Lead Pilot Review: Should Financial Advisors Use It? Here's What I Think...

Lead Pilot seems like an amazing inbound marketing tool for financial advisors. Does it live up to the hype? Read on to find out...

This post contains affiliate links. If you decide to use Lead Pilot and want 10% off your first payment, use the promo code ADVISORCOACH10PERCENTOFF 

Lead Pilot touts itself as “the turnkey, inbound marketing solution for financial advisors.” As you can see in the above photo, they claim to offer everything financial advisors need to grow their businesses, all in one place. 

But does it live up to the hype? Is it a solid tool for financial advisors who want to grow their businesses? 

Let’s explore…

What Is Lead Pilot?

Lead Pilot is groundbreaking software designed to help financial advisors harness the power of inbound marketing. 

Inbound marketing is defined by Wikipedia as “a technique for drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and branding.” 

In other words, inbound marketing provides potential clients with relevant, helpful information which guides them toward doing business with you. 

For example, people who are interested in learning more about financial planning will often begin by searching online. After coming across a helpful piece of content, published by your company, they might seek out more information and reach out to schedule an appointment. 

This type of marketing is more important now than ever before because skepticism and mistrust of financial advisors is higher than ever before. In fact, a survey conducted by Hearts & Wallets (“Trust-Building Practices: Updated Empirical Analysis of What Drives Trust”) found that only one in five investors reported actually trusting their financial advisor. 

Inbound marketing solves this problem because it allows a financial advisor to build trust, credibility and rapport with potential clients. Even better, strategies like content marketing can be automated to work whether the advisor is working, sleeping, or on vacation. 

The numbers don’t lie, either. Here are some stats about inbound marketing… 

• According to HubSpot, businesses that blog generate 126% more leads than those that don’t. 
• HubSpot also found that inbound leads cost 61% less than leads from outbound marketing methods. 

This means not only can financial advisors generate more leads, but those leads will likely be cheaper. It’s a win-win if I’ve ever seen one. 

Unfortunately, there’s a big problem with inbound marketing… 

It’s intimidating. 😱​

Most financial advisors aren’t natural marketers, nor do they have the time to learn all the intricacies involved with inbound marketing. 

Enter: Lead Pilot. 

It makes inbound marketing much easier for financial advisors because it has a collection of features which can’t be found anywhere else, such as…

Lead Scoring

This is a game-changer. 

Lead scoring is a way to quantify your leads to see which leads are the most engaged and likely to be responsive. For example, someone who opens your emails and reads all your blog posts will have a higher lead score than someone who rarely opens your emails and never reads your posts. 

This is a godsend because it allows you to see exactly who is receptive to certain marketing messages. You can also see who isn’t responding to certain marketing pieces, so you can try something new. 

My #1 piece of marketing advice for financial advisors is to have multiple marketing strategies. Lead scoring allows you to take this advice to the next level. If someone isn’t responding to a certain strategy, you can change gears. 

Plus, lead scoring helps financial advisors become more productive because it allows them to focus on the leads with the highest scores. 

With lead scoring, financial advisor prospecting will never be the same again.

Lead Pilot's lead scoring allows financial advisors to see which prospects are most receptive to their marketing messages...

Content Library

I have been an advocate of content marketing for years. Heck, this blog article you’re reading right now is a form of content marketing. 😎 

Content marketing can deliver tremendous results for businesses. For example: 

• According to DemandMetric, content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less. 
• According to Kapost/Eloqua, content marketing costs 41% less, on average, than paid search. (In my experience, content marketing costs even less than that for financial advisors because finance-related terms can get extremely expensive in paid search.) 
• According to Aberdeen, conversion rates are nearly 6X higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters.

However, most financial advisors don’t have the time nor the inclination to sit around creating content all day. Fortunately, Lead Pilot has an amazing content library. 

You can even filter by categories and personas. For instance, you may want to post from the business category one day and the family category the next. Their personas include those like athletes, business owners, HENRYs, HNW investors and more. 

I’ve never seen anything as defined as their content library. You can literally choose who you want to target, and Lead Pilot will spoon-feed you the content.

You can allocate more time toward running your business while Lead Pilot automates the delivery of messages across channels. You can easily build and run campaigns at their scheduled days and times, via single or multiple channels (such as email, social, etc.). 

The best part? Everything is editorial in nature and doesn’t offer advice or act as an endorsement, so it keeps you compliant. In addition, all content created and deployed on the Lead Pilot platform is archived for a minimum of seven years. 

Social Media Scheduler

This is another great tool to have because not only can you choose which content you want to use, but you can schedule it from within Lead Pilot. You can set a specific time and day, so you don’t need to worry about posting on social media in real time. ​

The social media scheduling tool alone can help you save hours of time...

Analytics

One of the things I love about the team over at Lead Pilot is that they’re REALLY into analytics. They give tons of statistics and information, which is great because it helps financial advisors make better decisions. They’re upfront about what is working and what isn’t. 

Inside your Lead Pilot account, you will have access to your analytics so you can see how your marketing strategies are performing. There’s no guessing whatsoever. Everything is there for you to see, such as:

• Social media reports. You get real-time data about your post performance so you can determine what’s working and what isn’t. 
• Lead reporting. This allows you to track every detail of your contacts and better tailor your messaging. 
• Email campaign reporting. You can see email delivery, clicks, open rates, and more. 

Speaking of email campaign reporting, Lead Pilot also has…

Email Marketing

Honestly, I’d recommend Lead Pilot for this feature alone. Because they’re one of the only services out there tailored specifically for financial advisors with topics like compliance in mind. 

The cold, hard truth is this: if you’re a financial advisor and you’re not using email marketing, you’re falling behind. It is by far the most effective conversion strategy I’m seeing right now for financial advisors. Nothing else comes close because email allows you to follow up and build a relationship with the people on your email list. Also… 

• According to McKinsey & Co., email is 40X more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. 
• According to YCharts, clients prefer email over all other forms of communication (and it’s not even close). 
• According to CampaignMonitor, email averages a 4,400% return on investment. 
• According to Forrester, people are twice as likely to sign up for your email list as they are to interact with you on Facebook. (This blows a lot of people’s minds but it’s true.) 

Email is the king of all marketing strategies. 👑 

One of the biggest parts of my business is showing financial advisors exactly what to say in emails to convert people into booked appointments. Before Lead Pilot, I was recommending services like MailChimp and Constant Contact. But now, neither of them can hold a candle to Lead Pilot.

Landing Pages

When I found out that Lead Pilot offered unlimited custom landing pages, my heart started beating a little faster. My mind raced with the possibilities. Because this means financial advisors can make as many landing pages as they want with their own branding. 

If you don’t know what a landing page is, it’s a page designed to get a visitor to take a specific action. This could be to register for a webinar, to set an appointment, or to sign up for your email list. 

Lead Pilot makes it easy to create these landing pages. You don’t need to be tech savvy and you don’t need a developer. You can easily customize every aspect of your landing pages (colors, fonts, buttons, etc.) and update them at any time.

Integration

Lead Pilot allows you to integrate with a lot of different tools, such as Riskalyze, Wealthbox and Redtail. Client and prospect data can be automated and synced across platforms to provide a seamless experience. 

I imagine they will add even more integrations in the future. With a software like this, it only gets better as time goes on.

(By the way, if you'd like to start your free trial, you can do that here:  Lead Pilot Free Trial | Start Your Free Trial Of Lead Pilot Today

Lead Pilot Pricing...

The people over at Lead Pilot are straightforward with their pricing, which I love. Here’s how much it “costs”... you can choose between… 

• $299 per month, or… 
• $2,988 per year (which works out to be $249 per month). 

And I say “costs” because, if you use it, it shouldn’t cost you anything. If nothing else, using Lead Pilot is like handing money to your business. Because look at it this way… 

Let’s say your personal income is $150K per year, which works out to be about $75 per hour assuming a forty-hour workweek. This means all Lead Pilot needs to do is save you 3.32 hours per month and it pays for itself. 

(You can EASILY save twice that much through the content library and social media scheduling alone.) 

That doesn’t even factor in the money you’ll save by having all your inbound marketing tools under one roof. Check this out…

Lead Pilot is a steal at only $249 per month (for an annual plan) compared to over $1,000 per month with separate tools...

If you were to pay for a ghostwriter and separate tools, it would run you $1,263.99 per month… and that’s assuming you don’t need the more expensive versions of those tools.

Honestly, if you’re hesitant about investing a few hundred bucks per month into Lead Pilot, which can transform your business AND save you money along the way, maybe you shouldn’t be giving financial advice. 😆

How's Their Customer Support? 

Let me start with something awesome: all Lead Pilot users have a free 30-minute onboarding session to ensure they're properly set up and can adequately use the site. 

This is amazing and it makes sense. It's in Lead Pilot's best interest to make sure you know how to use the platform, that way you see positive results and stay a user. 

If you need anything, you can always email the team, or you can start a conversation with them within the app. 

They also do frequent webinars and workshops about topics related to financial advisors. You won’t find this type of information anywhere else because the other tools aren’t tailored specifically to financial advisors. 

Additionally, they have a help center, complete with different articles and tutorials which show you how to do everything. With such a robust help center, you may never need to contact support in the first place.

Lead Pilot's help center is fairly robust, with guides and tutorials showing you how to navigate the software...

Finally, they’re nice people. I had a chance to talk with Samantha Russell (Lead Pilot’s Chief Marketing Officer) on my “Financial Advisor Marketing” podcast and she was one of my favorite guests. 

(If you’re interested in listening to that episode, it’s titled “Practical Inbound Marketing Tips To Grow Your Business”.)

Case Studies And Results...

You might be thinking, “All this sounds great. What do other people say about Lead Pilot?”. That’s why I’ve done some digging and unearthed some real results for you… 

Braun-Bostich & Associates got the following results: 

• 20 warm leads in the first six months.
• Reduced marketing costs by eliminating HubSpot from their tech stack.
• Increased email open rate by 346% in less than one year. 

Padilla Wealth Management achieved 400% organic social media growth in the first thirty days… 

Kelson Financial saw 5X the growth on LinkedIn… 

And Mark Sharp Retirement saved eight hours per week by consolidating the work from three different systems (MailChimp, Hootsuite, and Leadpages). 

I could go on and on but the only real “case study” that matters is YOU and the results it can help you achieve in YOUR business. That’s why I encourage you to…

Give Lead Pilot A Try Today (With No Risk)...

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you know I almost NEVER recommend any type of tool. However, I wholeheartedly recommend using Lead Pilot if you want to save time, save money, and get more clients.

They’re so confident you’ll be blown away that they offer a free trial, which you can try here: Lead Pilot Free Trial | Start Your Free Trial Of Lead Pilot Today

If you love it, you can sign up for their monthly or yearly plan. 

They also offer the ability to schedule a 1:1 demo, which is nice. You’ll get the opportunity to have someone walk you through the software and answer any questions you may have. So, if you check out all their features and still have questions, I suggest scheduling a demo. 

Oh, and because I’m an affiliate of Lead Pilot, I have the ability to grant you 10% off your initial month (or 10% off your entire annual fee if you select the annual plan) with this promo code: 

ADVISORCOACH10PERCENTOFF

Here’s what it’ll look like when you sign up… 

Use coupon code ADVISORCOACH10PERCENTOFF when signing up to get 10% off your first payment...

If you select the annual plan, this adds up to nearly $300 in savings. Not bad for reading an article!

So, head on over to Lead Pilot and sign up for their free trial here: Lead Pilot Free Trial | Sign Up Page For Financial Advisors

You’ll be glad you did. 😄