Facebook Advertising for Financial Advisors

As you may know, we here at Hyperchat Social started with a niche in the financial field. We focused on helping financial advisors grow their practice through the use of social media. This is all thanks to our CEO, Ted Jenkin, who is a practicing financial advisor here in the Atlanta area and a marketing guru.

With Ted's background in the financial industry, we know all about the tricks of the trade when it comes to social media in the space. We know about compliance departments and can work with almost any broker-dealer's approval process. We know what works and we know what practices may not perform as well.

Social media can be a powerful tool when growing a practice and one social tool you cannot afford to overlook is the power of Facebook advertising.

If you have clicked around on our blog before, you know the importance of paid advertising in a social strategy. But what are the best practices for financial advisors wanting to dive into the world of Facebook advertising? Keep reading to find out!

Getting Familiar With Facebook Targeting

Almost everyone has a Facebook account! In fact, there are over 1 Billion daily active Facebook users. Odds are, not every single one of the billion people on Facebook are going to need or want your financial planning service. This is where targeting comes in! Without targeting, you will be spending advertising dollars on people who will never need your product.

Facebook allows users to create a custom audience based on four main categories, including location, demographics, interests, and behaviors. To learn more about hitting a bullseye with your targeting, check out this blog post that goes into each of the targeting categories in depth.

Identifying Your Target Audience

The first step to take when creating a stellar social strategy is knowing who your target audience is. This may seem obvious, but the targeting is the foundation of a successful Facebook campaign.

When identifying your target audience as a financial advisor, it is important to picture your ideal client. Where do they live? How old are they? What are some things they are interested in? Do they work at a certain company? Do they have kids? What about their household income? Are you looking at the elite top five percent or a broader twenty-five percent? These are all things to consider before delving into Facebook advertising. Odds are, Facebook has a filter for the criteria you are looking for.

Pro-tip: Write down your ideal client profile and play around with Facebook's targeting features to best match this profile.

Selecting an Objective

Congrats! You have crafted your perfect target audience to serve the ad to. The next step is picking an objective. Facebook's advertising platform will prompt you to select an objective. This is basically where the advisor can set the goal for their campaign.

There are several objectives Facebook offers when creating an advertisement campaign. The selection of which objective to use highly depends on the goal of the overall campaign. However, there are two main objectives we suggest for financial professionals to take advantage of.

Traffic Objective

This objective provides the opportunity for financial advisors to drive web traffic to a certain webpage, whether that is a landing page, a contact page on your brand's website, or even an event registration page.

Simply select the traffic objective, create your advertisement and plug in the URL you want to increase traffic to!

Lead Generation

In the financial advising world, the name of the game is lead generation. It is all about getting a quality lead for the lowest cost possible. Lucky for the advisor, Facebook has a lead generating objective designed to deliver leads and contact information straight to the advertiser.

You could have a pretty below average cost-per-click on your Facebook traffic campaign, but little increase in conversion. Whether it be sales, or consultations, the people who clicked on your ad expressed interest in your offer clicked away for some reason. And the worst part of it is, the only record you have on them is from the data on your website.

When you select lead generation as the objective for your Facebook ad campaign, Facebook requires the social media user to fill out a simple lead form before directing them away from your ad.

There are two great advantages Facebook advertising gives you when setting up this campaign. Facebook allows the marketer to select which information they would like to receive from the prospect and Facebook pulls this information directly from the user's profile. This makes the process extremely easy for social media users to input their information to decrease the chances of the prospect clicking off the page.

The lead form system that Facebook uses is extremely user-friendly. The platform comes equipped with a data library where Facebook stores the prospects' information and easily downloadable in an excel spreadsheet.

Tips For Running A Successful Ad Campaign

#1: Offer an incentive

The information you get from a Facebook lead form ad is valuable. Since the social media user is giving you something of value, offer them something of value as well. As a financial professional, offer an eBook full of valuable information or a free consultation in exchange for this information.

Pro-Tip: Use your blog to create valuable e-books to prospects! Then at the end of your E-book, plug back to your blog, increasing your website traffic.

#2: Use compelling fonts, colors, and images

There is so much happening on social. In fact, there are 4.75 billion items shared by Facebook users every day on average. And there is an average of 1,500 posts to appear in a user's timeline each day. So how do you make an impression on the user?

The name of the game is stop the scroll. Different audiences respond to different fonts, colors, and even pictures. For example, if you are targeting millennials or a HENRY (high earner nit right yet) use a sleek sans serif font. If you want to appeal to women, use a script font. If targeting a baby boomer getting ready to retire, use an easy to read font that is dark on a lighter background.

You need to be strategic when deciding the message to convey. You need to use compelling fonts, colors, and pictures to make an impression on your audience.

Do you know the importance of fonts in your marketing message? Check out our blog post!

#3: A/B test different ad images, copy, and fonts

Social media is all about finding the right combination of copy and images to appeal to your desired audience. At Hyperchat Social, we know the importance of A/B testing different copy and images in an advertising set. When we start to notice some combinations outperforming others, we will turn off the less successful ad and allocate all budget to what we know is working.

Facebook recently rolled out an A/B split testing option where you can test different variables. The variables to choose from are creative, delivery optimization, audience, and placement. Play around with these variables and see how they affect your projected results and cost per leads.

Now, now, I know I just threw a lot of information at you but do not worry! We are Facebook advertising specialists here at Hyperchat Social. If you want to learn more about increasing your presence on social and increasing your top-line revenue, click here to schedule a free consultation to start Turning Social Into Sales.