Does your financial services business use paid social media to promote itself?

Most companies in the industry have broken through the social media compliance barrier and leverage it as a prime marketing and communication resource.

The more important question: Are you taking full advantage of it?

Likely not because your expertise is in finance, not social media marketing.

This article offers ten tips from Sondhelm’s experts on improving your paid social media marketing efforts.

1. Ensure You Target the Right Investors and Financial Professionals

Most social media platforms have powerful targeting capabilities. Depending on the platform, you can reach people based on income, assets, occupation, age, sex, education level, location, interests, associations, and much more.

Have you reviewed your social media targeting and campaign results lately? If not, you could be wasting advertising dollars.

• Is your current targeting still aligned with who you want to do business with?
• Are you using the full range of targeting options available across all platforms?
• Are you seeing people you don’t want to reach in your results?

It’s smart to review your social media promotion data at least monthly — more often is better if you have a significant advertising budget or promote your financial services business on multiple social media platforms. Don’t just look at simple metrics like clicks, click-through rate, and cost per click. Go deeper and check that the people you really want to do business with are taking those actions.

2. Test Many Creative Options

Preparing multiple images and messages when you’re under pressure to launch a campaign can be challenging, especially if you have limited in-house creative support. Still, the best practice in paid social media promotion is to launch many ad variations in a single campaign, including different images, headlines, copy, and calls to action, then let the algorithms identify the winning combinations.

Key point: Creative testing in paid social media marketing isn’t a once-and-done process. Even when you have identified high-performing elements, testing new things against them is essential. You never know when you could find something that outperforms. Plus, it is an excellent idea to have new, good-performing elements when old ones become overexposed and stop earning clicks.

3. Go All-in with Video

Video is the most popular medium for people today. Yet too few financial service businesses use it in their social media marketing. It seems too challenging to produce and get approved for use.

With its growing popularity, it only makes sense to overcome these challenges and add videos to your marketing mix.

Here are some tips to optimize your videos for social media.

• Come out of the gate fast. People have limited patience when it comes to videos on social media, which is why so many viral ones open big to get people’s attention. Find a way to connect with viewers quickly and deliver value within the video’s first five to ten seconds. If you can’t do this, you may need to shorten and clarify your firm’s value proposition and key messages.
• Be relevant. Ensure your video content is meaningful to the people you are targeting. For instance, if you are promoting retirement solutions to people nearing age 65, ensure client stories feature people that age.
• Personalize the content. If you are targeting people you’re already doing business with, acknowledge your existing relationship with them. If you’re promoting a specific financial solution, ensure your videos directly connect it to the viewer’s unique needs or situation.

If you’re not using videos in your ads, it’s time to start. A good smartphone and some affordable professional lighting and sound equipment can produce polished content worthy of promotion. And if your compliance experts give you a hard time approving video content, it could be time to find better, more informed support.

4. Enhance Your Content

If you’re promoting content in your social media ads, is it entirely right for your audience and as good as it can be? People have unlimited content choices in the financial service space (firms, blogs, dedicated television networks, publications) and have little patience with anything that doesn’t completely resonate with them.

If people are responding to your ads but not taking the action you want them to take after engaging with your content (like scheduling an appointment or providing contact information), it could be because your content is falling flat. You can find out for sure by adding tracking software to your website. The heat maps and other information it provides will show what visitors like and what turns them off. It will provide the information you need to refine your content so it resonates with visitors. Another option is to test it with investors or financial professionals similar to those you are targeting and ask them for their feedback.

5. Build Look-Alike Audiences

Most financial services firms want to build new relationships with investors and financial professionals similar to their best current relationships, whether its advisors with a certain type of client base or a class of investors. One way to do this is through the lookalike audiences feature available on many social media platforms. You can grow your business by finding people with attributes similar to your ideal investor or wealth manager and targeting them with digital advertising.

LinkedIn, Meta, and other social platforms offer powerful tools for generating lookalike audiences. They can be a little challenging to master. The pros at Sondhelm are available to help.

6. Take Advantage of Social Listening

Social listening tools can help financial firms track brand mentions, identify industry trends, and understand what competitors are doing on social media. This information can inform your organic and paid social media efforts and identify new opportunities to connect with the people you are targeting.

Invest in a social listening tool that monitors conversations across various platforms, including social media, news, blogs, and forums, to gain a wider perspective. This will give you a complete view of what people are saying about your brand and financial industry trends.

If you’re feeling stuck in a digital marketing rut, the insights gained through social listening could provide the ideas you need for a breakthrough.

7. Work with Financial Industry Influencers

While not a paid social media tactic, teaming up with influencers can expand your audience’s reach and generate greater interest in your brand. This is an especially valuable tactic when trying to attract new firms, financial professionals, and prospective investors. When a respected financial expert supports your brand, it lends credibility. The association will make your paid social ads more compelling to financial professionals and investors who know the influencer.

8. Leverage AI-Powered Support

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a godsend to marketers and financial professionals dealing with the challenges that come with paid social advertising. Social media platforms have added AI-powered tools to automate, simplify, speed up, and optimize tasks like targeting, bidding, developing creative assets, and analyzing data and campaign performance. When people take advantage of AI support, they can achieve higher levels of efficiency, precision, and return on their investment in paid social activities. 

9. Monitor and Analyze Data

The most powerful tool for improving paid social media campaigns is data. Go beyond reviewing standard metrics like clicks and click-through rates. Also, move beyond social media campaign data and review website performance, personal interactions, and investment metrics. Track every step of your marketing and relationship-building process, looking for disconnects and breakdowns. The failure in your paid social media campaigns may not be found on LinkedIn, Instagram, or X. It could just as likely result from a poor website experience or inadequately trained representatives.

Tracking all aspects of a social media marketing campaign can be complex. The Sondhelm team is available to help.

10. Rethink Your Social Platforms

Social media is evolving at a faster pace than ever before. Maybe Facebook and Linkedin were the go-to for the investor or financial professionals you target last year. But are they still top platforms for them today? Affluent investors and financial advisors are getting younger all the time, and yesterday’s social media leaders may not be effective today.

Even if your campaigns are doing relatively well, it’s smart to check in with prospective clients you are targeting to find out where they’re spending time on social media. If you find that they’ve moved on — or are splitting their time with another platform — it’s probably time to move on with them or start building a presence on the new social site.

Optimizing Your Paid Social Media Campaigns: The Final Word for Financial Service Businesses

It’s always possible to up your paid social media game. Fresh opportunities pop up all the time, which means your promotional efforts can’t stay stagnant. Leverage the tips in this article to constantly push yourself to try new things. It is the only way you can find opportunities to improve campaign performance and build new relationships with prospective business partners and clients.

Need help taking your paid social media efforts to the next level? The experts at Sondhelm Partners are available to find out what you’re up to now and offer suggestions for improvement. Schedule time for a session with Dan Sondhelm today.