How Financial Advisors Can Leverage Facebook for Clients and Prospects

Since social media platforms gained prominence in the mid-2000’s, their influence has grown exponentially. As people move away from traditional mediums such as television, newspaper, and radio, advisors are beginning to leverage digital platforms such as social media, video, podcasts and blogs for their marketing and communications needs.

This growth has only accelerated as the pandemic has impeded the ability of advisors to gain new prospects through seminars and in-person meetings. Not surprisingly, there has recently been an influx of ads highlighting financial services and products within Facebook feeds from leading dealers and asset managers.

From an advisor’s perspective, Facebook can be leveraged two ways:

1)      As a communications tool to promote your practice and connect to existing and potential clients through regular content posts. This approach requires only a business page and regular posts, such as interesting finance related content or market updates.

2)     As a marketing tool with the ability to deliver hyper-specific audience targeting to promote an advisor’s services. This approach can be done in conjunction with the first method or not. It requires less frequent content updates, but does require more thoughtful targeting of audience and content delivery.

To date, advisors’ ability to leverage social media has been limited by some dealers through compliance and controlled access to specific platforms, such as Hearsay and LinkedIn. This is changing however as the pandemic has forced many advisors to pivot their marketing, communications and lead generation strategies online.

Since the start of the pandemic, adults 35 years and older have increased their usage of social media by 40% and as a result, advisors have increased their presence in this space. According to a recent Putnam Investments survey, 9 in 10 advisors agree that social media has changed the nature of client relationships during the pandemic and 74% of advisors who use social media were able to obtain a lead or onboard a new client.

Facebook has Over 2.7 Billion Active Users, with the Ability to Target Specific Segments

With over 2.7 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the largest social network in the world. As a result, Facebook can deliver the most targeted form of advertising, providing advisors with the ability to focus on numerous individual demographics including age, location, employment, life events, as well as hundreds of interests, and purchase and online behavioural data points. These interests can include criteria such as occupation, relationship status, hobbies, political and social issues, travel, vehicles and more.

Looking to target women aged 60-64 living within 10 miles of White Rock, BC who are interested in BMW, Mercedes-Benz and luxury goods? There are 3900 individuals in Facebook’s dataset.

Tracking Your Progress

Once an advisor has decided on their audience, images and content, Facebook advertising can be run almost immediately. The results can also be viewed throughout the duration of the campaign, providing you with information on the number of impressions (times content was displayed) and engagements (clicks, shares, reactions and conversions), along with a breakdown of the audience that has viewed and interacted with your content to date.

The ability to see real time results means you can make edits on-the-fly, and run simultaneous campaigns using different strategies to improve your rates of engagement. These insights can be used to build upon new campaigns and increase your odds of success through re-targeting (focused on individuals who have previously engaged with your site) and creating “look-alike” audiences (inputting existing lists of clients/prospects and allowing Facebook algorithms to build an audience of similar prospects to target).

Advertising is Cost-Effective

Facebook is one of the most cost-effective mediums for advertising with free site platforms, the ability to promote your message to thousands of individuals for under ten dollars and cost-per-click rates averaging $3-4. Budgets are completely customizable and can start with an investment of as little as $5. 

Facebook advertising costs are dependent on the advisor’s objectives and success in audience targeting and content development.

Types of conversion Facebook ads can include:

• Conversions: Drive an action on your website
• Webinars

Lead Magnets/ Offers

A lead magnet is an offer to prospects of something they value in exchange for contact information such as name and email. Lead magnets are an offer or content valuable to your audience (eg. Top 10 Retirement Strategies or Cross-Border Tax Strategies) and can be delivered either via a lead form and pdf document, your own website or through attending a seminar/webinar.

Advertising Results are Instant and Measurable

The results of a user’s marketing efforts can be broken down throughout the campaign based on the demographics of the audience, including; gender, age, channel (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger) and geography.

Getting Started

Facebook has an abundance of information available on how to build your profile page and effectively leverage Facebook advertising. There are also numerous videos and articles on the web as well. You will need a Facebook account to build a business page and begin your marketing efforts. The work required to build a business page and ads is fairly minimal, however using a designer to help create images will give it a much more professional look. Once you have built your business page, adding content and ad creation are dependent on your overall objectives.

As always, check your dealer firm’s policy on using Facebook for marketing purposes before getting started.