5 Foolproof Ways Financial Advisors Can Use Social Media to Boost Lead Generation

90% of businesses use social media to increase brand awareness. If your firm isn’t already taking advantage of social media, it’s time to catch up.

By now, we hope you’re convinced to start investing more time and effort into your advisory firm’s social media presence. Not only does it give you access to a huge audience, but it also helps build and humanize your brand, spread your original content, and create a trustworthy voice for your firm. All of these steps will result in more lead generation and more clients, so let’s get right to it!

1. Share Links to Your Gated Content

Gated content  is any content where the website visitor has to provide information in order to access it, like through forms on a landing page. When a person signs up to download your ebook or get your monthly email newsletter, you can be pretty certain they actually want to read it and may be interested in your services. Clearly, it’s a great way to collect information on leads to start a relationship, but if people don’t know your content exists, they won’t know that they can download it!

This makes promoting your gated content just as important as creating it. Like other promotions, social media is a great place to start. Whether you use Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, putting out a post with a link to the content will get people to check it out. Try writing an attention-grabbing caption and using a graphic that captures the point of the content. If you haven’t made a graphic already, Canva is a great graphic tool that is free and easy-to-use!

2. Keep It Updated

Treat each of your social media pages like you would your website – update them regularly and include pertinent information about your business and contact info in your bio. If a prospective client finds the wrong contact information for your firm, there’s no way they’ll look for the right information on their own. This makes it important to keep all of the information on your profiles (your phone number, address, logo, etc.) as up-to-date as you can.

Just like how adding fresh content to your website is important for SEO rankings, it’s also super important to consistently add content to your social media profiles. Keeping your profiles updated with fresh content will show leads how organized and trustworthy your firm is. Share links to your blogs with a catchy caption and an eye-catching graphic. Be sure to curate third-party content to share regularly throughout the week as well!

Angela Dorsey from Dorsey Wealth Management shares her blog on LinkedIn.

We recommend posting 2 or 3 times a day on Twitter and Facebook and at least once on LinkedIn, but you can tailor that number to your firm’s goals. By making an editorial calendarfor each month ahead of time, you can take away some stress and ensure you’re posting enough each day.

3. Engage With Others

While regularly posting your own content on social media is great, too much of it can seem overly sales-pitchy. If you want your brand to come off as trustworthy, you’ll need to engage with others’ posts as well.

Set aside at least 15 minutes each day to go through your feeds. Making a point to share, retweet, like and comment on others’ posts everyday will show your audience you care about having a strong presence. Keep in mind that anything you share should be relevant to your audience and posted by a reputable account. In the example below, Blanchard Wealth Partners shares an infographic from NAFPA that might interest their clients. 

Spending a few minutes a week finding new accounts to follow is also a good habit to get into. This will show your followers you’re present, give you access to new relationships, and spark ideas for your own original content. The more you grow your network, the bigger your firm’s reach will be.

4. Use Video

82% of users watch videos that pop up in their Twitter feed. That gives you a pretty good chance of being noticed if you use video marketing correctly. Instead of posting all written content, try filming yourself talking about the same topics you write blogs about. In this day in age, you don’t need to be a filmmaker or even have a video camera to make a video. All you need is your phone to record yourself, then you can upload it straight to social media!

For Market Assist, CMO Samatha Russell records one video a week on digital marketing tips for financial advisors. By including video in our editorial calendar, it switches your content up, puts a face to your name, and draws clients in that respond better to videos than written blogs. Plus, 70% of marketing professionals report video converts better than any other medium. So, there’s no excuse not to give it a go.

In the example below, Luis F. Rosa from Build A Better Financial Future takes advantage of video marketing to connect with his followers on Twitter.

5. Use Hashtags (Correctly)

Including hashtags in your social posts can help users find the content they’re interested in. By using certain hashtags, your post gets cataloged so other social media users who follow or search for those hashtags can find your content. This can give you access to a whole new audience who don’t follow you or might have not heard of your firm before.

But, beware… it’s possible to overuse hashtags. Any hashtag you use should be related to the content you’re posting and you shouldn’t use more than two or three. Using too many hashtags can make your posts feel unprofessional and cluttered. To make the most out of your hashtags, they should be brand-specific and trending.

A brand-specific hashtag can be one that users associate with your brand. In the example below, Twenty Over Ten created a campaign around the hashtag #SpringCleaning, which allowed users to follow the campaign from start to finish. It created consistency, allowed followers to connect with the brand, and encouraged followers to participate.

Trending hashtags are built around popular topics at the time. The beauty of social media is that it allows us to do real-time marketing. This means if there’s a current event or trend that relates to your advisory firm or niche, you can take advantage of the hype to promote your own brand!