8th April, 2021 - Webinar replay

Websites, social proof and plenty more marketing tips for financial advisers and planners

Lee Robertson 0:00
Well, here we are, another Octo Blast as part of our brand marketing month, where we’re wandering through all things websites, personal branding, company branding, etc. One of the big things, of course, is websites and social proof. So I’m really chuffed to be joined my pal Phil Bray of The Yardstick Agency, who’s going to talk through some of these issues? Hi, Phil, how are you?

Phil Bray 0:24
Hey, I’m good, how you doing?

Lee Robertson 0:26
Listen, very, very well. Thanks. Nice to see you and thanks for taking the time. So, one of the things that… just to kick us off, that I thought recently… And, congratulations, I know, you’ve been involved in lots of award winning websites, as well as the other work you do. But one of the things that really struck me over the last few years is how financial planners, planning… financial planning practice websites have really come on. You know, in a way that perhaps we almost couldn’t have imagined. They look incredibly slick, incredibly professional, lots of social proof. And I guess you were part of that movement, aren’t you?

Phil Bray 1:02
Hopefully play our part a little bit! I think there’s… you’re right, the websites have come on a lot. I think that’s because planners are now understanding the importance of spending time building a compelling shop window. And, as we’ve said umpteen times before, a potential client first meets their prospective planner on a Google search. Either because they’ve done, simply done a brand search, so searching for the name of a firm or the name of a planner after being recommended to them. Or they’ve done a service based search, you know, financial planner near me. And that Google search results page is where they first meet their prospective planner. The website is where they get to know them. And it’s, that’s where they start making judgements about whether they’re the right planner to solve their trigger at that time. And their trigger’s the reason why they’ve got in touch, the problem they needs solving, the aspiration they want to achieve. So I think it’s partly because, this increase in quality in planner website, is partly because there’s a bunch of people out there now who understand the importance of this. And also understand that it’s a relatively small investment. For a website that should last five years or so. And, actually, it wins business. So, I think there’s definitely a movement to improving the quality of sites and firms generally improving the quality of their online presence.

Lee Robertson 2:41
Great. And how do you think that’s manifested itself? I mean, in terms of, you know, I look back to, you know, there was a big parallax movement for a while, there was lots of… it was all about the professional qualifications for a while, whereas now it seems to be very much more about the human side, did you… is that a fair…?

Phil Bray 3:00
Certainly all the science we produce. So, for me, it’s so much about getting a firm’s personality through. And also showcasing individuals. There’s, there’s two groups of individuals who are really important when it comes to financial planning. There’s the clients who benefit from it. And there’s the team who delivers it. And I deliberately use the word team, it’s not just about the planner, it’s about, it’s as much as about the people behind them, and who help them deliver. So, for me, we need to be showcasing those two groups of people and websites that do that just engage more. I’ll show you an example if you like?

Lee Robertson 3:44
Yeah, please.

Phil Bray 3:46
I’m just going to pull it up and share the screen. So bear with me. So, this is the Smith & Wardle website.

Lee Robertson 3:55
Yep.

Phil Bray 3:56
Which hopefully you can see now?

Lee Robertson 4:00
I can, yeah.

Phil Bray 4:01
So, I don’t know why I picked this one, mate! But this happens to be the IFA Website of the Year 2021 which we’re very proud of. And it’s Helena and John’s website. But for me, the key thing on the homepage, is, it’s all about people. So on the first scroll, you go straight into their clients. And one of the things Helena and John did, and we help them do, was go and take pictures of their clients in their garden. We’ve got another firm today who the photographer is going around to their clients gardens to take pictures of their clients. Socially distanced, of course. And it’s a lovely day for it in the north. But it just brings websites alive, showcasing people. So here, we’ve got people, real clients. This chap was an introducer but real client. Scroll down, we’ve got a video. More social proof here with the VouchedFor ratings and reviews, and then the team. We have fun pictures of the team and more serious pictures of the team. But it’s all about personality. And it’s all about people. And I think that is, it’s so important. Because somebody’s coming onto the website… let me take the screenshare off. Somebody is coming onto the website with a trigger. And they want to know if that trigger can be solved. And this is the team that can solve that trigger. So, “do I see people like me?” “Do I see people that I can engage with?” “Do I see people that are showing me empathy?” Or do we have that hero statement at the top that talks about how financial planning changes lives, and people should live their best life, etc. It bypasses empathy, and go straight for a sale, it comes on too strong too, too quickly. So, for me, it’s all about, it’s all about people, it’s all about empathy. It’s all about problem solving.

Lee Robertson 5:59
So we agree then. So, that’s interesting. And what I thought was very, very interesting there was the two shots of the team, you know, the corporate headshot, and then the much more informal friendly show, which, which is something that I’ve not seen that very often. Typically, you get the corporate headshot of people, so that, I think that’s incredibly clever.

Phil Bray 6:21
Yeah, we’ve used that in a few occasions. I won’t embarrass some firms by looking at some of their headshots, but the quality of imagery on a website is so important. And it’s not been easy during lockdown when the best you’ve been able to get a picture of somebody with an iPhone up against a wall, it’s been quite difficult. But I can think of websites where absolutely, the quality of the imagery has just lifted it. And it… the words on a website are equally important as the imagery. Some people see imagery, some people see words. So we’ve got to get both to be as good quality as possible. But a mediocre website can be lifted by putting really good quality, quality photography on there. And in the same way, a really nicely designed site can be dragged down, because the quality of photography is poor.

Lee Robertson 7:19
Okay. And that’s, sort of, one of my bugbears. Funnily enough, I wrote about it the other week, is this overuse of the same images that come out of stock imagery. You know, we’ve all seen some of these pictures so often, that they don’t even register anymore, they just turn us off. So we don’t even read the copy. Is that fair?

Phil Bray 7:38
Oh, completely. Why does a happy and contented retirement have to be represented and characterised by a grey haired couple in linen, walking down a beach hand in hand?

Lee Robertson 7:55
Or pointing off a yacht, yeah.

Phil Bray 7:57
Yeah, absolutely, it’s just such a cliche. And whenever… we talk a lot to firms about like, “you need to understand your target market before you do anything else”. “Understand your target market, understand their 3am moments that keep them awake at night, what gets them out of bed in the morning, and and and.” We all know that sort of stuff. And, if you understand your target market, you understand the majority of them aren’t spending most of their time on the beach in the Seychelles, especially not now. Their retirement looks incredibly different. I think back to, think back to my parents. So, my parents are 70. And their ideal holiday is in the UK. Their retirement is spending time with each other, spending time with the grandkids. That sounds like cliche, but they’re doing a couple of school runs a week. Dad does charity work for Rotary, that sort of stuff. That’s the sort of thing that interests them.

Lee Robertson 8:57
Yeah.

Phil Bray 8:58
They never wear linen and they never walk down a beach hand in hand! Why do we use that to characterise people’s retirement? So it’s just lazy cliched stock images. And we’re better than that.

Lee Robertson 9:09
Yeah. And we have to be.

Phil Bray 9:11
Completely, completely, you’ve got to separate yourself. You absolutely do.

Lee Robertson 9:15
So if I was coming along to you, Phil, saying “it’s time for my website to be refreshed, to be completely redone”. Whatever the question is. We’ve talked about imagery and we’ve talked about copy. What else makes for a good website?

Phil Bray 9:29
I think social proof’s incredibly important.

Lee Robertson 9:31
Yeah.

Phil Bray 9:32
And, in fact, I think we can we can take our lead… I wrote this last week, two weeks ago, about the Smith & Wardle website and actually Darren Cook’s website at Red Circle.

Lee Robertson 9:41
Yeah.

Phil Bray 9:41
So, I thought in the week that they, Smith & Wardle, won, I should write a blog about websites. And I spent a bit of time looking to Google Analytics for Red Circle and Smith & Wardle and looked at the five most popular pages on each. And, homepage was clearly popular, as you’d expect, that was the entry point for everybody. Team pages was the second or the “About us” in the case of Darren’s site. And we need to spend time building team pages. Building that section out that shows who the consumer, the potential client is going to be working with. You’ve been a financial planner, I was a financial adviser, I never made it to be a planner. But your clients… they tell you, or they told you really intimate things.

Lee Robertson 10:34
Yeah.

Phil Bray 10:35
They told you things before they told their spouse in some cases. And they therefore need to know that they can form a bond, they can form a relationship with people. So that’s why team pages are really important. But there’s so often overlooked. I did a review of a website earlier on this week with a firm, not a website we built but somebody else built it. It’s two person firm. And I haven’t got a clue who the adviser is. Their pictures aren’t on there, their name’s not on there. And it’s just a very corp… they managed to turn a very personable firm and personable service into a really corporate environment, which is not… So what do consumers want? Well, they want a good quality homepage, they want “About us” pages, team pages, they’re really popular. Interestingly, “Client stories” pages are important. So they can see people like them.

Lee Robertson 11:31
Yeah.

Phil Bray 11:32
Testimonial pages are largely pointless.

Lee Robertson 11:36
That’s interesting.

Phil Bray 11:37
The days of anonymous testimonials that says “Lee was great” are completely pointless. I’m sure you were great! But it’s completely pointless. Nobody looks at them. Our research shows only one or two people out of every 100 actually look at testimonials pages, pointless. We need to scatter the social proof around the website.

Lee Robertson 11:58
Which was going to be my next question. Would it be better to scattered through the site then, would you…?

Phil Bray 12:02
100%. So I would always have a client story section as we’ve got with the Smith & Wardle website or a “Meet our clients” section. And video’s always preferable to written content. But we need to take a, we need to take a leaf out of the social media giants. So if you’re on Facebook scrolling through, Zuckerberg doesn’t put a page of adverts you can go and look at if you choose. You see the adverts in your timeline, don’t you? And some you’ll bypass, some you’ll look at, and the odd one, you’ll click and they make a few quid out of that. And we need to take a leaf out of the social media giants’ playbook and scatter social proof around the site. So it can be displayed on those most popular pages. And the other, the other really popular page, just getting back to the original question, on both the Smith & Wardle and the Red Circle website was the fees page. Third position, I think, on both. Really, really popular. Now clearly, I don’t know how many visitors were actually clients looking at it, and how many were nosy financial planners looking at what their peers might charge. But a bunch of them will be, a bunch of them will be clients. And it’s, it’s, so we got to give visitors what they want. And they want a good quality homepage. They want good quality team pages, they want to see who you work with, and they can solve those problems. Fees are important and a good quality contact page.

Lee Robertson 13:29
Okay. So, and I take the point on fees, absolutely. Because, at the moment, there’s not that many firms do it. So it’s almost a rarity. So that would be a mixture, I’m sure. But one of the… I’m interested in one of the pages you didn’t mention, and it’s become a bit of a thing that many advisers do, is the blog page.

Phil Bray 13:47
Yes, I need to have check back on my blog about that, actually. But blog pages tend to be, they tend to be in the top 10.

Lee Robertson 13:57
Yeah.

Phil Bray 13:58
If you think about the journey that consumer takes, the majority of blogs… a blog is written, it’s put on the website, you’ve got a kind of library section on on the site. But the majority of people, consumers, are pushed straight to the blog. So the blog might be included in a newsletter, might be included on a social media link. And, of course, the consumer is going direct to that blog post to read it. They’re not going to the blog library section and then selecting then which one. So most people are signposted directly to a blog as opposed to the blog section. But, of course, people can hit the page website and can hit the blog section, that library, and therefore it needs to be kept up to, up to date.

Lee Robertson 14:41
Okay, yeah, well, that was another thing that is quite hard to do, isn’t it? And this is something that came up in the questions that members have been asking me to ask guys like you is that consistency thing. How do you stay consistent? How do you make sure your blog doesn’t go out of date? Beyond the obvious which is to write more of them, but it’s quite a chore for lots of people.

Phil Bray 15:02
I think it is, yeah. So I wrote a piece for Money Marketing, I think, about the two great, the two powers that people need to be great marketers. I think one of them is patience and one is consistency.

Lee Robertson 15:15
Right.

Phil Bray 15:17
And consistency, when it comes to blogs, consistency of quality and consistency of output. With output trumping quality. Because we all know that the search for, the search for perfection is the enemy of getting things done. So I think, for me… now I sell content. So, I’ve got skin in this game.

Lee Robertson 15:38
Yeah.

Phil Bray 15:39
But, if you’re going to produce content, and I don’t think it’s possible, to effectively market your business without content, you’ve got two choices. You can produce it yourself or get someone in your team to do it, or you can outsource it. Now clearly, if you outsource it, and you get the outsource, right, you should tick the consistency box and the quality box. If you’re going to produce it in house yourself, I think you’ve got to enjoy it. It’s very difficult. You write a lot and you enjoy it.

Lee Robertson 16:10
I do. I do. Despite being quite visual, I like writing. I’m not saying I’m particularly good at it, but I like doing it and and Natalie at Illuminate or whoever sort of tidies up for me, I guess.

Phil Bray 16:23
Absolutely. And so I think, for me, if you’re going to write content and you’re going to do it on a consistent basis, first of all, you’ve got to enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re not going to do it on a consistent basis, it becomes a chore. You’ve then got to be disciplined and find the time to do it and find your, find your happy place to write. So mine used to be Saturday morning in a coffee shop on the laptop at eight o’clock and bang out the next week’s blog for a few hours. Clearly don’t do that anymore. Although looking forward to getting back to it. Yeah, it’s not gonna happen right now. But you’ve got to find, I think, your happy place. You’ve got to find the place that you want to actually do it. And I would argue that, unless you do enjoy it, unless, and you can do it consistently, that actually the financial planner is the wrong person to be writing. So we’ve got a few clients where we will write their set of, I don’t know, three articles a month. And, when they’re feeling creative, and want to do it, they’ll just top up with an article here and there. But at least they know that they’re getting consistency in output for three articles a month. And they don’t have that pressure put on them to actually get it, get it out and get it done.

Lee Robertson 17:35
And yeah, it’s a pressure, isn’t it? Because you know, you write for magazines, I write for magazines, and the deadlines come around quick. And I take my hat off to professional writers, because the inspiration for an article doesn’t always come around with a deadline. You’re kind of crashing around in your head thinking what can I write about? What can I write about? What have I not written about before? And unless the inspiration from that happy place comes, it is, it is quite a chore.

Phil Bray 18:03
Yeah, completely. And I don’t know about you, but I, when I do strike, inspiration strikes, I send myself a little email. I did it this morning, early doors, wondering what to write this Friday. And something popped into my head on the way to work. So I just noted it down on the phone as I was walking in. And I just file it away in a little folder on Outlook. So I’ve got a kind of reservoir with ideas that I can pull down on when I need them. And that works quite nicely.

Lee Robertson 18:33
Yeah, I’m the same, I use just the most basic thing, which is Notes on my iPhone. That if the idea strikes, boom, I just write that thing and what it had triggered. If I’m on someone else’s website, you know, whatever it happens to be, and it triggers a thought, I linked to it with the word that it had triggered. So it’s not, I’m not gonna lift the copy. But it’s obviously triggered a thought process. So I’ve got this big thing of notes that I can go up and down thinking “oh, that’s what I was thinking about that”. So I think it’s useful that kind of ideas box, that, wherever you keep… a friend of mine uses Google Keep for the same reason. You know, there’s all sorts of ways of doing. Yeah.

Phil Bray 19:10
Yeah, and if you don’t, you’ll forget it, or I will anyway! You’ve got to, when that inspiration strikes. There’s different processes of writing, isn’t there, you’ve got the inspiration of what you’re gonna write about. You’ve then got writing and research, which are two different disciplines, but equally important. You’ve then got editing. And you should spend broadly the same amount of time editing as writing. And then you’ve got proofing which somebody else should do because you can’t proof your own work. So it’s different, different stages.

Lee Robertson 19:39
Yeah, as I… you probably know, I posted on Twitter last week because I’d submitted something to Natalie at Illuminate, despite having edited it and edited it and read it and read it and read it. It was only once I sent it I saw the typos and grammars! It’s… because you, I think your mind reads what you think you’ve written

Phil Bray 19:54
Completely. And, for me, changing the format works. So if I’m writing in, I don’t know, Calibri 11, then I can read it and read it and read it. But to really tighten it, tighten it up, I’ve got to change the format. So I’ll print it out. That works. And I’ll see things when I print it out that I won’t on the screen. Or I’ll change it to a different font size, a different colour, and a different font completely. And then I see things as well. So my brain needs the format to change. And when the format changes, I see different things.

Lee Robertson 20:30
See that, thank you. That’s another really good tip. Another tip that was given to me on Twitter after I tweeted that was… get Microsoft Word to read it to them. And get them to hear the errors when Microsoft reads it back to them. So I guess there are all these these tips and tricks.

Phil Bray 20:44
Yeah, absolutely. And reading it out aloud to yourself works as well. I think, for me, reading out aloud helps you understand whether the structure of the sentence is simple enough or is too complex. But it isn’t, it isn’t good enough just to have it on the screen. You’re… for me, you’ve got to change the format to really tighten the writing. And that’s even different to proofing it. Yeah. So we’ve hired a proofreader.

Lee Robertson 21:13
Right.

Phil Bray 21:14
Sole job is to edit and proof content. That’s how important it is, that we’ve got somebody whose dedicated job is in the team to do that.

Lee Robertson 21:21
Great, thank you. Just before we move on to social proof, because that’s an area that I’m fascinated by… Is there a danger… and I say this with all due respect because you’ve got skin in this game, as you said… is there a danger, if you subcontract writing, that you begin to lose your brand tone of voice? Or how do you make sure that you keep control of that? Because everyone sounds slightly differently.

Phil Bray 21:46
I agree completely. And yeah, there is always that danger. For me, you get over it with the quality of the brief, the quality of the writer, and the partnership between, in our case, the client, the planner, and then the writer, the writer here. And we absolutely will always try and capture that firm’s tone of voice. And one of the simplest ways of doing it…. people talk about “I’m not a writer, I can’t write”. Well, anyone can write, you just got to write how you talk. And the most authentic way of writing is to write how you talk. So if the writer that you subcontract the work out to do is good, they will… they won’t find it particularly difficult to get in your head, and your turn of phrase, your tonality, the words that you use, etc. I think it’s relatively straightforward for good quality writer to do.

Lee Robertson 22:51
Great, thank you. So moving on from there… social proof. I mean, you and I have spoken about this loads of times and there are ways of doing it. You know, there’s there’s, you know, we’ve talked about testimonials. We’ve talked about things like Trustpilot and Vouchedfor and other stuff. Just how important do you think social proof is?

Phil Bray 23:14
I think it’s incredibly important. Which is more powerful? To tell somebody that you’re good, or to show them evidence? That is far more powerful than that. And, for me, there’s three types of social proof that we should be collecting, and that we help firms to collect. But the short answer is, I think it’s incredibly powerful. People need to engage with it for it to be powerful. But it is so much more…. It’s going to hit home so much more showing people evidence than telling them.

Lee Robertson 23:49
Great. Ways that you favour in terms of getting that message out and measuring it, sort of, proving it?

Phil Bray 23:57
So, I think there’s three. There’s three social proof boxes that we like to tick. And I say no particular order. I probably don’t mean that. So I would say that, kind of, equal second would be online ratings and reviews and client surveys. So online ratings and reviews, big fan of getting your clients to give you ratings and reviews and ongoing feedback in public. Too many firms do client surveys after they’ve onboarded a client or after an annual review. Surveys are driven by compliance. Nobody completes them. And they’re completely pointless. So we should be collecting ongoing social proof in public. So when people are walking towards the planner’s door, they see it. And we’ve done a lot of work on this and our two platforms, two preferred platforms are Google and VouchedFor. Google, because when someone runs a brand search, the Google My Business listing pops up on the top right hand corner. And it’s quite impressive to show ratings and reviews there. It has a marginal SEO benefit. It works in Google Places, you can import them into your website, just Google – that’s the first place. Second thing, VouchedFor, and we need to change how we think about VouchedFor. It is not a peer or competitor to Unbiased. It is first and foremost online reputation management. So TripAdvisor for financial planners essentially. And reasons why we like it. If someone has a brand search for Helena Wardle, from Smith & Wardle, the Google My Business listing won’t come up but her VouchedFor profile will. We can use the great little widgets and tools that VouchedFor will provide on the website, they’ve got The Times top rated guide, SEO benefits as well. And, of course, it will produce enquiries during the year to a degree. So ratings and reviews for me, I’m not a fan of other platforms, I would go Google and VouchedFor.

Lee Robertson 26:13
Okay, you would just disregard the others, would you?

Phil Bray 26:15
Yeah. Yeah, frankly. Yeah, I would, I would. I think those two are too powerful to ignore. And I think you’ve got to be a bit careful about asking clients to do too much.

Lee Robertson 26:27
Yeah.

Phil Bray 26:28
So second equal to that would be client surveys. I said, don’t do client surveys, for me, when you onboard a client, I would do them at fixed point.

Lee Robertson 26:39
Right.

Phil Bray 26:40
So we might do, a financial planner might say, we do our client surveys every year in January, or every other year in January. So you can measure change from one fixed point to another. And those clients surveys should produce some fantastic results that can be used in marketing. They should, they should obviously help the firm understand what is working in the business and what isn’t. But they should produce just really little nuggets that can be used in marketing. For example, I’m gonna share my screen again in a second if that’s okay.

Lee Robertson 27:20
Yeah, of course.

Phil Bray 27:21
And one of the questions we ask, we always asked the kind of pseudo Net Promoter Score question, “would you recommend this to other people?”. But we ask a really open question – “what’s the biggest benefit you get from working with us?”. We don’t give any prompts. And we just ask that question. And I did a little a word cloud for a firm that we did a client survey for last week. Can you see the word cloud?

Lee Robertson 27:45
I can.

Phil Bray 27:46
Yeah. So it’s not hard to see where the value lies, is it? Yeah, peace of mind, clarity, confidence, reassurance. Investment strategies in there a little bit. But it smacks you between the eyes where clients get the value from. So client surveys come up with some great stuff like that, that you can use in your online marketing and just marketing generally.

Lee Robertson 28:14
Yeah. And that kind of that tone of voice.

Phil Bray 28:17
100%. Yeah. And then lastly… so those two are equal on the silver step. Lastly, for me, client videos.

Lee Robertson 28:25
Yeah.

Phil Bray 28:26
Nothing beats somebody telling their story. And I’ve interviewed maybe 70-80 consumers over the past year, as we’ve been building client videos for firms that we work with. And they all have fantastic stories to tell. And it’s a pre-selected group, isn’t it, obviously, but they all have fantastic stories to tell. And there’s always a line in there that’s great. So, for example, I remember asking one client of a financial planner, “would you recommend this financial planner?”. And our answer was great. She thought about it for a second. She said “absolutely because recommending my financial planner is like a gift I can keep giving to my friends. If they can get the peace of mind that I get. It’s like a gift I can keep giving.” It’s a fantastic line. And it made the final edit, unsurprisingly. But you hear lines like that all the time. I interviewed someone last week. They were 53-ish, I guess, and going to retire at 55, no question. And, retiring at 55, it’s not that easy to do. And great lines. “Without our financial planner, there’s no way we’d be retiring at 55.” They’ve give… financial planners giving them 10-15 years of just great time, great memories and probably extended their life by the fact that retiring early.

Lee Robertson 29:45
Yeah.

Phil Bray 29:45
And so, for me, client videos would be on the gold step and ratings and reviews and client stories on the silver step.

Lee Robertson 29:56
Okay, great. Thank you. So as we wander towards the end, Phil and, if you don’t mind, two or three quickfire questions. Answer as short or as long as you want or pass if you don’t. These have really come in from members. I’ve been quietly canvassing members and they’ve come up with some questions. First one is, “is there any colours that should never be gone near on a website?”.

Phil Bray 30:15
No. Colour combinations, maybe, but not colours, I don’t think.

Lee Robertson 30:21
Okay. “Is there a particular time of week that tends to work best for communications and messaging?”

Phil Bray 30:27
Depends on whether you’re doing B2B or B2C. And we’re doing some research on it now. So I’ll take the fifth and come back to you on that one.

Lee Robertson 30:35
Perfect. Okay. “What’s the worst mistake you see on a website?”

Phil Bray 30:41
Oh, geez. Wow. Only one?

Lee Robertson 30:51
Well, list them if you wish!

Phil Bray 30:53
Oh, man. Lacking empathy?

Lee Robertson 30:55
Yeah.

Phil Bray 30:56
That’s massively important. Not putting those two groups of people on there. Clients and the people who deliver. And a complete lack of social proof. You see so many sites that just make no effort to prove they do a great job for their clients. And I could go on forever, but I’ll go with those three.

Lee Robertson 31:28
Thank you. So final question. And this is one I love asking. “Is there a particular touchstone or phrase or mantra that you like to bring to your marketing work, which is, you know, exemplary, you know, award winning, etc?” Is there a particular watchboard that drives right through your firm like a stick of rock?

Phil Bray 31:48
I think, for us, I don’t think it applies to financial planners, but, for us, it’s the fact we do our work in public. So everything we do is in public. The Smith & Wardle website, our logo’s on the bottom of it. So someone likes it, they know if you’ve developed it, someone doesn’t like it, they know you’ve developed it. So I talk a lot to the people here about us ticking three boxes. Quality, value and on time. But, essentially, the most important thing is, that we’ve got to remember, that we’re doing our work in public. And if we do our work well, more people will benefit from the life changing, life changing effects of financial planning. So that’s essentially what I want us to remember. Do our work well in public. More people benefit from life changing financial planning.

Lee Robertson 32:38
Brilliant. Listen, for a largely financial planning audience, what a great session. Thank you, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Great to talk to you as usual.

Phil Bray 32:46
Loved it. Cheers mate. See you soon.

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Rob Gill

Managing Director, Altura Mortgage Finance

"Best of all, their results driven approach is both refreshing and helping us achieve real goals. Thank you Yardstick!”

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Tom Orchard

Director and Financial Planner, Annetts & Orchard

"I’m a big Yardstick fan now and look forward to working with them on future projects."

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Alasdair Walker

Managing Director, Handford Aitkenhead & Walker

"We have felt like collaborators, rather than customers, and feel like Phil and his team has a vested interest in our marketing success that far exceeds his fee.”

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ENDA BRADY

Financial Planner, IQ Financial

We were lucky to be referred to Yardstick last year. We are delighted we hired them. They have specialist knowledge designed specially to help Financial Planning businesses like ours.

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JAYNE GRAVES

Head of Marketing, Ellis Bates Financial Advisers

Phil's style is informed, humorous and collaborative. The content is punchy, relevant, a go-to guide on how to create more recommendations and prompts action with no exceptions. Great workshop.

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LLOYD FRENCH

Financial Planner and Founder, Delaunay Wealth

I am absolutely delighted with all the work the Yardstick team has done for us and am very excited about how this will drive our new business/client acquisition in future. I would highly recommend them to any financial planning firm that takes their business seriously.

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JASON MCCONKEY

Director and Financial Planner, Insight Wealth

Great to work with a good professional outfit that had provided us direction and clear thinking in marketing our business effectively to obtain quality new clients.

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GUY SKINNER

Director & Financial Planner, Citygate Financial Planning

A thorough and excellent service. Phil and his team know exactly what to do, how to do it and when to do it. We very much look forward to working together more in the future.

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