A guide to making short videos to boost an RIA’s brand

On the one hand, posting short videos to social media can help financial advisors draw new potential clients, give the public credible information and save time and money.

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On the other, it can always feel weird or clumsy putting yourself out there online.

But more and more, planners like Sathya Chey Patterson, a managing partner and wealth advisor with Rolling Hills Estates, California-based advisory practice Arise Private Wealth, and Kelly Klingaman, the founder of Austin, Texas-based registered investment advisory firm Kelly Klingaman Financial Planning, are posting videos to platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram. And they credit the videos for boosting business, even as they acknowledge some initial stage fright.

The videos aid advisors in connecting with ideal prospects and fellow professionals who could be future referral sources, without necessarily requiring a giant marketing investment. Alongside an RIA or advisory practice website, they leave an increasingly important digital footprint for prospects’ inevitable web searches before the initial meeting and cut down on the need for get-to-know-you icebreakers or salesy talk within that first consultation. 

The performance data from the online videos provide an additional, free source of marketing insights. And, while it’s unfair to brand all “finfluencers” as novices or misleading, the videos from real licensed professionals can drown out some terrible financial advice on social media.

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Referrals today

In fact, that mission first drew Chey Patterson to the idea of creating videos during the pandemic, she noted. But it wasn’t until last year that she “started posting things more intentionally.” This past December and January, she told herself, “OK, I’m going to stop saying I’m going to do this and actually do it,” she said. 

Previously, Chey Patterson said she had been overthinking her video ideas — a habit she has dropped in favor of a commitment to seeing what sticks among her doubled ranks of followers. Like most advisors, referrals remain her top driver of new clients. But they’re different now.

“It’s become harder and harder because people still trust their own research — they still may get a referral, but they’ll Google you, they’ll see what your website looks like,” Chey Patterson said. “Because I’m in this growth phase of my career, because I value client referrals, I want to arm every new potential client with as much of an ability to get to know me and feel confident in that decision, even before we have our first qualification call. That saves me time, too.”

Klingaman has been posting videos since launching her firm four years ago, though she said that the fact that her first ones look “a little bit cringe” to her today displays how advisors “can start somewhere, and it can come a long way.” 

Like Chey Patterson, she has set time aside on her weekly schedule to produce the videos and other social content. Klingaman generally schedules client meetings on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, while devoting parts of her Mondays and Fridays to creating the videos and other posts and setting two or three to go online each week. 

She got over some initial hesitation by separating her online business presence from her personal life, even as she found that talking about being a working mother drove connection with her target base of “breadwinning women in male-dominated fields” such as finance, technology, engineering and medicine, Klingaman noted. Social posts are “doing a lot of the selling for you before you get the first meeting,” and they’re an important driver of new business, especially for solo advisors, according to Klingaman. 

“I am very much the brand. People are hiring me. The name of my business is my name — they need to know who I am,” she said. “If you’re the brand, I think video content is the quickest way to humanize yourself and show that, ‘Hey, we’re going to talk about really deep topics together.’ People talk to me about things that they don’t talk about with anyone else.” 

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‘Never been easier’

That type of vast — often untapped — potential recently occurred to Mike Byrnes, the president of advisor growth consulting firm Byrnes Consulting, when a video of his son Mick hitting a baseball to the fence in little league captured thousands of views on YouTube, he said. Videos pay off “in a world where people still want to work with people” and advisors “can create their own personal brand” by speaking more specifically to their target clients, rather than trying to follow influencers’ examples of amassing millions of likes at a time, according to Byrnes.

“There are all kinds of hurdles to doing videos, but, in reality, it’s never been easier,” he said. “You don’t have to spend a lot of money on a marketing expert. … You’re starting to blanket the internet with your content in short form and then seeing what works. You might double down on that video and actually pay to have it promoted more. You actually see the results for free.”

For any advisors truly petrified by the idea of wading into the social media video waters alone, though, Chey Patterson noted that she has gotten assistance with quality lighting and filming sessions from her daughter who is studying public relations and a three- to four-hour appointment with a marketing firm that yielded several weeks’ worth of posts. 

However, there’s a reason that companies are “hiring professional influencers that are less polished,” and “the trend now is the person in a ballcap on a walk, talking” into their phones, she said. So she films many of the videos herself. And she tries to restrict them to less than a minute, without going into too much detail that can add to the length and lose viewers. 

While she admitted that the videos are delivering business results and an audience for her future book, she said it “really has to be a little altruistic why you do this” and she wants to send some “helpful information out there” to target clients and the general public. Some of the recent videos she has posted include one explaining the differences between brokerage accounts, Roth individual retirement accounts and 401(k) plans, a seven-second clip inviting working mothers to follow her and a greeting for Asian American and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month. 

“You’re not trying to be everything to everyone. You’re trying to be everything to that one person,” Chey Patterson said. “It’s really understanding what makes you unique, and that’s your voice.”

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Keep it short yet specific

While Klingaman said it can be “scary putting your face out there, and it’ll sound bad at first,” she believes those early benchmarks will make it easier for advisors to tell they’re making progress over time. 

Kelly Klingaman Financial Planning

She uses a cheap phone stand and wireless microphone to film videos and an app called Splice to edit them. She likes “being off the cuff” more than using the many teleprompter apps, she noted. And she’s talking with fellow planners in her study group as she considers her social presence. 

Klingaman’s recent posts include a reshare of her video four years ago explaining why she quit her corporate job to start the RIA, as well as images that unfurl into her written answers to the questions of how she’s teaching her children about money and why it’s important for professional women to ask financial advisors how many clients they serve.  

“Any sort of consistent schedule getting in the habit of posting is great for anyone just starting out,” Klingaman said. “We all try to post really consistently, and we also have tried to cultivate groups of people who are not financial advisors who can help elevate our content.”

Those kinds of targeted answers will appeal to search tools and artificial intelligence bots that are “going to look for a very specific result when they make recommendations,” Byrnes noted. And videos that are “really crisp and to the point” will be effective in “getting somebody to know who you are and getting them into the lead funnel,” he said.

“It’s not just vanity statistics like likes,” Byrnes said. “If you got three people to come to the office and you converted one, you got a pretty good ROI on that marketing tactic.”