As social media usage continues to grow amongst financial advisors and their prospective clients, advisors are growing increasingly interested in whether spending money on digital advertising can provide a good return on investment. As many readers know, Kitces.com is very involved in the world digital marketing and social media, so I wanted to share some of my own thoughts on digital marketing and social media for financial advisors – and particularly when it comes to actually spending money on digital advertising. Because, as I’ve learned through many years of testing and experimenting with social media, while it can be a powerful tool, it can also be easy to waste money if not done properly.
In this week’s #OfficeHours with @MichaelKitces, my Tuesday 1PM EST broadcast via Periscope, we explore how financial advisors can use digital marketing and social media to grow their business, and particularly why it’s important to have a clear understanding of what you are trying to accomplish in the first place (e.g., awareness, engagement, or acquisition) in order to use digital advertising effectively!
The first question to consider is what, exactly, you’re trying to accomplish with social media. Because the reality is that digital marketing, like any kind of marketing, is actually a multi-step process. And at a high level, I like to think of it in three phases: Awareness, Engagement, and Acquisition. The Awareness phase is simply about making people aware that your business exists in the first place. The people you reach are not necessarily ready to do business with you, but you want to make them aware that you exist. The Engagement phase is where you try to actually help a prospective client begin to know, like, and trust you. There’s a famous saying in the marketing world that people need to engage with your brand 7 to 9 times before they’ll be ready to do business with you, and that’s what’s happening in the engagement phase. The Acquisition phase is where you actually try and acquire a client. In other words, this is where you transition from marketing into an actual sales process, because the prospect is ready to do business, is interested in doing business with you, and now you just have to convince them to actually take that action.
And these phases (Awareness, Engagement, and Acquisition) matter in a social media context, because they influence what you are trying to do through social media in the first place. Social media can be great for building awareness. For instance, if you broadcast useful content on Twitter, it tends to get retweeted and shared with others, who become aware of what you’re providing, follow you, and now you have more people who are aware of what you’re doing and can amplify your content. The caveat, though, is that Twitter is a short-form medium (280 characters or less), so you’re not going to convince someone to give you their life savings based on a 280 character tweet. Facebook can also be effective for building awareness, particularly if you share content through a company page. So it may make sense to spend some dollars to try to further build your audience. Paying for awareness on Twitter is less effective (since relevant content that gets shared is far more useful in the first place), but Facebook – with their ad tools specifically built to help you target people who are not already following your page but would likely be interested in learning more about you with – can be particularly effective for gaining awareness through paid ads tightly refined specifically to your audience.
However, building awareness alone isn’t enough to actually get new clients. You actually have to engage prospects in order to get them to know, like, and trust you enough to want to do business with you. On social media, engagement means doing something that prompts people to take a further action. Maybe you run a TweetChat on Twitter or ask a provocative question on Facebook, but the key is that you have to get them to do something. In a social media context, you may want to promote a particularly popular tweet, or perhaps on Facebook you might pay to boost an article, survey, or an ad that prompts individuals to come to your website and do something. These aren’t necessarily big ad spends. You spend money to get your engagement opportunities in front of your prospects on your social media channels, but the key here is that there must actually be some element of engagement.
The third part of the funnel is acquisition. Here, a different set of strategies are relevant. This is the domain where you’re most likely to do very targeted ads, that really invite people to actually hire you and do business with you. Notably, this doesn’t mean just plastering ads out for the whole world to see. Your targeted messages should go to the people who are already engaged with you. This could mean paying to target a particular offer or invitation to do business with you sent to the already-engaged audience that has ‘Liked’ your Facebook page, but you aren’t asking people to ‘Like’ your Facebook page at this stage. You’re paying to make them an offer to take a next step towards actually becoming a client of yours.
Ultimately, though, the key point is to recognize that any digital marketing advertising you do has to align with what you’re trying to accomplish. There are lots of strategies which may or may not be effective – from keywords and organic search, to SEO and retargeting (all discussed in greater depth in today’s office hours) – but the key is that you need to do more than just throw ads out into social media. Digitial advertising can work great, but it’s almost never about sending out a magic ad or Tweet. You need to build awareness, find ways to engage your audience, and then prompt them to take action that allows you to acquire them as a client. If you don’t have a well thought out process, digital advertising will likely not provide the return on investment that you want!
source https://www.kitces.com/blog/financial-advisor-social-media-advertising-pay-per-click-digital-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=financial-advisor-social-media-advertising-pay-per-click-digital-marketing
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