S2 EP05: Video Blogging for Financial Advisors with Bill Winterberg

10.14.19 | 0 Market Transform

My guest today is Bill Winterberg. Bill is founder and president of FPPad.com and a respected personality in the financial planning industry. Bill is probably the only fintech vlogger in the United States (see his YouTube channel here) and is widely recognized as an independent authority on the subject of technology in financial services.

In this conversation, we discuss the importance of using video blogging for financial advisors to showcase their expertise and value to both clients and prospects. When you take a concept and show it in a video, using authentic communication that isn’t blog-speak, you supercharge your ability to connect with your audience. Bill provides an objective and unbiased perspective of technology trends in the industry. He is generous with tips for all advisors who want to grow a practice with using video blogging. 

Don’t miss one of our favorite moments, when Bill explains why most advisors have an aversion to video, and what you can do to get over it. Are you afraid of being on camera?  How could your clients benefit from you showing them something on video (as opposed to writing a lengthy email)? You will love all the practical ideas shared in this episode. I hope it inspires you to shoot a video today!

Looking for more ideas about video blogging for financial advisors? Join the Model FA advisor community, where you will find expert advice on how to launch, grow, scale, and transform your firm.

Resource Links
FP Pad 
FPPad YouTube
Connect with Bill
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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Bill Winterberg: 00:06 The more that you can use video to demonstrate, "You go to our website, this is what it looks like. If you want to upload documents so we can get started, this is how you do it." You, all of a sudden, decrease that friction, and you lower that resistance of a prospective client. And guess what, at the same time, that prospective client keys in to your client dashboard, they see how easy it is to use your services and engage you as a financial professional using this technology. And guess what, they're going to compare that with the three other advisors that they're currently interviewing, none of whom have provided any of this framework, and they're going to say, "Man, I want to go with this advisor, because they kind of give me this white glove, what to expect, here's what's next."

Bill Winterberg: 00:53 Which is way more tangible, for lack of a better word, than the advisor down the street who is just like, "Oh, yeah, we'll get started, sign here, and we'll get everything underway." It's like, I still don't know what to expect in the first two months, other than you're going to start collecting fees.

Patrick Brewer: 01:11 Welcome to the Model FA Podcast. This is Patrick Brewer. I am your host, and today, I have Bill Winterberg. Bill, how you doing?

Bill Winterberg: 01:17 I'm doing great, Patrick. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Patrick Brewer: 01:20 Absolutely, man. It's been great to connect. And what we're going to focus on today is a topic that a lot of advisors get really apprehensive about, their palms start sweating, they freeze up, and it's the topic of video marketing, putting somebody on camera, hearing their stories, their experiences, their beliefs, and hopefully getting that person to connect with their ideal prospects and turn them into clients. So Bill, I know that you've done a lot in the video space over the years, what are your thoughts on video marketing and just video in general as it relates to today's financial advisor?

Bill Winterberg: 01:57 Well, great question, Patrick. So you were talking about my video experience, I've probably created 4 or 500 of my own videos, and with my partner, Steve Biermann of Creative Marketing Solutions, we've probably created another 100 or 200 for clients. So that's the portfolio I guess I bring to the conversation. And I still feel in 2019, when we are recording this, video content is still a blue ocean in the land of financial professionals and investment advisors. It's not overly competitive, so anyone who is tentative and hesitant about moving forward, I don't think it's right to have the frame of mind that, I shouldn't do video just because so many other people are doing it. It really still is a blue ocean, in my opinion, and I think a lot of upside is available in this content.

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: 02:55 Yeah. One of the objections that I get from financial advisors, because I do a lot of video content as well, when you tell them to get in front of the camera and to create content for their audience, they look at you, first, deer in the headlights, and then the next question is, "What do I say? What type of content do I create that's going to connect me with someone and get them interested in becoming a client of my firm?" What's your advice to an advisor who wants to do video but maybe doesn't know the type of content that will resonate with their audience or how to structure that and actually create a video?

Bill Winterberg: 03:28 I remember going to a conference years ago, it was like 2005, Stephen Covey was there before he passed away. And Stephen Covey, one of his important tenets that still sticks with me today is, begin with the end in mind. Begin with the end in mind with your video plan. What's the end outcome? What are you trying to accomplish by pursuing video? My purpose when creating video is I hope to create a piece of content that provides something of value to the viewer, and that's not just information. We were talking a little bit about information versus stories in demonstrating something, video is a powerful medium to show people something, because you can see it.

Bill Winterberg: 04:13 This is why the how-to Videos, or like this old house is so large in terms of its audience, because you get to see how old broken stuff gets repaired. And it's a lot different than, this old house never would have taken off if it was the this old house podcast, right?

Patrick Brewer: 04:31 Yeah.

Bill Winterberg: 04:31 Nobody would have a clue how to do any of these repairs. But the fact that it was a video crew showing you, "Here's this busted up thing, here's the new part, this is how we replace it." That's really maximizing that video content. So let's think about beginning with the end in mind. If you're an advisor and you're going to create content, why is this piece of content going to be valuable for your prospect? And then equally so, why is this piece of video content going need to be valuable for your current client and cause them to stay engaged with you? Or perhaps refer somebody that they are thinking about who may need your services? Is there something that you can show them and demonstrate through video that accomplishes and achieves those goals?

Bill Winterberg: 05:19 So begin with the end in mind when thinking about what overall strategy, what overall game plan is. Because the worst reason to do video is because you feel like you need to do video, that is the worst reason to get started. So if that's what you're saying to yourself right now of, "Well, I need to do video because I listened to Patrick's podcast and he says I just need to do video and turn on my phone." Well, no, I feel that's the wrong reason, have a different reason to get started and move forward with video.

Patrick Brewer: 05:48 Great. What's your advice to an advisor who has the right reason? Maybe they want to add two to three new clients over the next quarter by building connections with their list of prospects, others in the community and their clients through video, what's the first step? I mean, do they go out and do they buy a DSLR and set it up and get all angry because they can't figure out how to sync the audio? Do they hire somebody to come in and film the videos for them and do all the post production? What is the first step for an advisor who wants to get started with video?

Bill Winterberg: 06:20 There's so much to this, which is why it is so intimidating. We got to be sympathetic, Patrick, to our listeners.

Patrick Brewer: 06:27 Believe me, I am.

Bill Winterberg: 06:28 There is so much to it, because you can spend hundred hours researching all the cameras available, then you got to research microphones, then you got to research video editing, and then if I want to use somebody else's clip or video to demonstrate it, now I need to be a professor in copyright law. So okay, we've got to do a little timeout and yeah, there's a lot to get started here. The first way that I would approach your question of, "I want to get a couple of new clients, I want to demonstrate that we offer services, and we do provide value to our clients," think about how to create this sort of welcoming video content, either one standalone piece of content or a little series, like, what's it going to be like to become a client?

Bill Winterberg: 07:14 So let's talk to a prospect, and if you're going to hire Winterberg Advisory Group for your wealth management services, well, what's the first step? So as an advisor, can you show me, can you do a little role playing, "Hey, I'm so thrilled that you have decided to engage with us, here is what you can expect. First, we will send you a link to our website, and you log in. Well, guess what, here's a B-roll opportunity." We haven't talked about A-roll and B-roll and stuff, but where I'm going with this is show me, now you're showing me your website, you're showing me the cursor going to the top of the screen, which is login to your account. You're showing me a mock up of your client portal, which is where I can go to the documents tab, and guess what, upload my documents, my tax returns, my estate documents, my bank statements, my investment account statements, all this stuff that's required by a new client who is signing on with a firm.

Bill Winterberg: 08:19 This is a really great step for video that decreases some of those barriers or resistance, I think that many prospects have of, I'm engaging in an advisor, and I want some services, but they're intangible, right? I can't touch. I'm not buying a car. It's not something I can hold and feel and smell, these are intangible financial services. So the more that you can use video to demonstrate, "You go to our website, this is what it looks like. If you want to upload documents so we can get started, this is how you do it," you all of a sudden, decrease that friction, and you lower that resistance of a prospective client. And guess what, at the same time, that prospective client keys in to your client dashboard, they see how easy it is to use your services and engage you as a financial professional using this technology, and guess what, they're going to compare that with the three other advisors that they're currently interviewing, none of whom-

Patrick Brewer: 09:19 Have done that.

Bill Winterberg: 09:20 ... have provided any of this framework. I think I say, "Man, I want to go with this advisor because they kind of give me this white glove, what to expect, here's what's next," which is way more tangible, for lack of a better word than the advisor down the street who's just like, "Oh, yeah, we'll get started sign here, and we'll get everything underway." It's like, I still don't know what to expect in the first two months, other than you're going to start collecting fees.

Patrick Brewer: 09:46 Yeah, you're documenting the process, you're giving them a look under the hood to figure out exactly how you work with clients, what they could potentially experience if they engage you, and you're building intimacy and starting to build the relationship with them. What are your thoughts on the relational aspects of video? That's one thing that I found to be pretty transformative for me as I can get my perspective out into the marketplace. I can document the build of my advisory firm and other things, and it's worked really well for attracting the right types of prospects. Do you feel that video is a good medium for building a relationship with someone who maybe doesn't know you right now? And do you feel it might be even more effective or less effective than other forms like blogging and things of that nature?

Bill Winterberg: 10:28 Well, video, in my opinion, and I'm totally biased here, with hundreds of videos in my portfolio, video is the most effective medium to forming relationships in a scalable fashion. So there's no substitute for the one on one, face to face interaction-

Patrick Brewer: 10:46 Agreed.

Bill Winterberg: 10:47 ... but if you're not able to ... I mean, you're not physically able to have a one on one, face to face engagement with every prospect who's interested in your firm. And the reality is today, hundreds of prospects are checking out advisors all the time, and they're hitting websites, and they're hitting Twitter feeds, and they're hitting Facebook pages, and they are looking to see what they can find about this firm before they move forward with that potential face to face interview or conversation, or maybe even a phone call. So absolutely, with video content, I as a prospect, I get to consume whatever video I can find, so hopefully it's available, linked on your website, hopefully it's linked somewhere prominently on other social areas.

Bill Winterberg: 11:36 But as the prospect, I am now going to get a sense for how you act, how you communicate, what your mannerisms are. And if I'm comfortable with that ... Effectively, I'm looking for red flags. Do you talk down? Do you use overly verbose language? Do you use really technical terms in your content? Because if you do, speaking personally, that's a huge turnoff for me. Now, imagine if I take that video clip with all the jargon and jabber and I sent it to my spouse, and if she watches it, what do you think she's going to think of communicating with this financial professional? So video, in my opinion, the most effective medium in terms of scalability when it comes to that first formation of a potential relationship.

Patrick Brewer: 12:33 What are your thoughts on getting better at video? So you've done a lot of videos, you were, and you still are one of the prominent reviewers of fintech software and consulting for financial advisors in that space, but I'm assuming you had to start somewhere. So what is your advice to an advisor who hasn't done video? Or maybe they've started to do video and they're worried that it might not be up to snuff, and prospects could see that, or clients could see that and say, "Wow, that doesn't really reflect the level of professionalism that I would expect from an advisor." How do they get around that, where they're still beginner, and they're learning the craft of creating videos and getting their message out there, but maybe they're just not quite an expert yet? How do you address that?

Bill Winterberg: 13:19 I address it by encouraging anyone pursuing video to give yourself permission to take as many at-bats and swings as, I guess, humanly possible. Give yourself permission to take swings and take at-bats. The more and more you do it ... I hope the more and more the technology, the cameras, the microphones, the lights, I hope they all disappear for you. And the attitude that I have now when I work an event and I interview people, when you see me on camera, I'm literally walking around a conference center holding this gigantic camera with a bendy selfie stick, okay. It's the most ridiculous thing that I could imagine at a financial services conference, but I stand shoulder to shoulder with my guest.

Bill Winterberg: 14:12 And I've got Steve, my producer, with his other camera there with a light on it, and I'm holding this camera over here, and it's like, "Look, it's just you and me right now, I need to know what's new. I need to know what makes you tick. I need to know what you just spent 60 minutes talking about on stage in front of 2,000 people, but it's just you and me right now shoulder to shoulder, never mind the cameras, never mind all that stuff." And hopefully, that little pep talk helps my guests ignore all the cameras. But something really interesting happens, because now the eyes go right into my eyes. They're not looking at Steve, they're not looking at his camera, they're not looking at my camera, they're looking at me, and there's that personal connection were like, "Oh, I can talk to Bill. Yeah, I just shared this, and I've been researching this, and here's the value, and here's the key takeaway, and I really hope everybody takes this to heart."

Bill Winterberg: 15:05 So let's bring that back to the advisor where, look, you just got to stop being so worried about embarrassing yourself. I mean, do you approach a client meeting saying, "Oh, well, I hope I don't make mess ups, and I hope I don't use words that may not be understandable to the client." I mean, do you have to give yourself a pep talk before a client meeting? I hope not, because you've had thousands and thousands of client meetings. So that's why it's important to get the reps in, get the repetition in, so that you enter a little video production process with the same mindset as you enter a client meeting. You don't have to psych yourself up for it, you have to be natural and do what you do best, which is speaking honestly and openly about money and what to do with it. Do the same, just instead of a client in front of you, you've got this little black electrical box with a lens attached to it. But you should not change just because you've got a camera in front of your face.

Patrick Brewer: 16:06 Pardon the interruption friends, but I got some cool stuff to share with you. It's available on modelf8.com. It's a podcast, a blog, videos, resources and all this really cool stuff that you don't even know about, because you're not there. It's available at modelfa.com. Make sure that you check it out, watch some stuff, you're going to learn how to grow your practice, scale it and just generate more profits so that you can do whatever you want with your time. So we'll see you there.

Patrick Brewer: 16:33 I agree. Let's say we have an advisor, he's got a staff of three to five people, and two of them are, let's say, client facing in some capacity, do you feel that it's good to get the team's perspective out into the marketplace to build relationships with potential prospects and clients or is it just the responsibility of the lead advisor? What is your thought as far as building the company brand and the team's presence versus just that of the founder?

Bill Winterberg: 17:00 Well, this is definitely very cultural with respect to a firm. So my perspective will come from the consumer financial services. When I engage a financial advisor, I'm hoping that I'm getting more than just the advisor I interact and engage with. I understand that my advisors highest and best use is interacting with me and asking questions and providing frameworks for strategy reviews, but I know and I hope my advisor is not dealing with trade errors or trade reconciliation or database updates. I hope my advisor has staff to do that. I am a big fan of demonstrating and involving the team. And this is going to be hard, I got to say I'm thinking three steps ahead already.

Bill Winterberg: 17:51 It's going to be hard to get people in your team to like, "Hey, we want to do this video." Great. "I don't want to be on video, that's not what I got hired for, and I'm really ashamed of it." And it's like, "Look, you are as valuable as I am for the client. The client would not get what he or she needs if we didn't work together, and we need to demonstrate this, not just to our clients, but we need to demonstrate it to our prospects." So it's kind of like a little pep talk for all the individuals and stakeholders in the firm. But look, we're all in this together, and so it's important that we all be involved at the same time. It's important, in my opinion, for all the stakeholders to be participants in what is going on.

Bill Winterberg: 18:37 And so that means not only the advisors should be involved in video content, but all the stakeholders should be involved in some form and some fashion in that content that is client facing and is prospect facing.

Patrick Brewer: 18:49 Awesome. What are your thoughts on distribution? I mean, let's say we create these amazing videos, we've got some A-roll, some B-roll, we've taken in the feedback, or not the feedback rather, but the contributions from our team and we've put together a sequence of videos with an end goal in mind of acquiring clients and building relationships with those in the local community, COIs, clients, et cetera, how do we distribute it? Where are we putting these videos? How are they being consumed? What are your thoughts on that?

Bill Winterberg: 19:18 I counter that with, you have to ask yourself, where are your clients? And where are your prospects? Where do they consume information? What's their resources that they use to get updates? So you, hopefully, as a successful advisor, already have hundreds of clients that you can ask, inquiry, "If we did something like this, what would be the most convenient way for you to consume this information?" I think, still, email is kind of a king here. I think email is a really, really good strategy to pursue, which means you got to have your email newsletter service, and there's plenty of technologies that offer email newsletters, and they also do the compliance, so you don't have to worry about compliance as well, because that keeps archives of everything.

Bill Winterberg: 20:03 And think about how you're going to deliver an email to your clients. You're obviously not going to attach an .mp4 file to the email. You're going to create and host that video somewhere. So you think about, if it's going to be private, you need a private hosting service. So private hosting services include Wistia, which is one that I purchased and I subscribe to, W-I-S-T-I-A. I think Vimeo allows you to do private videos as well. And of course, YouTube allows you to upload videos and set the privacy settings to private or unlisted. And that way, you get a URL that you copy and paste, put it in your email and send it to clients. And for prospects, think about getting the prospect to sign up to say, "Hey, we've got a couple of ..."

Bill Winterberg: 20:51 You build out one of these campaigns, an email service that builds a campaign which sends you five emails spread out every two days or 48 hours, and it's the introductory video series, and it's, "Here's what you can expect for day one, day three is the next step, day five is the next step." And then over a course of a few days, you've got all these touch points with the prospect. And at each touchpoint you're showing them, not just telling them, but you're showing them through video, what the onboarding process is, what your technology looks like, and what it actually ... You might have to have a mock up client meeting in your office or maybe do like a pseudo screen share or something for those clients who meet virtually, right?

Bill Winterberg: 21:35 You capture that in the video, "This is what you can expect when we meet with one another." So emails, I would still be thinking very heavily about how I can distribute content. We talked about private listings on Wistia, private videos on YouTube. Definitely, if you're going to do some public facing content, I think YouTube is still a blue ocean-

Patrick Brewer: 21:54 Yeah, I would agree.

Bill Winterberg: 21:56 ... some which are professionals. Start a YouTube channel, and then there's always syndication possibilities with Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. But I think emails and YouTube give you your big one two punch on distribution.

Patrick Brewer: 22:08 Yeah, I agree. And one pretty neat strategy just to get tactical with it is if you are advertising on Google and you're targeting really competitive search terms like financial advisor, Austin, Texas, or finding a financial advisor near me, you can pay upwards of 25 to $50 a click for those keywords if you're advertising. But what you can do is since YouTube is owned by Google, you can actually run intent based videos for people that have searched those keywords on Google, and you're just running videos on YouTube showing the videos to the people that are searching those really competitive keywords. So it's a way to hack the attention of your audience without having to pay for that advertising. You're paying pennies for the video on YouTube versus paying 20 to $50 a click for the ad on Google.

Patrick Brewer: 22:55 So there's a lot of different ways that you can leverage video outside of even just documentation or process, but just for getting in front of your market who's searching for you right now and building that relationship. What are your thoughts on the emergence of the virtual advisor? I mean, do you feel video is more important for someone who is working virtually than someone who's in the local community meeting face to face? Who would you say video is the most applicable for? Is it all advisors? Is it specific to maybe the virtual advisor? Who should be prioritizing video?

Bill Winterberg: 23:26 Well, I feel all advisors should be prioritizing video. It gets back to what I said earlier about this being a relationship based business, and I know of no other medium or type of content that communicates and demonstrates the potential for a relationship than authentic video content. And I put in the authentic qualifier because you as an advisor, I feel that ... Okay, I was going to rant about teleprompters, but I use a teleprompter for 100 episodes of my little bits and bytes news update, but that's because I got really good at reading teleprompters. And my challenge was, I can't keep in my head the number of users, a particular piece of software has, or what the terms of an acquisition were, that's what I use a teleprompter for.

Bill Winterberg: 24:17 But I tried and rehearsed before I started shooting episodes for the public, how quickly can I go through this teleprompter and sound natural. So I was going to rant on teleprompters, because if you're really bad at reading teleprompters, then you've got to take at-bats and get really good at reading teleprompters. However, as an advisor, no advisor that I know of uses teleprompters and client meetings, right?

Patrick Brewer: 24:46 Yeah.

Bill Winterberg: 24:46 That just doesn't exist. So I think as an advisor, avoid the gravitation towards teleprompters, unless you're really good at it, or you're doing really complicated stuff where you can't get the tax brackets wrong, and you've got to get the cut offs and phase outs right, and you can't put it in your memory.

Patrick Brewer: 25:04 Yeah, for sure.

Bill Winterberg: 25:04 That's really reasonable. But look, I have no problem if you have to have a little cheat sheet-

Patrick Brewer: 25:10 Yeah, [crosstalk 00:25:10].

Bill Winterberg: 25:10 ... don't try to hide it. Hey, put it on screen, "I've got a little cheat sheet here, because I can't keep all this stuff memorized, but I know that we made a cheat sheet, and this is what we use for you, so my advice is this ..." And it's like, "Hey ..." If you brought in a cheat sheet into the client meeting, like, "Hey, you've got the resources." See where we're going with this is, it's not a virtual advisor, it's not a face to face advisor, it's any financial professional, show me how competent you are. Show me how confident you are in your craft, which is digesting all this financial mumbo jumbo, digesting it and crumpling it up into something that delivers actionable insight for me as a client that helps me solve problems that I have, or addresses the concerns that I have. If you can do that with video, you will succeed.

Patrick Brewer: 26:04 Where do you think the primary aversion to video is coming from them? I think you and I will agree on this. There's not that many financial advisors that are producing video and pushing it out to prospects and clients. I would say it's probably less than 1 to 2% of advisors across the country are actually doing this at all or doing it well. What's the main aversion? Is it the mindset around not feeling comfortable, not knowing what content to create, not knowing how to set up the systems? Is it all of those things? What do you feel is driving an advisor to sit through a presentation about video or this podcast, and then say, "Yeah, that's just not for me."?

Bill Winterberg: 26:38 I feel it's the aversion to mistakes. So you think about financial services business, if you make a mistake, next to healthcare, which is deadly mistakes, these are financial mistakes. It hurts clients in the pocketbook if you make a recommendation of an investment that blows up, or you make a tax strategy that turns out to be dubious and results in an IRS audit. Those mistakes are consequential to the reputation of the advisor. And I think that that aversion to mistakes is parlayed into the aversion for video, where advisors and financial professionals feel like they cannot make mistakes in front of a video camera, where it will be uploaded to YouTube or-

Patrick Brewer: 27:26 Memorialized.

Bill Winterberg: 27:27 ... be on Facebook Live into perpetuity. So I think that aversion is what is a big set of resistance for many advisors. And it's easy for me to say, "Oh well, just get over it." But I'm sympathetic that you don't want to say necessarily the wrong thing. But look, you're in a video, why are you giving advice on specific investments in a video, it's probably not the right form of content. We've talked about a lot of other content that you can generate that does not involve advice that would have financial penalties with it. So it's getting off that ... I think advisors also, they don't want to look bad, or they don't want the video to be poor quality. They don't want to say the wrong thing.

Bill Winterberg: 28:07 There are things that we can do, like talking about decent video cameras and a decent lavalier microphone, that helps establish a good platform or a good base of production quality, then you eliminate the aversion of looking bad and sounding bad, or at least having bad audio. Then you go into your content about what you say, and it's like, just approach that conversation like you would approach a client. You don't use overly grandiose words when you're in a client meeting, do you? So I go back to teleprompters, if you're going to create a script, then you have to use dictation to create your script. People don't talk like they write for blog posts. So if you're going to take a blog post and load it in your teleprompter, stop. Nobody talks like they write for blogs, so this is totally different writing style.

Bill Winterberg: 28:59 You have to write like you're going to speak it. So the things that gets me are the intros to sentences where, "On the other hand, blah, blah, blah, blah." It's like, nobody says, "Patrick, well, on the other hand," or, "In retrospect, I ..." Nobody talks like that. When you and I are having coffee or a beer at the pub, we're not using this gratuitous language.

Patrick Brewer: 29:24 Yeah, keep it simple.

Bill Winterberg: 29:25 A lot of people put it in blog posts. But delete that, get it out of your vernacular when you're doing video content. Speak like you would speak to a regular human being when you're genuinely interested in helping them.

Patrick Brewer: 29:39 Yeah. I think that's huge. I sympathize with the advisor audience as well, because when I first started creating video content about two years ago, Eric, sitting right next to me is my creative director, we spent two hours trying to produce a two minute video. I was getting so upset. By the end of it, I was about to explode. I like kicked everyone out of my house because I thought it was going to be easy. I'm sitting there on the couch, and I'm like, "We just need to record this two minute video, this should be easy." But it took a lot of energy and effort and takes, probably like 500 takes to get through this freaking thing without a teleprompter. I don't use a teleprompter either, because I feel like it's just more authentic to go off the cuff, and if you mess up, you just re-record it. But it is hard.

Patrick Brewer: 30:21 Doing video is not easy. The interesting thing that we found out doing a lot of videos, outside of the fact that it's hard, and the technical setup and aspects of that are also annoying and hard, especially when your dog eats your microphones, I think I went through like five different lovelier microphones at this point, because my French Bulldog keeps eating them, but it's the type of content that resonates. I originally thought that only educational, really value adding content would connect us with our audience. So I would initially start talking about marketing, strategies and the different tips and tactics associated with getting clients as a financial advisor, because I have a consulting company and that's one of the things we specialize in.

Patrick Brewer: 31:00 And those videos did okay, they did fine, but when I started to talk about different stories and experiences and connect them to the advisor community and what advisors aspire to be and who they want to become, I noticed that my engagement went through the roof. Once I started sharing personal and intimate details about me and my life and different things that I've walked through, it got even better. So I think with advisors, the temptation is to only focus on the educational side of the business and talk through Roth conversions and your process. And those types of things are great because they get people from the indication of interest to the point where they're more solution oriented and ready to move forward. But sometimes you just got to share some information about you and your life and what you believe to be true, what you believe that is not true, and how you're different and why you do what you do.

Patrick Brewer: 31:50 And those types of things can be a transformative way to connect you with people who see the world as you see it. Because I found that a lot of advisors, they want to have a value proposition, and they're confused about how to differentiate themselves and how to have a true value proposition, and what it really comes down to, I think, is just having an opinion. You've got to believe in something. You've got to be able to share your story and why you do what you do, otherwise, your value proposition is exactly the same as everybody else and you're completely undifferentiated. So I think, for me, the way that I've been using video, and it sounds like you advocate for this as well, is just it'll give you a value proposition. You can actually use the leverage of video and the distribution of video to get your message out there to more than just one person at a time in a networking event, and the people who resonate with you will self select and opt in.

Patrick Brewer: 32:43 And you'll be working with people who like what you have to say. So you're not going to have those clients that you have to arm wrestle in the sales meeting to become clients of your firm. So those are some things that I found to be pretty successful with video marketing.

Bill Winterberg: 32:55 Yeah, and what you can't see on a podcast is how vigorously I'm shaking my head or nodding my head up and down. I agree, the educational content or the Roth IRA stuff, that's table stakes, right?

Patrick Brewer: 33:08 Yeah.

Bill Winterberg: 33:08 Everything about the nuts and bolts, whether you're a CPA with taxes, or a CFP with wealth management, that's table stakes. I, as a prospect, will give you credit, because you have a CPA or CFP or both. I'll give you credit for this table stakes of information, but having that opinion, being a human, being relatable, that is a differentiator. Again, this is a relationship based business built on top of financial education. So I, as a prospect, everybody kind of looks the same, because they all have the CFA or CFP and CPA, I kind of treat them all the same. How are you different? Is it how you talk? Is it your mannerism? Is that how you communicate? And emphatically, the answer is yes.

Bill Winterberg: 33:53 And so when you talk about those videos that engage and are more storytelling and relatable, it's like, "Wow, I can now relate to this advisor. I suspect that he or she has a team of similar like minded individuals backing up the advisor." And if that's a turnoff, we go back to being worried about mistakes in this business. Guess what, if it's a turn off, that's a good thing. It's not a mistake. It's good to turn away prospects, because it's usually those prospects ... And some advisors or solo advisors listening to this, look, a lot of times you bring on everybody, because you have to get to a sustainable revenue model in your business. So you work with them, but know it, when they call and their caller ID shows on the phone, and you take that breath, because you're like, "Oh, man, I don't want to take that call." Well, that's a sign that is a prospect that probably would have been turned off by your videos.

Bill Winterberg: 34:51 And in the long run, Patrick, you do plenty of work with business owners and advisors here, that's a good thing. It's good to turn off people, because those who make it past that barrier and really engage with you, those are long term customers, almost customers for life. They will be with you for years and years.

Patrick Brewer: 35:09 Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think you said it in the beginning of the episode, before you even start video, you got to start with the goal. Who are you even trying to attract, and then you create content with that end in mind. Because if you're just pushing out video content on educational concepts, and being a subject matter expert, you're being helpful, you're establishing one component of trust, because you're a credible expert, but you're not building intimacy with anyone because you haven't decided who you want to build intimacy with. One of the components of trust is being very, very specific about who you can help and then building an intimate relationship with them.

Patrick Brewer: 35:42 I think you nailed it in the beginning when you were talking about the idea of just having the end in mind. Because I know that you do some consulting with advisors and others in the industry on video production, creation, post, I'm an advocate, personally, for outsourcing this, because I've experienced the pain. I've gone through $500 worth of microphones that my dog has eaten. My dog is 60% dog, 40% lavalier microphone at this point. I truly believe that video is something that most advisors, at least initially, would benefit from a conversation with someone who can set up the equipment, help them with the storyboarding, help them through those mindset issues, and then push the content out and distribute it in a way that is going to feel comfortable and good for the prospects and the clients. What's your process with this? How do you think about helping advisors with these types of things?

Bill Winterberg: 36:40 Well, I guess it's a multi step process. But quite honestly, in many cases now, the camera quality in mobile phones today is pretty darn good. You do need to understand how to lock the exposure on your mobile phone camera and lock the focus, because the most distracting thing to me is anyone who's shooting with a mobile camera, it gets light and dark and light and dark as the clouds move by your office, or the focus goes in and out of focus. The easiest thing to do from a production standard is figure out how to lock that exposure and focus, and that's as simple as, on an iPhone, tapping and holding your finger on a screen. Now, you might need a friend to help you, because someone's got to be in the frame, and your friend can just tap and hold the screen to lock the focus and lock the exposure. That's like 90% of the production quality right there.

Bill Winterberg: 37:38 And then also think about that external microphone. The iPhone and Android microphones, they're made for telephone conversations when you've got the phone right up to your head, not when you're talking three feet away or five feet away in your office or even outdoors. So again, there's a whole host of microphones solutions, but the most flexible and most diverse is a wireless lavalier microphone. You could spend $200 with a company called RØDE Microphones and get their RØDE wireless lavalier, it's 200 bucks, fairly affordable. There's a Samson, not Samsung phones, S-A-M-S-O-N, Samson. They have a wireless lavalier kit that's also $200. It plugs into mobile phones. It's just native, and it just works. It's great for offices, and it's great for the outdoors.

Bill Winterberg: 38:32 If you really want the high end stuff, you move up to the Sennheiser wireless microphones, that's about 650 or $700, but that's what broadcasters use for TV stations. So if you want that quality, or you're going to do event coverage, where there's thousands of people at the event, and there's 400 Wi-Fi signals in the area, you probably need that high end gear. So you just think about where you're going to shoot your video, and that'll move you between that $200 to $600. So make an investment in the equipment is where I'm trying to get. Make an investment in knowing how to use your phone and getting a good decent audio capture. And then identify someone who can work with your stories, work with your creative and do some of that pre production, so that if you're going to do scripts, you use regular human speak and not blog content.

Bill Winterberg: 39:23 And go through the ideas, like, what can we show? Is this idea better for audio podcasts only? Is there something that we can show here and create that in a video? And for distribution, again, bring in somebody, Patrick, you already talked about like level 401, do the YouTube targeted keywords and do a video there. Go get somebody who does a little bit of this video distribution for a living, maybe even outside of financial services. Pick their brain by three hours of consulting, bring them in your firm for a half day in your conference room and say, "Hey, how do we get our video out to clients? And how do we get our video out to prospects who don't know that we exist?" And get some great tips from that consult. I mean, that would be like 1000 bucks or less. I'm in Atlanta, so I'm spoiled by a lot of creative people who know distribution. But it's money well spent to get some of these great ideas to get rolling on distribution once you have that content created.

Patrick Brewer: 40:22 Absolutely. Bill, I feel like we just went for a long time on video. We were going to cover technology in the fintech space, but I feel like we're going to have to have you on for episode number two with Bill Winterberg, technology expert, for the next series. Appreciate all the advice and guidance you shared to our audience in relation to video marketing.

Bill Winterberg: 40:42 Yeah, indeed. It's actually the tech work that I did, the tech blogging and the tech consulting, that was my pathway into video. Because I think like many advisors listening right now, I saw the opportunity five years ago, hey, there's nobody in technology, nobody in fintech, who is creating video content and doing it in an engaging way that shows what's happening at events, that shows how to do a demo and shows you the value of the platform. So that was my segue into getting into this content. So advisors listening right now, they're like, "Yeah, I've been doing this business," maybe this podcast is going to be their segue into getting started with video.

Patrick Brewer: 41:21 Well, I hope so. Bill, thank you so much for your time. We look forward to having you on for a future episode related to tech. Thanks again.

Bill Winterberg: 41:28 Thank you, Patrick. I can't wait to be back.

Patrick Brewer: 41:30 All right, take care. Hey, it's Patrick, we've got a little bonus clip with Bill Winterberg that didn't make the episode, but I want to go ahead and share that with you right now.

Bill Winterberg: 41:40 So Patrick, we were talking about how to lock your exposure on your mobile camera, getting a wireless lavalier, so your production looks really well. One secret for audio content, especially a lot of advisors who are thinking about podcasts, one secret that I want to share is when you're recording your podcast, get out of your chair, you got to stand up. Go get a microphone stand. Go get one of those arms that you see, but don't put it on your desk where you sit. Get in a standing position. Allow yourself to breathe. Allow yourself to get animated. When you start hand-waving, and you get all that air in your lungs, because you're standing and you're not sitting down compressing it, all of a sudden, that energy in your body, it just comes out of your mouth, and it gets captured in your podcast.

Bill Winterberg: 42:32 I'm standing up right now, and I have been standing up through the whole podcast. And I bet you can listen to all of your prior episodes, and you can identify, "Okay, that guest was sitting at his or her desk, and they were talking into their headset microphone while sitting in a chair, versus, I know Bill Winterberg was standing up, because he was way more animated than other guests." So that's my secret is if you're going to do videos, do it standing up. If you're going to do podcasts, do it standing up. Invest in that microphone stand. Get that little boom arm that goes up six feet in the air. That's my secret.