Mastering Short-Form Video Marketing

Maddy Roche: Hello, and welcome to XYPN Radio. I'm Maddy Roche the host of this podcast and an executive business coach here at XYPN. Today, I'm excited to welcome Nate Hoskin and Nick Meyer to XYPN Radio. Both Nate and Nick are CFP®s. They both live in Denver and they're both co founders of the N2 Content Marketing Group.

Nate is an XYPN member because he runs his own RIA. But today Nate and Nick are on XYPN Radio to talk about short form video and how and why advisors should leverage this marketing strategy. I pepper both Nate and Nick about the ins and outs of how to actually post these videos, make them digestible, and how to rank well.

They describe in detail about how the discoverability and SEO of short form videos is stronger than any other content marketing strategy. And they discuss why they think short form video will be table stakes for advisors as this industry continues to evolve. During this discussion, I ask about how to address the haters out there on social media.

I discuss the compliance concerns with both of them, and I ask them their opinions about what they would tell advisors who just don't love marketing. Pull out your pen and paper. I suspect that during this episode you're going to be taking a lot of notes, and maybe afterwards, you may all be posting your own short form video.

 Without further ado, here's my interview with Nick and Nate.

Hello, Nick and Nate. Welcome to XYPN Radio. How are you both today?

Nate Hoskin: Good. Thanks for having us, Maddy.

Maddy Roche: . Of Great to see you both. Will you let the audience know, Nate where you're located before we dive in?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah. So I'm in Denver.

Maddy Roche: Okay, and Nick?

Nick Meyer: And I am also in Denver about five minutes down the road from Nate.

Maddy Roche: Okay, awesome. And if anyone's tuning in on video, you'll see we're each on our own video. Nate and Nick are not together in the same room, so we will be having a wonderful, fun dialogue with the three of us today. So we're having a little bit of a different dialogue because we have some really diverse people in front of us in terms of what they bring to this show.

Nate, I'd love for you to introduce yourself. You're the XYPN member of the three of us, and just give the audience a little bit of background about who you are, please.

Nate Hoskin: Yeah. I am a member because I have my own independent RIA, Hoskin Capital, and I started the firm in 2020 in the middle of COVID. It was very much a passion project of mine. The thought process was, well, the world is on standby. I might as well try something new and worst case scenario, when everything kicks back in, I can take my book and go work at a different firm.

I'll have some flexibility. And luckily I never needed to do that because I started making videos and getting a whole bunch of clients and really starting to see some growth. So that was how I really got into the independent RIA space. I had started in wealth management for a smaller wealth advisor.

And then I started looking at XYPN after we had a conversation with Chris at FinCon. And I was like, wait, hold on a second. You're telling me that my entire tech stack is cheaper if I join this. And then I also get the forums and the Academy and I get to have cool conversations like this. All right, I'm sold.

No questions asked. That's part of what brings us here today. But we've also just been having a fantastic time collaborating with XYPN at XYPN Live, that sort of thing. It's been awesome.

Maddy Roche: Totally. And Nate, maybe you would have found us earlier had we have been employing short form video on social media. But Nick, I was really tickled to hear that you are the most followed CFP® on social media. Is that true?

Nick Meyer: I don't like to brag, but I do have about 1.8 million followers across major platforms. I've had like over 350 million total short form video views. So it's been a wild ride so far.

Maddy Roche: Okay. Let's back up, Nick. where did you start? And how do you describe yourself? Like you certainly don't introduce yourself that way.

Nick Meyer: These days I'm a marketer, but I did start off in the industry. I spent four years as a financial advisor who also prepared tax returns, which was not the most fun thing in the world, for high net worth ultra high interest individuals did that for four years. COVID hit just like Nate. I was locked inside, didn't really have much else to do.

But instead of using video initially as a prospecting tool for my firm because they weren't really open to the idea. I just decided instead to spend my nights and weekends making educational personal finance content that younger me would have learned a lot from. Really would have been helpful to level up my personal finance knowledge about a year later, had a couple of hundred thousand followers, big brands like Fidelity.

SoFi, Discover Bank, Ally Bank, et cetera knocking on my door and saying, Hey you clearly understand this new format of marketing that we don't. Why don't you partner with us and help us get our next generation of customers on social media. So I'll quit my job as an advisor and have been in the marketing space on social media and short form video specifically ever since.

Maddy Roche: Heck yeah. And listeners, that's why we're here today is to talk about short form video and how to leverage social media. As a coach, I talk to members all day, every day. And there is a nice group of advisors who just don't really want to touch the social media space. I tell them I don't blame them and I don't urge them to, but I think Nate and Nick are going to make a very good case for why being on social media, specifically with short form video is so important.

Now, Nate and Nick, you two paired up together, right? Tell me a bit about N2.

Nate Hoskin: Yeah. So N2 content marketing is designed to help financial advisors make short form video by doing everything except appear on camera, because the main thing we learned both from our own time as advisors and also as marketers was that advisors are busy and there is a crazy seasonality to the work that they do.

They might have surge, then they have tax time, then they have a much needed vacation. But then they have a nice month where they can do a lot of marketing work. And so how do you fit something like social media that requires very consistent posting into a very inconsistent work cadence? The way we do that is we help them create three months or even six months of content in just three days. So that's the idea behind N2 is checking all of the boxes except actually sitting down and pressing the record button and of course doing all the coaching so that the advisor feels very confident doing that recording.

Maddy Roche: I had an advisor recently ask me, I need someone to help me with the plumbing behind the scenes of how all this works. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Like you would help them post it. You would help them edit it. Things like that?

Nate Hoskin: Exactly. Yeah, all of those little things that you don't quite think about how many hashtags should you have? What's the posting time if we're gonna get it edited how do we line up the editing with your brand colors and your personality? There are just so many tiny things that once you sit down to make a video you go Whoa, okay.

This is a bit more of a commitment than I was expecting.

Maddy Roche: Okay. I like hearing this, that you guys are pretty open. That it's not the easiest form of marketing out there. Is that what I'm hearing, Nate?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, I would say it is the easiest form of actual content marketing So the challenge is that pretty much all content marketing is really challenging. If you want to do a YouTube video if you want to do a podcast if you want to make static posts, all of them have those same limitations of needing to be very consistent, needing to really go out and be properly produced so that people like to consume it. That's not native to short form video, but it certainly is to content marketing.

Maddy Roche: Really good points. Nick, I'd be interested in just the space. You, seem to be an expert in it and I'd love to hear just you talk directly to the advisors who are listening around what is available, like what's on the table for advisors when it comes to social media marketing and short form video.

Nick Meyer: Yeah. I think a good place to start is just why we're such a big fan of short form video, specifically. When you do have long form video, you do have podcasts, you do have static Instagram posts. We even have text based LinkedIn or Twitter posts, short form video has the greatest potential for reach of all of them.

One of the big things we see with advisors is they love making podcasts. It's hard to find an advisor without a podcast these days, but the big problem with podcasts is discoverability is basically nothing. if you don't already have a built-in audience. No one's going to listen to it. So it's really difficult to be consistent with podcasts.

If you're uploading these hour long podcasts that take you a couple hours each to make, and you're getting three listens, one of them's maybe your mom. One of them's like one of your favorite clients. And I don't know who the other one will be, maybe you. But it's really difficult because the numbers just aren't there.

So instead of starting off with a podcast, we say podcasts are still awesome, but you want to build your audience first and that's what short form video is really great at because your follower count doesn't matter. When you're posting short form videos. If I post a bad video on my TikTok page that has 1.1 million followers, it'll get like a thousand views. Like still, that's a lot of people that are seeing the video, but it's not like maybe the 50 or a hundred thousand that I'd expect a decent video to get. And that's because the algorithm decides like whether or not your content's good. And if it's good, it shows it to more and more people because each platform is incentivized to keep people on the platform for as long as possible.

So if you make good content, They'll show that good content to as many people as they can, who they think would be interested in it because they want those people to have a good experience in that platform. So they can stay on there longer, get served more ads. So discoverability and the reach is just ridiculous on show for video.

And that's why we'd be able to impact so many people.

Maddy Roche: I'm so glad you used that word discoverability. What is going on in the background? Like how do they decide it's a good video? Is it just based on watch time?

Nick Meyer: Yeah. Watch time is the biggest metric that's tracked. So it varies depending on the platform. But just to give you an example on TikTok, if your average watch time for videos is like over 50% that usually means it's going to get a couple hundred thousand views. So that's really good. YouTube shorts is different. Those I see if it's over 80 or 90% usually you'll get pushed up into that six figure view range, just to give you an example of how it can vary across platforms. I have no idea why but just to dive deep into the mechanism of how like your videos, even get to certain people in the first place, whether or not you have a following is the algorithm will take your content, no matter how big your following count or if your follow count is or how low it is and push it out to a test group of a couple hundred users.

So no matter how many followers you have, you're still going to get at least a couple hundred views in your first few pieces of content. And that's the test group that determines whether or not your video is actually good. So if those people engage highly with the video, if the watch time is high, if they comment, if they watch it all the way through, if they like it, et cetera then it'll just keep pushing, getting pushed out to more and more people but obviously the barrier for what's good content keeps getting higher and higher as you get pushed out to more people. So it has to continually keep performing well, if it wants to get reached that next level of a push out.

Maddy Roche: Fascinating. Nate, I'm interested as an advisor who's trying to target specific people. Ideally, anyone at XY will be telling you that you need to think about who your ideal target market is. How do you become discoverable if you're trying to be somewhat narrow in who you're speaking to?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, so you do exactly that. You speak to the person that you would like to have as a client. So rather than saying, okay, I'm going to just make a blank video about the best savings account that people should have that just has the widest possible reach. Instead you find an exact light bulb moment or a problem that you've solved for a client and you distill that into a video because if you have a client that you just love and you answered a question for them and their eyes just lit up If you can take that same explanation and distill it into a video, the person who sees that video and resonates with it meaning that they're going to watch it for a longer period of time is going to be very similar to your persona, right?

And so then what these algorithms will do is within that test group. They will say okay half of the people in this test group really liked this video the other half maybe not so much. When we do the next test group, we're going to push it more towards people with that, with those similarities So the algorithm will naturally niche into the people who have the problem that you are solving, your only job is to answer a question or solve a problem that your ideal client would have. From there it takes care of it for you.

Maddy Roche: Wow, there's some momentum in the background working for you to get to the ideal target market.

Nate Hoskin: Absolutely. Yeah.

Maddy Roche: And Nick, as you explained, when you post a podcast, none of that's happening, right?

Nick Meyer: No, really the only discoverability for podcasts appears at the very top end of the spectrum. Like you'll see some shows are recommended, but you have to have tens of thousands of listeners before you even appear in those charts. 

So Nate I want to go back to the days that you had just launched your firm and you launched during Covid as you mentioned. I had just

Nate Hoskin: started my firm. I had no way of scheduling meetings with people I had no way of taking people out for coffee chats or holding in person seminars A lot of the things that i'd been doing to generate leads at my previous firm. But this little app called TikTok was really coming on the scene.

And was really becoming an interesting wave that people were getting on and I downloaded the app and I started seeing people like Nick making finance content and I was like, huh? I had never considered that as even an opportunity to educate people. So the other element that lined up really nicely was that I was studying for my CFP® at the time And so I was learning so much And I was like man, people need to know this.

This is information that I took home. I was surprised by it. I'm willing to bet that other people would be surprised by it too. And so what I would do is I would just take what was top of mind from my CFP® study, and I would talk about it on a video. And the first couple of videos were terrible for my first six months, making TikToks.

My bio line was the CEO of vocal fry. Because I was so worried that I would whisper and I would talk really quietly in my videos and so it would pull my voice down so much that it sounded like I was a smoker and it just sounded terrible, but people would watch it and people would engage so I just kept making them and kept improving my confidence as I went.

Maddy Roche: And so your first video is posted and to Nick's points, it does get out and tested. Like every TikTok gets tested like the way that you've explained, Nick?

Nick Meyer: Yeah. Nate, how about you tell her how much reach your first couple of videos got? Cause Nate started a lot of the gates really hot, way hotter than I did.

Nate Hoskin: I believe that the first three videos you post on social media Are absolutely essential. They're not necessarily going to break your progress But they can really change your momentum if you make those first three videos really impressive. And I think I got lucky more than anything. I happened to make three videos on really prevalent topics that people were really interested in that moment And so my first three videos combined got 1.7 million views. And so I was like, whoa, okay hold on this might be something I can do

Maddy Roche: I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall that night as you like checked your phone and saw that.

Nate Hoskin: Oh my gosh The doom scrolling of scrolling the comments and reading people roasting you on your voice and being like, oh god, I can do this It's working. But also I shouldn't do this because I'm bad at it and oscillating wildly back and forth

Maddy Roche: I want to talk to you about that, but first when it comes to your first three videos, like any recommendations or tips on how to gauge what it should be, what makes a good video? What have you both learned?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, I think I was actually just working with an advisor the other day on this talking about kind of the structure of a script because I believe that the good video comes down entirely to the structure of the script that you write. And with this advisor that I was working with he wrote a video script about taxable brokerage accounts.

And at the very beginning of his script, he said if you want to retire early, you should be using a taxable brokerage account as part of your retirement tool belt. And it got terrible engagement when he made the video and so all we did Was we just removed the word taxable brokerage account from that hook?

So if you want to retire early you should be using this tool. Because what that does is it opens a loop that they just have to close by watching the rest of your video and you can delay giving them the answer until later. That's what I struck on really early was I knew just from watching other videos that I shouldn't give the answer immediately. I would lead in with why it's useful and what the benefits are and what's going on with it And then at the very end of the video I would tell people what the tool was or what the thing was that I was talking about. And so that I think is something that I learned early that just completely changed my level of success. 

Maddy Roche: Nick, what did you learn early on about how to become engaging on video?

Nick Meyer: Yeah, it really changed for me when I started to up my production quality a little bit, because unlike Nate, unfortunately I did not get seven figures worth of views my first couple of videos. It took me probably three or four months to really start to see my engagement go up. The biggest part of the production quality increasing was my audio.

I think I was just using my phone mic immediately. And you'll learn this early on. If you do start posting video content, people will watch like lower quality, like video content, but they will not listen to lower quality audio content which is why we all have these fancy microphones in front of us for the show right now, because audio quality is key.

So I improved that. And then I eventually got this fancier camera. I started recording everything with, and that just really helps set you out against the crowd. Like you don't need super high quality stuff, but you need to make sure production video production quality is never a reason someone scrolls by your video and Hey, if it's a reason that they're impressed and gets them to stick around at least a second longer to hear what you're talking about, then that can really make a world of a difference.

Maddy Roche: And Nick, what were you drawn to posting about early on? What brought you into the space?

Nick Meyer: Yeah, I really just wanted to teach younger me what I wish I would've learned about personal finance because my parents weren't really financially literate, even as a finance major in college, I didn't really learn anything about personal finance. So I didn't really learn anything about personal finance until I started working as an advisor.

And I just realized I had so much information that would've helped out younger me and I figured there would be thousands or millions of people out there that were in the same position as younger me was. So why not try to help them out?

Maddy Roche: Do you know any of the demographics of who's on social media and maybe particularly TikTok? Because I can just hear some advisors saying, well my seven figure clients are not on TikTok, or this isn't where I'm going to find my ideal clients. Like, what would you say to that?

Nate Hoskin: I think that's the easiest cop out that financial advisors can use when it comes to social media, is they'll just say look like my clients or my prospects just they don't watch social media because I don't watch social media. And they project their distaste for the platforms on their clients And the simple fact is that 83 percent of Americans between the ages of 55 and 65 consume short form video on at least one platform.

They tend to go more towards YouTube and Facebook and less towards Instagram and TikTok. But that's not to say that TikTok and Instagram are bad platforms for attracting high net worth people. I actually had a conversation about a month and a half ago with a prospect that was so qualified that I ended up needing to say no because there was just no way that I could have served this client in the way that they needed so this person called me and we just started having a conversation and I learned very quickly that they were one family of 30 families in a three generation family tree that had been essentially aggregating all of their business resources like a family office but they weren't aggregating their personal saved resources like a family office So they all had different estate planners, they had different accountants and they had different wealth managers. But their businesses were absolutely intermingled. So this guy had been elected by the family to go and start to aggregate those resources and see if he could achieve some economies of scale. So he was asking me if I would be capable of overseeing 30 from intentionaly defective grantor trusts, all the way to qualified charitable trusts and charitable lead trusts, and then he also wanted me to manage about 178 million that would be split between broad equity and bond investments.

And private investments, which is not something that I do for my clients. And then he also wanted me to do the tax returns for all of those trusts and each of those individual families. And he was looking to see okay, if I give you all of this work, what kind of deal can you cut me? And I said I am not the person to help you with this, but today I wish I was, because if I could just serve those 30 families, that would be a business in and of itself.

I would never need to take another client

Maddy Roche: For sure. For sure. so Nate, this person found you on short form video? Or through short form video?

Nate Hoskin: On Tik TOK.

Maddy Roche: Oh, my gosh. Well, good thing you're part of XYPN and we know many advisors who would be happy to help this family, and kudos to you for knowing your boundaries and limits. Which makes me want to ask you, Nate, just to stay with you for a moment, how do you balance running your firm?

How does this impact capacity for it while you have the N2 endeavor and your presence on social media?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah. So I think I had a limiting belief when we started N2 that it was going to take three or four years to really ramp up and get busy. And so I was like, yeah, I'll know how to balance things by then. It'll be fine. And of course the growth at N2 has just been absolutely meteoric. And so I have had to find ways to balance my practice alongside that.

And the end result is that right now I'm not taking any new clients. I am just working with my existing book. My clients are awesome. I love hanging out with them. And so I never feel like It is too much of a strain to really serve them because I've found and I'm sure many advisors will agree with this that the actual management of the book is about 20% of the work The other 80% is growing the business and all of the things that you need to do to get that next client.

So when I removed my growth aspect and just started working with them, I freed up a lot of time And I know that in the next few months I will have to free up even more time to keep up with the work that we're doing at N2 So I'm not sure I have an answer to how I will handle that just yet. 

Maddy Roche: And Nick, how do you allocate your time among all of the different things you're involved in?

Nick Meyer: Yeah, it's 99% N2 right now. I basically have paused. I still do a couple of brand partnerships on my social media pages but I don't accept most of them. If there's a really good opportunity that comes in, like I just did one with, United Health Group that posted last month, that one made sense to take, but unless really good opportunities come in the door, I'm basically just pausing it and focusing on my effort here because this is a real business I can build. Like the other thing is cool. I have social media pages, but it was basically like, I'm an employee who every single video is like determines how successful I am. Like I'm only as good as my last video. whereas like with N2 we're building real business and we feel like we really are helping transform an entire industry.

So while maybe I'm like a top 10 or 15 personal finance creator, I feel like we can be a top one marketing firm in this specific niche that we are going after, and it's really just fun helping advisors get into the space and like just seeing them have so much success using this medium that they really hadn't thought about before.

Maddy Roche: Oh, I love that. I share that love for helping advisors. It just is a really special space to be in. Nick, I'm interested, among the platforms, how do you coach an advisor to choose which platform? If you make video, do you put them on all four? Coach me a bit on this.

Nick Meyer: Yeah, easy. All of them. advisors understand the benefit of diversification. And if you make one video, like just to give you some more context here if you make a video that is 90 seconds or less, it can be posted across all of YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTolk and LinkedIn. So if you can post a video everywhere, why not post it everywhere?

Because even to this day, I have videos that I post across all of my platforms on one platform, I get 10,000 views. Another platform, I get a million views. Like you just have no idea who the platform is going to send your video out to in that initial test group, or who is going to resonate with so you might as well diversify away. And if, video gets a million views in one platform and 1,000, another, you still feel like it's a successful video because of the total amount of views that it's got.

Maddy Roche: And where in the marketing pipeline are these videos sitting? is this establishing credibility? Do we have a call to action at the end of them? Like how, where in the funnel do short form video set.

Nick Meyer: Yeah. For all the clients that we work with, we split them up between top, middle and bottom of funnel pieces of content. We do batches of 60 or 120 videos for all the clients that we work with, and we split them 40 percent top of funnel, 40 percent middle of funnel, 20 percent bottom of funnel.

So top of funnel is purely to help grow their brand of social media, help their videos get more engagement and just get more viewers basically. We only include CTAs in about half of them, which are call to action. So like telling people to do something after the video, and usually they would be just follow or like or comment your opinion. One hack or one tip that we tell everyone and that we do for them, for the clients we work with, because we do all the scripting is you want to only tell people to do one thing.

So only have one call to action per video. Don't tell them to like and follow and share, tell them to do one thing. Otherwise they're just not going to do it. For middle of funnel content, this is when we really start to incorporate things like lead magnets or email lists, different things to get people further down that advisor's funnel and off platform, basically

grab their email so they can market to them or reach out to them in some other way. For bottom of funnel content, most of that is either like a higher end, like free retirement assessment or something where the client has to submit more information to them or just schedule a call to get people actually booked on the advisor's calendar and get them talking with them.

Maddy Roche: Anything to add to that Nate?

Nate Hoskin: I think that people think of the short form video as either a direct conversion or no conversion but something that they miss in that is that it really is part of a content flywheel. Because in general advisors need to have five or six touches with a prospect before they actually convert to a call. Those touches can be all sorts of different things. Maybe they go to a seminar, they receive the follow up email, they look them up on Google, which I'll talk about SEO ranking and how you can do that with short form video and then they'll go to your short form video, they'll watch a couple of those, and maybe from there they find your podcast, and that's where they really decide to schedule a call.

And so it's not necessarily just a first touch tool. It can also be a way of really getting people into your ecosystem in a really interesting way because if you make a short form video Google is actually now ranking those videos when you search for something. So it used to be that if you searched for something you would just find written articles. Now you will actually find videos that are related to the question that you are asking and so if you look up financial advisor Denver, you're not going to find anyone on the dedicated video tab.

In fact, you actually find Genesis, who's one of our content creator friends. She's one of the top ranked for that search result. And so it's just a complete blue ocean for advisors. It's a whole part of Google that they could rank on and they could be number one on for free and not have to compete with the half page of ads that usually comes in when you search for something.

Maddy Roche: Fascinating. Talk to us a bit more about SEO. I have so many advisors always thinking about how their website is performing. Would people be posting these videos on their websites ever? Or is it always just linking people to their websites from the videos?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, so I actually I had this idea that I really want to get one of our clients to do I'm curious to know if anyone will be open to it, but I think it'd be so interesting to have a video blog on your website. So instead of or in line with having a bunch of written content on your website, you could just have all of these videos posted as thumbnails so that they can just click in and watch multiple videos when they go to your website and that will also help your SEO ranking because those are still videos that can rank, right?

I personally believe that the best way to do SEO is to use other people's SEO rather than trying to build yours completely from scratch The more traditional method to do that is with backlinks, right? Contribute to Forbes, contribute to Business Insider, they'll link back to your website, both will rank you and your name higher.

But social media is an incredible way to rank as well because there's pretty much no one better in the space at SEO than Instagram and LinkedIn and Facebook, right? Think about how many times you Google something and that's one of the first things to come up And so when you're making a short form video in your caption or your description of the video, you can put in a blurb on your firm.

That's what I do every single time. Hoskin Capital is a Registered Investment Advisor in Denver serving this target demographic providing these services, so that when google gets a hold of it, they know exactly what that video is about even if their video translation is a little bit off. Text analysis is significantly easier than video analysis from a crawling perspective.

Maddy Roche: Wow. I'm interested, Nick, about the compliance component to this. What do you coach advisors on in terms of remaining compliant? What can they say? What can't they say? What should they say? Disclaimers. Either of you are welcome to answer this question.

Nick Meyer: Yeah, I'll pass that one off to Nate because he actually has to deal with this day to day as a Registered investment Advisor. I just have to deal with it whenever I do sponsor content for the big financial firms.

Maddy Roche: Okay? Nate?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, so compliance I think is something that scares advisors more than it should when it comes to marketing. I've actually been through the California and the Colorado examinations over the last couple of years and really I had to ask the Colorado examiner if he would please take a look at my social media and let me know if everything looks okay Because they just would not request it and Patrick the regulator who I was working with For Colorado DORA, he was like, you know what sure. Send me three videos and i'll just give you some feedback and it didn't show up on my deficiency letter It never came back as anything that was non compliant because they just don't really mind and I think he described it really well. He said look we want you guys to be out there because you're the experts.

You're the people who are fiduciaries You're the people who are providing really good knowledgeable perspectives on these topics We don't get to control and regulate the people who just show up on TikTok and start saying whatever. And so the idea that they would be withholding the most valuable educational resource just seems totally counterintuitive to their mission of making sure that everyone is getting legal adequate financial advice, and I was blown away by that.

So how do you stay compliant? Understanding that the regulators really want to help you do this and encourage you to do this The main thing is record keeping. So an advisor should maintain the script to the video, they should maintain the date that script was approved and by whom it was approved and then they should also maintain the final file for that video.

Because you need to have your marketing materials recorded for about five years to meet your books and records requirement. So if you check those boxes, and maybe you use something like XYPN Archive or Sharp Archive to keep those behind a glass wall as well as just another way to hold on to those materials you will be covering a lot of ground in terms of your compliance. The other thing that you can do is not talk about performance. Not recommend specific securities. Most advisors are probably rolling their eyes right now. They're like, yeah we know we've never been allowed to do that of course we wouldn't do it on short form video. And then also not giving direct advice. So if someone in a comment asks you what they should do with your 401k, it's probably not advisable to give them direct advice on what they should do with their 401k. As long as it's kept broad and kept educational you're really green lighted to do all of it.

Maddy Roche: I recognize you're not a compliance expert, although you're familiar with this when you say the video has been approved. Can you approve it yourself?

Nate Hoskin: Yep. Yeah So if you wear the CCO hat then you can be the person who approves it if you're at a larger firm or you outsource compliance to someone who is perhaps a fractional CCO they're the person who would have to put their stamp on it before you record it.

Maddy Roche: Okay, wonderful. I'm wondering if maybe advisors aren't ready to hire into but they want to be getting into short form video, like what are some of the softwares, the tools we talked about good mics, good lighting. Nick, what do you feel like are the top few pieces that advisors should be utilizing here?

Nick Meyer: Yeah, as far as software goes, we really run our business off of two main pieces of software. One is Notion for just like the project management side of things and the compliance tracking, compliance approvals, tracking like links for all posts and videos, et cetera. We have that all set up in a board in Notion, and we actually have a free template if people want to download it. We sent you a link, I'm sure it's going to be in the description, wherever this is posted, people can go in there and download it. And then we use a video editing software called Descript, which is super cool.

It's AI enabled. So what really sets out Descript apart from their competitors is that they automatically transcribe all of the video content you plug in there. So instead of having to go through and like edit video on a timeline, you can just like highlight text, delete it and it removes that part of the video.

So this allows us to. Edit videos a lot faster. Cause usually we do multiple takes for each scene and we do verbal call outs after we are done recording the scenes and say, Hey, that was a bad clip. Cut that. Or that was a good clip. Watch that one. So we can automatically cut all the bad ones before we have to waste time listening to it.

So it really speeds up our workflow there. Descript is paid. Notion is free. unless you do a certain business plan, but Descript's only like 12 bucks a month. So it's not anything crazy. So that's it really the software side. If you really just want to do test out short form video on as low of a budget as possible on the production side, if you have a relatively recent model phone.

That will do just great. And then if you get one of these guys, which is a Rode Video, Mic Me-L there's also a version called the Me-C for USB-C adapted phones, that will give you better audio quality. It's $70 than a multi hundred dollar professional microphone. It is very good.

It'll make a world of difference in your content. If you have that plus your phone, plus even just a softbox light, which I have two set up right in front of me. Nate also does, which is why we have even lighting across us right now. That will set your content apart from most other people in your feed and make you look really good.

And then go back to that point I made earlier about video production, not being a reason that people scroll by your video. 

Maddy Roche: Fascinating. I'm wondering, Nate you mentioned kind of getting into the doom scrolling and I imagine with the kind of followers you both have, there are some haters out there. How do you deal with them? 

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, if you get a hate comment, you've made it. You've reached. Congratulations. That means that someone was so annoyed or just engaged by your content that they just had to comment. And so, my response is always, oh they just supported my video. Because the more comments, the more engagement you get, the better the video performs.

And so I never recommend posting something incendiary with the intention of getting hate comments or getting people yelling at you, but if you post something that creates a dialogue where someone might take a polarizing view on that topic That's a great way to have a really good video. For example, I did one, I did a random one on European delivery essentially where you can go overseas to pick up a Volvo or a Mercedes or a Porsche, and they will give you some sort of discount, put you up in a hotel, let you drive it on their racetrack, that kind of thing.

And some people loved it. They were like, Oh man, that's the coolest thing. I didn't know you could do that. And other people hated it. They were like, Oh, they're just avoiding the landed tax. They're just avoiding the import taxes. They're doing this to try to con you. If they're going to put you up in a hotel, it means you're buying too expensive a car.

You should buy used. And that dialogue. Drove the video to a combined 10 million views across all platforms because people were arguing in my comments. So I think hate comments are great. And in general, I don't respond to any comments. If I'm going to respond to a comment, I'm going to save that comment and respond to it in a video.

Because then I get another piece of content out of it and I also get to share my opinion with a wider audience. I'm not scrolling through my comments replying to everyone trying to fight the people who are hating and support the people who aren't.

Maddy Roche: Would you ever delete comments?

Nate Hoskin: I will delete spam comments, and I will delete misinformation comments. So if someone is posting, I have a bit of a, bit of a war going on with IUL salespeople, Indexed Universal Life salespeople, we just don't, we don't get along and so occasionally people will post something that is just utterly non factual and I will delete that.

And then I also have people who will try to sell something like a day trading course or something like that in my comments, I will delete that. Otherwise I leave and let lie.

Maddy Roche: Great. Nick, what do you see as the future for short form video for advisors?

Nick Meyer: Yeah, I think it's going to be table stakes. If you want any, if you want to obtain new clients, we're obviously a little bit biased but if you think about the impact video has, discoverability wise and then also as a way to warm up a completely cold audience, like there's really, it's really peerless. Video allows you to get in front of your ideal client at scale and build trust with them in a way that no other form of media can because not only do they hear your opinions on certain topics, they get to see your body language, they get to hear your speaking cadence. They basically feel like they already know you before they ever schedule a call. And there's really not any other form of media, especially with the discoverability power behind it, that just offers that sort of reach, discoverability ability to get new clients.

So, yeah, if you want to have a presence as an advisor, especially as a solo advisor, without a huge marketing budget behind you, we're again, we're biased but we think it's a really good idea to get your face out there, to get your opinions out there to start building trust at scale with short form video because if you don't, other advisors will. And if, your potential clients are seeing these other advisors on their social media feed, seeing their videos week after week, building up trust with them, why would they ever look anywhere else to hire an advisor? Why would they try to look elsewhere and go find you who they've never met, never seen talk, never heard their opinions of. When they already know and trust this other group of advisors, they can just go out and interview.

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, something else we've been seeing as a regime shift with the short form video is that larger companies are using it as the foundation of their marketing. Because now that everything is starting to become more established, if you have a podcast, short form video provides the discoverability.

If you make long form videos, you can link those long form videos to your shorts in YouTube, and you can drive that traffic to the less discoverable format. If you want to run paid ads, instead of paying a bunch of money to run a lot of different creative, you can just post short form videos, figure out which one performs the best organically, and then put money behind it.

So you get to do all of your A B testing with paid advertising completely for free, just as a function of your marketing in general, rather than having a separate budget for that. And then if you have any sort of lead magnet, Or a newsletter or any other way of collecting email addresses. Short form video is going to provide the traffic to get conversions there.

Whereas otherwise you just had to wait for people to land on your website. And so that's where the larger companies are going. Short form video is the foundation. Let's build an entire funnel off of the discoverability that we're driving from short form. And that's, I think is where advisors will end up is it's just going to be absolutely table stakes. It's going to be foundational to all of their marketing efforts and then they get to do really cool things like they get to add more things on top of that simply wouldn't work without that traffic.

Maddy Roche: Yeah, I'm just thinking of a lot of the people I work with, their bread and butter, what they love the most is working with clients. Not everyone like loves marketing and I don't know if everyone, would want to run a big marketing machine the way both of you have built marketing machines.

And so like how much input are they going to have to put in to get a really solid book of business out of it? And I don't know if you can answer that, but do they have to do this for five more years or can they do it for six months and get enough leads? Cultivate those leads and convert them.

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, that's a really good question I think that there will always be value in posting the next video, but there will absolutely be diminishing returns because when you have a digital mass, when you have 120 or 240 videos out there and available for people to consume, you are going to have the initial momentum of posting all of those to short form video platforms, but then you have all of these assets that you should be using in other ways.

So a number of ways that our clients use them is they will send their social media profiles to their clients as a method of making soft referrals. So hey, you don't need to send someone my phone number or my email address to refer me. You can just send them my social media. That way they can get caught in and start to know and trust me without feeling like they have to sit down for a call with their friend's reputation riding on the line, right?

They just get to watch hands off and really figure out who I am. The other big one is using these videos to send to prospects in the future to improve your show up rates. So we actually have a client who pays Smart Asset for leads. And they have completely blown every other advisor out of the water on closing those leads Because rather than cold calling them off the jump like the other three advisors who got that phone number are doing They're sending them a text and then they're sending them a video. And so if you get three cold calls that you immediately hang up on, but then you get a text with an introduction video where you can actually know and understand that person who do you think you might respond to?

Or you might be more likely to respond to. So what we see with clients is that they build that digital mass. They find a million and one ways to use it. And then at some point down the line, they usually come back and figure out a way to make that next video.

Maddy Roche: As we kind of wind down our conversation, Nick I'm wondering if you have any final tips or pieces of advice to people who maybe aren't quite on social media yet, to maybe draw them towards that. 

Nick Meyer: Yeah, I think one tip that we always share with people that this is a mistake that advisors make all the time when they do decide to start short form video is understanding that people follow people, they do not follow companies. So when you do finally branch out and make your social media profiles, please make your own headshot the profile picture. Do not make it your company logo and try to have your name in your handle, so your username across all platforms, not your company name. Because people know when they're being sold to, they're not stupid. These are people that watch like tens of hours of social media content every single week.

And branded posts show up in their feed, like every four or five scrolls and people do not like being sold to. So make sure you're personally branded. You lead with value in all of your content. And to go back to your point from the last question of a lot of advisors, they don't like marketing. They just want to serve their clients.

Short form video feels the least like marketing of any marketing channel I've come across because you aren't just saying, Hey, come work with me. I have a financial advisor I'll do these things for you. You're just sitting down and explaining helpful information that you probably say to a lot of your clients as well, or just information like what I was doing right away, just saying personal finance stuff that I wish younger me would have learned.

So you're really coming at it from the space of an educator rather than a salesman. And that feels a lot more comfortable for a lot of people.

Maddy Roche: I often describe social media as being noise and I'm just wondering, are we just inviting people to create more noise, more videos about the standard stuff? Like, how do we differentiate ourselves here?

Nate Hoskin: Yeah, I think that there is so much genuine noise on social media where that piece of content is not gonna benefit anyone. Maybe it'll give them just a little bit of dopamine, a little something, get them through the day. I don't want to completely discredit it but the idea that you could get in front of someone who might be completely ignoring their finances because they're just really stressed out about it Or someone who is using social media as an escape from losing a family member or losing a spouse And they're not in the position to really face those types of decisions, but they are ready to start to learn about what that might look like If you can meet them in the most comfortable place And give them something that will actually help them.

That's a really powerful thing. Like I have a million people a month who consume my content And they might be 18 and they will never work with me but if they understand what a Roth IRA is or if they understand what taxes will look like depending on how their income works That's something they're going to use to become more comfortable in life That's a genuine impact.

That's something that I feel very proud of. And it doesn't have anything to do with whether or not I made money off of that content.

Maddy Roche: Well said. Thank you, Nate. That makes a lot of sense. Any final words from you, Nate as an active advisor to others in your community about adopting short form video on social media.

Nate Hoskin: I think the big thing is that I just want to congratulate everyone who's already doing it. I'm blown away by how much short form video i've been seeing from advisors just in the last two or three months. It really is this wave where advisors went. Oh, I get it. I see the value of this and so I get to scroll Linkedin and see all of these people that I met at XYPN Live or that I saw at these other conferences And I see them making videos and of course there are some where i'm like, oh, please come work with us, we could really help you with lighting and production but for pretty much everyone like they're out and they're doing it. They took that leap And i'm just so excited to see the impact that has on the industry as a whole as Nick said earlier We get to truly change this industry just by teaching people that short form video is possible.

So for all the people doing it, congratulations and please keep going.

Maddy Roche: Well, congratulations to you two. It has been a total pleasure to get to know both of you and to really learn more about social media marketing through these short form videos. Thank you so much for attending XYPN Live for being part of our community and for being advocates for this space.

Nate Hoskin: Absolutely. Thanks for having us, Maddy.

Maddy Roche: You're welcome.