If you are any of the above, you may be looking to use Facebook marketing to expand your reach.
This article provides a step-by-step Facebook marketing strategy that would be beneficial for financial planning professionals.
1. Build a Customer or Buyer Persona
The most important thing you need to do is figure out who your potential investment or financial clients are on Facebook.
A good way to understand your target market is to create a customer profile that outlines who they are.
When thinking about their customers, it can be helpful to consider factors such as their demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and what problems they are trying to solve (or what they desire).
What this target audience would appreciate most is to know what solutions or content would be useful to them.
An example of a customer profile that an agent might need to create for a potential client could include information such as: name, age, income, job, family situation, etc.
It looks at their demographic background, what kind of lifestyle they have, their financial and job situation, what their pain points are, and how they behave online.
Here’s yet another customer avatar that was generated, focusing on your prospect’s job, education, demographics, communication methods, financial goals, and challenges using HubSpot’s Make My Person tool:
2. Do Research Using a Keyword Research Tool
Your next step after identifying your prospects and their interests and trigger points is to identify the topics that they are interested in.
Long-tail keywords are keywords that are more specific and usually longer than other keywords. Keyword research tools can help you find these keywords as well as potential questions that your prospect might have.
There are two very useful tools which you can use here.
a. Ahrefs
This tool offers some free keyword research tools, such as the Keyword Generator Tool, which you can use. You can zoom in to your specific country as well as Keyword Ideas, and it’ll come up with some suggestions for you as follows:
b. Answer The Public
This tool is helpful in coming up with questions that your potential customers could be searching for. It provides you with long-tail keywords which can be used to improve your chances of being found in a search engine.
What are some of the most common questions that people query Google for when it comes to financial planning? To get an idea, we’ll take a look at the results for “financial planning” in “English/Singapore.”
You can identify potential keyword topics to focus on for your prospects by using the above tools.
3. Read The News and Inject Trending Content
It can be helpful to create and share financial advice or wealth planning content that is related to current events. Use a tool to see what is popular in the news. Flipping the local newspapers will also be helpful.
Keep up to date with news about the financial and economic situation in your country. Topics such as the following may be of interest to your prospects:
- Economic trends and job statistics
- Wealth management and financial market news (eg the performance of the stock markets)
- Human interest stories—both positive (financially savvy individuals) as well as negative (those who are in bad financial situations)
- Policies relating to insurance, investment, and other related areas
- Government policies and rules relating to social security or retirement planning, eg mortgage rules, investment rules, etc
4. Organize Your Facebook Posts
Organizing your potential content topics, questions, and campaign ideas into broad content themes will make it easier for you to create a content strategy.
It is suggested that you create a content strategy that you can rely on for your future Facebook posts. This will be especially useful when you have used the tools above to generate a list of content ideas.
There are several ways to organize your content:
a. By Customer Avatar
Here, you should group your content based on the different customer types that you’re targeting. The content you create for your business should be based on who your target customers are.
You can either create different types of content for different customer groups, or you can have different channels (such as social media, email, and your website) that are designed for specific customer types.
The cost of a hip replacement A hip replacement is a surgery that is performed to replace a damaged hip joint with an artificial one. It is a major surgery that requires a hospital stay, and the cost of the surgery can be quite high.
b. By Broad Categories
This is where you should categorize your content based on the different types of financial advisory services. There are many different types of financial plans. Here is a way to classify them based on five common areas.
- Investments
- Insurance
- Financial Planning and Budgeting
- Financial/Lifestyle Habits
- What’s In The News
c. By Customer’s Buying Journey
You will need to map your customer’s buying journey and come up with content topics that correspond to each stage.
In addition to mapping your content to the customer’s journey, you can also map it to your digital marketing funnel stages, starting from awareness, to consideration, to conversion, to loyalty/advocacy. This is shown below
For a financial advisor, such content categories may include the following:
- Awareness: 1-minute financial video tips, news commentaries, infographics
- Consideration: Instructional videos, blog articles (“How to pay for a 4-room HDB flat?”), Facebook Live series
- Conversion (Lead Gen): eBook to financial planning, budgeting template (opt-in to download), Zoom Webinar on retirement planning
- Conversion (Sales): Face-t0-face consultation, Financial coaching
- Loyalty/ Advocacy: Customer testimonials, success stories, case studies (anonymized)
5. Put Them into a Content Calendar
Once you have written the main topics for your content, you should add them to a content calendar. Your goal should be to share useful content with your audience on a regular basis.
This is an example of a content calendar for a social media marketing agency that includes information on customer personas, the buying journey/marketing stage, content title, topics, content format, channels, and results, all in one spreadsheet.
To make a calendar like this, start by creating a grid with seven columns and five rows. You can make a calendar like this by creating a grid with seven columns and five rows.
6. Adopt Best Practices in Facebook Copywriting
When creating a post for Facebook marketing, it is important to keep the first 1-2 lines interesting and attention-grabbing, as well as using visuals to further draw in the reader. Here are some ways to do so:
- Focus on your customer persona
- Talk about their pain points/concerns
- Use a triggering question
- Stir their curiosity
- Cite facts and figures that grab their attention
- Reduce risks/ uncertainties
- Tap on their dreams and desires
7. Pay Attention to Your Visual Designs
Your Facebook marketing efforts will be greatly enhanced by the use of visuals such as photos, illustrations and videos. Here are some best practices:
- Use videos if possible—tools like Lumen5, Invideo, wave.app and many others can be useful for creating simple videos
- Feature humans in your visuals—preferably those who look like you target audiences
- Text overlays to highlight salient points
- Animations may sometimes work well
- Bright and highly contrasting colors work well
- Use a simple way to illustrate your points
8. Attract and Nurture Your Leads on Facebook
What if you want to use Facebook to generate leads? Well, consider running a Facebook Lead Generation campaign. I have written this article to provide a step-by-step guide to doing something. Read the text and see if you can identify and apply the principles discussed.
If you want to succeed in the financial advisory business, you need to come up with a lead magnet that will make your prospects want to fill out a form. Examples may include the following:
- Webinar on financial management for specific target groups
- eBook or guide on insurance types
- Template to help clients to manage their expenses
- Calculator for wealth management or retirement planning
- Checklist before they invest in any financial instrument
- Quiz to help them make better financial decisions
- Giveaways (eg premiums or prizes)
9. Start Small To Win Big
There is a lot of pressure for financial advisors to be present on all social media platforms in order to reach the most people. If they are only present on some platforms, they may feel like they are not doing enough.
The truth? Start small. You will be more successful if you start with one platform and become an expert on it before you move on to another.
Facebook has a lot of different advertising options, so you will be busy learning about all of them. Don’t make your job harder by also trying to learn about other platforms at the same time.
You might be tempted to think you could feed two birds with one scone, but you’d be making a common mistake if you did that. The mistake would be taking the same ad creative and running it on all the platforms available.
This can work, yes, but it’s mostly just dangerous. Each platform has different ways of attracting users, as well as different functions and capabilities.
Rather than trying to advertise on every platform at once, focus on one platform at a time.
Before creating any additional ads, ensure that the existing ad is effective for the platform it is being used on. Test the ad against other ads to see how it measures up.
Does it still win? If so, test it again. It’s important to keep testing your ads to find the ones that work best and will increase your conversion rate over time.
When starting your ad campaign, you should begin with a small budget in order to gauge its effectiveness. If you don’t want to waste a lot of money on ads that might not be effective, try only spending $20 per day to see if they work. Then, adjust accordingly.
Keep your objectives small and simple, too.
It may be expensive to use cold traffic to get a prospect to book an appointment with a single ad.
If you want to get someone to subscribe to your email list, you can start by offering something for $15. Over time, you can lower the price to $10 or even less.
You can figure out how many people on your email list book appointments, and it probably won’t require you to spend $500 a day.
Other marketing strategies like webinars, email marketing, direct mail or your website’s content should not be forgotten about as you focus on one platform.
10. Disregard Vanity Metrics
Some advisors who seem to think they are too good for basic strategies like direct mail turn their nose up at it because they think it’s too old-school. Even if it means you have to put your face on the side of a bus, folks, if it makes you money, run the darn ad.
The only thing that matters is how much money comes in versus how much goes out. That’s it.
vanity metrics like follower count and website visitors hold a lot of power over marketers, but the only thing that allows your business to exist is $$$
I would prefer a business where each customer is worth $10, even if there are only 100 of them, to a business where there are 1,000 customers but each is only worth $0.50.
What we need to focus on is not how many people are downloading our app, but rather how many people are actively using it Although increased rates of downloads may be impressive, they are ultimately meaningless unless people are also using the app regularly.
Instead of fixating on how many people have downloaded the app, we should be more concerned with how many people are actively using it.
Ask yourself this: why are you in business? If you answered yes, you’re in trouble. If you’re trying to maintain a professional image and copy everyone else’s strategies, you’re in trouble. Do you want to help people and make a difference? Do you simply want to turn a profit?
It doesn’t matter what your reason is, your answer is always fine–but smart financial advisors always emphasize this: it’s all about how much money you’re putting in versus how much you’re taking out.
11. Timing Matters
If you want your Facebook ads to be seen by your target market, find out when they are scrolling through Facebook and post your ads at those times.
Want to figure this out faster? Track how many people are online on Facebook chat for the next week at different times of day. If the people you are surveying are representative of your target market, you can make a quick judgement about what they want.
Advisors who target businesses are more likely to see engagement on weekdays, while those who target consumers are more likely to see engagement on weekends.
It is advisable to post on Facebook on Thursdays and Fridays, and the most optimal times are between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. You should still post even if it’s not one of the suggested days or times. It’s better to have some people see you than no people at all.
According to a study by Databox of 45+ Facebook Ads experts, a good engagement rate is considered to be _____. Check out the breakdown of the responses
12. Your Facebook Ad Spend Is An Investment
A sunk cost is an expense that is not recoverable. For example, you will never be able to get the money you spent on dinner at Outback Steakhouse last night back. When you pay Facebook to show your ad to people, it is an investment.
When you only view Facebook marketing as an expense, you’re missing out on opportunities to grow your business and get new customers.
Although building an email list with Facebook ads is currently successful for financial advisors, this may not always be the case.
Not all companies can have this policy because every company’s policy is different. These advisors use email opt-in pages to generate traffic and then follow up with their target market through email.
Sending traffic that is specific to the niche of your opt-in offer will result in more conversions. You can offer a free PDF report as a bonus to someone joining your email list.
The report is titled “7 Retirement Mistakes Teachers Make (And How To Avoid Them)”. Then, advertise the opt-in on Facebook and target teachers.
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