As a financial adviser, are you struggling to get results from your social media posts? Our advice is to always support them with a paid social media strategy.
We have all been in a position where our organic content has had poor engagement and reach.
It can be disheartening to see after all the efforts and thought involved in creating your organic social media content.
But this does not necessarily mean organic or free social media publishing is insignificant.
So how can you increase your reach? You need a perfect mix of paid and organic social media.
The importance and value of organic social media for financial advisors
You can post organic posts on social media for free, and they will appear in your brand’s feed. These posts are great for telling the story of your brand, connecting with followers, building relationships and sharing valuable information.
With these posts, you can share information such as market updates, behind-the-scenes photos, blog articles and industry news organically.
Tips for organic posts
- Ensure they are engaging: Make sure you create content that is interesting to your audience.
- Keep your audience’s attention for as long as possible: Algorithms will favour posts that people are interested in. Because they take longer to view, videos or photos in a carousel are often more effective than single images.
- Mix it up: You should publish a mix of content. This can include: polls, videos, photos, infographics, gifs and other media. Get creative!
- Added value: Do not pester your followers with sales pitches week in and week out. You should give them added value in exchange for their ‘follow’. Even better – give them information that they will want to share with others.
- Use a social media scheduling and management tool: Tools like Buffer or Hootsuite help you to easily manage your social media accounts
It is important to analyse the top-performing posts to see what made them so successful. Next, ensure your future posts contain those elements.
Maybe you’ve been posting regularly and are not witnessing the growth and conversions you expected. This is where paid social media can support your organic efforts.
Paid capabilities can be combined with organic strategies to improve your success. They are a match made in marketing heaven.
Paid Social Media for financial advisors
Paid social media guarantees reach. In simple terms, you pay to appear higher in the algorithm, reach more people, and get your content seen by people who don’t normally view it.
Paid social media also allows you to target a specific audience – which you can choose. You can target specific people based on their interests, behaviours, location and much more.
Additionally, your ads can have very specific goals and timelines. You can run ads that are geared towards gaining followers. You can run an ad that aims to get people to download a guide. You can also create an ad that promotes general brand awareness or lead capture.
It is important to think deeper about your broader marketing strategy, efforts and desired results, rather than simply choosing one and hoping for the best. This is where many firms and financial advisers go wrong.
Tips for paid posts
- Select platforms that your audience uses: In the financial industry, we see amazing results with LinkedIn and Facebook/Instagram. Each platform offers a unique proposition, depending on the service you promote and the audience you want to reach.
- Define your goals: Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase your followers? Are you aiming to increase conversions? You can create a call to action that clearly reflects your goal once you have identified what you want to accomplish. This goal will also help you decide who your target audience is and what type of ads to run.
- Try different formats and placements: You can try different placements to find the one that best meets your goals. Carousel ads can be a great way to communicate your message. They allow you to upload up to 10 images to explain your service offering, and each image can be connected with a unique URL. Video is also a content type not to be ignored. We will talk more about the video below.
- A/B testing: By testing your ads one variable at a time, you can test different copy, images and calls-to-actions and easily find out what works best. These details allow you to get the most out of your advertising budget.
How financial advisers can leverage organic social media paid ads
Social media algorithms do not favour business page content, although instead of abandoning organic content, you can support it by incorporating a paid strategy.
You should first use your most successful organic posts to guide you. It is easier to create paid ads when you know what your target audience likes.
You can also use your organic post demographic data to help. Analyse who is already enjoying your brand, and target them with paid posts. Create a look-alike audience for your current followers, and target those with the best of your content to support the growth of your followers and fuel your lead generation efforts.
Organic data can also influence your paid ads. Maximise your budget by placing ads at the most active times and days for your audience. This information is available on many social media platform analytics sections, as well as third-party publishing apps.
Retargeting is another key to maximising organic data for paid-social. This is the option to target people who have engaged with your content or visited your website (through the use of pixels).
Targeting a hot lead instead of a cold one is what makes retargeting an obvious choice. It’s a great way to create loyal followers by targeting people who have already engaged with your brand, with further value adding content, increasing the likelihood of them converting.
You can also boost (put money behind) organic posts on social media platforms that perform well.
Maximise social media by using a hybrid strategy
We’ve now established the benefits of both organic and paid social media, and how they can be combined. It’s called a hybrid social media campaign.
You can take a post that did exceptionally well organically, and make it even better by using it again. You can target your existing followers with an ad that uses the same content or similar.
Once the ad has been running for a while, and there are positive comments and likes, you can then duplicate it and show it to a different audience.
If you replicate the ad, those positive comments and likes will be transferred. The people you want to reach will see the engagement and consider your content valuable.
Video ads are another effective way to generate leads for your firm. Make a video that is informative and useful to your target client. Offer tips and advice on a topic your audience is interested in, or highlight the USP’s of your company.
You should target a lookalike to your followers with this video. Post the video organically, and pin it at the top of your social channels.
After the video ad has ended, you can retarget those who have viewed more than five seconds of the video by creating a new ad. This group did not scroll by; they took the time to look at it because they were likely to be interested.
This is just one example of a successful social strategy by using organic and paid content, but hopefully you get the idea.
Increase your ROI with social
Don’t let ever-changing social algorithms deter you. You can learn from your audience what resonates and motivates them by testing, developing and testing a solid strategy, and continually experimenting with it.
Your success depends on both organic and paid social strategy. You’ll get more conversions, engagement and ROI if you keep them all in sync.
Read our comprehensive guide to marketing for financial advisors
