Seminars have long been part of the marketing toolkit of financial advisors. And for good reason. They work. When an advisor speaks in front of an audience that has deliberately come to hear him, he's in a good position.
That audience has spent time with him, has heard him work through a financial problem and has asked him questions. By the time he proposes a consultation, he's likely built up considerable credibility with them.
That kind of experience can't easily be reproduced online.
That said, this isn't a piece arguing that Meta ads could replace seminars.
If a firm runs a good seminar program, fills its rooms, turns attendees into clients and isn't hitting capacity, why would it want to change what it's doing? Many successful RIAs have built their practice around educational events.
The Real Comparison Is Structural, Not Qualitative
More important is what happens when a seminar program isn't generating enough leads, or the cost of running seminars outweighs their value to the business.
In that case, paid acquisition could come into play. And here's the key point: Meta isn't a substitute for a seminar. It's more like an accelerant for seminars, webinars, speaking, radio and other channels a firm already uses.
In essence, a good funnel is a 24-hour-a-day seminar. Instead of educating a room once a month, the firm is putting its message in front of prospects who fit its criteria continuously.
And here's a temptation: one might well ask which of the channels produces the best prospects. And more often than not, the answer would be seminars.
Someone who attends a seminar and then asks to meet has done far more work than someone who sees an ad. He spent an evening at the seminar. He listened to an hour of content. He asked questions. And more importantly, he signaled interest.
A better question is, what kind of volume can be driven from each channel? How often could it be driven at reasonable cost?
Cost Structure
Here's where the two look quite different.
With a seminar, the costs are visible upfront. A typical seminar involves a venue, food or drink, advertising or direct mail to attract attendees, printed material, time for the advisor to prepare, time in the evening and follow-up afterward.
Often well before anyone shows up at the event, the firm has spent money on the venue, on food, on mailings. It doesn't know at that point whether the room will fill up or who will turn up.
Meta costs are quite different. They include advertising, creative, landing pages, tracking, compliance and campaign management. Each day, the amount of money spent on media can be adjusted. And over time, the creative is reused across multiple campaigns. A good video, for example, could run for months.
Neither approach is necessarily cheaper. A seminar attended by relevant local prospects could well produce strong value. And a poorly targeted Meta campaign could quickly eat up budget.
What is different is that once money is spent on a seminar, most of it is sunk. With Meta, the firm could cut back on spending the next day.
Predictability and How Far Ahead You Commit
Often weeks pass between the decision to run a seminar and its outcome. In that time, there's little that could be done to change anything.
Only at the event is it known whether it was successful.
For this reason, seminars tend to come in fits and starts. A firm holding one a month will see a pipeline of prospects arriving in bursts, but not every month. And if one event doesn't work, the next chance to fix it would be a month later.
With a funnel, feedback on appointments, show rate, qualification and cost per appointment is received within days, not weeks, of running a campaign. And if the message isn't working, the firm would know before it had used up all its budget.
That doesn't mean Meta is more reliable. Sometimes a campaign won't work, the creative will wear thin and the audience will become saturated. The feedback time on a funnel is much quicker than on a seminar. That means correction could be made during the campaign rather than next month.
That's the key difference. And one worth asking: what would it take to multiply by ten the number of seminars produced?
Scalability
To produce ten times as many seminars, a firm would need ten times as many evenings, ten times as many venues and ten times as much preparation. Alternatively, it would need an advisor constantly away from the desk or a team of presenters to be recruited, trained and kept on board.
Output increases linearly with effort. At some point this undermines the role of the advisor for the clients.
A funnel could easily be widened through increased spending (if it made economic sense) and more appointments at the firm. One pre-recorded educational video could be used for one prospect or for 10,000. And the advisor wouldn't need to be involved in that education.
That's the strength of the funnel. And above a certain size, most firms find they need to add a channel to their events.
That doesn't mean seminars stop working. But one person simply cannot devote ten times as many evenings to them. And over time, most firms run up against a limit in their seminar program.
Geography
Seminars are local. To attend one, people need to travel there. That puts a limit on who could attend. For a firm working in one metropolitan area, this limit may well not matter. It would be an advantage for a firm to be local. And its audience would be people in its own community.
But for a firm looking beyond driving distance, this would be a limit. It wouldn't make sense, for example, to hold a seminar for potential clients in another state.
Meta can be local or national. A firm could, for example, advertise in its local area. Like a seminar, this would build trust and familiarity with that audience. Or it could advertise nationally, reaching more people but at greater cost and at a lower conversion rate.
Whether this matters depends on how the firm delivers its service. A local, in-person advisor would have limited value nationally. But one who could work with clients remotely would.
Attendance Is Not Demand
Look at a typical seminar audience of 40 people. Maybe only 8 of them would be a good fit for the firm, and of those, maybe three would want to follow up with a meeting. Others would go more for the meal, the information or because a friend of theirs was attending.
The firm paid for 40 seats. Three opportunities came out of it.
That doesn't mean seminars aren't worthwhile. But it does mean the firm should think about the right measure of one.
Attendance is one thing. Qualified consultations another. And it's in that gap that the economics of a seminar can be judged.
Likewise, in a funnel, an appointment isn't necessarily an attended one, and an attended one isn't necessarily a qualified opportunity.
But in a funnel, before the appointment, the firm could ask attendees about their investable assets. In a seminar, it would only become clear afterward whether someone was a good fit for the firm.
The Coordination Load
To do a good job at a seminar, many factors need to fall into place. Advertising, direct mail or word of mouth. Registration. Reminders. Food. Materials. Layout of the room. The presentation. Follow-up of questions. Scheduling consultations in the seminar. And follow-up for those who didn't book.
Each of these could take time and skill. Taken together, they are a substantial operational investment. And much of it falls on people whose main role is something else.
A funnel itself has an operational burden: compliance, landing pages, tracking, follow-up and creative production. But it's more of an ongoing infrastructure than a project. And once the firm has one, the next campaign doesn't need to start from scratch.
More useful to think of a funnel as a system, and of a seminar as a project.
The Presenter Problem
A seminar requires that someone be able and willing to present. Often in the early years this is a stimulating role. But after 10 or 20 years of putting together presentations, spending evenings, selling events and following up with people, it becomes draining.
A logical response would be to have another advisor take over presentations. That can work. But it brings another risk.
An advisor who gets good at presenting has developed a skill that can be used elsewhere. He or she could sell a room, engage an audience and turn event attendees into clients. And at some point, might well decide they could do this work themselves.
Firms that rely on a presenter in their acquisition strategy are building around that person. That's fine while they are there. But if they leave, they risk undermining their own foundation. And in part for that reason, over time they tend to pursue acquisition approaches that don't rely on any particular person in a room on a Tuesday night.
In a similar way, a funnel using recorded content depends on the advisor appearing on camera. But in this case the asset would survive his or her departure. And another advisor could create more content.
What Meta Offers That Seminars Cannot
Controllable volume. The firm could increase its spending if it wanted, or cut it back if its advisors felt stretched.
Continuous rather than episodic demand. Rather than depending on an event date, prospects would flow into the funnel every day. That would make the funnel more stable than one built around an event.
Reach beyond driving distance. For a firm comfortable working with clients online, the pool of potential clients would be much bigger.
Daily feedback. Within days of putting content out, the firm could well know whether it resonated with prospects. Not on the night of the event.
Qualification prior to the conversation. When booking an appointment, asking about investable assets screens out some prospects. That way, time with an advisor is reserved only for prospects with investable assets.
What Meta Costs You
A colder sale. Someone who saw a video in an ad has spent far less than someone who spent an evening at an event. Typically conversion will be weaker, and more work will need to go into selling to them.
Creative overhead. People get tired of ads. A seminar presentation can be used for years with only slight tweaks. Meta assets need regular testing and replacing. That's an ongoing production burden.
Compliance throughput. Every new ad idea has to go through review. If compliance lags behind testing, then your ad campaign will be limited more by process than by opportunity.
Follow-up discipline. Someone who attends your seminar is actually there. Someone using the funnel may not think of you again for some time. Much more important here would be consistency and speed of follow-up. Firms that lack this tend not to convert the leads they already have and put it down to the channel.
Running Both
The firms that do best don't use one or the other. They use each in its strengths. And together they add up to more than many people realize.
Use the funnel to fill the seminar. Often a better way to drive registrations for your event would be through Meta than through direct mail. And in many cases, the event would be more effective with a more relevant audience.
Turn seminar content into ad creative. Over the years you may well have developed an educational asset in your presentation. Sections of it that regularly provoke questions would support your ad. And you could record your seminar. In it would be a range of creative ideas, tested in front of your audience.
Keep events for your strongest market. Use your event where you have strength. If your firm has a good presence in a market, its name will already be known there. And its community will be familiar with it. Use Meta in a market where you have none of that, where the economics are different but where the potential is better.
Work the tail of each event. And use the funnel to pick up people who didn't attend your event. People who registered but didn't turn up, and people who attended but didn't book, form a warm audience. Through Meta you could pick up value from them after your event.
Together, often, this would be more effective than either alone. In the seminar, you build trust at depth. Through the funnel, you build volume at breadth.
Which Should Your Firm Invest In?
Keep holding seminars if:
your advisors are good at presenting and enjoy doing it;
your client base is local;
your events sell out reliably and lead to consultations;
you could act on those consultations; and
the work would be manageable for the people running them.
Add Meta if:
you need more consultations than your events generate;
your presenter is stretched or your firm depends on his willingness to speak;
you want to engage people further afield than driving distance;
you want ongoing demand for your services month on month, rather than only at the time of an event; and/or
you want quicker feedback on your work than you'd get from an event.
Neither is your constraint if:
your advisors couldn't take more appointments;
opportunities arising from your events weren't being picked up;
prospects didn't know why they'd want your firm over another; or
they didn't follow up on your event.
Most important of all, a seminar won't fix your sales process. Nor will extra advertising. Before allocating money to any channel, think about where the bottleneck in your sales process lies.
The Bottom Line
In many ways, a seminar creates a sales environment that advertising can't. A roomful of people who've spent an evening with an advisor is a good position for your firm. And if you run them well, you should run more of them.
But a seminar doesn't scale. You could wake up one day and realize you needed, say, 15 good consultations in the next month. But you couldn't simply crank out another seminar. Each one would take another evening, another venue and another round of prep. And at some point the presenter would no longer want to do more.
Meta doesn't replicate the environment of a seminar. Rather, it creates demand for your work, on an ongoing, customizable and geographically unrestricted basis. But the prospect is less likely to be warm and the sales process longer.
It's useful to think of the funnel as a seminar for your firm. It would run every day, before prospects who haven't yet committed to spending an evening with you.
But it's in the seminar that prospects are most likely to build trust. The funnel lets you get in front of people who wouldn't have driven to the Marriott on a Tuesday.
Use the seminar to add depth. Use the funnel to add reach. And judge each on consultations, not on how many people are in the room.
