Social Media Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media platforms used to be a place where you post about your private life — pictures of your pets, life updates, even the occasional angry rants about the line in your local IRS office.
As more interactions started to happen online compared to IRL (“in real life”), social media bloomed into a space for everything. And while people can still connect on a personal level, businesses are also getting in on their fair use of social media, and more brands are incorporating it into their digital marketing strategy.
With more and more people flocking to social media, the platform has become an excellent place to find new clients.
Professionals can get to know each other despite their distance. Influencers can make a living through their content and brand partnerships. Brands can connect with customers and prospects while building their authority in the process. And prospective clients can do prior research into which companies to trust before booking a consultation as well.
As someone in the financial services industry who builds relationships based on trust, social media marketing is a good way to build a foundation for your client relationships at scale.
In this article, we’ll discuss why financial advisors should use social media and share the best tips for utilizing these platforms to promote your business.
Why Should Financial Advisors Invest in Social Media?
Let’s start with the most straightforward reason why you should be on social media — your potential clients are on social media.
The ones who are still looking for a firm to trust won’t be exposed to your genius.
The ones who are actively comparing their options go to the one they know most about first.
The ones who have decided to meet with your firm might have sent you a message — that you missed.
In addition, popping up in your prospects’ social feed once in a while with something they may appreciate helps you build your authority as a trusted figure. It puts you top of mind when they need a service like the ones you’re offering.
This also ties into your brand awareness. While you can use other channels to improve your customer’s awareness level as well, social media is the only place where you can actively interact with your customers and prospects alike.
Improving your brand awareness isn’t just about getting clout.
Improving brand awareness primes your prospects to know, like, and trust who you are so that you attract only the best-fit clients into your ecosystem.
5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Financial Advisors
Being consistent is great advice when you’re tackling social media marketing. However, here are several other tips to help you dodge the mistakes you can make with social media marketing.
Understand Your Demographic
Any marketer will tell you that creating a good strategy starts with getting to know your target audience. Social media isn’t any different.
Understanding who you want to reach helps you create the most impactful campaigns and minimize the risks of said campaigns.
Here are a few things you should collect before you start popping up on social media.
Who is your target audience? What platforms do they spend their time in?
What’s a problem you can solve right now?
What do they want in the long term?
What do they look for when they start searching for an advisory firm?
This information helps you craft a strategy that will attract your ideal clients and weed out the others.
For example, if you know that you want to work with tech professionals who are looking to retire, you can create social media content specifically targeting this segment. You know that they’re mainly on LinkedIn and Twitter, so it won’t make sense to focus your efforts on Instagram or Facebook.
On the other hand, if you specialize in helping new business owners in the eCommerce industry manage their finances, you won’t be posting the same things, nor will you be frequenting the same spaces.
Standard information, such as which generation your prospects belong to, will also play a part in how you present your services on social media. For example, millennials and Gen Z are known to have different behaviors on social media, so it makes sense to tailor the experience accordingly.
Tailoring what you post, where you post it, and even when you post helps you get the engagement you’re looking for from your target audience.
Interact with Prospects
If you’re not interacting with your prospects on social media, you’re missing the point.
Your social media account isn’t a flyer where you only need to say your piece and that’s it. As it’s designed to be an interactive platform, having conversations with your prospects is the most important aspect of your social media strategy.
Responding to DMs, asking for referrals, commenting on others’ posts, and replying to comments should be the core of your social media marketing strategy.
Having these interactions make your brand more approachable and helps you build trust with your prospects.
Additionally, whether you’re responding to a complaint or participating in a discussion, you’re shaping how you want to be remembered by your prospects.
On some platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, interactions like these might also help you reach a wider audience.
However, keep in mind that interactions in social media can be tricky. Especially for people in the financial services industry, such as wealth management, financial planning, or financial advisory.
There are a lot of compliance rules you need to follow from regulators such as FINRA or SEC. Make sure that you’re not breaking any of these rules by studying them before you execute your strategy.
Direct Prospects to Your Website
Including links to relevant content or pages that live on your website is a good way to move your prospects further in their buyer’s journey.
Your website is a natural next step, especially if they’re ready to book a consultation with a financial planner.
The goal here is to move your interaction from a borrowed platform (your social media account) to an owned platform — such as your blog, webinar collection, or newsletter — and boost your content marketing strategy.
Including links to a relevant page on your website exposes your prospects to an owned platform, where you have better control over their interactions with your brand. Ideally, these pages would be optimized for conversion and SEO so you can maximize your ROI.
Do note that the links you include in your social media posts should be relevant to the content of your post here. Sending links to prospects who aren’t ready for it would just turn them away. And while you might see them clicking the link or trickling into your website, that doesn’t mean they’re engaging with the content on the other side of the link.
Create Relevant Content
Surprisingly, your prospects like being promoted to. Especially if what you’re sharing is relevant to their needs.
Social media content that helps prospects do the things they want to do are what your prospects will remember. Associating your brand with being helpful builds authority and trust, especially in your prospect’s mind.
Whether you’re helping them solve a problem or accomplish a goal, relevant and timely content helps you get better engagement from your prospects.
For example, if you recently guested on a podcast about personal finance, it’s likely that you’ll get a surge of visitors looking to DIY their financial planning. In this case, a helpful post on how to solve common financial problems or pointing to a few resources to understand more about the topic you covered would be ideal.
In addition, consider making your strategy more comprehensive by creating content for customers and prospects in different stages of awareness. Having something for everyone in your buyer’s journey helps you build a comprehensive social media marketing strategy.
For example, besides educational posts that help new followers DIY their way into a solution, you should also post client testimonials once in a while to remind prospects that are actively looking that you have experience with people in a similar situation.
Monitor Performance
Just like other marketing campaigns, you’ll need to do your social media interactions strategically.
While following best practices is a good first step, knowing what works for your unique audience — and what doesn’t — helps you plan your next social media marketing campaigns.
In addition, monitoring the metrics of your posts and links help you prove that the channel you’re targeting is working and validate your strategy.
Monitoring your performance helps you discover a lot of things that will help with your strategy.
For example, by tracking the engagement of your posts, you can find the type of content that resonates best with your target audience. If you’re up for a more detailed experiment, you can vary your post times to figure out when your target audience is active so they’ll see your posts. If you can set up more intricate tracking on your website, you can also figure out which links get clicked, and which ones are actually producing results (such as calls booked, ebooks downloaded, or websites explored).
Grow Your Social Media Presence with Asset-Map
When you create marketing content relevant to your target audience and publish them on the relevant social media platforms, you’re both showcasing what you can do and at the same time engaging your target audience.
Having a strong social media presence means you can attract more prospects, nurture them into leads, and reap more of the benefits social media offers.
Simple experiences are the best way to go with social media. Considering that your posts are stuck between countless other posts, you’ll need a way to stand out from the crowd and catch their attention right away.
Use Asset-Map’s visual maps to simplify your social media posts into digestible content.
See how Asset-Map can help you turn complex client conversations into meaningful discussions that leave your clients feeling empowered instead of intimidated. Book your demo today.