From Skeptics to Fans: The Power of Compelling Content with Matt Halloran

Welcome to the FAST Podcast, Financial Advisor Strategy Talks with Lara Galloway, SVP of Channel Management at White Glove. Lara provides advisors with an opportunity to hear from some of the best minds in the business. Follow along to learn quick tips to help you grow your business. From gaining new leads to keeping current clients engaged and everything in between.

Now, onto the show.  

Bill Tucker: And welcome to The FAST Podcast with your host, Lara Galloway. Lara, it's always a pleasure to visit with you, but it is a particular pleasure to be with you this episode because you have a guest very near and dear to my heart, a pretty special fellow, and I can't wait to hear your conversation with him.

Lara Galloway: Well, I am so excited Bill, to bring on none other than Matt Halloran of ProudMouth.

Bill Tucker: The co-founder, aka my boss, by the way.

Lara Galloway: Yes, your boss and my friend. I'm so happy to have you here, Matt. Let me just give [00:01:00] an introduction for anybody on the FAST Podcast who hasn't met Matt before. So Matt Halloran is co-founder of ProudMouth, and he's the world's leading influence accelerator for financial advisors, maybe not all by himself, but with the other folks there at ProudMouth as an in-demand speaker, he has appeared on over a thousand podcasts as well.

Matt is the host of ProudMouth’s top advisor marketing podcasts, where he and industry leaders empower advisors to become trusted recognized authorities. Matt is the author of the social media handbook for financial advisors, which is the first social media book for financial services. And I'm so pleased to say that Matt is fresh off the stage at White Gloves own Host University, our big education and training event.

I got to have him here in Detroit with me last week and spend some time listening and learning from him about his content marketing and influencer strategies, and even spent some time at a ball game with [00:02:00] him, you know, seeing the Tigers. So Matt, welcome to the FAST Podcast.  

Matt Halloran: Thanks for having me. I appreciate you allowing me to be here.

Lara Galloway: It is such a pleasure. And I have to say, I'm still kind of coming down off the high from Host University and all the amazing interviews you did with so many of our guests there, that was so great. And I think it's perfect to share a little bit about that, Matt, because I wanted to talk to you today about your efforts and your expertise in content marketing.

And one of the things that I think you did so beautifully at our event was help us magnify our presence across social media, demonstrate our thought leadership, expand the reach and the influence of the speakers and the attendees that were there to learn by all those interviews that you recorded.

And posted very quickly on social media. We keep laughing. We talk, you know, here a week later, everybody's like my Instagram or my [00:03:00] LinkedIn or my Twitter feed is still full of Matt Halloran's interviews at Host University. Love it.  

Matt Halloran: You know, first off, I'm always very grateful to even have the opportunity to do that.

Because I think if you watch the videos, you're going to notice that I'm actually having an enormous amount of fun. That's like kind of my happy place you know, doing something very quick, that is going to amplify those speakers, the attendees. This is something that I'm now being asked to do almost every event I go to because one, we have a very large following here and Lara, we talked about this before we talked about it at host university but influences really works, right?  

You know, I was listed as one of the top 41 influencers in financial services, which I'm still very, very humbled to be on that list. But the reason why is because we create so much content not only for ourselves here at ProudMouth, but that's what we do for our clients. [00:04:00]  

Lara Galloway: Absolutely. And that's kind of what I want us to hone in on because you know what we do here at White Glove Matt, we're generating leads right for our financial advisors. We're helping them get in front of an audience of people that need some financial expertise or financial guidance. They come and they attend an educational workshop on a financial topic like retirement planning or college planning or estate planning and social security, and then they may decide they want to get a little more help and get a financial advisor to help them.  

And that warm and friendly educator who was up at the front of the room is now trying out for their job, basically auditioning for their job. But once the advisors have those leads and maybe even before too.

We know that they need to magnify their own thought leadership. We know that they need to demonstrate their expertise in a variety of ways, not just standing in front of the group at a library, right? But in showing up in all the ways that an audience is going to [00:05:00] find them online. And so can you just talk a little bit with me about that?

Because I know in your position, you're always talking to advisors, telling them they need to do things to distinguish themselves and stand out in a very increasingly competitive field in the financial services economy. So what do you say to these advisors to help them get out there and differentiate themselves?

Matt Halloran: You have to have the social proof, right? So, somebody wants to sign up for a webinar or a seminar. The first thing they're going to do is Google you, right? And so if you don't have a great website, if you don't have a great brand, if you don't have great messaging, and if you're not creating content that proves that you are who you say you are.

People and more people are becoming more and more skeptical. And so our whole philosophy here is moving people from skeptics to fans, right? Could you imagine for the advisors that are listening to this, if people already came to your seminar, pre-sold, they already know who you are. They already like, no one trusts you.

They've already consumed other thought [00:06:00] leadership. You're reinforcing the message and reinforcing your personality. You're going to set more appointments, right? That it's just Lara, you and I've talked about this offline. But the people who use your system, who have the social proof, which is a strong social media presence, a strong some sort of audio or video presence so that people can consume their thought leadership when it's convenient for them.

They're more successful. It's just, that's the reality of the situation. And the other thing, and we talked about this when we were on the panel together, is a lot of advisors will get 40, 49 units in the room. And they'll maybe close two or three of those people, right. Depending on how good they are in the performance and their follow up system, all of that.

But all those other 30 plus people that what a lot of advisors do in a seminar or webinar system is they just, they're not ready yet. I'm not going to focus on them. And they're so wrong that what they need to do is they need to continue to drip on them and [00:07:00] show them that they are truly committed to continuously educating them, not just in single point of time.

Lara Galloway: That's exactly what I wanted to hone in on with you, Matt. I'm so glad you brought that up because yeah, I thought that was a fabulous conversation that we were having on the panel. And the idea for me in the workshop system, once an advisor gets in front of the group of people, you know, after the day, after the event, the way White Glove works, we don't charge anything upfront.

So, we only charge after the event and we only charge for the attendees, right? So, the advisor gets a contact list of all the registrations that no showed as well as the attendees, but they only pay for the attendees. So, they've got a ton of people who usually about double the number of the people that attend is how many we register.

They got a ton of people who initially raise their hand and said, you know what I'm curious about a estate planning. I don't know if I need to update mine or not. I don't even know if I need one. I'm going to go to this [00:08:00] estate planning workshop, but then something happens. They don't go but then the advisor who does the workshop may just decide to not follow up with people that didn't show up and it's such a swing and a miss.

It's absolutely just leaving money on the table because to your point, these people just need continuous touches. They need continuous drips. And for an advisor, I know a lot of times it's like look, I'm not a content marketer. I'm not a marketer. I'm an advisor, right? So how do I come up with stuff to continually send good thought leadership and education to these people?

That just seems like such a hurdle, but we know that that's exactly what's required to convert those leads that maybe didn't attend a workshop at all. So. Let's talk a little bit, Matt, about the nuts and bolts. We're talking about the why, right? Like you need content marketing so you can convert more [00:09:00] leads.

Even the people who attended may take a little while to decide that they're actually ready to work with you and they also need to be continually dripped on. But what are the nuts and bolts here? What does it look like to continuously put out solid thought leadership via content marketing?

Matt Halloran: We just really want the advisors to stay in their lane. So advisors talk for a living. They tell stories. They tell jokes. They use live case studies and all of their client meetings. This is exactly the sort of content that we want them to create. We don't want them to become marketers. We want them to stay in their lane of expertise, share their expertise widely.

Right. And also make sure that they're infusing their personality into their content. So that when somebody does decide to set an appointment, they already feel like they know the moment. I'm going to tell you a digress and tell a quick story. So, we have an advisor who does a lot of workshops and part of our system is center of influence podcasting.

And so what he does is he [00:10:00] brings on estate planning attorneys and CPAs and famous business people, business owners, stuff like that on his show, and he interviews them. And he did in a estate planning workshop. And then about a year later, he had an estate planning attorney on and on the closing of the podcast, he had said, you know, hey, Jane, I want you to tell me how many trusts do you have in your desk drawer right now that have been entirely funded?

You've been paid, but we're never funded. And she started laughing and she said like three quarters of them. And so he says, Hey, Jane, what should they do? And she laughs and she goes, well, I don't know. They should probably call you and fund it. And so that was the end of the podcast, right?

Right after that podcast went live, his office started getting phone calls. And they're like, what the hell is going on? Why are we getting so many phone calls? And it was people saying, I went to one of your estate planning workshops years ago. I just heard your podcast. I've been listening to your podcast.

I'm an avid listener of your show. And I [00:11:00] have 250, 000 sitting at a bank CD right now that I've always needed to fund the trust, but I didn't know how to do it. I'd like to come in and have you help me with this.  

Lara Galloway: Oh my God. What a one, two punch. That's awesome.  

Matt Halloran: Two punch, Lara. Oh my God. Are you kidding me?

It's printing freaking money. But here's the funny thing is everybody always talks about ROI. I know you guys deal with this all the time. We do too from a sales perspective, right? Sometimes the ROI isn't going to happen for two years, but real businesses, advisors who want to run a real business, not a practice doesn’t understand that they need to start marketing for the long term. It's just like the best food in the world is slow cooked food. The best marketing in the world is slow marketing.  

Lara Galloway: I love it. And, oh my god, if you didn't just take away a note right now, like call up an estate planning attorney, and ask them that question.

How many unfunded trusts do you have in your drawer? I love that. Get some new clients real fast. [00:12:00] I love that slow marketing. I mean, have you made a t shirt out of that yet, Matt? Because I think that would be a really good one.  

Matt Halloran: Well, I know you haven't met my business partner, but Kirklow, my business partner the person who I partnered with because of his level of genius, I mean, this guy is one of my favorite human beings, not only professionally, but personally, and he loves creating t shirts.

So, he's got this entire Canva folder of t shirts and slow marketing is there because this is something that we have to talk a lot about. I mean, advisors are looking for an A plus B equals C equation when it comes to sales. What you all do is help them fill their sales funnel, right? But if you don't have that one two punch, you're just wasting so much time and money that you could continuously have relationships with these people, but make it when it's convenient for them.  

So, Lara, that's a big change in our world today is people want things when it's easy for them webinars and seminars are a [00:13:00] specific point in time. So you had just said maybe 60 people register, right?

40 people show up, you know, 10 people buyer or whatever. Your guys’ numbers are right. So those 20 people who didn't show up. They're still prospects, man. They're totally people who you need to build a relationship with because life might have happened for them. Because guess what? I don't know about, well, I do know about you.

We've got kids. We've got adult kids. Stuff happens, right? You know, maybe they've got a flat tire on the way to the event, right? They shouldn't be punished for that. In fact, they should be shown even more love for the fact that they showed interest in the first place.  

Lara Galloway: You're absolutely right. And that's the beauty.

Again, when we talk about content marketing, if you're an advisor listening to this and it still sounds overwhelming, the point is you're talking about stuff that you do with your clients every day. You talk about stories. Think about what happened in your office yesterday and talk about that in a blog or a [00:14:00] podcast or something you post on social to just share like the thing that you just shared about the estate planning attorney with all the trust in the drawer.

You know, you share things like that. That's content. And then when someone who is sitting out there and you don't even know is listening, but attended one of your workshops a while back or registered and never attended and just hasn't ever booked with you. You say something that resonates with them.

Maybe it triggers a thought, an emotion, a question, a fear, a goal that they have been thinking about. And that's the thing that convinces them to call you and come on in. Love it. Well,  I want to overcome an objection that you just really touched on with the listeners minds.

Which is hey, you know, Matt what in God's name am I going to talk about?  

Matt Halloran: So, we do about 150 episodes for advisors per month. Now I got topics coming out the wazoo within a 10-minute session with your client success coordinator, who's the person who you work with here or with your producer, [00:15:00] you've got Bill, the producer of your show, you've got two other people who are producers.  

If you're an advisor and you don't know what to talk about, all you have to do is lean on us here. Or what's even better is lean on White Glove. You guys have so much great content that the advisor can pull from every single solitary seminar that you can do could be 5 to 10 podcasts, right?

Instead of doing the larger overview, which is what you want to do. Right. You know, workshop specifically find one or two things, do a two part mini series on the power of Roth conversions, guaranteed income, trusts, wills, long term estate planning, life insurance, multi-generational planning, right?

I'm just focused on that one estate planning seminar that you guys do. You'd see, that's the sort of stuff, the content. Once you prime that pump and Lara, I talk about this all the time. Once you prime the pump-up content, you see content in everything. [00:16:00] And we are just the way to be able to get that content out of your brain and out into the marketplace so that you can continue to build those relationships.

Lara Galloway: Well, I know for sure we can say that just like White Glove is very much focused on playing in the done for you space. So, advisors don't have to figure out all the stuff that it takes to market and manage a seminar or a webinar. Same for you guys. You know, you deliver on that promise, Matt.

And I appreciate that where you don't have to come up with the content. You don't have to come up with the ideas. ProudMouth can do it for you. And then The other thing that I do love about what you guys do, if any of you are considering doing a podcast, and I will put in a strong plug for you to do it with ProudMouth, because the beauty of it is you guys take one podcast and then you slice and dice it into a thousand different little content pieces, you know, a little video snippet, an audio snippet, a social post for all different platforms of social, where you can multiply that [00:17:00] one piece of content by breaking it up in little pieces.  

So, you record one podcast and you break it up and you can use it in so many different ways.  

Matt Halloran: Yeah. Gary Vanderchuck, Seth Godin Daniel pink, all of the kind of big marketer and thought leaders, even Malcolm Gladwell of our time here in the mid, early 2000s have been talking about do it once and then try to take that, we call it cult content multiplication or content automation.

And the idea here is you spend 30 minutes with our team, right? You record your podcast. We transcribe that podcast so that you have it for compliance. Everything that we do is compliant. We've got three areas of redundancy. If anybody wants to talk about that, I've done all sorts of content on that specifically, but yes, and then we do audio snippets, video snippets.

We do quote memes. We do text-based posts. We also post that on your platform of choice, right? So, whether that's Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn we don't do reels yet. We can do YouTube shorts and [00:18:00] we also don't do TikTok and that's really just a major compliance issue. Nobody's really been able to figure out how to get through TikTok unless you're on R.I.A.

And you have a way to save the videos and comments. I'm not going to get into all that. But anyway, the idea here is we want to make it so once again, you stay in your lane. We are the marketing arm for our clients. Most of them they don't even hire a marketing person. They use us for that because not only do we create the content within the advisor's voice, but we also compliantly post that content.

So, all the advisors and their team has to do is fan maintenance, right? So we can't do that because that is an entire compliance violation. The advisor or the advisor's office does have to interact there. You have to remember social media has one word in it. That's really important, which is social.

So you have to communicate with your fans, [00:19:00] tell people thank you for liking the post or, Hey, can you elaborate on what you liked about the podcast or those sorts of simple things? And in fact, we even have a list, Lara, of compliant responses that you can just cut and freaking paste into your social media.

Because again, we want to make this as easy, just like you guys do. You guys make it so easy for advisors to get up in front of an audience, do their show and you know, have all of the stuff that needs to happen. You know, one of my favorite things at Host University was Frank Maselli. All right.

And just how he talks about how to do seminars and how to close business and when you need to drop your different points of contact and all of that sort of stuff. Yeah. Your guy’s system is amazing. And Lara, this is why, we've had a relationship with White Glove for almost since inception of ProudMouth is because we know you do something we're never going to do.

And we do something that's such an amazing add on [00:20:00] to what you do, that we are really a complete system.  

Lara Galloway: Yeah we're a good compliment. We're a good fit for each other. And that's why we're talking. So Matt, let me ask you this. You know, you just mentioned a whole bunch of different platforms and such, but I'm curious with all of the posting that you guys do, I consider you content marketing experts.

So which types of content have you found to be the most effective for engaging and attracting clients?  

Matt Halloran: Well, that's a super loaded question, sister. And the reason why the algorithms keep freaking changing. So one of the things that we kind of a mantra that we have here is pleasing the algorithms.

And so we are constantly looking at what algorithms work on different social media platforms. We get reports every single solitary month from trusted research sources that really tell us where we need to pivot right now. Video is king. I'm not going to say that it's always going to be that way, but there has been a very strong preference on the [00:21:00] algorithms.

But what you have to do is upload that video natively. So one of the things that every social media platform doesn't want you to do is to click off their platform. So even sending somebody to a YouTube link, pisses off the algorithm. So you have to upload that video natively to the social media platforms, whether that's LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and Lara that's why my live Twitter interviews that I do at events get so much traction is because I upload those natively to Twitter or X or whatever the hell it's called now in order to make it so that you stay within that platform.  

Lara Galloway: Yeah. And that makes perfect sense.

And I know one of the things that you've always talked about too, is when it's video, it's of course, it's short form video. It's not, I mean, I've talked to some advisors about doing some video marketing and it's like, Oh my God, they send you something that's, you know, maybe just a 5 to 10 minute long video.

And I feel like it's an hour, you know, and it's like, you need to [00:22:00] be like 90 seconds.  

Matt Halloran: So three minutes down to 90 seconds. Right. Three minutes, max 90 seconds is actually preferred. And honestly if I see that's there's a video over three minutes and I don't really have a relationship with you, I don't watch it.

Lara Galloway: Yeah, exactly. No kidding. So, we're running up on time, Matt. I want to ask you a couple more questions and then we're going to close out, but if you're looking ahead and you being a thought leader yourself, what emerging trends and content marketing do you foresee for financial advisors?

What's going to help them stay ahead of the curve?  

Matt Halloran: The big major shift that I see in the future is in, and I've said this many, many times. And it's one of my favorite things that I'm quoted saying, which is, you know, marketing is fundamentally changed.

You have to market to your ideal clients and prospects and the media they prefer while they're there with organic content. And so the first step that every advisor needs to do is to Google or use Chat GPT or [00:23:00] AI to find out what social media platform their ideal target market is on. And that's where they need to focus.

But when I say it's an and not an or what they need to then do is hyper focus on that social media platform, specifically with varying kinds of content. And then after you've done it for 6 to 12 months, because again, slow marketing is really the only marketing left after 6 to 12 months, then you're going to be able to pull reports on what kind of content that you create is preferred by those people.

And then you need to lean into that.  

Lara Galloway: I love that. So go be where your audience is. And then create the content that they like and keep doing it. Okay. Very cool. So Matt, we are running on our time here. And I always like to wrap up each of the episodes just by asking a bit more of a personal question. And it's just about a definition of success.

So how do you define success for yourself. [00:24:00]  

Matt Halloran: So success for me is impact, right? Success used to be numbers and revenue and profit and how much money I had in savings. But now it's really impacting because all of those things are a result of making more impact. One of the times that I feel the most successful, Lara, for free and actually help somebody with something that I know about, regardless if they're a client or not.  

Kirk and I both actually, our whole executive team donates anywhere from 10 to 15 hours a month to just helping, in our situation, financial services professionals just make better marketing and branding decisions.

So that's really what success means to me.  

Lara Galloway: I love that. That's great. I mean, impact is such a powerful word on its own, but I have to say, if anybody knows a little bit more about you than just the ProudMouth you know, person that you are, they might know that you might define [00:25:00] success by how many eggs you get from your urban chickens, right?

I was thinking you might include that, Matt.  

Matt Halloran: Well, if we went for personal success, I went to professional success but personal success for me is really daily trying to be the best husband and father that I can be. And I am also a dog father and a chicken father. And you know, I want to make sure that my chickens and my animals are well taken care of, that they're happy, happy chickens, lay better eggs, happy dogs are more obedient and also are just better friends.

And you know what, happy kids and happy wife also just make and every night when I go to bed, Lara, I review all aspects of my life and I rate myself on how well I did in each of those areas every day. And it's wonderful because it's a wonderful way for me to think about what I need to do tomorrow.

But I don't think people give themselves enough time for that level of reflection. I talk about, you know, I review it. Was I a good husband? Was I a good father? Was I a good friend? Was I a good business partner? Was I a good business owner? Was I a good podcast host? You know, how was I [00:26:00] to my dogs?

And I review those every single solitary night as I lay my head down. And it just really keeps me focused on what matters.  

Lara Galloway: Well, it's no doubt that your goals and your reality are probably quite aligned with regards to the impact you're having in all of those areas. So Matt, it has been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you for joining me today on our co-hosted wonderful ProudMouth podcast. I appreciate you.  

Matt Halloran: Thanks for having me.  

Bill Tucker: Wow, as always, Lara, that was a really fascinating edition of your podcast. If people listening were moved and wanted to get in touch with you, how would they reach out to you?  

Lara Galloway: You can always reach out on our website whiteglove.com or email info@whiteglove.com.  

Bill Tucker: Fantastic. Thank you. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in and listening to the FAST Podcast with Lara Galloway. If you have not subscribed to the podcast yet, click on the subscribe button down below. That way, when Lara [00:27:00] comes out with a new podcast, you don't have to remember to go to it.

It will come to you. We also ask that you rate and share this podcast, because in doing so, it helps others find it again.  

Thanks for listening today for everyone at White Glove. This is Bill Tucker reminding you to live your best day today. We'll see you next time.  

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