There’s no doubt that Facebook has come a long way since its inception in the early 2000s as a primitive, college-based, social media platform. Today Facebook has more than 2.8 billion users. It has become normal to be connected with friends, family, and colleagues on a minute-to-minute basis if you are so inclined. In addition to helping people connect on a personal level, Facebook has also emerged as one of the leading social platforms for financial advisor marketing.
This is especially true for financial advisors who want to expand their client base. And while there are many aspects of building an audience organically with Facebook, the quickest way to target and appeal to your target audience is through Facebook Ads – a form of paid social media advertising.
Read on to learn more about how Facebook Ads can boost your financial advisor digital marketing strategy.
1) Find Your Target Audience(s)
Anyone who has been on Facebook in recent years has inevitably seen Facebook ads. These ads are often presented as sponsored content on designated ad sections of the page layout or even within your news feed and sometimes within Facebook Messenger. The most appealing aspect of Facebook ads for businesses is perhaps the ability for Facebook’s ad platform to identify very specific audiences.
In addition to what you add to your online profile, Facebook has the ability to use your activity on the platform to determine your interests. For example, if you are an avid sports lover, and you frequent many sports team pages and comment on or interact with sports-related posts, Facebook knows that about you and can target you as a sports enthusiast.
For financial advisors, this offers an opportunity to reach an audience of ideal investors based on many factors, including age, geography, and interests. The best part? You can create multiple audiences, depending on your campaign message and objectives.
2) Choose Your Objective
When setting up a paid Facebook Ad campaign, you can choose the overall objectives of your campaign. This is broken into three subgroups: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. Here is a deeper dive into each of those objectives and what they mean.
Conveniently, these objectives also follow the sales process of a sales funnel which starts with awareness and ends with a conversion. Keep in mind that your ad graphic and copy should coincide with the objective you choose.
Awareness
If you want to simply make an audience aware of your financial advisor firm, this is where you would designate that within the Facebook Ads platform. Within the awareness objective, you can also choose between brand awareness (showing ads to people likely to remember them) and reach (showing to the maximum number of people).
Consideration
Your objective may be to move potential prospects through the sales funnel and encourage them to take the next step toward finding out more about your firm. Within that category, you can select one of the following specific methods of this consideration, meaning how you would like them to interact:
Traffic – Sending them to a website or landing page
Engagement – Encouraging them to interact with your Facebook page, events, or posts.
App Installs – Displaying your ad to the most likely people to download your app.
Video Views – Showing video ads to your audience
Lead Generation – This enables a landing page to collect leads. This is usually used with gated content such as a whitepaper or eBook.
Messages – showing people your ads in the Messenger section of Facebook.
Conversion
Depending on what you consider a “conversion,” because it varies between financial advisors, this campaign objective needs to be clearly defined before you launch your campaign. That’s because unlike a retail business, there are no tangible products being sold. However you define a conversion, it can determine the effectiveness of the campaign objective.
3) Create Your Budget
A critical part of any campaign, your digital marketing budget is set by determining how much total spend you have dedicated for that campaign. The convenience of digital advertising is that ads can be stopped within seconds and budgets can be added, reduced, or reallocated based on the ad’s performance. Additionally, Facebook Ads offer what’s called Campaign Budget Optimization or CBO. CBO is a tool to help you manage your campaign budget across all ads and ad sets within that campaign to produce the best results.
4) Set and Monitor Your Goals
As with any campaign, it’s critical to have goals outlined before the campaign starts. With Facebook Ads, you can monitor the results of the campaign in real-time and assess how the campaign is performing when compared to your overall goals. If it’s exceeding your goals, that’s great! If not, you have time to make adjustments early on rather than waiting for the duration of the campaign when it wasn’t effective to begin with.
5) Test Ad Variations
You may have heard of A/B split testing when speaking about email campaigns, but this is also a useful tool in Facebook Ad campaigns. Within Facebook’s ad platform, you can create variations of ads testing copy, headlines, and graphics to see which ad combinations are performing the best. Once you find the right combination, you can stick with that ad and dedicate the remainder of your budget to that specific combination.
While there is no right or wrong way to use Facebook Ads for your financial advisor firm, the above recommendations, and best practices are meant to get you started in the right direction with Facebook Ads. If this sounds like something you want to pursue, but don’t have the time or resources to dedicate to going it alone, consider seeking the services of a digital marketing partner that knows investors and financial advisors.
While there are many ways to go about utilizing Facebook Ads, there are always new and improved methods and features that can be hard for someone who isn’t a full-time digital marketing professional to keep track of. Partnering with a professional, or team of professionals can take some of the burden off of your daily responsibilities, while also allowing you to appeal to larger targeted audiences full of your ideal types of clients.
