While some social media content can seem sporadic and random, the truth is that when it comes to businesses and brands that are successful with it, there is a method to the madness. In fact, social media for financial advisors is an important part of a comprehensive financial advisor marketing plan. Because social media platforms are different from traditional media channels, the content and frequency of posting and sharing content is different from other places, such as websites and blogs.
In digital marketing for financial advisors it’s considered a best practice to have certain brand elements established prior to launching a social media marketing campaign. Use this quick guide for a simplified walk-through.
Read on for five steps to creating a financial advisor marketing campaign, which covers:
- Setting goals for social media
- Creating quality, relevant content for social media
- Encouraging engagement on social media
- Planning ahead for social media campaigns
- Measuring social media performance
1. Why is setting goals for social media campaigns important?
It’s difficult to determine if your financial advisor social media campaign is successful if you don’t first define what “successful” means. If you’re looking for email sign-ups, you can measure how many new subscribers you gain from a specific social media marketing campaign and compare it to your numbers when you started. If you’re simply looking to grow your social media followers on certain platforms, then you can set a goal to increase followers by XX% or set a specific number of followers as your goal. 
Other examples of common social media campaign goals include:
As with any goal-setting process, it’s important to set goals that are both achievable and measurable. Without specific measurement capabilities, it’s impossible to know if that goal was achieved; without that, it’s easy to get discouraged and ultimately give up.
2. How to create quality, relevant content for social media
Once the fundamentals of your brand and message have been identified, it’s time to put together the most important element of your social media campaign: content.
Timing
They say timing is everything, and it's absolutely true when it comes to social media. Because social media is such a fast-paced medium, getting your content in front of your audience at the right time is extremely important. And your financial advisor marketing content is competing against all of the other content on that user’s wall, feed, or page – depending on the platform.
While it would be easy to perfect the timing of your content posting if there was a magic time of day, social media doesn’t work that way. Instead, the optimal time for sharing social media content varies by platform, audience, type of content, and many other factors. To find the optimal time to post your financial advisor social media content, it will take some trial and error and analyzing metrics and analytics to recognize patterns in audience engagement. More on measurement coming later in this post.
Frequency
The other factor involved in timing is frequency. How often should you post your financial advisor social media content? Not posting enough can result in your content getting lost. Conversely, posting too frequently can be irritating to your audience and result in them unfollowing your account.
As with the timing of your financial advisor social media content, the optimal frequency will be unique to your audience and will take a bit of patience and effort to figure out. However, it will be a huge payoff in the long run when you can post less content with more engagement simply by learning your audience’s preferences and behaviors.
3. How to encourage engagement on social media
Social media is all about interactions between users. This engagement is what separates successful social media campaigns and those that fizzle out before really ever getting started. The type of engagement you’re looking for can vary between social media platforms and the type of content shared.
That said, common engagement interactions for financial advisor social media campaigns include user comments, shares, likes, and video views. And don’t forget to engage back. If someone leaves a comment, leaving a reply or liking their comment makes the content now a 2-way conversation, showing the audience that you’re engaging right back with them and are not just a business, but a real person having a conversation.
4. How does planning ahead help with social media?
Social media can be a full-time job, and since you already have one of those running your financial advisor business, that means being efficient is critical. One of the best ways to boost efficiency is to plan for content weeks or even months in advance. This can be achieved by implementing a content calendar. 
This doesn’t have to be complicated or fancy – it can be a simple document listing the type of content you plan to share and when. This will help you avoid long pauses between content, resulting in less views of your content overall. Additionally, as with any business, financial service providers see some seasonality to their business.
This may mean there are times when your financial advisor business is busier than others. Or perhaps your personal schedule is more demanding during specific months. Taking advantage of the slower times to create your financial advisor social media content will be useful during the really busy times and allow your brand and content to continue to gain traction.
Additionally, many social media scheduling tools are available to get a queue of content scheduled weeks or even months in advance.
5. How to measure social media campaign performance
As alluded to above, accurate and frequent measurement of your financial advisor social media campaign content is necessary to not only determine if your established goals are being met but also to learn what type of content is the most engaging, what times of day that content was most engaged with, and many other critical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that can help you make informed and educated decisions about your financial advisor social media campaign.
These KPIs can be found through the social media platform’s analytics section available to page/account owners as well as through other analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, as long as the content shared was given a unique URL or other identifiers to attribute the source to a social media campaign.
The Takeaway
If your financial advisor marketing strategies are lagging in performance, step it up by getting active on social media. If you don’t have the time or talent to craft and lead your social media presence, we have a whole team at PDM who will do it for you. Reach out for support to get started in connecting with more of your target audience ASAP!
