Swift Chat: FPA Kansas City Compilation Episode with Michael Kitces, Micha Baxley, and More (August and September 2022 Events)

In this Swift Chat compilation episode from the FPA Kansas City Symposium from August 2022 and the FPA Kansas City chapter meeting in September 2022, host Marie Swift, CEO of Impact Communications, interviews a range of guests about their experiences at the events including:

- Micha Baxley, Vice President of Business Development of Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America
- Mike Flinn, Vice President of National Sales with BOK Financial - Advisor Trust Services
- Brian Willet, CEO of Advisor Game Plan LLC
- Michael Kitces, Head of Planning Strategy for Buckingham Wealth Partners
- Colin Swift, Digital Media Production and Relationship Manager at Impact Communications, Inc.
- Jonny Swift, Vice President and Director of Social/Digital Strategy for Impact Communications, Inc.

Learn more about the FPA Kansas City chapter events here.

Listen to Podcast/Audio Version

​Transcript of Conversation

Marie Swift: Hey, it's Marie Swift and we're doing a special live edition. We're here at the FPA Kansas City Symposium in August. We're also going to be back in September, the Impact Team, and we're doing some podcasting and video here, but we're also talking with some interesting people. And we're going to be talking to a bunch of speakers, getting their insights and what's hot and happening here at the FPA Kansas City chapter.

INTERVIEW WITH: MICHA BAXLEY
SCENARIO PLANNING, MASTERING THE CONVERSATION, ANNUITIES W/O COMMISSIONS AND MORE

Marie Swift: I am here at the FPA Kansas City Symposium, and I'm here with Micha Baxley. Micha, you are with Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America, and you're here talking about risk factors in financial plans and how advisors can help their clients control what they can versus the uncontrollable. So tell us a little bit about what you talked about today.

Micha Baxley: In our presentation today, we basically went over a sample financial plan for clients. Many things that advisors do on their own of adjusting the retirement age, some of the controllable factors like retirement age, contributions remaining into the retirement plan, withdrawal rates, that sort of stuff.

That's, 101 for most advisors. What we looked at today was a little deeper and using a Monte Carlo to stress test different portfolios and then also different uncontrollable factors. So for example, if you had a shock risk to a portfolio, let's say you had a client and I think in our case, our sample client had a 93% chance of success of meeting their plan there.

And if you injected a market shock -- and to do that, we used five years into retirement, a decrease by 30% in the equity market, and a decrease by 5% in the fixed income market. What would that do to the probability of success for that plan so early to the transition? And in that example it was about a 20%, and don't quote me on numbers, I apologize, but it was a significant reduction.

So basically advisors a lot of times just need to dig a little deeper with those Monte Carlos and, and use the stress test. If we have equity underperformance, for example, what does that do to our probability of meeting our retirement goals?

Swift: So one of the terms I've heard other practitioners use is scenario planning. Is that what you're talking about, pulling different levers to see how things might play out?

Baxley: Absolutely. And we're diving a little deeper too in those levers that you're not able to pull, that you're maybe, let's just say, happen to happen. You know, if you have a market drop, if you end up living longer than you planned, maybe everybody in your family dies pretty early and so we plan to age 90, but you're the anomaly and you live to age 100.

What does that do to a financial plan? Like, and more importantly, what does it do to your probability of success in that plan. And advisors understanding that things like increased inflation, for example, that's a very hot topic right now. You know, if inflation is higher than you projected into your plan, what effect does that have on your probability of success?

And the great thing about our financial planning technology nowadays is that they can model that with Monte Carlo simulations.

Swift: So one of the things that I know is near and dear to your heart is a stabilizing factor called an annuity. So could you talk about how to model an annuity in a financial plan?

Baxley: One of the things we did in this presentation actually is show how those stressors, those uncontrollable factors, affect the plan, but then also compare that with how would it have affected the plan if it was in an annuity with that had guaranteed lifetime in. And summation, it was obviously a much reduced amount.

Annuities in my space are non-commissioned products, and they usually have some downside protection and some upside limitations. And when you add that downside protection into a financial plan, it drastically reduces the impact of the uncontrollable risks.

Swift: So what I heard you just say is that if you're a fee-only advisor, you can actually get access to good new modern annuity solutions to stabilize and work into a financial plan.

Baxley: Absolutely. My career, I did not have tools like that. These are all in the last couple years that these products have been released by the insurance companies where they're now non-commissioned. Many of 'em, the advisor can debit a management fee directly out of the product. It's a game changer for advisors looking to provide that lifetime income for clients.

Swift: So another thing that I'm curious about is I believe that you have a service inside of your division or one of the divisions where your team will actually help model financial plans, say using Right Capital and some of your solutions. Is that correct?

Baxley: Yeah, It's one of the things that attracted me Allianz Life originally is that they don't have a product, they have a full offering. So for example, we can model it inside of E-Money or Money Guide Pro or Right Capital. We can also go in and provide data feeds to all of the, well, I shouldn't say all, the majority of the performance reporting vendors and a nightly data feed for the advisor.

And then we also have a transaction desk because a lot of advisors don't have Series 7s anymore. They dropped that and when they went into the RIA world, and even those who do and are acting in a hybrid world, oftentimes don't want to exercise that, you know, Series 7 because then you have suitability requirements.

And while those requirements do need to be done either way, you can outsource that to a transaction desk model. So now we're accessible to RIAs who don't have a Series 7 in, that's a brand new thing. Like as of this year it's a full offering. It's, actually very impressive.

Swift: Is there anything else that stands out that would be noteworthy for our listeners, advisors who are tuning in?

Baxley: You know, I think a lot of advisors don't entertain annuity conversations as a whole. And what we're seeing now is this is a lot of advisors' path to growth. Simply talking to their current clients to see if they have an annuity today. Most advisors haven't worked with it in the past, so it's a matter of maybe they don't even know about it.

And I've had advisors write letters to clients, find out that they had an annuity, and now that advisor can bring that into their entire estate, represented in their financial planning software, as well as into their performance reporting. And give that client more of a net worth or holistic view. A lot of times these products too, are legacy products that have been around for decades.

They have extremely high fees and the newer products just don't. There are a lot of times in everyone's best interest to reduce fees for the clients, to allow the advisors to turn a debt asset into a producing asset that's now fee billable. And everybody wins.

Swift: That's fantastic. So in closing, let's talk about these two papers. I had a hand in helping Allianz create some of this content. And the first study that we did was in March 2020, right? As we were realizing that the pandemic was setting in. Things were pretty rocky for a number of months, and then maybe for a year or more for many people. But we did something called the Conversations That Matter study. And 342 advisors wrote in, answered questions, survey questions, and about half of them gave essay responses about how things were going with their clients. So I believe we're gonna relaunch that study here coming in the spring at the three year anniversary mark, just to kind of see how advisors are doing now that we've been through this unprecedented time.

I'll just say one more thing and I'll ask you to give your opinion. So we did a follow on paper called Mastering the Conversation, and we had 14 experts including Heather Kelly from Allianz, myself, various Julie Littlechild, Steve Gresham, Kathleen Kingsbury. I mean, the list goes on and it's really great about how to hone your communication skills.

So just touching on the Wealthie Awards coming up next week, that's September 8th in New York City. Allianz will be up again for a possible Wealthie award for the work on the Conversations That Matter project. They won last year for their category as an insurance service provider. So how do you think about conversations and advisors on the front lines, counseling their clients?

Baxley: I think it's a great piece because it's timely, right? I mean this has all been shifted during Covid and, and I'm not sure we've landed at a new norm. So a three year checkup there is a perfect kind of follow up to see how have things changed? Were those changes permanent? Have we evolved back to the way we were or to a new norm? And I don't know the answer. I'm very interested to see the results.

Swift: Well, I don't know the answer either. I've been kicking around in the space for 30 some odd years, and I find that the best insights always come from the practitioners who are actually on the front lines talking to their clients.

And then the counselor's practitioners, so absolutely. It's been fun to do the projects with Allianz and to get to know you a little bit more. I know we knew each other when you were at TD Ameritrade on the custodial side there, and here we are.

Baxley: We appreciate everything you do, Marie. It's been great. Thank you.

Swift: Thanks so much for your time today.

INTERVIEW WITH: MIKE FLINN
ADVISOR-FRIENDLY TRUST SERVICES, FIDUCIARY RESPONSIBILITY, AND MORE

Marie Swift: And I'm with Mike Flinn. He is the VP National Sales at BOK Advisor Trust Company and Advisor Trust Services it looks like here. So you spoke today at the FPA Kansas City Symposium. Tell us a little bit about your topic.

Mike Flinn: Sure. The topic today, Marie, really was focused on advisors managing trusts that are irrevocable and the difference in how they have to manage those assets versus managing normal accounts that are trusts.

We talked about some of the things that impact an advisor when it comes to the fiduciary responsibility of both they in their role as a delegated advisor in our business model, which is an advisor-friendly business model that allows advisors to do what they do best, which is manage relationships and manage assets in a situation where, BOK financially is a trustee.

Unlike most traditional bank trust companies that do everything, manage the assets, custody the assets, manage the relationship. Our business model with independent advisors allows them to manage those assets and maintain a feet on the ground relationship management role with their clients. While our role as the fiduciary is the trustee, then, is to do the traditional trust administration, the blocking and tackling, if you will, of interpret the trust, figure out the principle and income, and then most importantly, make those discretionary distribution decisions.

So in that unbundled role, we are often delegating the management of assets to these preferred advisors, the advisors that were here today. So we talked about some of the things they need to be aware of when they manage those accounts that maybe don't necessarily apply if they're just managing my personal account or their client's personal accounts.

Swift: Well, that sounds fascinating. I know that you are a big supporter of FPA events and I saw your colleague Rosemary Hueser at the FPA Retreat back in the spring this year. Why is it important for advisors to think about trust services in the context of their practice and their client services?

Flinn: It’s very important in a sense that is, most advisors are now becoming more and more aware of, there are trillions of dollars that are in motion over the next several decades. There are actually billions of dollars on a daily basis that are being moved into trusts, this great wealth transfer, if you will. And, I like to say when I speak-- it's happening. Until they invent the immortality pill. People are gonna die and you don't see a U-haul behind a hearse. And these assets, again, in the trillions of dollars over the next decades are ending up in trust.

70% of households with over a million dollars of assets are associated with a trust. So advisors need to be aware of that, especially in a sense that these assets that are in motion often are unknown to advisors. So a lot of what we do is educate advisors as to the types of questions to be able to ask to identify hidden opportunities, especially with their own clients that may already be beneficiaries of irrevocable trust from mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa, and they don't know it.

The advisor doesn't know that their client is getting a thousand dollars a month from traditional bank trust company back on the East Coast cause mom and dad named the local bank trust company, Olathe Community Bank back in 1988 who got bought by, who got bought by and, and now mom and dad are gone and the trustee is on the East Coast and it's 1-800-black hole. And they've had five different trust officers and they don't really know the trust company, but they know their advisor, they know their FPA. But they don't look at that FPA advisor as somebody who could manage that trust from mom and dad and grandma and grandpa.

So a lot of what we do is educate advisors to ask the right questions and to be aware that they can compete for that business by bringing in an advisor friendly trust company like BOK, who can take the place of that traditional bank trust company, but more importantly, allow that advisor to manage the relationship and manage the assets.

So, that's critical in terms of advisors being able to identify those opportunities that are gonna come up. As well as the other side, which is the successor trustee side. It's the side where many advisors, most advisors of course, have living revocable trusts on their books. They have clients who've created living revocable trust are their own grantors and obviously their own trustees.

And what advisors don't realize is the successor trustee risk that they take on with their clients that have established living revocable trusts, but yet the successor trustee might be one of those bundled bank trust companies because the drafting attorney has named them in the document. So that advisor could potentially lose those assets if their client becomes incapacitated or dies.

So many advisors aren't aware of that and certainly have to mitigate that risk. And by putting a company like BOK into their client's documents as a successor trustee, we'll then allow them to have a seat at the table if something happens to their client, if they pass away becoming incapacitated.

INTERVIEW WITH: BRIAN WILLET
ALIGNING VISION WITH ACTION, THE VALUE OF HAVING A COACH, AND MORE

Marie Swift: Alright. I'm joined now by Brian Willet, founder and CEO of Advisor Game Plan. And you are from Lincoln, Nebraska, is that right?

Brian Willet: That's right.

Swift: All right. So you drove down here to Kansas City. How come?

Willet: Well, I've got a lot of connections in the Kansas City area. Used to work with Waddell & Reed, so there were a lot of people here that are still part of Financial Planning Association that are connected to that company and just came down to support it and be around the group.

From our company standpoint, we serve a lot of advisors in this community, and so it's just a great way to be a part of that community.

Swift: And you also spoke today. Tell us a little bit about what you said.

Willet: Yeah, so our session was maybe a little different. It was a less of me speaking and more of a working session.

So it was around taking your vision with aligned action. So how do you make sure that you have a very clear vision that you're passionate about, that excites you, that'll carry you through any of the good or bad that happens in your years in the industry and then make sure that there's a aligned action that could make that vision actually become a reality?

Swift: So that ties in with the company name Advisor Game Plan. Is that a coaching company?

Willet: Yep. You got it. So we're advisor coaches, and so I always say it as, as advisors, we believe in coaching, if you're doing financial planning with your clients. And so if you know the power of a coach, then you say, "Well, I want that too."

And so I personally, even though I coach advisors, I still have a coach myself because it's a belief in coaching that I'm better with a coach than without a coach. And so that's what we're here to do is serve advisors and their best interests with what their vision is and how they can align their action to that vision.

Swift: So at one point you were an advisor.

Willet: Yes. I actually started my own independent practice back in 2007. Then sold that practice to an employee. Went through that transition, went into coaching advisors, come full round. I've actually started an RIA from scratch and so I've gone through it the second time.

Both of them being built right from the start and now using all those years of experience myself, but also with all the advisors we've coached to be better at how we serve our clients right now of advisors and how they run their business.

Swift: All right. Well, it looks like Happy Hour has begun, so let's join them, shall we?

Willet: Sounds good. Thanks so much.

INTERVIEW WITH: MICHAEL KITCES
ADVISOR MARKETING, AND HOW TO BUILD A BIGGER MORE SUCCESSFUL ADVISOR COMMUNITY

Dori Thomas: And we're back now at the FPA KC Symposium with my Michael Kitces. I'm sitting in for Marie Swift who is out and about visiting with attendees here today. Michael, you had a great talk this morning. You wanna tell me a little bit about that?

Michael Kitces: Yeah, we were talking this morning around the dynamics of advisor marketing and really just trying to rethink a little bit how marketing really works from the advisor perspective.

You know, most of us are trained in a world that just -- advisor marketing sales is all about activity whether you're networking meetings or cold calling or cold knocking or all the different ways that we've done it. It was always about activity, and just do more activity. But when you really look at like the underlying fundamentals in marketing there's sort of a general rule of business. Like if the long term profits you can make from a client are higher than the cost that it takes to get a client, you have a business. As long as the long term value exceeds the cost to get a client, you've got a business.

But the reality is, like clients in the advisory business are really frankly ludicrously valuable to an advisory firm. If I take just like a proverbial million dollar client, cause makes the math easy, what percent advisory fees are $10,000 a year? A lot of advisory firms have 95% plus retention rates, which means the average client stays for 20 years. So a million dollar client may pay those fees for 20 years, which could literally be 200+ thousand dollars. We can run 30+ percent profit margins on this at scale. Which means a single client, like a single millionaire client, could be worth $60,000 of profits to a firm.

Now, I don't wanna make light of that because you know, there's a lot of work you have to do for like 20 years ongoing of clients every quarter saying, "What have you done for me lately?" To retain that relationship and earn those dollars. But, once you get a client that you can do that value proposition with for several decades, it's a phenomenally valuable, profitable relationship.

And when you look at what advisory firms typically spend on marketing, it's like 2 or 3% of revenue. So a $10,000 client could be worth $60,000, accumulated profits, and the average advisory firm spends 200 to 300 bucks on marketing. And to me, like that's just an awkward mismatch, like for clients that are that valuable in the long term, we should probably be spending a lot more than a couple hundred dollars for relationships that can be tens of thousands of dollars of profit when we serve them well and do all the things that we need to do.

And so we spent a lot of time this morning and just talking about like how to understand your lifetime client value for your clients. How to understand your client's acquisition costs. Like what does it really cost for you to clients between what you spend on marketing, what you spend in time, because your time is worth money in an advisory firm.

And making sure as an advisor, like whether is that formula imbalance is the lifetime client value greater than what it costs you get a client. Are you spending well for how you're getting clients? Is there ways that you could bring that cost down or manage that cost differently?

Because when you look, the sheer amount of kind of private equity dollars that have been coming into the advisory space, the reality is private equity firms have done this math. They figured it out. That's, that's literally why the valuation of advisory firms is getting bid up because they've realized that the math of the advisory model is so compelling.

Again, I don't wanna belittle, there's a lot of work you gotta do for a couple of decades there to keep that client throughout. But if you do the work and service the client and provide the advice and support the relationship, it's a phenomenally profitable business. And so PE firms, I think, have sort of realized this in the aggregate.

My goal and hope in this session this morning was to help help our advisor community realize like, "we can do this for ourselves to build bigger, better, more successful advisory businesses."

Thomas: Yes. And we agree with that great advice. That's awesome. What about this afternoon? What can we learn from your session this afternoon?

Kitces: So this afternoon we'll be talking a little bit more about -- broadly speaking, behavioral finance, but I've found I actually really don't like the label 'behavioral finance' for what we do, just being the nerd that I am, like having read a lot of the behavioral finance research and studies.

Most of these studies are basically built on the premise of, human beings should always be perfectly rational and make optimally rational decisions the way economists predict. But sometimes human beings do human things instead of perfectly rational things. So behavioral finance quantifies all these scenarios where human beings fail to behave the way that economists predict.

And so like that's, I guess neat. Like it's interesting to observe that there's more to our decision making process than just whatever the purely like maximally, economically rational decision might be. But I've never found that research to be very helpful from the advisor perspective.

Like, okay, I understand the research tells me that my client holds way too much in company stock because of a combination of the familiarity bias and the overconfidence bias, like, well, so what am I supposed to do? Like do I sit across my client and say, "Well, Mr. Smith, I need to let you know that you actually have an inappropriately high amount of your company stock. And I think it's because you're extremely overconfident and you're overly familiar with your company and misjudging its risk." I've never really tried having the conversation that way, but I'm fairly certain it's gonna go very poorly. Or like understanding that behavioral finance phenomena exists does not really tell you very much about what to do about it.

And so as I view it, the opportunity, and much of what we will be talking about in the session this afternoon is much more along the lines of, what do you do about it? And that comes not from the research and behavioral finance, but the research on financial psychology and the psychology of decision making.

How do we make decisions and how can you shape decisions to be more effective? Changing how you present the choices to them in the first place and trying to get small wins with them on changing their behavior so that you can get them to make bigger changes in their financial behavior, or even leveraging social proof in positive ways.

You know, one of the common sayings we talk about a lot in the industry is how the overwhelming majority of baby boomers aren't saving enough for retirement. And if you look at what the research says about that, well, if you tell people, "the majority of baby boomers aren't saving enough for retirement, and you're a baby boomer not saving enough for retirement," what that basically says is you're normal.

Don't really need to do anything different because you're behaving like everybody else is. I mean, it might not be great, but at least if the herd's gonna go off the cliff, you're all gonna go off the cliff together. Because as we know, we really do stick with the herd. It is how our brains are wired.

So how do you change that conversation with something as simple as, "Well the majority of our successful clients who have a positive retirement save at least 15% of their income." Like, "Well, I wanna be one of the successful ones. I wanna be like that crowd. That sounds like a good herd to be with."

"Well, great. You're only saving 6% of your income right now, so let's talk about how to bridge that gap." So, we'll be, just be talking broadly around the different ways that we can frame the conversations differently, not just leveraging behavioral finance research that says, "people do funny things with money," but how do we actually help people change their behavior and make better decisions, leveraging what we know from psychology, not just from economics?

Thomas: That's great. And sometimes it's just how we say it and the way it's perceived. That's fantastic. Thanks for sitting with me today, Michael.

INTERVIEW WITH: COLIN SWIFT
HOW TO SET UP A PODCAST OR VIDEO SERIES WITHOUT SPENDING A BUNDLE

Marie Swift: Here we are again. We're at the Kansas City FPA meeting and this is September 21st.

We've actually been here in August and September and I'm joined now by Colin Swift. And Colin, you and Jonny are going to be talking about SEO and online presence. You're also going to do a show-and-tell with gadgets and gizmos today for the chapter meeting. So can you give us a little highlight?

Colin Swift: So we'll be talking about SEO and online presence. I'll let Jonny dive in on that. That's his little area of expertise. But basically, we're going to talk about how to optimize growing your online presence using social media, and then feeding the top of your funnel with that by using your social media to bring people back to your website and let them see you and see what you're all about.

I'm going to be leading the conversation on gadgets and gizmos. That's all the stuff that's going to be used to help you up your video, your audio, your webinars -- no blotchy lighting, you look great, you sound great, and you present. So I'm looking really forward to that; it should be a fun time. It's a nice little crowd here that we have today, so it should be an intimate, fun time.

Marie Swift: Yes. We have two full hours. So I'm going to kick off talking about marketing that works with advisors today, and I'm going to tell some stories, tales from the trenches, related to advisors and what's been working for them. We are going to talk about trust and credibility and how online presence and multimedia helps with all of that. And being seen and discoverable is really, really important. And then what people see when they find you. Right?

Colin Swift: Exactly. 

Marie Swift: And so with the gadgets and the gizmos, we brought an array of items to show-and-tell. We've got this podcast station with all of our accoutrements that we typically use when we travel. We've got a lot of traveling video equipment today.  But does it have to be expensive to set up a podcast or video station?

Colin Swift: No. I think that's what's so great about our gadgets and gizmos presentation that we do, is that we show people that you don't have to spend this Hollywood type millions of dollars on the most expensive equipment.

We're doing this podcast station with a laptop and two Yeti microphones that run about a hundred dollars each. You can buy an HD webcam to upgrade your webinars for under $50 nowadays and with the phone technology getting it more advanced, you can shoot great quality video right on your iPhone or Android phone that you're using and turn around and have a quality product of a video.

So I think that's really eye-opening to people is that you don't need this huge investment to get high quality audio and video content.

Marie Swift: And after all, they're shooting whole movies on iPhones. Right?

Colin Swift: Exactly. A lot of the b-roll in Hollywood movies nowadays are actually being shot on iPhones because it's not the important scene, but it's important to the movie. So you can do a lot with, with iPhones nowadays.

Marie Swift: Absolutely. And if it's just for web and it's not for the big cinema, I mean, why would you need to get anything more than an iPhone?

Colin Swift: Exactly. I think so. I think you can overcomplicate the situation by trying to invest too much to get the big, high quality top of the line tech when really all you need, like I said again here, two mics in a laptop and we're doing a full podcast.

Marie Swift: Right? And then the post production, once you've got the raw footage, then there's some tricks to making it look and sound better, whether it's video, audio.

Colin Swift: Yeah, there are some tricks to do in post-production, but again, you don't need a big software. Garage Band on Mac is a great tool. It's what Impact uses to edit a lot of the podcasts.

It's what we'll be using to edit this podcast. There's free software out there like Audacity that you can download and use to edit your podcasts and have a quality product. Like you said, there are some tips and tricks, but it's not the software, it's the editor that's doing those tips and tricks.

Marie Swift: Well Colin Swift, thanks for being here. It looks like we're about ready to get started in the room, so goodbye for now.

INTERVIEW WITH: JONNY SWIFT
QUICK TIPS FOR SEO AND ONLINE PRESENCE

Marie Swift: Alright, so we are capping off our Swift Chats here at the FPA. Today's date is September 21st, but we were actually here in August, too, where we had the opportunity to talk to FPA members here in the greater Kansas City area. Jonny Swift is here with me right now. And Jonny, you and Colin talked about gadgets and gizmos to produce audio and video, and SEO and online presence. So can you leave us with a couple of quick tips as we wrap up our podcasts?

Jonny Swift: Sure. So when it comes to online presence, I think it's important to be as visible as possible online and have as many relevant online assets as possible.

And ultimately crosslink between all of them. And ultimately backlink to your website, which is the hub and the center of your online presence. So at Impact, we like to think of your online presence like a digital spider web or a net in the cloud with all of your online assets linking back to one another, and lifting each other up.

Obviously, a lot of your online assets are going to show up high in search results themselves, but if you crosslink them all to each other and it's just gonna build your overall online presence and lift up your spider web and your net as a whole. So that's really important. And when it comes to SEO, we're starting to see more important than ever with the Google algorithm is that on page content is more important than the metadata or the back office content and data for your SEO. So make sure your on page content is optimized. Make sure your website is content rich, text rich, that it's constantly being updated with fresh, new, relevant content that you wanna show up high in search results for.

So that's really going to help your website show up higher and search results and boost your overall online presence. Marie, you also gave some great talks today on marketing that works for advisors today -- some great examples of what advisors are doing to grow their celebrity and their credibility as well as camera and presentation skills.

So we also filmed some videos here at the event and are doing this podcast as well. So hopefully all these advisors got some good takeaways.

Marie Swift: I'm sure they did, and you know, I've seen some studies that video gets shared more often than text and links alone. They say photos twice as often and videos 12 times as often. I have to imagine that that sharing, that validation, helps with search engine spiders too. Not just the people but the spiders.

Jonny Swift: Definitely, I mean, the more that you are shared online, the more that your content gets out there and just boosts your overall online presence. If you are doing more digital media content, make sure to always put really descriptive titles and descriptions that work in all of your relevant keywords into that text sense.

You know, Google can't really crawl the words that are being said in your audio and video. And whenever you can include transcripts of your videos and your podcasts and things like that, so you get all of those relevant keywords and everything that's discussed in your podcast or your video on your webpage as well, and build SEO that way.

Marie Swift: Yes, and it gives people choice because not everybody wants to watch a video or listen to a podcast, but they might skim your transcript so it's all good. Well, so this has been a great event. We thank the FPA Greater Kansas City chapter for having us here in both August and September.

We hope that you will listen to all of our podcasts on our Swift Chat channel, and you can find everything on our blog. Either go to MarieSwift.com or ImpactCommunications.org. And Jonny, I think we have a vanity URL for you too, but I don't remember what it is.

Jonny Swift: It's JonnySwiftIC.com. We also have it on our podcast at SwiftChats.libsyn.com.

Marie Swift: Thanks for being here.

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Listen to the podcast here