Using social media for your financial firm might appear easy at first glance. Surely you just need to post an occasional link to your “About Us” page, or share some company news, and the leads will come in?
If only it were that simple! When it comes to financial marketing, most people who encounter your business for the first time aren’t going to immediately turn into a sale.
Rather, you need to present continual value to them as they assess your brand offering over time. This means delivering real, tangible value before presenting a call-to-action; one that the prospective client will answer at the right time.
What does this look like when it comes to the social media aspect of your financial marketing? Given the immense power and business opportunity presented to financial firms by social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, it’s certainly worth examining.
Here are 4 essential traits that your social marketing should possess:
#1 You Aren’t Demanding
The content you post on your social media should be primarily for your buyer persona, and not for you. In other words, it’s about leading with “give” and not with “take.”
A good rule to go by for the social aspect of your financial marketing is the 80/20 rule. This means that 80% of your content should mainly benefit your prospective clients and audience. The remaining 20% can then be devoted to promotional material for your brand.
#2 Your Content Honours Context
You could create the most amazing content in the world, but if it isn’t appropriate to post it on particular social platforms then the content won’t work well.
Gary Vaynerchuk, author of “Crush It”, has four pretty good rules of thumb here which can be applied to your financial marketing on social media. Here they are:
- Use Twitter for listening
- Use Facebook for storytelling
- Use Pinterest for “glamming it up”
- Use Instagram for creating art.
#3 It’s Self-Aware and Consistent
Every post or interaction you make on social media is essentially a broadcast. A broadcast, moreover, projects an aspect of your brand’s identity.
This means that every post and piece of content you put out on social media needs to be “in character.” In other words, it should sound like “you” and not like someone else.
People are generally smart, especially clients of financial advisers. After all, they are typically very successful people who are good at reading others. They can usually tell when someone isn’t being true to their personality. Moreover, it’s exhausting for you to pretend to be someone else all the time when you’re online!
When it comes to your financial marketing, this means not straying too far from your known brand on social media. Don’t share or say things that your audience know don’t sound like you.
#4 It’s Minimalist (Generally)
As an overall strategy to your financial marketing, it’s good to go by the “less is more” principle. The main reason here is that social networks are very noisy, and people have short attention spans.
As such, typically you should try to convey your message as soon and in as few words as possible. Great ways to do this include gifs, videos and images.
However, there are important exceptions. Facebook marketing, for instance, works well when you do “storytelling.” As such, there might be times where a “long post” might be quite effective.
For instance, sharing a moving rags-to-riches story of one of your clients can be very emotive and generate a big response, creating more exposure and engagement for your brand.
