Joel Crampton: I'm Joel Crampton, I help financial advisors, RIAs, and wealth managers replace scattered marketing with strategic systems that boost AUM and production volume. ⁓ Welcome to CMOs Without Borders.
Mandy: Hey, how's everyone doing today?
Joel Crampton: Okay, good day. Nice.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: going well.
Mandy: That's a better start than what I started with our last podcast, Yeah, exactly. Today is a better day, especially because we have Alex on the call with us today. Yeah. ⁓ We're really excited to have Alex on the call with us.
Joel Crampton: Last week he was, ugh.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Thank you, Amara, for having me.
Mandy: Alex Casa is the founder of Clients Black Box. They have been in business for five years now and they specialize in meta advertising and they're a meta partner, specifically for financial advisors, RIAs, different types of advisors that are looking to get more leads that convert within meta. So Alex, over the last five years, they spent over 10 million ⁓ meta advertising and they've booked over 30,000 appointments. ⁓ are amazing numbers, Alex.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: that's a great intro. ⁓ Thanks for starting with that.
Joel Crampton: And just to clarify, Meta, a lot of people may not know Meta, ⁓ but it's fairly synonymous with Facebook, but that also encompasses their Instagram platform, any other channels. Alex, can tell us a little bit more of, when you say you're a Meta partner, you're a Meta platform, advertiser, how do your ads go out and reach different audiences?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so we're an official Metta partner just means that you know, we have a little bit better relationship with Metta than somebody who advertises directly with them and ⁓ most of our clients are advertising towards pre-retirees and retirees and 70 % of big boomers are on Facebook, which is a big part of Metta. Metta also encompasses Instagram as well and we use, let's say 80 % of our spend is Facebook and 20 % is Instagram and it's Mostly for the, I guess, Gen Xers who might be on Instagram just to retarget them, but Facebook still gets majority of spend and has the best return for most of our clients. If you're advertising to a 35 year old, probably want to spend most of your money on Instagram, but that's not our demographic.
Joel Crampton: And you don't advertise outside of the meta platform like on LinkedIn or X or anything like that.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so we've tried every other platform, including YouTube ads, Google ads, Bing, ⁓ Quora, Pinterest, ⁓ Reddit. We spent anywhere between, and LinkedIn as well, we spent anywhere between 10 to 20,000 on each of those platforms to first to see how the quality of the prospects that comes from that is and the cost. And ⁓ we found that Meta is the most scalable. ⁓
Joel Crampton: Ready? Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: We've got one client up to half a million a month up spent on Meta targeting pre-retirees and retirees. And it's hard for me to imagine to be able to do that elsewhere. YouTube and Google have the promise of maybe potentially doing that, but I don't know anybody who's successfully doing ⁓ late generation that's compliant at scale on those platforms. So from our experience, Meta is the most scalable or reliable.
Joel Crampton: I was gonna mention the most recent headline when it comes to meta-advertising is that they're overtaking Google. Is that correct?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. Yeah. And the biggest headline for us is that they want to have, including financial advisors, any business go into Facebook and just say, Hey, here's who I want to target. And then it does all the work for them. creates the ads, the assets, the targeting. Yeah.
Joel Crampton: Yeah, through their AI platform, right? You get them your target audience and the message, they go build the ads. They take more than just your four or five ad sets that you've created in-house. They use their AI algorithms to create all these ads and then just over time figure out just exactly what is most engaging with that content. So it's almost a done-for-you approach. You just have to give them your credit card and let them run.
Mandy: Yeah, but the challenge with Meta and Facebook is that they have so many restrictions when it comes to financial services advertising. Alex, talk a little bit about how you ⁓ ⁓ work within those restrictions while producing good results for your clients.
Joel Crampton: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so last year about this time April of 2025 is when they really tightened on financial services category where they met up really wants you to apply that label to your ads. And what that does is it doesn't allow you to target by age, which is a big deal for our clients because they most people don't have a lot of liquid assets outside of their 401k and IRAs. And that doesn't become liquid up until 59 and a half. So really, most of our clients only want to advertise to the folks that are 55 and above. we're getting them lot of 35 year olds, they're not happy about that outcome. So financial services category says, hey, you can't really target by age, so we're gonna spend it however we'd like. And the targeting is also a little bit weaker. So a lot of our clients that joined us this year say that they got affected by that. And our approach, It is compliant within Meta's restrictions, but we don't use ⁓ the financial services category because we're not promoting in the way that we market our RIAs and financial advisors. We're not promoting a product. We're not saying, hey, use this investment model or buy this insurance product or hire me as a financial advisor. We are creating educational videos where it's advisor led, the advisor in the camera, he's saying, hey, did you know that XYZ Well, you don't have enough time in this video, click the button below, see my longer video that's going to educate you on the top three retirement risks and how to avoid them. So it's all very educational in nature. And even our Facebook pages, we try to label them as like an educational website instead of a financial planner or financial advisor, the ones that everyone adds from in order to go around that restriction. So that way we don't have to use the special ads category and we're able to advertise this as an educational funnel. that gets people to potentially book an appointment with a financial advisor after that. But it's not, we're not promoting the appointments, we're not promoting the products, we're not promoting the advisor, we're the educational content. So that's helped us spend a good amount on Facebook ads right now. And a lot of our clients this year saying the quality of prospects they're getting this year is better than last year because of this approach we've taken this year to navigate the changes in meta. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about your approach a little bit more Alex you talk a little bit about ⁓ going after clients not selling them on a specific product, but educating instead. And that seems to be generating more leads for your clients. Tell us a little bit about what results you are seeing and why that educational approach makes a difference.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so the educational approach is based off of, there's a book that I have here in my library, I don't know if I can find it now, called Breakthrough Advertising. There it is. And this guy popularized the concept of awareness levels. So ⁓ you got the smallest segment of the market is people who are aware of the product. Hey, I want to buy this insurance, I'm shopping for this insurance product or shopping for financial advertisements. 3 % of the market according to a lot of different stats. Then you've got people who are ⁓ product aware, which is smaller than that. They want this specific insurance policy or this specific financial advisor. ⁓ Beyond that, you've got solution aware. Then you've got problem aware. I know that I have a problem. Maybe I'm not aware that there are solutions to that. And there's the unaware. don't even have a problem. don't even know that they have a problem. So the broader you go, the lower your advertising costs will be because you're able to resonate with more people and you're able to educate them through the decision making process from, hey, ⁓ yeah, actually I do have that problem and ⁓ I didn't know there are solutions to this and this firm is the best. you know, solution for me to go about this and here's why the three different reasons why and what's the next step I should book a meeting with them. Okay, great. the way the reason why we go with an educational approach is ⁓ it helps us expand our addressable market. It helps us scale up. can't really spend that much money if you're only going after the people that are ready to buy and able to scale beyond beyond what you're able to get. ⁓ But also it helps us enable ⁓ the missions of most wealth management firms, which a lot of their mission is to educate Americans on better financial planning strategies. That's if you go to most financial advisor websites, the mission's somewhere in the website, you're find that, our mission is to educate as many people as possible on better financial planning strategies, help them make less mistakes and make better financial decisions. And if you're only advertising a product or pay hire me or do XYZ, ⁓ you're not accomplishing that. But by... accomplishing your mission and also expanding your town, your total addressable market to be able to get better results for business-wise and also ⁓ mission-wise. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, Metta is becoming a tougher platform and it is getting harder and harder to get really good sales qualified leads on Metta ⁓ You're probably seeing some results where some the financial advisors with you directly seeing great results and others are not seeing ⁓ as good ⁓ What's the difference in those that you're seeing?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. So I like to break up results by a couple of things. So you've got marketing, which is I'm going to get you leads, opportunities, appointments on your calendar. Then you got sales. It's how do I get those from, I'm interested in qualified to let me sign on a dotted line and become a client. When it comes to marketing, we see very consistent results in being able to drive qualified appointments at a certain cost for most of our clients. The ⁓ variance ⁓ or the volatility can come from their ability to actually close business. ⁓ ⁓ And that we try to pre filter for before accepting a client based off of the company size. So Five years ago, we would work with any financial advisor today. Our minimum is typically three advisors and a hundred million of a U.M. because we found that if you have more than a million a year of revenue, can, you're at a stage where you can start affording marketing. You're not sales driven as much. You're not, want to, your time is worth enough money that it makes most sense, more sense for you to put your dollars towards advertising than put your time towards prospecting. That's one. Number two, if you have three or more advisors, then you've had
Joel Crampton: Thank
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: good sales process, you're able to teach those advisors and you also have the ability and the willingness to scale beyond yourself and not just be a solo advisor. And there's nothing wrong with being a solo advisor, I'm just saying that. Both solo advisors. ⁓ would have a higher priority on sales and business development than actually marketing, which is a different stage for the company. So those companies that have fewer advisors and 100 million plus of AUM, they typically have a good dialed in sales motion, sales process, and they're able to close. ⁓ But people that are under that, it's more hit or miss depending on their own sales ability.
Mandy: Hmm.
Joel Crampton: think it's an analogy. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. So the horse is the advisor. The water is the lead, the prospective client. You can give them the lead, but for them to actually close that prospective client into an actual client, that's on them. And that's maybe where Vandy and I can come in and help them improve their sales process. take that lead and actually convert it into a prospect or at least take that lead and nurture them through the process, because I don't know what your close ratio is on that lead. mean, again, that's dependent on the advisor, but even if they don't close that lead and that their first initial one, two, three calls, they get dropped into a nurturing campaign where we can continue to send them messaging, drip on them, try to get them through the process eventually, but just because they don't close that first, round of calls doesn't mean that's a wasted lead or a wasted ⁓ investment that they put with your firm. that a good way to think through it?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: No, for sure. mean, there's many firms that we work with that 30 to 40 percent of their production would come from opportunities they got last year. And for somebody to say, hey, I want you to ⁓ manage my and I've worked three to four decades and I can trust you with it from the first meeting, that's unrealistic. So the ⁓ sales cycle a lot of our clients see is 60 to 90 days, and that's three to four meetings to get somebody to move forward, and that's average. Some people are gonna be faster than that, and some are gonna be a lot slower than that, because it's a big decision for them. It's not like buying a book ⁓ or ⁓ ⁓ and things around me, mouse pad, it's a big decision. So it can take a while for people to get comfortable with you and build that trust and decide to move forward.
Mandy: Yeah, trust is.
Joel Crampton: And you talked about earlier that 95 % of the market's not ready to make a change anyway. And the fact that they're on Facebook and scrolling, looking at their friends' photos and grandkids' activities, it's kind of a pattern to interrupt when that ad does pop up for that financial advisor. So while they may have some initial interest in filling out the ad or filling out the contact form on that ad, that they're not actively looking in that exact moment. So it does take a little bit to convert them. What's the follow-up process? Like, you walk me through? I'm just so curious about that actual process ⁓ of working with your firm, because I've never worked exactly with clients, Black Box. I've with a couple other ⁓ firms that do something similar. And I've also done my own Facebook and Meta-Ad campaigns. we'd love to learn more about your process.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so our primary responsibility is on generating the appointments. 40 advisor and our firms typically have their own, our clients have their own follow up processes. So they have either help spot like Mandy uses that they'll build out like, you know, a multiple month follow up sequence. And what a lot of them would do. And again, this is not something that we do for them, but what I've seen them do is they would host quarterly webinars for people that are in their pipeline where they are going to invite everybody to show up to webinars to talk about, know, what's, what's happening now in the market and what they need to do to address that or tax planning opportunities like the one, one big, build that came out, gave people a lot of new opportunities that they can take advantage of. So people had a lot of questions about that. So a lot of people did webinars about that. That worked really well for them. So quarterly webinars do work for nurturing your existing pipeline. haven't seen a lot of people have success with running ads to a webinar to get clients, but for pipeline nurture, they're a great and effective tool. If the advisor is local and they're marketing locally to their immediate radius, then a lot of times going to host events, dinner seminars or workshops or client appreciation events where they're going to invite their existing clients or potential clients to come in and maybe, you know, get, get dinner and get educated about tax planning or investment management strategies. That's another way to nurture their pipeline. And a lot of people have, you know, email sequences and, and if they have the staff, you know, SDRs and BDRs who follow up with their prospects on a regular basis in order to get them re-engaged. And if they didn't show up, they're going to call. email them, voicemail them to get them back to book an appointment if they spoke with them six or nine months ago and the client said, hey, I need to go do XYZ, then talk to you again, like, you know, if they're going through a certain life situation. ⁓ For example, I've just got a client call an hour ago and there's a couple of his prospects that were getting divorced a few months ago and he's reaching out back to them this month to see how everything went and to see if he can support them in their financial planning side of things. Or, know, they're going to sell real estate, whatever. There's a lot of reasons for people to... move forward right now and ⁓ a lot of our clients, know, again, they have either quarterly webinars, ⁓ events that they're marketing locally, ⁓ sequences, and if they have the staff for it, ⁓ follow-up in order to get people re-engaged and then booking another meeting either with that same advisor or if they're big enough, a lot of times they can say, hey, know, and like Jeff, would you want to talk to Brad? You know, switching up advisors to start up a new ⁓ if that was the objection back then.
Joel Crampton: just to reiterate, you don't set up any of systems or processes. That's something like Mandy and I would do from a marketing and leadership standpoint. So you just bring that lead in to the firm and then however they follow up with that and that's on that, right?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, yeah. So we like to stay very niche in what we offer because everybody's got a limited bandwidth, right? Like the reason why a lot of people see a lot of volatility with marketing agencies is that the agency tries to do everything for them. You know, like we're going to run Google and LinkedIn and Facebook and this and that. So how could you build expertise if you're doing 10,000 different things every day? We do one thing very well. I've got 10 people doing it for our clients for a very homogenous side of clients. You we don't work with e-commerce or SaaS or even FinTech, is close enough, but not really that close. We really only work with RIAs and financial planning firms who serve mass affluent, high net worth prospects that want financial planning. And that's why we're able to produce a more consistent result. And that's why we say, hey, you need to do this, but it's not something that we do for you. This is something that you can hire a fractional CMO for, you guys, Joel or Mandy, or the bigger firms that have enough
Mandy: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: revenue, they would hire an in-person ⁓ marketing, director of marketing, a marketing leader who that's their main job is to build out all these infrastructures, ⁓ email sequences, nurture sequences, SMS, deliverables, downloadables, branding, posting on social media, which can be important. ⁓ That's not something that we do for them, but we recommend that they do it, ⁓ you know, especially if they want to convert more aspects.
Mandy: Yeah.
Joel Crampton: Good, love it, yeah. Two thumbs up for that.
Mandy: Yeah, Alex has a really well-oiled machine with his team and able to execute really quickly. I was so impressed ⁓ in the execution of what he actually does. ⁓ But I wanted to just touch on ⁓ that conversation and the fact that, Alex, you highlighted the fact that you can bring the leads in. from a marketing standpoint, you could bring the leads in, but unless sales is connected to marketing and you have that connective tissue in there, you're not gonna be able to effectively close those leads. So it's so critical that marketing talks to sales, who talks to, if there's a product, who talks to product, and that the entire organization is aligned ⁓ in that messaging and in getting that ⁓ what we call in marketing of that full funnel into play so that the lead is being passed off efficiently and effectively through each stage.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Absolutely.
Joel Crampton: Hey Alex, is there a budget that, like a minimum budget that ⁓ firms should consider investing in? Because a lot of firms just, they just, they don't do any marketing. Going from zero to 10,000 a month is a big jump for them. there tiers that you can kind of get them, ⁓ like get ads going or what's your process there?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, in terms of advertising on Facebook to generate appointments and lead generation, there is a recommended budget and I'll go through that. But first of all, I do think it is worth investing in the infrastructure of how to handle the opportunity once it comes to you. So, you know, what's your onboard?
Joel Crampton: Yeah, say it louder, Alex. You want to repeat that?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: No, I don't just say that to be on this podcast and be like, hire Joel and Mandy. But it's even like for my company, know, like we're like, you know, we have our own marketing and sales process and without having that educational sequence to get somebody from, hey, I'm interested to actually, you know, booking the appointments again later on and then moving forward, we would have wasted a lot of money. A lot of our clients this year are people that have been following my content and been in my email list for literally years. Like I just got off a
Joel Crampton: Right, yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: this morning again with somebody who spoke to me back in 2022 when I was just first getting started. We spoke again in 2023 and now he spoke to me again in 2026. His business changed, my business changed and now it's a fit, right? So having that is very important and I think that's sometimes senior, like more important than just throwing money at. getting leads or opportunities because it's really important to have that. Sometimes you just have to get some momentum and start getting some opportunities, but you also want to know that once they come in, you're going to be able to convert them. that aside, if you want to start advertising on Meta in order to get appointments and leads, especially if you're advertising towards pre-retires and retirees, if you're going nationwide, we recommend the minimum budget of $10,000 a month on ad spend. because we find that that's just barely enough to get you enough prospects in the door for enough of them to show up, for enough of them to have at least one or two like actual... people who are likely to close a month for you to get any consistency. If you're spending two or three thousand a month nationwide, it's really hard to have any consistency. You might get lucky and get one client but not get anything for two quarters. ⁓ for you to control that regression to the mean and the volatility, you have to spend enough for you to see some consistency ⁓ month over month. If you're advertising locally, ⁓ you know, locally means, your state or a little bit smaller than that in terms of geography, five to 7,000 a month would be appropriate because the. I'm talking about financial advisors now, but close rate, if you're local, is a lot higher if you get to meet them in person versus nationwide through Zoom, right? So you're able to afford a higher cost per meeting because you know you're going to close a lot more than nationwide. So those are the general guidelines we tell people. So it depends on their goals. And some people just want to dominate their area. They still have some room to grow there. Or some people just, you they say, hey, I've done well here. I want to expand nationwide. Or some people will say, I don't really care where my clients live.
Joel Crampton: Thank
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: as long as I can help them, they're a good fit for me personality wise and asset wise, then I don't care if I'm in New York and they're in California or Texas, I'm happy to work with them. So depends on the client's goals, but those are generally the guidelines to go after.
Joel Crampton: So from a client acquisition cost standpoint, if they're spending five grand a month, minimum, how many leads, how many appointments does that typically get on average? I know you've got tons of data around that.
Mandy: listen.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, I can talk about the appointments. If they're advertising locally, they're spending $5,000 a month. They should be seeing around 10 appointments a month booking their calendars. And that should get them, depending on their close rate, somewhere between one to three clients that month, and also depending on their minimum vegetable assets.
Joel Crampton: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: ⁓ A good general rule if you want to be super safe with your marketing budget is the 1 % rule. So for every million dollars of AUM, you want to be able to spend $10,000 to get that client and be okay with it. So. Yeah. ⁓
Joel Crampton: That's break even costs essentially, yeah. From an AUM B only standpoint, you know.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: At scale, that's what you're seeing. A lot of big firms, that's what they're seeing at scale. And if you get better than that, great, good for you. But if you want to be able to do that at a much bigger level, that's typically where you're be looking at safely. And you can probably do a lot better at smaller scales. it also depends on, again, if your minimum is $3 million, are you comfortable spending $30,000 to get one client? Right? If your minimum is 500K, you could spend five grand and get one client, you know? and that's generally the rule of digital in person. You know, you could do a little bit better. And if you have a better, more optimized funnel, you can definitely do a lot better.
Mandy: Yeah, I think, you know, with with client back clients black box, I think that the process that you're doing a 30 to 60 second ad, but then you're leading them to a landing page that has an 10 minute or more video. So the clients going through that video are very engaged by the time they watch that video. They've dedicated 10 minutes to it. So at that point, them booking an appointment. you've hooked them in, you've got them completely engaged. So it's a higher likely, in my opinion, a higher likely to close at that point.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, I just attended an event Monday and Tuesday ⁓ where it's a financial planning organization. They're getting all their clients from Facebook ads and the way they were running ads is, you know, it's a 60 second video to a page that has an offer. says hire us because of XYZ and they're seeing good results with that. But they just launched their VSL finals this month and they're seeing ⁓ Better engagements. People are not coming in for an offer. They're coming in because they have a problem and they want you to solve it for them. They're seeing better engagement from those leads. And that's what we call funnels, a VSL funnel, video sales letter funnel. It's very, again, educational, but it's very specific. we don't talk about, financial advisory firm might do eight to 15 different things for their clients, including investment management, risk management, income planning, social security maximization strategies, tax planning, estate planning. a lot of different things, but for every marketing campaign, we try to be very specific. Like, hey, for this one, I'm only going to talk about this specific risk that applies to this specific person. If you have more than half a million dollars and you're about to retire, here's a risk that most of us don't tell you about sequence of returns risk. What if you retired the wrong time? Let me show you a couple of examples. Are you comfortable accepting this risk or would you like to transfer it to a different part of your portfolio that wouldn't be affected with it? And we have strategies for that, book a call. So we try to be very specific and that helps improve the quality of the conversations that the ⁓ advisors get. So instead of running like a ⁓ general branding video, bragging about the firm saying, we've been doing this for 30 years and we have this many clients and all of that. ⁓ There's a place and a need for that. But when it comes to direct response advertising, which is what we do, you want to be very specific with the problem and that drives up the quality of the conversations you would have with your prospects.
Joel Crampton: And do you help them, what's the actual, again, I don't know anything about the company. Like what's the process look like ⁓ that you work with the advisor? Do you help them record that first video and then that longer video and what does that actually look like?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: So we try to take on everything that we can take on. So we script everything. The advisor does the recording. We have a remote videographer who helps him with the recording or her with the recording. We do the video editing and post-production. Even if they have a compliance department they want us to go through. So they're going to send the scripts to compliance. Compliance will say, change ABC. We go change it for them, send it back to compliance. Compliance approves of the final version. Then they record. So we do the post-production. page build outs and calendly and schedule one, whatever appointment booking software they use, we're going to set it up for them, manage it for them. Even when we're running the ads, we will monitor their availability. So if for example, they're gone vacation one week, they don't tell us, going to email them and Hey, by the way, I don't see any spots in calendar that's going to affect your cost. Would you like us to reduce the spend or, you know, ⁓ pause it for a week? ⁓ So we manage that for them. And also when we're running the ads, we ⁓ run the ads, do the media buying, we target the right audiences, we booked 30,000 appointments, we use that as a local like on Facebook, which we can do by going around special ads category. And we have tracking spreadsheets for you how much we spend per day per week per month, what's the number of appointments, what's the cost per appointments, another tab where they can fill out their information, or if they're big enough, or if they use HubSpot, they can fill it out on HubSpot, we, you know, take the information and fill out in our spreadsheet, we track the results that way. And we meet with them, depending on the client and their need, but in most cases, twice a month, where we go over here's what's happened in past two weeks, here's how much we spent, here's how many appointments, and here's how many people you talk to, what's your close rate, what's your show rate, go through all those metrics with them. So that's the process and what it looks like to work with us. It's very much, we try to do everything for them that they don't need to do from this specific appointment generation system in their business. Are we going to build up their email nurture sequence? Not really, you know, because it's custom for each, too custom for each client and it's better for them to build it on their own. ⁓ The only thing that's on their part is basically recording the videos, which we help with. We have a remote videographer who helps them with that. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, Alex's team is actually very easy to work with and they do end to end for all of the meta advertising that they do. It's literally end to end from start to finish. ⁓ As, as you said, they won't go into the infrastructure that goes beyond getting that sales qualified lead, but everything within meta, everything that needs to happen, they've got it covered. I'm going to circle back. you must be seeing a difference in the quality of videos that you're getting from advisors. So some advisors are probably great on camera while others may not be ⁓ as good on camera ⁓ for of that, because ⁓ that impacts ⁓ your ⁓ ability to get the as well.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah.
Mandy: So what advice do you give to advisors before they're on camera to make sure that they are camera ready?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I guess we have a little bit of selection bias because we tell people what our process is. We say, hey, you're to be on camera. So if somebody is really not comfortable being on camera, they're not going to work with us. They're going to choose somebody else to be on camera instead of them. So most of our clients, luckily, are pretty good on camera. And the client that we have through you, is great on camera. so we have clients who are not as good on camera. And our process for that is our
Mandy: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: remote videographer, Kevin, he's been doing this, he did this a couple hundred times. So he makes them feel comfortable during the recording ⁓ session, which is about three hours long. In the beginning, they're going to do a couple of test rounds with the recording. And then after they feel comfortable, you know, being in the recording mode, that's when they do the rest of the recordings. From a technology standpoint, we use teleprompters, either like a physical teleprompter or a teleprompter app on their iPhone that helps them ⁓ look, you know, close enough to the camera where we can fix it with AI and be able to just read from the script. ⁓ But sometimes we don't get a good output and I have to make the hard call and be like, hey, Chris. sorry, but I need you to redo this. Let me just fix one, two, three. And they're like, well, I'd rather you call me and redo it than us run the campaign and it work. So that's rare. ⁓ we try to coach them through it. Also, we give them access to examples of other clients who did well. So they get to see that I don't have to be perfect. If this guy can do it, I can do it too. ⁓ So they get examples. get ⁓ coaching with the videographer during the recording session. ⁓
Joel Crampton: you
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: use the teleprompter, which helps a lot. You don't have to remember, you know, so many words, but also we create a lot of volume. So for every client, you know, we create five different campaigns and within each campaign, there's 25 different ads. So that gives us enough. Yeah. Enough for us to find the outliers for them and apply to 80 20 of the 80 20. And like, what's the one of the 25 is going to work really, really well for them. I think there's another 24 and just double down on that. So that helped.
Mandy: And it's a minimum of five VSLs or video sales letters that you're creating. Those are the 10 minute long ones, right? So for some clients you're creating more than five and then there's like 10 ads minimum in there. ⁓ It's a lot, it's a lot. And it's important, right? From a test and learn perspective to make sure that you're getting the right ad out and you're optimizing to the ones that are
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah.
Mandy: ⁓ that are getting the most traction.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, 100%. And also common question people get or ask us is how often do I update the videos? And my answer typically is it depends on the performance. So we'll update the videos whenever needed. But if you're spending call it 10,000 a month, it's roughly once every six months, we need to update the videos. But I have one client that you your client knows for spending about 65,000 a month with us, we're having to update the videos every two months in order for us to maintain our target cost per appointments at the same range. So the more you spend, the more
Joel Crampton: and
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: volume of content you need and that's what changed this year with Meta. Like this year we weren't doing this much volume of content last year. This year we're really ramped it up because we found that with the Andromeda update, if you guys have heard of that recently with Meta, it really favors ad accounts that have a lot more content and different messaging than ad accounts that just have you know one or two campaigns and would let them run for too long. So the content is a big piece of this.
Mandy: Yeah.
Joel Crampton: Is there any set up cost or is it just straight ad cost?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're paying Facebook, you're paying us ⁓ a one-time set up fee that depends on how much content we're creating for them and how much their expected budget is going to be. And they're paying us a service fee on an ongoing basis in order to manage their ads.
Mandy: So Alex, ⁓ us a little bit about the Y black box ⁓ as a final closing here.
Joel Crampton: Oh no, we're not letting him go. I've got lots of questions. We've got one more minute. I've got a lot of questions. Sorry. Alex.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Great. Yeah.
Mandy: Amazing, Joel! Yeah, you keep going!
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, you got to listen to my pitch. Yeah, just wait. Go ahead.
Mandy: Yeah.
Joel Crampton: No, no, these are just kind one-off questions I'm thinking of. ⁓ So from a geographic exclusivity standpoint, if you do have advisors that are just advertising in their local regional area, do you put any constraints around that? Because a lot of people are going after the same audiences as retirees, pre-retirees.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. Yeah. Most of our clients are advertising nationwide. ⁓ so
Joel Crampton: ⁓ there, OK.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, most of our clients like 95 % are advertising nationwide. We have a small subsection that advertises locally. So because of that, we don't have like any real restrictions because we don't have that many. But also what we do, they could hypothetically do it themselves. So why limit us on the kind of clients that we get. But as of today, we don't have any clients advertising locally, both in the same area. So we don't have any exclusivity on geography yet.
Joel Crampton: ⁓ okay. So how does your platform decide, like if you're having, I know how many people are using your platform, but there's a thousand advisors and they're all going nationwide and they're all doing the same kind of thing, like how they differentiate themselves then?
Mandy: Yeah. ⁓
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Thank
Mandy: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: enough. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so we're not a ⁓ platform that advertises their own brand and sells you leads. That's one thing. That's where it makes sense to have a lot of geographic exclusivity. ⁓ We are a marketing partner who's going to help you refine your message in a way that works in meta ads, and every firm has their own message. Right. So everybody says something different. Right. So when you when Joel shows up on Facebook, it's different than when Mandy shows up. It's different than when Alex shows up. Everybody has a different message. The themes might be similar. So all three of us might talk about tax planning, but you you might focus on R &Ds and I focus on Roth conversions and Mandy might focus on the OBBA benefits or strategies. ⁓ So the content is custom and specific to every firm. ⁓ But there are themes that we know work better than others. So there are topics that
Joel Crampton: Okay.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: know we're better than others. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, but you're not exclusive to a specific audience. So a 55-year-old could see Mandy, Joel, and Alex ⁓ in Facebook.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, and they get to pick. Yeah. Yeah, we.
Joel Crampton: And I think ultimately it's a comfort level. Do you want to work with Joel or Alex or Mandy as a person? You're seeing them on video. People are humans. We have a draw to different types of people. And maybe they hate my video, but they love yours, Alex. And so they want to work with you because they just are more drawn to you and your personality and your energy.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Mm-hmm.
Mandy: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. And I always tell my clients, so from a numbers perspective, we always do this math to just answer the objection. We find that 95 % of the appointments that we generate across all our clients are unique to them. They don't book with other people. Very small percentage, you know, see multiple ads and actually book with multiple people. But the competition most of our clients have is not really any of our other clients. It's typically the top three big firms. There's a big yellow firm that's local that always gets brought up.
Mandy: Right. Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: There's a big green firm that, you know, hates annuities that is their number one competitor. ⁓ So it's the big one or two or three big firms out there that they're ⁓ competing against and their current advisor. It's never like another, you know, somebody who works with Alex.
Mandy: Yeah. Yeah, before, Joel, before you move on to something completely different, I just wanted to ask a tag on question there. For your financial advisors, when do they exhaust Facebook and Meta as a channel? Do they?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: So yeah, the highest spend we've had for a single firm in one month is $500,000 a month. If you're spending less than that, you're probably fine. If you're spending more than that, let's talk. Because that firm, we creating a new campaign, like what I just told you guys, multiple VSLs and 25, like every week in order to keep up with the spend. So it was a lot more work. Yeah. And their retainer was also quite a bit higher. But yeah, if you're spending less than that, you're fine. There's 10,000 people retiring every day and about 10-ish percent of them are you know, millionaires. ⁓ So there's about a thousand new, you know, super qualified prospects coming to the market every day. No single firm can satisfy that demand. No single firm is closing a thousand new clients a day, even including the top, top, top, top big three firms in the country. ⁓ So the demand is huge. I was at a conference, you know, again, Monday, Tuesday, and the guy running the conference said, hey, there's so much demand, I'll raise you to a trillion, you know, AUM, right? So there's a lot more demand than there are advisors. ⁓ The advisor base in the industry is shrinking year over year. Yeah, so there's less. Yeah, so it's, I guess, far ⁓ from overly saturated. Are you going to get an appointment and have them talk to a couple other advisors? Yeah, but you know, to pick one of you guys. So yeah.
Joel Crampton: More consolidation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Mandy: normal.
Joel Crampton: So I'm just curious, just from my own business understanding point, what are some of the marketing tools that you're using in your own business to increase your business development efforts?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: So for us, we do a lot of things. I'd say the most effective thing that I do is thought leadership content on YouTube. And if I get somebody to watch my YouTube content and they watch a couple of my longer videos, by the time they talk to me, they're like, I get what you do. And if they watch through it, they're interested and they're able to have a call with me. The issue with YouTube is that it's really hard to drive.
Joel Crampton: Mm-hmm.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: top of funnel attention to it. You know, it's really hard to go viral and get the right people to watch it on YouTube itself unless you're consistent with it. So what I do to compensate for that is I run ads on Meta targeting advisors. ⁓ Yeah, so I, you know, have them, you know, go to my ⁓ funnel essentially, and then part of that is YouTube. So I make sure that they watch all my YouTube videos before they talk to us. So that's our ⁓ marketing strategy. ⁓ And also we have DSL. funnels that we run for our marketing. ⁓
Joel Crampton: So you eat your own cooking. I you're promoting what you're selling, right? I mean, you do what you are telling other people to do. That's exactly what Bandy and I do.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah.
Mandy: Yeah, exactly.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Absolutely. Yeah, so that you know, we've got active campaign, which you know, it's not the best maybe we need to move to HubSpot or something more fancy, but it's good for Yeah.
Mandy: I... yeah. That was a hard one. Try to high level first before you. Yeah. Yeah.
Joel Crampton: That's what I'm using at high level. That's what I'm working on my clients to.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, high level is great as well. A lot of our clients use high level for a lot of, they're doing the pipeline feature, the email sequence feature, the...
Mandy: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: appointment booking feature, so we're able to integrate with that as well. We use Calendly, know, most of our clients use Calendly too. Some use schedule ones or some other weird advisor specific appointment settings and systems. Yeah, you asked me about tools. Those are the main ones that I can think of. You know, you got Slack and Gmail and Claude now. Claude is huge. Yeah, so we use a lot of AI projects in Claude that help us produce a lot more content for ourselves.
Joel Crampton: All right, Mandy, bring us home.
Mandy: Okay, Alex, tell us about Black Box in your own words.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so if you're an owner or CEO or managing partner or marketing director of an RIA that has more than three advisors and has more than a million of a ⁓ and you'd like to get more pre-retirees and retirees as clients, ⁓ check out clients.box.com. I mean, you've listened to an hour, so you probably get it by now. So we can help you ⁓ get qualified appointments on your advisor's calendars at a much better cost and quality than what you're doing elsewhere. And we can act as a growth engine to help you grow faster or as another ⁓ spoke in the marketing wheel, like some advisors like to call it, ⁓ or help you accomplish your goals. ⁓ So that's typically the best kind of clients for us. And even if you're not bad, you're just curious, I'm happy to chat anytime. So ⁓ clientsblackbox.com is where we live.
Mandy: ⁓ Alex's company is easy to work with, ⁓ especially ⁓ as a fractional CMO working with wealth management firms. It is an easy decision if you're looking for more sales qualified leads.
Joel Crampton: Thanks for having me. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate your time.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you.
Mandy: Thank much, Alex. Mandy McPhee. ⁓ I a fractional chief marketing officer and work with founders who are doing too ⁓ and need someone to turn their scattered marketing into system that actually drives results.
Mandy: Hey, how's everyone doing today?
Joel Crampton: Okay, good day. Nice.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: going well.
Mandy: That's a better start than what I started with our last podcast, Yeah, exactly. Today is a better day, especially because we have Alex on the call with us today. Yeah. ⁓ We're really excited to have Alex on the call with us.
Joel Crampton: Last week he was, ugh.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Thank you, Amara, for having me.
Mandy: Alex Casa is the founder of Clients Black Box. They have been in business for five years now and they specialize in meta advertising and they're a meta partner, specifically for financial advisors, RIAs, different types of advisors that are looking to get more leads that convert within meta. So Alex, over the last five years, they spent over 10 million ⁓ meta advertising and they've booked over 30,000 appointments. ⁓ are amazing numbers, Alex.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: that's a great intro. ⁓ Thanks for starting with that.
Joel Crampton: And just to clarify, Meta, a lot of people may not know Meta, ⁓ but it's fairly synonymous with Facebook, but that also encompasses their Instagram platform, any other channels. Alex, can tell us a little bit more of, when you say you're a Meta partner, you're a Meta platform, advertiser, how do your ads go out and reach different audiences?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so we're an official Metta partner just means that you know, we have a little bit better relationship with Metta than somebody who advertises directly with them and ⁓ most of our clients are advertising towards pre-retirees and retirees and 70 % of big boomers are on Facebook, which is a big part of Metta. Metta also encompasses Instagram as well and we use, let's say 80 % of our spend is Facebook and 20 % is Instagram and it's Mostly for the, I guess, Gen Xers who might be on Instagram just to retarget them, but Facebook still gets majority of spend and has the best return for most of our clients. If you're advertising to a 35 year old, probably want to spend most of your money on Instagram, but that's not our demographic.
Joel Crampton: And you don't advertise outside of the meta platform like on LinkedIn or X or anything like that.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so we've tried every other platform, including YouTube ads, Google ads, Bing, ⁓ Quora, Pinterest, ⁓ Reddit. We spent anywhere between, and LinkedIn as well, we spent anywhere between 10 to 20,000 on each of those platforms to first to see how the quality of the prospects that comes from that is and the cost. And ⁓ we found that Meta is the most scalable. ⁓
Joel Crampton: Ready? Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: We've got one client up to half a million a month up spent on Meta targeting pre-retirees and retirees. And it's hard for me to imagine to be able to do that elsewhere. YouTube and Google have the promise of maybe potentially doing that, but I don't know anybody who's successfully doing ⁓ late generation that's compliant at scale on those platforms. So from our experience, Meta is the most scalable or reliable.
Joel Crampton: I was gonna mention the most recent headline when it comes to meta-advertising is that they're overtaking Google. Is that correct?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. Yeah. And the biggest headline for us is that they want to have, including financial advisors, any business go into Facebook and just say, Hey, here's who I want to target. And then it does all the work for them. creates the ads, the assets, the targeting. Yeah.
Joel Crampton: Yeah, through their AI platform, right? You get them your target audience and the message, they go build the ads. They take more than just your four or five ad sets that you've created in-house. They use their AI algorithms to create all these ads and then just over time figure out just exactly what is most engaging with that content. So it's almost a done-for-you approach. You just have to give them your credit card and let them run.
Mandy: Yeah, but the challenge with Meta and Facebook is that they have so many restrictions when it comes to financial services advertising. Alex, talk a little bit about how you ⁓ ⁓ work within those restrictions while producing good results for your clients.
Joel Crampton: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so last year about this time April of 2025 is when they really tightened on financial services category where they met up really wants you to apply that label to your ads. And what that does is it doesn't allow you to target by age, which is a big deal for our clients because they most people don't have a lot of liquid assets outside of their 401k and IRAs. And that doesn't become liquid up until 59 and a half. So really, most of our clients only want to advertise to the folks that are 55 and above. we're getting them lot of 35 year olds, they're not happy about that outcome. So financial services category says, hey, you can't really target by age, so we're gonna spend it however we'd like. And the targeting is also a little bit weaker. So a lot of our clients that joined us this year say that they got affected by that. And our approach, It is compliant within Meta's restrictions, but we don't use ⁓ the financial services category because we're not promoting in the way that we market our RIAs and financial advisors. We're not promoting a product. We're not saying, hey, use this investment model or buy this insurance product or hire me as a financial advisor. We are creating educational videos where it's advisor led, the advisor in the camera, he's saying, hey, did you know that XYZ Well, you don't have enough time in this video, click the button below, see my longer video that's going to educate you on the top three retirement risks and how to avoid them. So it's all very educational in nature. And even our Facebook pages, we try to label them as like an educational website instead of a financial planner or financial advisor, the ones that everyone adds from in order to go around that restriction. So that way we don't have to use the special ads category and we're able to advertise this as an educational funnel. that gets people to potentially book an appointment with a financial advisor after that. But it's not, we're not promoting the appointments, we're not promoting the products, we're not promoting the advisor, we're the educational content. So that's helped us spend a good amount on Facebook ads right now. And a lot of our clients this year saying the quality of prospects they're getting this year is better than last year because of this approach we've taken this year to navigate the changes in meta. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about your approach a little bit more Alex you talk a little bit about ⁓ going after clients not selling them on a specific product, but educating instead. And that seems to be generating more leads for your clients. Tell us a little bit about what results you are seeing and why that educational approach makes a difference.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so the educational approach is based off of, there's a book that I have here in my library, I don't know if I can find it now, called Breakthrough Advertising. There it is. And this guy popularized the concept of awareness levels. So ⁓ you got the smallest segment of the market is people who are aware of the product. Hey, I want to buy this insurance, I'm shopping for this insurance product or shopping for financial advertisements. 3 % of the market according to a lot of different stats. Then you've got people who are ⁓ product aware, which is smaller than that. They want this specific insurance policy or this specific financial advisor. ⁓ Beyond that, you've got solution aware. Then you've got problem aware. I know that I have a problem. Maybe I'm not aware that there are solutions to that. And there's the unaware. don't even have a problem. don't even know that they have a problem. So the broader you go, the lower your advertising costs will be because you're able to resonate with more people and you're able to educate them through the decision making process from, hey, ⁓ yeah, actually I do have that problem and ⁓ I didn't know there are solutions to this and this firm is the best. you know, solution for me to go about this and here's why the three different reasons why and what's the next step I should book a meeting with them. Okay, great. the way the reason why we go with an educational approach is ⁓ it helps us expand our addressable market. It helps us scale up. can't really spend that much money if you're only going after the people that are ready to buy and able to scale beyond beyond what you're able to get. ⁓ But also it helps us enable ⁓ the missions of most wealth management firms, which a lot of their mission is to educate Americans on better financial planning strategies. That's if you go to most financial advisor websites, the mission's somewhere in the website, you're find that, our mission is to educate as many people as possible on better financial planning strategies, help them make less mistakes and make better financial decisions. And if you're only advertising a product or pay hire me or do XYZ, ⁓ you're not accomplishing that. But by... accomplishing your mission and also expanding your town, your total addressable market to be able to get better results for business-wise and also ⁓ mission-wise. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, Metta is becoming a tougher platform and it is getting harder and harder to get really good sales qualified leads on Metta ⁓ You're probably seeing some results where some the financial advisors with you directly seeing great results and others are not seeing ⁓ as good ⁓ What's the difference in those that you're seeing?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. So I like to break up results by a couple of things. So you've got marketing, which is I'm going to get you leads, opportunities, appointments on your calendar. Then you got sales. It's how do I get those from, I'm interested in qualified to let me sign on a dotted line and become a client. When it comes to marketing, we see very consistent results in being able to drive qualified appointments at a certain cost for most of our clients. The ⁓ variance ⁓ or the volatility can come from their ability to actually close business. ⁓ ⁓ And that we try to pre filter for before accepting a client based off of the company size. So Five years ago, we would work with any financial advisor today. Our minimum is typically three advisors and a hundred million of a U.M. because we found that if you have more than a million a year of revenue, can, you're at a stage where you can start affording marketing. You're not sales driven as much. You're not, want to, your time is worth enough money that it makes most sense, more sense for you to put your dollars towards advertising than put your time towards prospecting. That's one. Number two, if you have three or more advisors, then you've had
Joel Crampton: Thank
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: good sales process, you're able to teach those advisors and you also have the ability and the willingness to scale beyond yourself and not just be a solo advisor. And there's nothing wrong with being a solo advisor, I'm just saying that. Both solo advisors. ⁓ would have a higher priority on sales and business development than actually marketing, which is a different stage for the company. So those companies that have fewer advisors and 100 million plus of AUM, they typically have a good dialed in sales motion, sales process, and they're able to close. ⁓ But people that are under that, it's more hit or miss depending on their own sales ability.
Mandy: Hmm.
Joel Crampton: think it's an analogy. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. So the horse is the advisor. The water is the lead, the prospective client. You can give them the lead, but for them to actually close that prospective client into an actual client, that's on them. And that's maybe where Vandy and I can come in and help them improve their sales process. take that lead and actually convert it into a prospect or at least take that lead and nurture them through the process, because I don't know what your close ratio is on that lead. mean, again, that's dependent on the advisor, but even if they don't close that lead and that their first initial one, two, three calls, they get dropped into a nurturing campaign where we can continue to send them messaging, drip on them, try to get them through the process eventually, but just because they don't close that first, round of calls doesn't mean that's a wasted lead or a wasted ⁓ investment that they put with your firm. that a good way to think through it?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: No, for sure. mean, there's many firms that we work with that 30 to 40 percent of their production would come from opportunities they got last year. And for somebody to say, hey, I want you to ⁓ manage my and I've worked three to four decades and I can trust you with it from the first meeting, that's unrealistic. So the ⁓ sales cycle a lot of our clients see is 60 to 90 days, and that's three to four meetings to get somebody to move forward, and that's average. Some people are gonna be faster than that, and some are gonna be a lot slower than that, because it's a big decision for them. It's not like buying a book ⁓ or ⁓ ⁓ and things around me, mouse pad, it's a big decision. So it can take a while for people to get comfortable with you and build that trust and decide to move forward.
Mandy: Yeah, trust is.
Joel Crampton: And you talked about earlier that 95 % of the market's not ready to make a change anyway. And the fact that they're on Facebook and scrolling, looking at their friends' photos and grandkids' activities, it's kind of a pattern to interrupt when that ad does pop up for that financial advisor. So while they may have some initial interest in filling out the ad or filling out the contact form on that ad, that they're not actively looking in that exact moment. So it does take a little bit to convert them. What's the follow-up process? Like, you walk me through? I'm just so curious about that actual process ⁓ of working with your firm, because I've never worked exactly with clients, Black Box. I've with a couple other ⁓ firms that do something similar. And I've also done my own Facebook and Meta-Ad campaigns. we'd love to learn more about your process.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so our primary responsibility is on generating the appointments. 40 advisor and our firms typically have their own, our clients have their own follow up processes. So they have either help spot like Mandy uses that they'll build out like, you know, a multiple month follow up sequence. And what a lot of them would do. And again, this is not something that we do for them, but what I've seen them do is they would host quarterly webinars for people that are in their pipeline where they are going to invite everybody to show up to webinars to talk about, know, what's, what's happening now in the market and what they need to do to address that or tax planning opportunities like the one, one big, build that came out, gave people a lot of new opportunities that they can take advantage of. So people had a lot of questions about that. So a lot of people did webinars about that. That worked really well for them. So quarterly webinars do work for nurturing your existing pipeline. haven't seen a lot of people have success with running ads to a webinar to get clients, but for pipeline nurture, they're a great and effective tool. If the advisor is local and they're marketing locally to their immediate radius, then a lot of times going to host events, dinner seminars or workshops or client appreciation events where they're going to invite their existing clients or potential clients to come in and maybe, you know, get, get dinner and get educated about tax planning or investment management strategies. That's another way to nurture their pipeline. And a lot of people have, you know, email sequences and, and if they have the staff, you know, SDRs and BDRs who follow up with their prospects on a regular basis in order to get them re-engaged. And if they didn't show up, they're going to call. email them, voicemail them to get them back to book an appointment if they spoke with them six or nine months ago and the client said, hey, I need to go do XYZ, then talk to you again, like, you know, if they're going through a certain life situation. ⁓ For example, I've just got a client call an hour ago and there's a couple of his prospects that were getting divorced a few months ago and he's reaching out back to them this month to see how everything went and to see if he can support them in their financial planning side of things. Or, know, they're going to sell real estate, whatever. There's a lot of reasons for people to... move forward right now and ⁓ a lot of our clients, know, again, they have either quarterly webinars, ⁓ events that they're marketing locally, ⁓ sequences, and if they have the staff for it, ⁓ follow-up in order to get people re-engaged and then booking another meeting either with that same advisor or if they're big enough, a lot of times they can say, hey, know, and like Jeff, would you want to talk to Brad? You know, switching up advisors to start up a new ⁓ if that was the objection back then.
Joel Crampton: just to reiterate, you don't set up any of systems or processes. That's something like Mandy and I would do from a marketing and leadership standpoint. So you just bring that lead in to the firm and then however they follow up with that and that's on that, right?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, yeah. So we like to stay very niche in what we offer because everybody's got a limited bandwidth, right? Like the reason why a lot of people see a lot of volatility with marketing agencies is that the agency tries to do everything for them. You know, like we're going to run Google and LinkedIn and Facebook and this and that. So how could you build expertise if you're doing 10,000 different things every day? We do one thing very well. I've got 10 people doing it for our clients for a very homogenous side of clients. You we don't work with e-commerce or SaaS or even FinTech, is close enough, but not really that close. We really only work with RIAs and financial planning firms who serve mass affluent, high net worth prospects that want financial planning. And that's why we're able to produce a more consistent result. And that's why we say, hey, you need to do this, but it's not something that we do for you. This is something that you can hire a fractional CMO for, you guys, Joel or Mandy, or the bigger firms that have enough
Mandy: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: revenue, they would hire an in-person ⁓ marketing, director of marketing, a marketing leader who that's their main job is to build out all these infrastructures, ⁓ email sequences, nurture sequences, SMS, deliverables, downloadables, branding, posting on social media, which can be important. ⁓ That's not something that we do for them, but we recommend that they do it, ⁓ you know, especially if they want to convert more aspects.
Mandy: Yeah.
Joel Crampton: Good, love it, yeah. Two thumbs up for that.
Mandy: Yeah, Alex has a really well-oiled machine with his team and able to execute really quickly. I was so impressed ⁓ in the execution of what he actually does. ⁓ But I wanted to just touch on ⁓ that conversation and the fact that, Alex, you highlighted the fact that you can bring the leads in. from a marketing standpoint, you could bring the leads in, but unless sales is connected to marketing and you have that connective tissue in there, you're not gonna be able to effectively close those leads. So it's so critical that marketing talks to sales, who talks to, if there's a product, who talks to product, and that the entire organization is aligned ⁓ in that messaging and in getting that ⁓ what we call in marketing of that full funnel into play so that the lead is being passed off efficiently and effectively through each stage.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Absolutely.
Joel Crampton: Hey Alex, is there a budget that, like a minimum budget that ⁓ firms should consider investing in? Because a lot of firms just, they just, they don't do any marketing. Going from zero to 10,000 a month is a big jump for them. there tiers that you can kind of get them, ⁓ like get ads going or what's your process there?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, in terms of advertising on Facebook to generate appointments and lead generation, there is a recommended budget and I'll go through that. But first of all, I do think it is worth investing in the infrastructure of how to handle the opportunity once it comes to you. So, you know, what's your onboard?
Joel Crampton: Yeah, say it louder, Alex. You want to repeat that?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: No, I don't just say that to be on this podcast and be like, hire Joel and Mandy. But it's even like for my company, know, like we're like, you know, we have our own marketing and sales process and without having that educational sequence to get somebody from, hey, I'm interested to actually, you know, booking the appointments again later on and then moving forward, we would have wasted a lot of money. A lot of our clients this year are people that have been following my content and been in my email list for literally years. Like I just got off a
Joel Crampton: Right, yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: this morning again with somebody who spoke to me back in 2022 when I was just first getting started. We spoke again in 2023 and now he spoke to me again in 2026. His business changed, my business changed and now it's a fit, right? So having that is very important and I think that's sometimes senior, like more important than just throwing money at. getting leads or opportunities because it's really important to have that. Sometimes you just have to get some momentum and start getting some opportunities, but you also want to know that once they come in, you're going to be able to convert them. that aside, if you want to start advertising on Meta in order to get appointments and leads, especially if you're advertising towards pre-retires and retirees, if you're going nationwide, we recommend the minimum budget of $10,000 a month on ad spend. because we find that that's just barely enough to get you enough prospects in the door for enough of them to show up, for enough of them to have at least one or two like actual... people who are likely to close a month for you to get any consistency. If you're spending two or three thousand a month nationwide, it's really hard to have any consistency. You might get lucky and get one client but not get anything for two quarters. ⁓ for you to control that regression to the mean and the volatility, you have to spend enough for you to see some consistency ⁓ month over month. If you're advertising locally, ⁓ you know, locally means, your state or a little bit smaller than that in terms of geography, five to 7,000 a month would be appropriate because the. I'm talking about financial advisors now, but close rate, if you're local, is a lot higher if you get to meet them in person versus nationwide through Zoom, right? So you're able to afford a higher cost per meeting because you know you're going to close a lot more than nationwide. So those are the general guidelines we tell people. So it depends on their goals. And some people just want to dominate their area. They still have some room to grow there. Or some people just, you they say, hey, I've done well here. I want to expand nationwide. Or some people will say, I don't really care where my clients live.
Joel Crampton: Thank
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: as long as I can help them, they're a good fit for me personality wise and asset wise, then I don't care if I'm in New York and they're in California or Texas, I'm happy to work with them. So depends on the client's goals, but those are generally the guidelines to go after.
Joel Crampton: So from a client acquisition cost standpoint, if they're spending five grand a month, minimum, how many leads, how many appointments does that typically get on average? I know you've got tons of data around that.
Mandy: listen.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, I can talk about the appointments. If they're advertising locally, they're spending $5,000 a month. They should be seeing around 10 appointments a month booking their calendars. And that should get them, depending on their close rate, somewhere between one to three clients that month, and also depending on their minimum vegetable assets.
Joel Crampton: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: ⁓ A good general rule if you want to be super safe with your marketing budget is the 1 % rule. So for every million dollars of AUM, you want to be able to spend $10,000 to get that client and be okay with it. So. Yeah. ⁓
Joel Crampton: That's break even costs essentially, yeah. From an AUM B only standpoint, you know.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: At scale, that's what you're seeing. A lot of big firms, that's what they're seeing at scale. And if you get better than that, great, good for you. But if you want to be able to do that at a much bigger level, that's typically where you're be looking at safely. And you can probably do a lot better at smaller scales. it also depends on, again, if your minimum is $3 million, are you comfortable spending $30,000 to get one client? Right? If your minimum is 500K, you could spend five grand and get one client, you know? and that's generally the rule of digital in person. You know, you could do a little bit better. And if you have a better, more optimized funnel, you can definitely do a lot better.
Mandy: Yeah, I think, you know, with with client back clients black box, I think that the process that you're doing a 30 to 60 second ad, but then you're leading them to a landing page that has an 10 minute or more video. So the clients going through that video are very engaged by the time they watch that video. They've dedicated 10 minutes to it. So at that point, them booking an appointment. you've hooked them in, you've got them completely engaged. So it's a higher likely, in my opinion, a higher likely to close at that point.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, I just attended an event Monday and Tuesday ⁓ where it's a financial planning organization. They're getting all their clients from Facebook ads and the way they were running ads is, you know, it's a 60 second video to a page that has an offer. says hire us because of XYZ and they're seeing good results with that. But they just launched their VSL finals this month and they're seeing ⁓ Better engagements. People are not coming in for an offer. They're coming in because they have a problem and they want you to solve it for them. They're seeing better engagement from those leads. And that's what we call funnels, a VSL funnel, video sales letter funnel. It's very, again, educational, but it's very specific. we don't talk about, financial advisory firm might do eight to 15 different things for their clients, including investment management, risk management, income planning, social security maximization strategies, tax planning, estate planning. a lot of different things, but for every marketing campaign, we try to be very specific. Like, hey, for this one, I'm only going to talk about this specific risk that applies to this specific person. If you have more than half a million dollars and you're about to retire, here's a risk that most of us don't tell you about sequence of returns risk. What if you retired the wrong time? Let me show you a couple of examples. Are you comfortable accepting this risk or would you like to transfer it to a different part of your portfolio that wouldn't be affected with it? And we have strategies for that, book a call. So we try to be very specific and that helps improve the quality of the conversations that the ⁓ advisors get. So instead of running like a ⁓ general branding video, bragging about the firm saying, we've been doing this for 30 years and we have this many clients and all of that. ⁓ There's a place and a need for that. But when it comes to direct response advertising, which is what we do, you want to be very specific with the problem and that drives up the quality of the conversations you would have with your prospects.
Joel Crampton: And do you help them, what's the actual, again, I don't know anything about the company. Like what's the process look like ⁓ that you work with the advisor? Do you help them record that first video and then that longer video and what does that actually look like?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: So we try to take on everything that we can take on. So we script everything. The advisor does the recording. We have a remote videographer who helps him with the recording or her with the recording. We do the video editing and post-production. Even if they have a compliance department they want us to go through. So they're going to send the scripts to compliance. Compliance will say, change ABC. We go change it for them, send it back to compliance. Compliance approves of the final version. Then they record. So we do the post-production. page build outs and calendly and schedule one, whatever appointment booking software they use, we're going to set it up for them, manage it for them. Even when we're running the ads, we will monitor their availability. So if for example, they're gone vacation one week, they don't tell us, going to email them and Hey, by the way, I don't see any spots in calendar that's going to affect your cost. Would you like us to reduce the spend or, you know, ⁓ pause it for a week? ⁓ So we manage that for them. And also when we're running the ads, we ⁓ run the ads, do the media buying, we target the right audiences, we booked 30,000 appointments, we use that as a local like on Facebook, which we can do by going around special ads category. And we have tracking spreadsheets for you how much we spend per day per week per month, what's the number of appointments, what's the cost per appointments, another tab where they can fill out their information, or if they're big enough, or if they use HubSpot, they can fill it out on HubSpot, we, you know, take the information and fill out in our spreadsheet, we track the results that way. And we meet with them, depending on the client and their need, but in most cases, twice a month, where we go over here's what's happened in past two weeks, here's how much we spent, here's how many appointments, and here's how many people you talk to, what's your close rate, what's your show rate, go through all those metrics with them. So that's the process and what it looks like to work with us. It's very much, we try to do everything for them that they don't need to do from this specific appointment generation system in their business. Are we going to build up their email nurture sequence? Not really, you know, because it's custom for each, too custom for each client and it's better for them to build it on their own. ⁓ The only thing that's on their part is basically recording the videos, which we help with. We have a remote videographer who helps them with that. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, Alex's team is actually very easy to work with and they do end to end for all of the meta advertising that they do. It's literally end to end from start to finish. ⁓ As, as you said, they won't go into the infrastructure that goes beyond getting that sales qualified lead, but everything within meta, everything that needs to happen, they've got it covered. I'm going to circle back. you must be seeing a difference in the quality of videos that you're getting from advisors. So some advisors are probably great on camera while others may not be ⁓ as good on camera ⁓ for of that, because ⁓ that impacts ⁓ your ⁓ ability to get the as well.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah.
Mandy: So what advice do you give to advisors before they're on camera to make sure that they are camera ready?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a great question. So I guess we have a little bit of selection bias because we tell people what our process is. We say, hey, you're to be on camera. So if somebody is really not comfortable being on camera, they're not going to work with us. They're going to choose somebody else to be on camera instead of them. So most of our clients, luckily, are pretty good on camera. And the client that we have through you, is great on camera. so we have clients who are not as good on camera. And our process for that is our
Mandy: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: remote videographer, Kevin, he's been doing this, he did this a couple hundred times. So he makes them feel comfortable during the recording ⁓ session, which is about three hours long. In the beginning, they're going to do a couple of test rounds with the recording. And then after they feel comfortable, you know, being in the recording mode, that's when they do the rest of the recordings. From a technology standpoint, we use teleprompters, either like a physical teleprompter or a teleprompter app on their iPhone that helps them ⁓ look, you know, close enough to the camera where we can fix it with AI and be able to just read from the script. ⁓ But sometimes we don't get a good output and I have to make the hard call and be like, hey, Chris. sorry, but I need you to redo this. Let me just fix one, two, three. And they're like, well, I'd rather you call me and redo it than us run the campaign and it work. So that's rare. ⁓ we try to coach them through it. Also, we give them access to examples of other clients who did well. So they get to see that I don't have to be perfect. If this guy can do it, I can do it too. ⁓ So they get examples. get ⁓ coaching with the videographer during the recording session. ⁓
Joel Crampton: you
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: use the teleprompter, which helps a lot. You don't have to remember, you know, so many words, but also we create a lot of volume. So for every client, you know, we create five different campaigns and within each campaign, there's 25 different ads. So that gives us enough. Yeah. Enough for us to find the outliers for them and apply to 80 20 of the 80 20. And like, what's the one of the 25 is going to work really, really well for them. I think there's another 24 and just double down on that. So that helped.
Mandy: And it's a minimum of five VSLs or video sales letters that you're creating. Those are the 10 minute long ones, right? So for some clients you're creating more than five and then there's like 10 ads minimum in there. ⁓ It's a lot, it's a lot. And it's important, right? From a test and learn perspective to make sure that you're getting the right ad out and you're optimizing to the ones that are
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah.
Mandy: ⁓ that are getting the most traction.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, 100%. And also common question people get or ask us is how often do I update the videos? And my answer typically is it depends on the performance. So we'll update the videos whenever needed. But if you're spending call it 10,000 a month, it's roughly once every six months, we need to update the videos. But I have one client that you your client knows for spending about 65,000 a month with us, we're having to update the videos every two months in order for us to maintain our target cost per appointments at the same range. So the more you spend, the more
Joel Crampton: and
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: volume of content you need and that's what changed this year with Meta. Like this year we weren't doing this much volume of content last year. This year we're really ramped it up because we found that with the Andromeda update, if you guys have heard of that recently with Meta, it really favors ad accounts that have a lot more content and different messaging than ad accounts that just have you know one or two campaigns and would let them run for too long. So the content is a big piece of this.
Mandy: Yeah.
Joel Crampton: Is there any set up cost or is it just straight ad cost?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're paying Facebook, you're paying us ⁓ a one-time set up fee that depends on how much content we're creating for them and how much their expected budget is going to be. And they're paying us a service fee on an ongoing basis in order to manage their ads.
Mandy: So Alex, ⁓ us a little bit about the Y black box ⁓ as a final closing here.
Joel Crampton: Oh no, we're not letting him go. I've got lots of questions. We've got one more minute. I've got a lot of questions. Sorry. Alex.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Great. Yeah.
Mandy: Amazing, Joel! Yeah, you keep going!
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, you got to listen to my pitch. Yeah, just wait. Go ahead.
Mandy: Yeah.
Joel Crampton: No, no, these are just kind one-off questions I'm thinking of. ⁓ So from a geographic exclusivity standpoint, if you do have advisors that are just advertising in their local regional area, do you put any constraints around that? Because a lot of people are going after the same audiences as retirees, pre-retirees.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. Yeah. Most of our clients are advertising nationwide. ⁓ so
Joel Crampton: ⁓ there, OK.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, most of our clients like 95 % are advertising nationwide. We have a small subsection that advertises locally. So because of that, we don't have like any real restrictions because we don't have that many. But also what we do, they could hypothetically do it themselves. So why limit us on the kind of clients that we get. But as of today, we don't have any clients advertising locally, both in the same area. So we don't have any exclusivity on geography yet.
Joel Crampton: ⁓ okay. So how does your platform decide, like if you're having, I know how many people are using your platform, but there's a thousand advisors and they're all going nationwide and they're all doing the same kind of thing, like how they differentiate themselves then?
Mandy: Yeah. ⁓
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Thank
Mandy: Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: enough. Yeah, yeah. So, okay, so we're not a ⁓ platform that advertises their own brand and sells you leads. That's one thing. That's where it makes sense to have a lot of geographic exclusivity. ⁓ We are a marketing partner who's going to help you refine your message in a way that works in meta ads, and every firm has their own message. Right. So everybody says something different. Right. So when you when Joel shows up on Facebook, it's different than when Mandy shows up. It's different than when Alex shows up. Everybody has a different message. The themes might be similar. So all three of us might talk about tax planning, but you you might focus on R &Ds and I focus on Roth conversions and Mandy might focus on the OBBA benefits or strategies. ⁓ So the content is custom and specific to every firm. ⁓ But there are themes that we know work better than others. So there are topics that
Joel Crampton: Okay.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: know we're better than others. ⁓
Mandy: Yeah, but you're not exclusive to a specific audience. So a 55-year-old could see Mandy, Joel, and Alex ⁓ in Facebook.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, and they get to pick. Yeah. Yeah, we.
Joel Crampton: And I think ultimately it's a comfort level. Do you want to work with Joel or Alex or Mandy as a person? You're seeing them on video. People are humans. We have a draw to different types of people. And maybe they hate my video, but they love yours, Alex. And so they want to work with you because they just are more drawn to you and your personality and your energy.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Mm-hmm.
Mandy: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah. And I always tell my clients, so from a numbers perspective, we always do this math to just answer the objection. We find that 95 % of the appointments that we generate across all our clients are unique to them. They don't book with other people. Very small percentage, you know, see multiple ads and actually book with multiple people. But the competition most of our clients have is not really any of our other clients. It's typically the top three big firms. There's a big yellow firm that's local that always gets brought up.
Mandy: Right. Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: There's a big green firm that, you know, hates annuities that is their number one competitor. ⁓ So it's the big one or two or three big firms out there that they're ⁓ competing against and their current advisor. It's never like another, you know, somebody who works with Alex.
Mandy: Yeah. Yeah, before, Joel, before you move on to something completely different, I just wanted to ask a tag on question there. For your financial advisors, when do they exhaust Facebook and Meta as a channel? Do they?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: So yeah, the highest spend we've had for a single firm in one month is $500,000 a month. If you're spending less than that, you're probably fine. If you're spending more than that, let's talk. Because that firm, we creating a new campaign, like what I just told you guys, multiple VSLs and 25, like every week in order to keep up with the spend. So it was a lot more work. Yeah. And their retainer was also quite a bit higher. But yeah, if you're spending less than that, you're fine. There's 10,000 people retiring every day and about 10-ish percent of them are you know, millionaires. ⁓ So there's about a thousand new, you know, super qualified prospects coming to the market every day. No single firm can satisfy that demand. No single firm is closing a thousand new clients a day, even including the top, top, top, top big three firms in the country. ⁓ So the demand is huge. I was at a conference, you know, again, Monday, Tuesday, and the guy running the conference said, hey, there's so much demand, I'll raise you to a trillion, you know, AUM, right? So there's a lot more demand than there are advisors. ⁓ The advisor base in the industry is shrinking year over year. Yeah, so there's less. Yeah, so it's, I guess, far ⁓ from overly saturated. Are you going to get an appointment and have them talk to a couple other advisors? Yeah, but you know, to pick one of you guys. So yeah.
Joel Crampton: More consolidation. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Mandy: normal.
Joel Crampton: So I'm just curious, just from my own business understanding point, what are some of the marketing tools that you're using in your own business to increase your business development efforts?
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: So for us, we do a lot of things. I'd say the most effective thing that I do is thought leadership content on YouTube. And if I get somebody to watch my YouTube content and they watch a couple of my longer videos, by the time they talk to me, they're like, I get what you do. And if they watch through it, they're interested and they're able to have a call with me. The issue with YouTube is that it's really hard to drive.
Joel Crampton: Mm-hmm.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: top of funnel attention to it. You know, it's really hard to go viral and get the right people to watch it on YouTube itself unless you're consistent with it. So what I do to compensate for that is I run ads on Meta targeting advisors. ⁓ Yeah, so I, you know, have them, you know, go to my ⁓ funnel essentially, and then part of that is YouTube. So I make sure that they watch all my YouTube videos before they talk to us. So that's our ⁓ marketing strategy. ⁓ And also we have DSL. funnels that we run for our marketing. ⁓
Joel Crampton: So you eat your own cooking. I you're promoting what you're selling, right? I mean, you do what you are telling other people to do. That's exactly what Bandy and I do.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah.
Mandy: Yeah, exactly.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Absolutely. Yeah, so that you know, we've got active campaign, which you know, it's not the best maybe we need to move to HubSpot or something more fancy, but it's good for Yeah.
Mandy: I... yeah. That was a hard one. Try to high level first before you. Yeah. Yeah.
Joel Crampton: That's what I'm using at high level. That's what I'm working on my clients to.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, high level is great as well. A lot of our clients use high level for a lot of, they're doing the pipeline feature, the email sequence feature, the...
Mandy: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: appointment booking feature, so we're able to integrate with that as well. We use Calendly, know, most of our clients use Calendly too. Some use schedule ones or some other weird advisor specific appointment settings and systems. Yeah, you asked me about tools. Those are the main ones that I can think of. You know, you got Slack and Gmail and Claude now. Claude is huge. Yeah, so we use a lot of AI projects in Claude that help us produce a lot more content for ourselves.
Joel Crampton: All right, Mandy, bring us home.
Mandy: Okay, Alex, tell us about Black Box in your own words.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Yeah, so if you're an owner or CEO or managing partner or marketing director of an RIA that has more than three advisors and has more than a million of a ⁓ and you'd like to get more pre-retirees and retirees as clients, ⁓ check out clients.box.com. I mean, you've listened to an hour, so you probably get it by now. So we can help you ⁓ get qualified appointments on your advisor's calendars at a much better cost and quality than what you're doing elsewhere. And we can act as a growth engine to help you grow faster or as another ⁓ spoke in the marketing wheel, like some advisors like to call it, ⁓ or help you accomplish your goals. ⁓ So that's typically the best kind of clients for us. And even if you're not bad, you're just curious, I'm happy to chat anytime. So ⁓ clientsblackbox.com is where we live.
Mandy: ⁓ Alex's company is easy to work with, ⁓ especially ⁓ as a fractional CMO working with wealth management firms. It is an easy decision if you're looking for more sales qualified leads.
Joel Crampton: Thanks for having me. Thanks, Alex. Appreciate your time.
Alex - ClientsBlackbox.com: Thank you. Thanks guys. Thank you.
Mandy: Thank much, Alex. Mandy McPhee. ⁓ I a fractional chief marketing officer and work with founders who are doing too ⁓ and need someone to turn their scattered marketing into system that actually drives results.
