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18th September, 2024 - Webinar replay

Everything you need to know about client testimonial videos

Phil Bray 

Good morning everybody, and welcome to September’s Yardstick webinar: Everything you need to know about client testimonial videos. We’ve got a lot packed in today so I’ll work some of through some of this stuff quite quickly. The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed that it’s just myself and Abi today; Dan is not very well, so best wishes to Dan for a speedy recovery and Dan will be back next month. Talking of next month, we have got a fabulous guest for next month, really fabulous. So hang around until the end, we’ll announce who that is, and give you a link so you can grab your place. We’ve also just put up a little poll looking at the barriers you might have for recording client testimonial videos. So, if you could vote on that poll in the next minute or two, that would be fabulous. What are we going to chat about today? Well, we’re going to start by talking about the nine reasons why you should have or your business should have, client testimonial videos. Going to go into detail and talk about the two different ways you could record client testimonial videos, we’re then going to talk about how you decide which clients to ask to take part, and then how you ask those clients if they’re happy to record videos. We’re going to briefly touch on how to use the videos in your marketing and your sales. There’s probably enough content for a whole webinar on its own on that to be fair. And throughout, we’re going to bust a few myths about videos and client testimonial videos specifically. Before we get into that, Abi, a bit of housekeeping from you.

Abi Robinson 

Of course, yeah, obviously I am not Dan, but I have heard he looks great in leopard print, so this is for you, Dan. We will be using the normal format as if he was here. Engagement is really encouraged, it’s a safe space to ask us lots of questions and give us your feedback. If you have an opinion on client videos, think we’re talking rubbish or agree with us, please do share. We’ve got lots and lots to get through, it’s going to be a really good one.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, I appreciate that. The poll then. We asked, “What’s the biggest single barrier to recording client testimonial videos?” Nobody said, “I don’t understand the need to do them” you’re on this webinar, so we’ve probably got a self selecting audience there. “I’m worried about asking clients.” A third of people said that, and then two thirds, or almost two thirds “Getting around to doing it”. Oh the results are changing as we speak! 35% said, “I’m worried about asking clients” we’re absolutely going to deal with that today, and it would be interesting to get your feedback as we work through the webinar, whether we’ve solved that issue for you. For “Getting around to doing it” We can’t do much about your to do list, but we can make it easier for you to record videos and we’ll talk about that. “Cost”, as we get to the end of the webinar, we’ll start talking about cos, and maybe there’s a difference between cost perception and the actual amount that is being paid. Somebody has said “Other” as well. So, that’s really useful, and we’ll see if we can deal with some of those barriers as we work through today’s webinar. As Abi said, put your questions in the chat or in the Q&A and we’ll deal with those as we go through. So, let’s start. It’s always a good idea to start with the end in mind, so let’s start by looking at the nine reasons why we believe firms or individual advisers should have client testimonial videos. The first reason, for me, is that social proof is the best way of showing clients the value you deliver to them. Showing someone the benefit of working with you is always better than you telling them about the benefits of working with you, because let’s face it, you’re always going to tell clients about the benefits of working with you, but not every advice firm shows prospective clients, about the benefits of working with you. I think client testimonial videos are one of the three types of client-driven social proof all firms should have. The other two being client surveys, or the results from client surveys and online ratings and reviews from Google and VouchedFor. So showing beats telling, and the fact client testimonial videos are the best type of the three of social proof. I still think you need all three, but client videos are fantastic and that’s because they’re the easiest way for your existing clients, your current clients, telling potential clients and prospects why they work with you. Yeah, there are other ways of doing it, maybe client events and that sort of thing, but putting client videos on your website are the easiest way for your current clients to tell potential clients why they work with you. They also show prospects the type of people that you help and the outcomes that you achieve for them. The best type of client video tells a story, and we want that story of the transformational journey that someone’s gone through by working with you to come through in the video. It also builds trust in prospects. You can see how a prospect would be on your website, looking at the videos and the fact that you’ve got them, and thinking, “If this adviser’s clients are happy to appear on video, the adviser must be really good” sort of a halo effect there. So I think that’s really important. The videos themselves, and we’ll show some examples in a bit, capture the personal and emotional transformation that financial planning brings. Everybody on this webinar right now, whether you’re a financial adviser, financial planner or a mortgage broker, will be able to think of stories about your clients where you have transformed their lives, you have given them permission and the ability to do things they never thought they were able to do; they’re brilliant stories to tell in videos. It helps you stand out from the crowd because only 6% or 7% of firms have client testimonial videos on their website. By having them, you massively stand out from your peers and your competitors. The videos can be used throughout your marketing and in your sales, not just on your website, and if you use them in your sales, I think it helps, and we’ll talk about this in more detail in a bit, but I think it helps to show prospective clients who might not be convinced about the value of working with you. So for me, those are the nine reasons why client testimonial videos are absolutely essential for your marketing. It sounds as though, from the poll, everyone was pretty convinced of that anyway. So if we’re convinced of that, let’s start getting really practical and talk about the two different ways to record client videos. Those two ways are to record them remotely or record them face-to-face. Either way, they tend to be recorded as box sets. Here at Yardstick, we tend to do packages of three and six videos. Like I said earlier, we’ve got a special offer that we’ll talk to you about later on, but they tend to be recorded in box sets, and that’s because there are economies of scale, and also because if you put one or two client videos, on your website and to use in your marketing, I think it doesn’t look as impressive as having more of them. For me, the minimum number to have is three and ideally you want each of those videos to align themselves with one of your target audiences. We’ll talk about who you should ask in a minute but let’s go into this in a bit more detail, in terms of the two types of videos you can have: remotely recorded and recorded face-to-face. Up until March 2020, and there’s a very good reason why, all video shoots that we did were face-to-face. A typical schedule would be filming four to six videos in a single day. If you do one or two, you don’t benefit from the economies of scale of having the film crew in your office at that time. So typically, we’d film four to six in one day and usually, we’d film them in the adviser or planner’s office because you can control the atmosphere that way. We have done alternative venues though, where they’ve been in a hotel room or hotel suite, we’ve hired that for the day, a conference room, a serviced office, although serviced offices are not ideal because you tend to have a lot of background noise and you can’t control that noise as well. We’ve even done them in clients houses. So hopefully those people who are concerned, anxious, or worried about producing these and worried about asking clients, got a bit of reassurance. The shoot that we did was for a client called Lloyd French at Delaunay Wealth, and we went into clients homes to record those videos. Now, that shows how willing clients are to help their adviser out when it comes to recording these videos. One point here though, if we have to do face-to-face shoots or the camera crew has to do face-to-face shoots on multiple locations, it increases the cost. I think for Lloyd, we did five or six videos over the course of three or four days, because the clients were geographically diverse and that significantly increased the cost. So, whenever you add multiple locations or extra shooting days, you’re always going to increase the cost. The advantages of the face-to-face shoot are that you get studio quality audio and visuals. They look fantastic, and that’s because we’ve got a camera crew and the audio in the same room as the person being filmed. You can also shoot other videos at the same time. For example, we recorded some videos a couple of years ago for a firm called Henwood Court in Sutton Coalfield and we got some of the senior leadership team to record brochure style videos and we got some of their admin staff to do videos to support a recruitment drive that they were having. We got some of their admin staff or some of their support staff to come and answer some questions, and then we cut those down into short, sharp edits for the videos to support their recruitment efforts. So, other videos can be shot at the same time and you can also record what in the trade is called B-roll footage on the same day of the shoot. B-roll footage is incidental footage that is used in the final edit to make it more visually appealing. For example, B-roll footage might be the client getting out the car, it might be the client greeting or the financial planner greeting the client, it might be them in conversation, it might be them leaving the office. Whatever it is, it’s just additional footage that can be added into the final edit to make it more visually interesting and appealing, and you can do that as well as those other short videos, if you’ve got a camera crew on site. Disadvantages. It’s absolutely more expensive than a remote shoot. There are more overheads, there are more people involved, there’s travel involved; it’s just more expensive and we’ll quantify that for you in a bit. It’s more challenging to organise, because you’ve got to get all of your clients to turn up on the same day. Typically, if we’re doing a face-to-face shoot, and we were doing five or six videos, myself as the interviewer or Ellie, one of our other interviewers, would arrive with the camera crew around 08:30 in the morning. We’d spend from 90 minutes to two hours setting up and then we’d look for the first client to come in at 10am and then one client on the hour, every hour until we’re finished. Now that clearly takes some organising. What I would say, though, is, to my recollection, we have never had a client cancel and back out on the day of the shoot. Once they are there and once they’ve agreed to do it, they tend to show up. The reason for that is because they want to do this for their adviser, this, again, helps, hopefully, to reassure some of those people who are a little bit nervous about asking clients about the reasons why they’re happy to do it. I was on a shoot with a firm called One Life Wealth Planning, and we’ll give you the link to their videos in a minute, it’s down just north of London, and we did it in February/March time earlier this year. I happened to interview the clients and it was four couples talking about their retirement journey. I asked each of the four couples why they were so happy to do this, why had they come out on a rainy winter’s day to sit in front of a camera and talk to me? It’s not most people’s idea of fun, and all of them said the same thing. All of them said “It’s our way of saying thank you to Nick.” They were that delighted with the work they’d done with Nick, some of them were relatively long-standing clients, one had only been a client for two or three months, they were so happy with the work they had done with Nick that it was their way of saying thank you to him. It was fabulous to hear, and it was a great vindication for the work Nick’s done and also for the project. So again, hopefully that provides some reassurance. If you ask the right clients in the right way, you’ll get enough to take part and it’s because they want to thank you. One other disadvantage, it’s a minor one but it does happen sometimes, some clients are a little less open and willing to share on a face-to-face shoot. They’re a little more guarded, not always, but sometimes, and that’s largely because we’ve got a light, a mic, or they’ve been mic-ed up, there are a lot of wires around so it’s not the most relaxing environment. But that problem only happens occasionally. The two bigger disadvantages are it’s more challenging to organise and it’s more expensive. Some examples of face-to-face shoots, there are four there, Flying Colours, a large financial advice business, One Life Wealth Planning, which is Nick’s smaller financial planning firm, I’ve put Delaunay Wealth in there because we recorded those videos face-to-face with Lloyd’s clients, and Black Swan Financial Planning is a financial advice firm in central London, and we recorded those in their serviced office. So, there’s a variety of different videos for you to go and have a look at there, but do that later and carry on listening to me for the moment. That was a bit of background on face-to-face, advantages and disadvantages and some examples, so, let’s have a look at remote videos. As Abi said earlier, if you’ve got questions, comments, challenges to any of this, put something in the chat and the Q&A. Remote videos. March 2020, we knew we still needed to do client videos. The need to do them had not gone in fact, you could make an argument at that time when a lot of people turned to their financial adviser and planner for confidence, reassurance, and information about what was going on, that it was actually a great time to be asking clients to appear in videos. Clearly, we couldn’t record them face-to-face so that’s when we started to do remote videos and we’ve never looked back. The balance is heavily weighted towards remote video projects. They’re easier for the planner to organise, they’re less costly, etc, and we’ll come to those advantages and disadvantages in a minute but they became really popular during lockdown and their popularity hasn’t gone, hasn’t waned. We record the interviews, sorry, the interview takes place with your client on a Zoom or Teams meeting. Your clients are at one end of the remote meeting, and two members of our team are at the other end. The client then needs to record the interview on their smartphone. If you’re using Yardstick to do this, Luke, the videographer and editor is on the call with the client setting up the shot, making sure that we are not looking up their nose, making sure they don’t have that halo effect going on behind them, just making sure it’s a nice, pleasing shot. Talking through the technical aspects of how to record, etc. and we even go to the length of sending clients who are taking part in these projects a little tripod so they can balance their smartphone sturdily, rather than putting up a pile of books and it falling down halfway through the shoot. The client records it on their smartphone, and we ask the questions via the Zoom or the Teams call. Then, the client uploads it to us for editing, and it works like a dream. It really does. It works very, very well. Once the adviser has given us the names and contact details for their clients, generally speaking, the next thing the adviser sees is a set of fully edited videos. So it is a very smooth process. In terms of advantages here for this, costs are significantly lower, there’s no getting around it, costs are significantly lower, you need less kit, you don’t need to travel, you don’t need to hire a location. Projects also tend to be easier to organise because the videos are filmed in a time and location to suit the client. Most remote videos will be filmed between nine and five but our team can hang around after five if necessary. We’ve also recorded client testimonial videos in Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong and mainland Europe, so we can work around different time zones as well. The videos don’t need to be recorded in one block on one day, they can be done at different times. That convenience often increases client participation. You often find that advisers or planners, get clients to participate in a remote video shoot when their working life would mean that they couldn’t do a face-to-face video. Plus, clients are potentially more at ease when filming and being asked questions, because they are in an environment that they’re used to. They’re sat in their home or they’re sat in their office so they tend to be a little bit more at ease. Finally, this doesn’t happen often at all, but a video can easily be reshot if necessary. We’ve had the occasional client, I can remember one who came back and said “I wasn’t happy with my performance. Can we redo it?” Of course we can, because it’s been filmed remotely, but it’s not easy to redo it if you’ve been filming on location. So those are some of the advantages. In terms of disadvantages, smartphone cameras are great, and they’re better than the camera you’ve got on your computer, which is why we record on the smartphone, but they’re never going to be as good as professional kit, professional equipment. You don’t get the opportunity to film B-roll footage or do additional videos, and your clients need to have a smartphone; I guess most clients these days have a smartphone of some sort. So, those are some of the disadvantages but as I said, the majority of videos that we do, and I think that’s down to cost and convenience, are filmed remotely. We’ve got some examples, which Abi will put in the chat of remote videos. Druthers Financial Planning, that’s Ian Howe, a financial planner down in Windsor, we launched Ian’s website this year. Cheltenham IFA, no surprise about where they are, and we’ve done a variety of different videos for Cheltenham IFA, a larger firm than Ian, and then Expert Wealth Management down in Oxfordshire. So, those are some examples. Abi, I think Paul’s got a question about tripods.

Abi Robinson 

Yeah, just a quick one, asking if that’s right, that we send a tripod out to the client and I just said, “Yep, for remote video clients, yes, we do.”

Phil Bray 

Cheers for that. It’s not an expensive tripod Paul, but it’s a small tripod, a small desktop stand and we put one in the post for every client that we work with. It means that you get a still shot. We found when we first started doing it without sending that tripod, people were trying to balance their phone on pile of books or something like that and it just didn’t work, so now we put that in the post. Thank you. Yes, I agree, “Amazing commitment to service and quality.” Thank you, I agree with that. It does work, it works really, really well. The other thing we’ll do is, if a client is having problems uploading the footage to us, we’ll pop them a USB stick in the post and that’s often a little bit easier for them. We’ve established the nine reasons for doing this. We’ve established the two different ways, recording them remotely or face-to-face. We then need to start moving into an area where sometimes advisers, planners and mortgage brokers start feeling a bit uncomfortable, and this is deciding who you ask to appear and how you’re going to ask them. Let’s start by thinking about who you should ask to appear. No, let’s start by thinking about a group you shouldn’t ask. Our view is that you should not ask your longest serving clients, and that’s a bit counter intuitive, largely because your longest serving clients are more likely to agree and say yes to doing it, but there are a couple of issues. The first that we found is they tend to talk about a previous iteration of your service; it’s not unusual for a long standing client to have been with a firm and that firm to have changed from an advice proposition to a planning proposition over the course of that relationship, so focus has moved from investments and returns to planning underpinned by investments and returns, etc. but you know where I’m going with that. And they don’t tend to make such powerful videos, the story isn’t as strong and because they know the adviser so well, we sometimes find that they take the exercise slightly less seriously. You’ll know the type of clients I mean, it’s the type of client where, in olden days if you went to them and said, “Can I have a written testimonial?” They’d say, “Oh, can you write it for me?” That’s the type of client that we need to avoid on here. So, I’d avoid asking your longest serving clients, and instead, I would be asking clients who you’ve helped through big life events. The people whom you helped through big life events can talk convincingly about what life was like before the event, how you helped them navigate it, what life is like now, and how they feel about the future. It’s really important that we emphasize that we are not asking clients to talk about products, investment returns, tax mitigation strategies, or the amount of money that they’ve got, we are trying to tell a story. That story has got you and them as the central characters. They are the hero of the story, you are their guide. That’s what we are trying to tell on these videos, and that’s why clients whom you’ve helped through big life events are very powerful to have on video. Some of those clients might be relatively new to you, it might be someone that you’ve been working with for the past three to six months. And to bust another myth, there isn’t, in my experience, some magical date that someone has to have been a client of yours for, or amagical length of time someone needs to have been a client of yours for before they will start doing things like recommending you, leaving reviews and doing client testimonial videos. If you have added enough value to the relationship and helped them achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve, in my experience, they will be happy to appear on videos whether you’ve worked with them for three weeks, three months, or three years. Who should we ask? Big life events; the obvious one is retirement. Someone who has come to you with a dusty box of pensions, ISAs, share schemes, savings, investments, etc. feeling confused, overwhelmed, and nervous about the future; administratively you’ve cut through that, you’ve put a plan in place to help them achieve their objectives, having probably done some work to uncover their objectives, and they’ve probably now taken some big decisions and maybe have even given up work, and are now living the next phase of their life, that active retirement. They make incredibly powerful videos. People who have suffered bereavement also make incredibly powerful videos. I’m aware some of you might be a little bit nervous at the thought of asking somebody who has been widowed or is a widower to appear on testimonial videos but if you choose clients carefully and ask them in the right way, they will do it. I have interviewed both widows and widowers, and clearly you’re doing it sensitively but that story is very powerful. Business sale, a business owner talking about how their planner has helped them navigate through that. Serious illness, I can remember recording a client video, and it’s on their website I think, for a firm called KBA. It was for Sarah Hogan at KBA and the client I was interviewing talked about how Sarah helped her with a critical illness claim. It’s a fabulous video. Someone buying a business, divorce or separation, talking about how the planner has helped someone through divorce or separation. Again, you need to handle it sensitively, but we’ve done videos like that. So, people who are going through big life events where they can tell their story and explain, as the guide, How you’ve helped them through it, make fabulous videos. There’s one exception though to the big life event rule, and that is a person who comes to you with that box of stuff, who is confused, nervous, maybe anxious about the future, you’ve sorted them out, you’ve put them on the right track, but they haven’t yet finished work. They’ve set themselves up for the transformation, but they haven’t actually gone through it yet. People who you’ve done that for also make incredibly powerful videos. Incredibly powerful videos. Abi, we’ve got a question from Eamon.

Abi Robinson 

Yeah, Eamon is curious whether it’s better to have singles or couples or both.

Phil Bray 

I think that largely depends on your target market. I would say if your target market market is single people, people who have been divorced, people who have separated, widows, we know widowhood is a point where widows often change adviser, then clearly, you’re going to have a single person. Otherwise, I will try and work hard to get a couple on. For me, videos are much more powerful when you’ve got a couple. You get a bit of by-play between them, you get a bit of interaction between them, and you get a better outcome I think, you get a better story. The way we do that, Eamon, when we’re doing videos with couples is ask each person in the couple to answer all questions. So each of them answer all the questions, which means the recording takes a little bit longer, but you get a better output. So you ask each individual to answer all the questions, and then you choose the best answers, the best bits. Ideally you want a 50/50 balance between each member of the couple, but it doesn’t always happen that way. So, answering your question Eamon, it depends, but generally speaking, if the planner is advising a couple, I would say, try and get both members of the couple on the video. A long winded answer to a short question, but hopefully that helps. Any other questions, put them in the chat or the Q&A. So if that’s who to ask, we now need to get to the really nerve wracking part of asking your clients to record a video. This is where the reaction of advisers really splits. Some dive in, they’re a bit nervous about asking, but they dive in and do it really quickly, others procrastinate and find all sorts of reasons not to do it. There are  suddenly a load of other jobs that become important meaning they spend ages before they get it done and when they do ask, they’re always surprised by the results. One of the things we tend to find not always but we tend to find, is advisers in larger firms so firms with multiple advisers, where those advisers are maybe not the owners of the business, they tend to be more reticent to ask clients than those businesses that are owner managed. I’ve been on calls where we’ve been talking about this and advisers have just folded their arms and said, “My clients won’t do that. My clients won’t.” Okay, how many clients do you work with? 100? All right, in a split second you’ve answered for 100 people, whereas, in our experience, if you ask the right people in the right way, they will do it. There are two ways you can ask clients. The first way is in writing, via email or a WhatsApp message. The second way is verbally, and there are pros and cons for each. If you send out a request by email or WhatsApp, 90% to 95% of your clients will use WhatsApp on a regular basis, if you send it out by email or WhatsApp it is more efficient and convenient. You can copy and paste the same message, with a bit of personalisation at the top and the bottom into let’s say a dozen emails and WhatsApp messages if you’re trying to do six videos really quickly and far quicker than you can pick up the phone and have 12 conversations. It is definitely more efficient and convenient. It also allows you to avoid a potentially difficult conversation, or a conversation you are nervous about having because it’s arm’s length. And because it’s arm’s length and it’s written, it allows you to clearly lay out your ask in full without rushing or stumbling over your words. We have all had conversations in the past with people where it’s awkward or we’ve felt it’s awkward and we’ve rushed or stumbled over our words so, sometimes, it’s better to put these things in writing. It also means your client can give it careful consideration and avoid an emotional response. In my experience, the busier and more nervous you are about asking clients to do this, the more sensible it is to send a written message by email or WhatsApp. The alternative is you pick up the phone or you ask them in a meeting. It does take longer, but it is an alternative and might be seen as more personal. We are seeing more and more advisers move to using the email or the WhatsApp message, though, largely because it’s convenient and because it’s at arm’s length. To help you do this, not just for Yardstick clients, the version of this is for everybody and Abi’s going to put a link in the chat, we’ve created a free template that you can use when you are asking clients to appear in testimonial videos. There are two versions of it, because there’s one that talks about aface-to-face video shoot, and there’s one that talks about a remote video shoot. It is carefully worded to put the client in control. Abi knows that I do this quite often, If you start a difficult conversation with “No is a perfectly acceptable answer, and I will never mention it again.” you have just given yourself permission to ask somebody almost anything. The template can be cut and paste into emails, WhatsApp messages, or if you’re going to speak to clients on the phone, you could use it as a script for verbal requests. Go and have a look at that template. If you’re using Yardstick to do videos, we’ll walk you through it anyway, if you decide to do the videos yourself, or get another third party to do them, then the templates are yours with our compliments. So, we have covered the reasons to have these videos. We have covered two ways to record them and the pros and cons thereon. We’ve talked about who to ask and how to ask, and we’ve also given you the free template. One of the things I would be interested in before we talk about how to use the videos in your marketing and your sales, is people who are nervous about asking clients beforehand, just put in the chat, if you would, either “I’m no longer nervous” or why you are still nervous. I’m really keen to get to the bottom of why you might still be nervous about asking clients, because I’d quite like you to leave this webinar today feeling a little less nervous about it. How do we use the videos in your sales and marketing? It’s like all content, and for any of you who are on the webinar we did with Ross Simmons, when was it Abi? About June, July, time?

Abi Robinson 

Yes.

Phil Bray 

Ross was talking about create once, distribute forever. We talk about here at Yardstick, the difference and the balance between producing content and promoting content and there is no point recording these videos if you’re not going to do anything with them and they gather dust. So, I thought we’d finish by explaining some of the ways you can use videos in your marketing and your sales. To be fair, we could probably unpack each of these into a longer webinar. The first thing we would recommend you do is build out a client stories section on your website. Typically, in a client story section of the website you would stack the videos on top of each other, and then to watch a video, you would go into a sub page or a child page where the individual video sits and there’s a transcript of the video on what people are saying. The transcript is on there for SEO purposes, the video is actually usually held in Vimeo or YouTube and embedded in the website. Visitors to website won’t realise that, but it means that we don’t slow the website down by putting large files onto the website. Building that client stories page out is job one on the website but we also need to scatter the videos around the site and put them in other places, because we can’t guarantee visitors will go to that client stories section, in fact, we can probably guarantee that most won’t. Therefore we need to scatter the testimonial videos and other social proof, ratings and reviews and client survey results throughout the website so wherever someone goes, whatever page they look at on your website, they stumble upon your social proof. It’s really important that we do that. Think about your Facebook feed for a second. As you scroll down your Facebook feed looking at what your friends and family are doing and your connections, Facebook punctuates it with adverts. They don’t have a section on Facebook where you can go and read the adverts if you wish, and you’ve got a nice, clean feed, the adverts are punctuating your feed, and that’s exactly what we need to do with social proof and in particular client videos here. Then, I would launch those videos in an email to your clients, prospects, and professional connections. So when the website is updated, an email should go out pretty much  to the same audience that receives your newsletter saying “These are now on the website, go and have a watch.” Because it’s important that those three stakeholders, clients, prospects, and professional connections, get to hear the stories that your clients are telling. A launch email, launching those videos is important. Making show reels of the best bits. We will ask questions during the video shoot for example, “Would you recommend XYZ financial planning to other people?” “What’s the best thing about working with XYZ financial planning?” “What’s the best piece of advice your adviser has ever given you?” Those are three typical questions we might use to finish off the video and you can create show reels of those. A show reel of six clients explaining the best piece of advice that their adviser has ever given them is an incredibly powerful thing. A show reel of videos with six clients saying they would recommend their planner is an incredibly powerful thing. Show reels of the best sections work nicely, you can also then add whether it’s the individual videos or the show reels to your LinkedIn profiles. There are various ways of doing that, you could utilise the featured section – I’m looking for Abi’s nodding there and saying, “Yeah, that’s a good thing, yeah.” – We could use the featured section on your LinkedIn profile to put the videos on. You could put the links from your contact section to those videos as welll and you can post snippets on social channels,there are couple of ways of doing that. For example, if we have built individual pages for each video, one for Mr & Mrs Smith, one for Mr & Mrs Jones, you can then link directly to those pages on social. You could post your show reels on social media as well and posting snippets on social channels, we know that video performs well on socials, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or X, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. You could play the videos in your office. More and more planners see clients and prospects in their office. The chances are that even if it’s only for a short period of time, a minute or two, the prospect will be left alone in your office. It might be in the reception area, it might be in a meeting room, but have a video playing. Pick the video that matches their profile. Have a video playing on loop that they can’t ignore, they have to watch while they’re waiting for you to come in. It re-emphasizes the reason they’re there and that you are the right planner for them. You can also use the videos to send to prospects. Before they show up to your office, you will have probably sent them a meeting invite, a meeting confirmation, the time of the meeting, the location, how to park, just the basic stuff. At the end of that, put a link to a video with a bit of context. “As I understand it, you want to come and talk to us about planning your retirement next year. It sounds like you are similar to Mr and Mrs Smith, who we helped two years ago. Here’s a video of how we helped Mr and Mrs Smith.” That emphasizes to the prospect that you are the expert that they need. Finally, use them in award entries. I’ve reviewed a few award entries recently for the Professional Adviser Awards that close on Friday, and one of the things that they consistently lack is any proof or any evidence. We find that firms are making claims, but not supporting those with proof or evidence to back up those claims. Your client videos are a fabulous way of supporting claims you might make about client outcomes, client satisfaction, etc. So use them in award entries, probably by putting links in the entry or links in the supporting document. There are, what have we got? 7, 8, 9 ways of using those videos in your marketing and your sales. Most people just slap the videos on the website and never do anything else, whereas there’s so much more that you can do. Before we go into pricing, our special offer and revealing our guest for next month, Abi, just go through the chat and read out what people have said if that’s all right?

Abi Robinson 

Yes, of course. Karen is feeling a lot happier about asking clients after hearing all this info, so many thanks. Paul is feeling far less nervous and inspired. You’ve inspired somebody before 11am on a Wednesday morning. That’s impressive.

Phil Bray 

Thank you Paul, thank you for saying that.

Abi Robinson 

Roy feels a lot more confident and says “Good advice.” Celia does have a question for you, wanting to understand the compliance FCA requirements around these videos. “Do they count as promotions?”

Phil Bray 

That’s a good question. There is no set definition. I’ll put it slightly differently, the FCA interpret a financial promotion as an inducement to do investment business or regulated business. Every compliance consultant, every network interprets that differently and it’s a bit of a problem at the moment, frankly, but everyone interprets it differently. In my experience, though, compliance don’t tend to want to see these videos themselves, but where they have, there hasn’t been an issue, because all the client is doing is telling their story. That’s all they’re doing, telling their story. There will probably need to be sign-offs, Celia, on how you use those videos. For example, if you update your website and put a page of videos on there, make changes to it. Then compliance, if they wanted to sign off the website in the first place, will probably want to sign off the amended site. If you start posting on social media, then if compliance, have wanted to see your previous social posts, they’re probably going to want to see these as well. If they haven’t wanted to see your previous social posts, they’re probably not going to want to see them. The videos themselves, I’ve not seen compliance get terribly involved in and when they have, they’ve been fine. When it comes to how you use them, then it might be a financial promotion, and that’s probably based on your previous experience. So hopefully that helps Celia, if it didn’t or there’s a supplementary question, just put it in the chat if that’s okay? So, how we can help and how much videos cost. We run both face-to-face and remote video projects. You’ve seen some examples of those face-to-face projects are priced per project, and that’s based on location, number of days filming, number of videos. To give you a ballpark figure, if we are doing five or six face-to-face videos in one day’s shoot in a reasonable mainland single location, it’s about the £2,800 to £3500 plus VAT mark, something along those lines. So it’s about £500 plus VAT per video, but if you’re only doing one, you don’t get to benefit from the economies of scale. Five or six videos, one day of shooting, is typically £2,800 to £3500 plus VAT but we price them individually. Remote video projects, we know exactly how long these take so we can be far more sure and offer a fixed price on these. For a box set of three videos at Yardstick, we charge £747, plus VAT. That means the unit cost is about £250, £249, plus VAT per video. Produce six and it’s £1494, plus VAT, and that’s one of the reasons why some advisers, or a lot of advisers actually, decide to go for remote videos. Because it gives them access to a tremendously useful resource, they can be one of the 7% not the 93% who has client videos, at a much lower cost, and it’s also much easier to organise. We’ll coach you on which clients to ask, we’ll give you the template, you’ve just got to ask them and give us their details, and then we’ll do the rest. So three videos, £747, plus VAT, six videos, £1494 plus VAT. Now, what we thought we’d do for this webinar is produce a special offer. If anybody on this webinar wants Yardstick to run a remote video project for them for the next 24 hours and eight minutes (by 11am tomorrow) you will get four videos for the price of three or seven videos for the price of four. It’s a one-off project, we can do this in the B2C space if you’re an adviser or planner, and we can do it in the B2B space as well. We’ve done videos for compliance consultants, networks, all sorts of other suppliers of B2B services so it doesn’t have to be an adviser offer only. Four videos for the price of three, seven for the price of four. If you tell us you want to go ahead and sign a contract for it in the next 24 hours and seven minutes. If you want to do it, tell us in the chat or send me an email phil@theyardstickagency.co.uk.  Before we wrap up and finish with any other questions, we have another webinar guest to announce. Abi, do you want to do this?

Abi Robinson 

I will. I’m trying to multitask, I will get back to you in a second Danielle. Yes, this is very exciting, I do want to talk about this one. If you’ve been on any about other webinars this year, then you’ll know that we’ve had some brilliant guests. We’ve spoken to Rory Sutherland about bees, we’ve spoken to Andy Bounds about sales techniques, and Phill Agnew and Ross Simmonds. If you’ve heard Phil speak for more than about nine minutes, then this name will be very, very familiar to you. We’re beyond thrilled that we’ll be sharing our virtual stage with Marcus Sheridan next month. He’s written a hugely influential and best selling book, and there we go, just like he planned it, They Ask You Answer. He’ll be joining us to talk about the philosophy behind They Ask You Answer, the five questions that every business should answer on their website, why radical transparency should be at the heart of your marketing and some fantastic tips on generating content ideas. You will probably have heard us talk before about how 70% of a consumer’s buying decision is made before someone meets you, well, Marcus will be talking about that and what it means for your marketing too. Very excited. It is on the usual day, the third Wednesday of the month, Wednesday 23 October, but a little bit later than usual. We didn’t want to get Marcus up at the crack of dawn and since he’s coming to us live from the US, we’ll be getting started at 1pm our time. I will put the link in the chat and I’ll also put the link in the follow-up email that will be coming out later. Yeah, it’s going to be very exciting and I think you’ll be at fan-boying a little bit Phil.

Phil Bray 

Do you think?

Abi Robinson 

Yeah.

Phil Bray 

I think I might be. It’s going to be absolutely fabulous. I talk about, They Ask You Answer a lot, I talk about a lot of Marcus’s techniques, and it’s fabulous to have him on here and wrap of our year of fabulous guests. Abi, can you put a link in the chat for that if that’s okay? Abi, you’ve got a favor and then I can see there’s a couple of questions coming in.

Abi Robinson 

Yes, a little favor from us. We don’t charge for our webinars, as you know, and we never will because we  love giving these sessions away free and we really like delivering them but we do also really like receiving your feedback so that we can keep improving them. Me and Phil be sitting down soon to think about 2025’s schedule so now is the time if you’ve got anything you would like to share. An honest Google review would be much appreciated, it should only take you a couple of minutes. If you have enjoyed the session, or there’s anything that you’d like to share with us, a Google review is the way to do it. I’ll put the link in the chat now, and I will include it in the follow-up as well. So, thank you in advance.

Phil Bray 

If anybody wants to stay in touch with Yardstick, you’ve got all our details there, website, my LinkedIn, my email address, my Twitter. If you want to take advantage of that offer, then drop me an email. I will drop  you an email as well Anthony. I can see there’s a question Abi from Natasha?

Abi Robinson 

Yes, “If we book within the next 24 hours, is there a time scale to schedule the videos, and is the cost saving applicable to face-to-face and remote?”

Phil Bray 

The offer is only on remote videos for various reasons, we can do it on remote but we can’t afford to do it on face-to-face video shoots. In terms of the time scale, typically to go from contract signed to you having a box set of, in this case either four or seven videos, it’s generally a couple of months. There are two pinch points that can delay it. One of those is the length of time it takes the adviser or planner to ask their clients and get their clients to agree, a motivated planner can do that in 10 days, a planner who is nervous and doesn’t ask the clients, we’ve got one project outstanding for two years. So that’s one pinch point. The other pinch point can be booking clients in. It can take longer to book some clients in than others. I would say, typically, the box set takes eight weeks with those two caveats Natasha. Back to you Abi.

Abi Robinson 

If you want to get in touch about the video project, or just to talk about anything marketing related, then you can do so at Phil’s, email address that’s on there, or hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk we’re all over LinkedIn, Phil’s quite a big X-er, Can you say that? Or is it a Twitter-er? Whatever.

Phil Bray 

I’m not sure which is right there.

Abi Robinson 

No, but you can find us on socials. You can have a look at our website if you’ve got any questions and the door is always open whether it’s for the video project or otherwise. Don’t forget to register for the webinar next month, it’s going to be very, very exciting.

Phil Bray 

Thank you everybody. Thanks for the questions, thanks for the interaction. We’ll see you all next month for Marcus. In the meantime, stay in touch. See you soon everybody, bye, bye.

Abi Robinson 

See you, bye.