Brewer: 03:05 Wow.

Emily Binder: 03:06 And think about it from the Google Assistant perspective too. Alexa has market share, but Google is catching up and is certainly not to be ignored. And you've got Siri, Cortana, Bixby. I mean there are other players in the space. But when I talk to clients about optimizing for voice search, really, it's Google Play and Alexa too. Alexa is great for shopping.

Patrick Brewer: 03:25 Okay.

Emily Binder: 03:25 Google knows everything.

Patrick Brewer: 03:26 It's true. Scary.

Emily Binder: 03:27 So with your question though, about how many results are there and do I need to be literally number one or I might as well forget about it, we think what will happen is there will be opportunities for sponsored results. So with a voice assistant you might ask who's the best financial advisor in my local market, whatever city you're in. And I know that a lot of people listening to this are regional.

Patrick Brewer: 03:50 Yep.

Emily Binder: 03:51 With that you could be the top recommended result if you do the right things on your site. If you have voice content, like a flash briefing. But then there would be an opportunity down the road, we think probably in the next year or two, where you could say ... Alexa will say, "This is the top result and I have some more sponsored results if you'd be interested to hear those." So it's just like buying a PPC ad.

Patrick Brewer: 04:09 Got it. Yeah.

Emily Binder: 04:10 But not as gross.

Patrick Brewer: 04:11 Just show up above the organic search on Google type of deal.

Emily Binder: 04:13 Yeah.

Patrick Brewer: 04:14 So you got introduced to the ... I mean, not introduced, but your big contract that you landed in the financial services space was working with Ritholtz Wealth Management. So would you mind just talking me through some of the stuff that you've done for them. And for those that are listening, you're probably familiar with Ritholtz, Josh Brown, reformed broker. Emily has done some work for them to help with I guess ranking for voice search. So would you mind just giving us a rundown of some of the stuff you've done, obviously under contracts, so no proprietary information, but just so the listeners get a sense of like what's even possible with voice marketing?

Emily Binder: 04:47 Yeah. We started working with Ritholtz almost a year ago. Josh Brown approached me and said, "What's going on in the voice space? Is anybody in my industry? Are there any RIAs doing this?" And I took a look and I said, "No. Do you want to be first?" And he said, "Of course, yes." So we created a couple Alexa skills. One of them was a flash briefing called Market Moment and it's today in market history.

Patrick Brewer: 05:12 Let's quickly say what is a flash briefing so everyone knows.

Emily Binder: 05:15 Oh, good question.

Patrick Brewer: 05:15 Sorry.

Emily Binder: 05:15 No, that ... I forget I have to explain. I love flash briefing. I think it's the hidden gem of Alexa and it's so cool. Basically it's mini podcasts or brief casts. They play in a row. You subscribe to the ones you want to hear. They refresh daily. And you can get a flash briefing from all kinds of news sources like NPR, BBC, if you want Fox News. And then you can also subscribe to ones from individual content creators. Just like any old podcast, anybody can create a flash briefing. I have one about voice marketing called The Daily Beetle Moment Voice Marketing.

Emily Binder: 05:49 You can subscribe to them. And the thing is they're super short, so usually one to two minutes long, they play in a row. And the power flash briefing is that it occupies moments of transition in somebody's day. It's hands-free and they can multitask while they're listening.

Emily Binder: 06:04 We see that people are typically engaging with flash briefing, which you invoked by saying, "Alexa, news," or, "Alexa, flash briefing." They'll listen in the morning. They'll listen in the evening. It's like a book end to the workday and you get this content in this very intimate way. I say you crawl into your customer's ear because you're in their home and it's a warm human voice and it's in and out, just the information they need. And there's a very high rate of stickiness with people listening to these, especially on the weekdays.

Patrick Brewer: 06:33 It's probably not like ... I mean, you probably don't even need to pay for it, right? It's just organic content that ...

Emily Binder: 06:37 It's completely organic. And anybody can create one. But the beauty of flash briefing also is you have the ability to reach going on 150 million users and there are only 10,000 of these flash briefing skills. So you have a huge distribution platform and a scarcity of content. Just like the early internet, like early social media, nobody's there yet.

Patrick Brewer: 06:57 Yeah. First mover create the moat around the content and just capture the audience. I mean, I'm sure you have some metrics around how quickly this market is growing too. So you said 150 million right now. I mean, we could probably see that grow to an even bigger number here in the next couple of years I would assume.

Emily Binder: 07:13 Oh, definitely. We have a 78% growth in the number of smart speakers in US homes just in the past year. And a billion devices have access to various voice assistance. So, like I said, fastest growing consumer technology of all time. You want to be present there. You want your content there, especially in a native way, like with Alexa Skills, Google actions too.

Patrick Brewer: 07:37 So let's get back to Ritholtz. I want to learn about the scope of that project a little bit more, and then let's get in transition into how an advisor might think about using voice marketing now so that they can establish that kind of early mover type of vantage. So continue.

Emily Binder: 07:51 Right. Okay. So Market Moment, which everybody listening you should enable Market Moment and check out what the Ritholtz team is doing. It's today in market history. It's kind of based loosely on what they were doing on Twitter, but we took it and made it a voice skill. We put some Sonic branding on there. And within just a few weeks it climbed to the top of search rankings on amazon.com under the Alexa Skills department for terms like financial advice, investing, stock market, history, business because there just wasn't a lot of competition and because our briefing was such a good high quality and high engagement rates. So a lot of success there.

Emily Binder: 08:30 One of the keys to success with this is of course being consistent just like a podcast.

Patrick Brewer: 08:34 Yep.

Emily Binder: 08:34 There are 700,000 podcasts out there. Half of them podfade by the sixth week, meaning they disappear and nobody's updating it. You don't want to do that. So don't start unless you're going to commit.

Patrick Brewer: 08:45 Okay. What type of commitment are we talking about here as far as number of episodes, the type of equipment that you would need in order to record this and make it seem like it's professional? What type of commitment are advisors signing up for if they want to create a flash briefing?

Emily Binder: 08:59 Well, it's probably a good six to eight hours a month. It could be less depending if you get in a really good groove with it, but you need a good quality microphone, you need a little bit of audio editing software. I mean that's the way I would do it. If you want to just kind of wing it, you could honestly record into your iPhone and just use voice memos and upload it. There are tools, which if you're interested, just reach out to me and I can kind of advise on that. But you can get it done pretty quickly and you just have to have a workflow and batch record them and just schedule them out ahead of time.

Patrick Brewer: 09:32 What type of show formats or content formats are you seeing get the most engagement, not necessarily in the financial services industry, but just in general? Is it just like you sharing tips? Is it people just saying things like, "Hey, here's how I think about this?" And they're like, "Oh cool. I hadn't thought about it that way." Or is it like quick interviews? Like is it ... What's the structure for these flash briefings right now? Like what are you recommending?

Emily Binder: 09:54 Keep it short. That's the biggest thing. Nobody wants to listen to you talk about the weather or drone on. Actually that's why I wanted to jump right in when we got this conversation started. Nobody wants to know about five minutes of blah, blah, blah. That's the problem with most podcasts.

Patrick Brewer: 10:09 Where were you born? Tell me a little bit about your high school experience.

Emily Binder: 10:11 But you can figure it. Like Google me. Let's get to the meat. With the flash briefings, actually I interviewed Dani Fava who's the head of innovation for TD Ameritrade on my podcast. That hasn't aired yet. It's the Beetle Moment Marketing podcast. By the time this comes out, I think that episode will be live. But she put it so well. And she's done all of the TD Ameritrade flash briefings. There's one that's called TD Ameritrade for Advisors. I highly recommend that. And she said the key to it is brevity, levity, and familiarity. So you want to be human.

Patrick Brewer: 10:46 And be likable.

Emily Binder: 10:47 Yeah, be likable and give-

Patrick Brewer: 10:48 Be funny sometimes.

Emily Binder: 10:50 Sometimes funny-

Patrick Brewer: 10:50 Hopefully if you ...

Emily Binder: 10:51 Yeah.

Patrick Brewer: 10:51 Or don't be funny if you're not funny.

Emily Binder: 10:53 Don't be too stiff with it. Be consistent. Be professional. And the familiarity part is, you want to have kind of a consistent tone and the consistent host. You can have different voices, which actually is great. Like that's one of the things Ritholtz has done so well. They have five different voices on Market Moment. You'll hear Blair, you'll hear Joey, Jonathan, Barry, Tadas. Josh is not doing that one anymore.

Emily Binder: 11:16 But this leads me to the other skill that we built, which is called The Compound Show. That's actually a custom skill. So on Alexa, you have the ability to ... They're almost like apps. They're called skills. And this one is based on their podcast, which we launched called The Compound Show. And again, brevity, the episodes are about 10 minutes long, usually one or two a week, and they'll interview all kinds of experts in investing and in the financial world, but it's available on Alexa.

Emily Binder: 11:50 Part of that is about being early. And then there's also an SEO aspect to it, which is you kind of get rewarded if you ever want to sell anything on Amazon, like a book for example, if you're also playing in that ecosystem and you have a custom skill or a flash briefing, that makes you more likely to be successful selling other things on Amazon.

Patrick Brewer: 12:07 Yeah. Yeah, it might not be the entree point into somebody signing up and giving you a bag of money and becoming a wealth management client. But as you said, if you have a book or some other thought leadership or some product that you can use to kind of hook them and get them interested, at least gets them in that ecosystem, thinking about you as somebody who can provide that service.

Emily Binder: 12:25 Right, right.

Patrick Brewer: 12:26 What about for the local advisor? Let's say we've got a firm in Austin, Texas. They've got hypothetically like 100 million in assets, $1 million in revenue, a couple employees and they're like, "Hey, yeah. I'd love to be an early mover on voice search. I use Amazon right now, Alexa." How should they be thinking about this? Is it too early for those people? Is it the right time? Because you can establish that competitive advantage? And if so, what are they doing? What should they act? How should they be thinking about this? What should they be doing?

Emily Binder: 12:53 It's not too early. It's almost too late. No, it's not.

Patrick Brewer: 12:58 It's almost.

Emily Binder: 12:59 It's not too late. Like it's still definitely early. Think about it this way. Just like with any other channel, you don't want to just jump in because there's a bandwagon. You don't want to throw up a Facebook page because 10 years ago, like, "Oh, I need a Facebook page, but I have no strategy." Don't do that. Think about do you have a niche? Do you have a target audience? Is there something you do that's unique? How can you share that on this platform? Are you already blogging? Well, you can repurpose some of that content into audio.

Emily Binder: 13:27 The thing is people want to be able to interact or engage with your content hands-free in a way that doesn't demand all of their attention. For example, I have a player on my website, on my blog for beetlemoment.com. It's an audio player where you can listen to my blog posts read aloud by ... It's a voice assistant basically.

Patrick Brewer: 13:50 Yeah.

Emily Binder: 13:50 And I've seen my engagement rates go up 16% for time on site because people don't always have time to sit down and read. They want it to be read to them. If you give people that other option, then it's almost like you're not just a newspaper but you're also digital. You give them another platform where they can get your stuff.

Patrick Brewer: 14:08 Yeah. I think that's important because what I found is I prefer video. That's the medium that I prefer when I create content. Audio is great too. I'm also, I like to do audio stuff. But if you put me in front of a pad and paper and you're like, "Hey, why don't you just write this 2,500 word blog post," I will do anything in my power to not write that 2,500 word blog post.

Patrick Brewer: 14:27 So I think part of it is, you should be everywhere, but as an advisor what I've seen is you probably have like one or two areas that you're stronger. So like you said, perfect example, like if you're good at writing blogs and you can just take 5 to 10 minutes and just do an audio of that blog post, like that right there is another piece of content that somebody who doesn't like reading blog posts could turn around and see that audio and interact with your brand when otherwise they wouldn't have interacted with it.

Emily Binder: 14:55 Right. I think that a lot of people who want to carve out expertise or a niche think, "Oh, I should write a book." I was talking about this at the Voice Summit last month actually with one of the people who, she has the top flash briefing about PR. It's actually, her name's Amy Summers. It's called The Pitch. And she said, "You know Emily. I've been thinking about writing a book for so many years and I haven't been able to just like take six months and deal with that. I don't have time." But her cool strategy is taking her flash briefings and almost making a book of those that is purely voice. And then by the time you put the content out, it's not obsolete. When you write a book, especially if you have any stats in that book ...

Patrick Brewer: 15:40 Yeah, they're like immediately relevant-

Emily Binder: 15:41 ... by the time it gets published-

Patrick Brewer: 15:43 ... especially if it's related to digital media or something.

Emily Binder: 15:45 Yeah. It needs to be done in real time, just like everything else is moving toward more of a real time. The democratization of information with social media, you don't have this whole publishing process and red tape. Anybody can put anything out right now.

Patrick Brewer: 15:59 Yeah. And I feel like, I mean, books are great because it shows that you have authority. I feel like books for the most part are better for speaking engagements and opening doors for those types of things versus most financial advisors, they write a book, and what happens is it just sits on their shelf and they order like 500 copies. And before you know it, you walk into their office and they're like, "Do you want a copy of my book because nobody else is getting any copies."

Patrick Brewer: 16:22 So I think a book for me when I'm talking to advisors, it's like one of the last things that you should look at, because, one, you got to, as you said, you got to be able to get your ... the information out of your head in a medium that's more consumable. And if you're waiting years to produce a book, it's like just get that out right now so people can interact with the content and you're going to get feedback on what's resonating, what's not resonating. So as that feedback comes in, you can say, "All right, wow, this point really resonated with the audience. Like why don't I pull that out and make that a chapter on my book?" Something like that.

Emily Binder: 16:52 Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, you can course correct.

Patrick Brewer: 16:54 Yeah. And it doesn't cost you anything because you ghost write a book, it's I mean what? 30, 40 grand if you want a reasonable ghost writer. So it's not going to be something that's a cheap investment and you need to really build out the infrastructure to monetize a book as a financial advisor. It's not something where you just write the book and hundreds of millions of assets come in. Like, "Oh this guy wrote a book. Like yeah, let's do this. He's my new advisor."

Emily Binder: 17:16 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Patrick Brewer: 17:17 So what are your ... I mean, we've got a couple of different like voice mediums, right? You've got podcasting, you've got Alexa, the flash briefings. I mean, if an advisor has limited time and energy for marketing where ... I'm of the belief that you just do everything. You just make the time and do everything. But most people like to focus on one thing versus the other, like what's going to get them the highest ROI as it relates to audio marketing. Is it doing a podcast? Is it doing the flash briefings? Getting in early? What would you say where should advisors devote their time and resources right now?

Emily Binder: 17:49 First, I don't think there is a directly measurable ROI on early voice. That's not the reason to do it.

Patrick Brewer: 17:56 Okay.

Emily Binder: 17:57 There will be down the road, but how do you measure the value of being on Twitter the first two years? There probably wasn't much at that point.

Patrick Brewer: 18:06 No.

Emily Binder: 18:06 But did you get the handle @Patrick? That would be cool.

Patrick Brewer: 18:09 I definitely didn't.

Emily Binder: 18:09 Yeah, I don't have @Emily either.

Patrick Brewer: 18:11 I can't even break into Twitter now. I get blocked out. Nobody likes me on Twitter. I'm a little bit too aggressive.

Emily Binder: 18:17 I would do a flash briefing, but I would push it out to all of the podcast networks, all the apps. And the reason is like I mentioned with podcasting, podcasting is fantastic. I've been doing it for eight years and the medium is so powerful because we respond to sound and voice better than any other sense. It's our natural first universal language. Our brains process it faster than the blink of an eye. And that comes from literally when you're in the womb. Your mother's voice is your first sensory experience. So if you want to be in relationship with your client or your customer in an intimate way, voice is the way.

Emily Binder: 18:50 Podcasting is crowded. Like I said, 700,000 out there. Flash briefing they're 10,000. So that's why I would start there. And it will train you to be brief. Just like Twitter when originally 180 characters, or was it 140? 140. You had to get down to that message and drill down and just to be concise like that, it really makes you figure out, "What am I saying here?" Same thing with the flash briefing so you can zero in. Yeah, I would start with the flash briefing.

Patrick Brewer: 19:16 Okay.

Emily Binder: 19:20 But don't think of it as just on Alexa. This is the thing.

Patrick Brewer: 19:23 Hey Model FAs. I know that you're enjoying this episode. I wanted to talk to you about a program that we're releasing. It's called The Model FA Accelerator. It is an intensive experience where we're going to bring you to Austin. We're going to help you solve the biggest problems in your practice, how to pick a niche, how to build a consistent marketing strategy, a sales process that actually converts, and how to scale it all up. So if you're curious about that, go to www.modelfa.com/accelerator. Book your call and we'll talk to you soon.

Patrick Brewer: 19:54 Talk to me through that because right now it sounds like we're on Alexa. We've got flash briefings. We get a couple of minutes of content. People listen to it. Maybe they're listening. Maybe they're not. How does it benefit the advisor, whoever's doing it, outside of the Alexa platform?

Emily Binder: 20:06 Well, you'll have the content, the audio, and you can share it out on other mediums and other channels. You can use it for Instagram. There are ways that you can share it on your site. You can get transcripts, bake those into your blog. That helps your SEO. It's a way of just curating this content that's on themes. And everybody needs to do that. You can't not have content at this point. Like this is how people ...

Patrick Brewer: 20:33 Yeah, you have to do original content.

Emily Binder: 20:34 Right. Advertising is changing. It's becoming much more of a content driven, experience driven, word of mouth. This has been happening for quite some time. But we don't want to have some push messaging, like commercials the old way banner ad. Come on. Nobody clicks on those.

Patrick Brewer: 20:52 Yeah. People are looking for authenticity. They want to know that you understand them. They want to know that you have expertise. They're busy and they want to work with people that they can trust. Right?

Emily Binder: 21:04 Know, like, and trust.

Patrick Brewer: 21:04 Know, like, and trust. It's the formula, especially for advisors, right?

Emily Binder: 21:07 Yeah.

Patrick Brewer: 21:07 Because one thing is we're not selling t-shirts. We're not selling OxiClean. We're selling a relationship. And the relationship has to be built on a foundation of trust. I mean, voice, it sounds like would be good because you've got the nuance associated with communication, getting your value proposition across and showcasing your expertise in a way that's going to connect you with the other person on the other side of that, whatever it's called, device like Alexa. But it doesn't require you to sit down and write a post for like three hours, right? Like you can just ...

Patrick Brewer: 21:40 What's the mechanism for recording? So you said you just have a good mic and you basically just record some content. You just upload it right into Alexa, like through an app or something or through some type of ... ? Obviously, I don't do this yet, so.

Emily Binder: 21:52 You're close. The only thing is you would upload it to, I mean, most people use a host.

Patrick Brewer: 21:58 Okay.

Emily Binder: 21:59 Like wherever you host your podcast.

Patrick Brewer: 22:01 Libsyn or something?

Emily Binder: 22:01 Yeah, I just need an RSS feed. There are some that I prefer and I have some relationships with some of the better ones that are kind of geared toward flash briefing. But most podcasts hosts can get you going with an RSS feed.

Emily Binder: 22:14 Beyond that, you can have somebody like me come in and help you with the strategy and get it optimized, but you can do it yourself if you want to roll your sleeves up and figure it out.

Patrick Brewer: 22:24 Yeah, I mean you can, but the weird thing is you're talking to me, and I mean, we do a lot of stuff on the marketing side. We do all the Facebook, LinkedIn, blog posts, podcasts. We do pretty much everything except for voice. So I would say this is something that where a lot of advisors I think are going to be a little outside of their depth because they're not really going to know enough about marketing to really even know where to get started.

Patrick Brewer: 22:46 So like, what are you ... What are you seeing as far as advisors wanting to engage you on this stuff? Are they reaching out and saying, "Hey, can I bend your ear for an hour?" Or is it you have a program that you kind of work them through? Do you consult with them one-on-one for a period of time and perform services? Like what, how does it generally work to get somebody from zero to audio hero, I guess that's what I'll call them?

Emily Binder: 23:06 It's very much customized at this point. I don't just send them to a form. I actually talk to this advisor and figure out what do you want to do with this? What is your niche? Who's your audience? All of that. And then figure out the content strategy for it.

Emily Binder: 23:22 However, I will mention that based on what I've noticed and heard from advisors, there is a hole, which is how do I communicate when the market's in free fall and my phone is ringing off the hook all day and my inbox is flooded and people are freaking out? How do I calm them down without losing hours? Because this happens what, four times a year maybe?

Patrick Brewer: 23:46 Yeah.

Emily Binder: 23:47 People are freaking out. And then I thought, "How could we take ... "

Patrick Brewer: 23:50 Depends on the client. It could be 365.

Emily Binder: 23:52 Yeah. And then some clients don't have this problem because they're doing such a ... Or some advisors don't have this problem, but a lot of them do. So if you have a housewife that's freaking out because the market is in free fall and you want to be able to calm her down and you don't want to eat up your whole day dealing with all of these incoming worries, what if you could take your voice and distribute it out to everybody that's worried about the situation with the market ...

Patrick Brewer: 24:18 Yeah.

Emily Binder: 24:19 And have this kind of calm them down and say, "You know what? Based on our strategy, here's our perspective. We're set for the long-term. Don't worry." Essentially that's the message.

Patrick Brewer: 24:29 It's pretty great. But they'd have to subscribe to the voice briefing, right, to be able to get that, the flash briefing.

Emily Binder: 24:34 This isn't going to be a flash briefing. This is going to be a proprietary voice app that I'm building and it's coming out this fall.

Patrick Brewer: 24:41 Ooh. I need to be an early investor/on the board for this. So I will be also involved in this if you can pick me.

Emily Binder: 24:49 Yeah, we'll talk about it. But if you want to be first to know about this exclusive cool thing I'm building, go to beetlemoment.com/email, sign up for that and you'll get a message when it comes out.

Patrick Brewer: 25:00 Awesome. So I'm going to be a skeptical advisor. I'm going to put my skeptical advisor hat on and I am saying, "Well, Emily, most of my clients are in their late 60s and they have 1.7 million in assets under management and we meet four times a year and they do not use any voice communication in any way. How do you help me?"

Emily Binder: 25:22 Well, actually the thing that's so cool about voice technology is there is no one age group that uses it the most. It's actually spread very evenly. In fact, older consumers love voice assistance because they're ergonomic and there is no barrier to entry and you don't have to be a digital native to figure out how to use it. You literally use your voice. You already know how to use it.

Patrick Brewer: 25:45 And I remember, I think the statistics show that one of the biggest adopters or at least accelerating kind of trend is older folks adopting voice in their homes and just kind of using voice communication, because we were at an event, a marketing event, and I remember I was getting a drink and I was talking about voice and you were mentioning what you were doing and you were saying how you help advisors with voice. And I'm like, "Well, most advisors clients are a little older and old people don't use voice communicator." I just said that and I could just see it in your eyes, you wanted to smash the beer bottle and stab me in the neck and be like, "Statistics do not support your claim." So is that true, that most people that are in their 50s and 60s, it's an accelerating market for voice search and these types of things?

Emily Binder: 26:27 Absolutely. And when you look at people who are aging and seniors, this market is ripe for voice because people get lonely, especially when they're living alone. And having that voice assistant to converse with actually psychologically makes people feel less lonely even though it is AI. So they love it and it's adopted, I forget the exact stat, but it's one of the fastest growing groups for adopting voice. It's the 60 plus.

Patrick Brewer: 26:55 Wow. It's a lot of cool stuff. I mean I really like the idea of being able to get the message out while the market's in free fall in a leveraged way. I mean that would be such a cool thing. I'm still trying to rack my brain on what the delivery mechanism is for that. So I'm sure we'll have to wait and see what you come up with. But I can see that there's a lot of advisors and even large financial services firms that would benefit from that. Because if you think about large, even independent broker dealers or large wirehouses or even the big RIAs, it's really about consistency and communication and controlling the corporate communications so that the company knows what message is being delivered to the consumer and that it's compliant.

Patrick Brewer: 27:36 So if the company can broadcast that message out and say, "Hey, we understand that the markets have gone down. Here's what we think." And that goes out to all of the advisors that are part of that large financial services company, that's a value add to the advisor. It's a huge value add to the company. And it really just takes that huge problem off the plate of the sales team, which is for the most part, the advisor, right? They're responsible for managing the relationship with their clients.

Patrick Brewer: 28:02 So you've got to put this together. I'm going to hold you to it. It's on podcast world now. So now everyone is going to be waiting for this amazing invention.

Emily Binder: 28:10 Absolutely. That's why I mentioned it.

Patrick Brewer: 28:12 Cool. What are we looking for MVP, minimum viable product on this thing? It'd be like nine months out or-

Emily Binder: 28:18 Oh gosh, no. Less than three months.

Patrick Brewer: 28:21 Whoa. Okay, cool. You're moving along. All right, so we talked about your relationship with Ritholtz, kind of what you've worked on with them. That sounds really neat. Are they seeing any early traction, good kind of engagement and things on the flash briefing and the stuff that you've been working on with them?

Emily Binder: 28:39 Definitely. We look at the stats and the daily plays are consistently growing over time. I think that's a function of it being high quality. They are fantastic marketers. They know how to harness it. I've given some strategy behind that as far as getting it enabled. But when I approached these new things like voice or Alexa, the thing is you can't expect to build it and have people show up by virtue of I'm here.

Patrick Brewer: 29:05 Yeah.

Emily Binder: 29:05 You need it to be in concert with all of your other marketing channels and content and it needs to be promoted.

Patrick Brewer: 29:14 Yep. Yeah, that's why whenever advisors ask me, the most common question I get is, "Should I do this with my marketing?" And I just say, "Yes, you should do everything. If you have the capacity and the bandwidth and the money, you should absolutely be on every platform. You should be sharing out original content on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, everywhere. Because the more you're in front of your audience and the more targeted your communications are, and the more it aligns with their mindset and how they view themselves, and what stories they tell themselves and what they're looking for, and what their problems are, the more likely you're going to be to influence them and eventually get them as a client."

Patrick Brewer: 29:48 So I think that's smart. Viewing it as more of a long-term strategy and not saying like, "Oh, early mover ... first mover advantage, get on the platform, do a couple audios." And then as you said, you end up in the podcast graveyard a couple months later.

Patrick Brewer: 30:01 What I'm hearing from you is get on the wagon. Make sure that it's high quality. Invest in it. It's not going to be a two to three month massive ROI. You're going to have a period of time, could be years of invisible ROI potentially, but you're still going to get ROI out of taking the content that you're producing for it and pushing it out on other platforms that you may already have an audience on. So you're kind of re-purposing and leveraging the content instead of just charging down the invisible ROI path for 6 to 12 months. Is that what I'm hearing?

Emily Binder: 30:32 Absolutely. Yeah, that leverage on other channels is very powerful. And I agree with you. I think if you have the bandwidth to do it, like be everywhere. But the thing that a lot of people don't do is to tailor the message to the platform. The way that you tweet is not the way you post on LinkedIn, is not the way you post on Facebook. Don't just literally paste the same thing and just blow it out of Hootsuite or Buffer on everything.

Patrick Brewer: 30:56 Oh man. Yeah. That's what-

Emily Binder: 30:58 What people do.

Patrick Brewer: 30:59 I call it ... What do I call it? I don't even remember what I call it anymore, but it's basically just spamming people.

Emily Binder: 31:04 Right.

Patrick Brewer: 31:05 You're just pushing out yesterday's news and getting no interaction or really adding no value. Just taking up space.

Emily Binder: 31:13 Yeah. It needs to be a give and take. And don't just be there pushing out your own message and your own content all the time because it's boring.

Patrick Brewer: 31:20 Yeah. What would you recommend? Like what's a good mix of content? So when you say don't just push out your own content, you're saying like find other pieces of valuable content and then have your own interpretation of why it's valuable or comment on somebody's post and share value? Is that what you're talking about or is it something different?

Emily Binder: 31:37 Yeah, that's the main thing. I think just you don't want to be advertising or promoting yourself much. Maybe 2 out of every 10, 3 out of every 10 posts. I would really try to just add value, comment on the industry or trends or news or other people's ideas and add your take because then that positions you as somebody who's in the know and paying attention and has an opinion as opposed to like, "Oh here's my blog post. Read me. Read me. I'm interesting."

Patrick Brewer: 32:12 Yeah, you don't want to feel like you need people's attention. You want to be able to produce really good content and then the content will obviously speak for itself and they'll give you their attention just by nature of you sharing value.

Patrick Brewer: 32:23 So before I let you go and it's been awesome having this discussion because frankly I don't know a ton about, outside of podcasting I don't know a ton about voice marketing at all. So I think you're probably the only person, I don't know anybody else in the financial services space that really ... Do you know anyone else who's focused on the same vertical as you? I mean ...

Emily Binder: 32:41 No. And it's funny because I'm actually having my Sonic branding re-done and I was supposed to give Audrey, who's an expert, she's audio brand in New York. I was supposed to give her my competitors like who's doing what I do and I couldn't come up with anyone that's an exact competitor. I've like some rough ... There are a few agencies that are doing voice specific, but no.

Patrick Brewer: 33:02 Nice.

Emily Binder: 33:02 No to answer.

Patrick Brewer: 33:03 Well, the good thing is, is I also have an RIA and I like to do all forms of marketing at all times. So now that I know you and I always like to win and empower my advisers to win at all costs, I think I'm going to have to hire you away from Ritholtz. So hopefully our friend Josh Brown is not listening. But no, I kid, kind of.

Patrick Brewer: 33:19 But either way, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Is there any other tips that you'd want to share? Just like parting thoughts or wisdom for the listeners of the show as far as how they should be thinking about their marketing, how they should be thinking about voice, any of those things that you think they might find valuable?

Emily Binder: 33:34 I think this is a moment in time where we're straddling two eras of technology. We're moving out of tap type and swipe into voice first. And if you're here right now and you're thinking about it, don't snooze on this because it's the equivalent of snoozing on when we went from desktop to mobile. And do you want to have a website where people are pinching and zooming? Take that and apply that to voice. Do you want to be somebody that wasn't there when it started and in three years you're scrambling. So I would just start with a flash briefing at least. Just to get your foot in the door and start playing and learning and correcting, right? Failing fast, figuring out what works.

Patrick Brewer: 34:12 Yeah. If nobody's listening then nobody's listening for right now. But eventually you're going to work the kinks out and you're going to become really good at it. And then as the market floods in, like the early days of Twitter, you've got that moat, you've built that protective moat around all of your efforts. So awesome.

Patrick Brewer: 34:29 Emily, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Look forward to having you on again soon, hopefully in like three years when voice marketing is the number one thing in the world and everyone's like, "Can we get Emily Bender on the show?" And I'm like, "I had her here first on my show." So look forward to having you on again.

Emily Binder: 34:44 Great. Thanks Patrick.

Patrick Brewer: 34:46 You got it.