5 Stupidly Simple Reasons Your Finance Lead Ad Campaigns Aren’t Working

It’s one of the most frustrating things in marketing. Your finance lead ad campaigns aren’t working, yet everyone around you seems to be either singing the praises of social media lead generation or pulling in super high quality leads, left, right and centre from a seemingly tiny ad spend. After having spent a small fortune on finance lead ad campaigns, you come to the conclusion that they don’t work and you go back to the tried and tested method of trawling through LinkedIn, buying data lists and hitting up your network for referrals again.

One of the most common things we hear at Adviser Leads is, ‘we’ve tried Facebook ads before, but we didn’t get anything from it.’ Honestly, it’s painful to hear. Now the reason, in our experience, for this is either a) you tried to do it yourself thinking it would be easy, or b) you didn’t pay someone enough money to do a good job for you. 

Paid ads aren’t easy and you really do need to pay people good money to be able to get decent returns. It may take you a couple of months to close, depending on what you do, and it will also cost a few thousand dollars to pay and run the ads but at the end of the day, one client represents several hundred thousand dollars. One client pays you back several fold so it’s definitely worth the investment.

In this article we’re going to show you the stupidly simple reasons you finance lead ad campaigns aren’t working for you. By the end, you’ll be able to audit and assess your own campaigns, make the necessary changes and start generating high quality leads for yourself (Or you could get us to do it for you).

Auditing Your Finance Lead Ad Campaigns

Now, this bit is really only for those of you who are running ads yourself. If you don’t yet have an ad account on Facebook, then you’re going to need to start at the beginning. Before you even open up a business manager, you’re going to want to do your due diligence on your ideal customer. Luckily for you, we’ve created the ultimate guide to building out your buyer personas and given you a nifty template to do it with too. 

For those of you who do have a business manager account, pay attention!

Targeting

There are three main elements to running high performing finance lead ad campaigns. Target, text and imagery. We will cover all of these things in due course, but fundamentally, the targeting options you set are by far and away the most important. If you aren’t targeting the right audience, you can have the best ad copy, most incredible imagery and slickest offer then it won’t matter at all because the people you are running them to simply won’t take action.

There are 2 main ways in which this can be done. We’re going to give you the abbreviated version here because this process is actually much more drawn out and detailed than what we are able to give you here. The first way is through detailed targeting options.

Most people will start running cold finance lead ad campaigns. This means that they will need to input interests, demographics and other identifiable things from the Facebook targeting options. Take a look at this and ask yourself are you targeting the correct audience? For example, if you are looking to attract people who are saving for their child’s education, you will probably want to add a life event targeting option of New Parents. You can fine tune this even more by adding in a narrowing option underneath. In that way you have a super specific audience group that you can show your adverts to. 

The second, and best way, is to create Lookalike Audiences. This is where you upload an existing client list into Facebook and ask the platform to find people who match the data points within 1-10%. Facebook will then go away and leverage its own data to display adverts to people who are almost identical to your existing clients. This is often a much cheaper and more targeted option than the interest and demographic targeting choices.

Solve A Problem

Your finance lead ad campaigns need to solve a specific problem. We’ve spoken before about how a lot of people (who incidentally are certainly your target audience) don’t believe they can either afford or need a financial adviser. Which means they are quite likely to ignore any standard advertising promotion. You have to think about why having an offshore savings plan is solving a problem, and what problem it’s going to solve for them. Yes, this is a little bit of the art side of marketing here, but it’s important none-the-less. 

Quite often you will find that many people don’t know that they are interested in financial advice, or have been thinking about it for some time. It’s these people that you want to be speaking with and demonstrating how a regular savings plan or other financial products will benefit them both now and in the long run. Let’s look at our new parents’ example. It may seem like an obvious thing that they should start saving for university immediately. However, they have many other things on their mind at the present moment in time and saving money for the university education is not it. If we were to reframe education fee planning 

Matching Imagery

This one seems like a bit of an obvious one, but the amount of finance lead ad campaigns we’ve seen over the years that had images and videos of things that have absolutely nothing to do with what they are trying to promote would suggest otherwise.

The pictures and videos that you are using should reflect what the copy on the advert is talking about. If you’re trying to get people to speak to you about mortgages, then images of property would be useful. You get the idea. If you want to take this a little bit deeper, and there’s lots of studies that have been done on this, you could use imagery that directs attention. Generally we like to be able to tell a story with the images we use, so something that reflects the outcome of clicking on the ad. 

Make sure you’re using high quality images too. There’s nothing that screams untrustworthy like a blurry or pixelated image. 

Don’t Sell!

The more things change the more they stay the same and this is particularly true in the world of finance. We all should know by now that the financial services sector is slow to adapt to the new methods of marketing. People are sick of cold calling (even though it does still produce results) and would prefer to do their own research before speaking with a financial adviser. So the last thing that people want to see in their newsfeed is finance lead ad campaigns that are trying to sell them something. 

But people buy things from Facebook, Instagram and Tik Tok ads all the time! Yes, but people only will buy when they are ready and from brands they trust. Literally no one buys something from an ad they see from an unfamiliar brand the very first time they see it. They will also typically be a fraction of the money required than an investment plan.

The reason why the finance lead ad campaigns being run by large financial services businesses aren’t really all that successful? It’s an extension of their cold calling division.

Time To Review Your Finance Lead Ad Campaigns

With the above info in mind, it’s probably a good idea to take a look at the ad campaigns you currently have running. First off, look at your audiences. Are they really focused on the right people? Keep in mind that more isn’t necessarily better. An audience of over 1 million is most likely too large and will simply spend your budget. Try to keep it within 100-700k people and wherever possible, narrow down the audience to make it super specific.

Go back and read your ad copy. Is it too salesy? Does it address and talk to the people you want to talk to? Or is it generic and non-valuable? The same goes with the images. Do they reflect the value of the offer? As much of a pain as it may be, you may have to change the whole structure of the campaign, but that’s better than simply spending money and not getting anything back.

If you’d like to learn more about running successful finance lead ad campaigns, book in your session with us now and get a fully customised action plan that you can implement straight away. Simply click the link below to get started.