Social Media Strategy For Financial Services

The definitive guide to a social media tragedy for financial services. In this guide we’re going to show you exactly what you need to do to maximise your social media activities, what channels you should be using and how to make it worth your time.

Financial services are still quite some way behind most industries when it comes to digital marketing. Many individuals and firms rely heavily on creating connections through LinkedIn but are still focusing on traditional lead generation techniques. 

This can lead to a slightly warped view of the power and usefulness of social media, so it’s really quite important that a defined social media strategy for financial services is implemented. As with all decent social media strategies, it’s important to understand who you are speaking to, what you are trying to achieve and what sort of content you want to share.

Firstly, we want to let you know what you should not be doing when it comes to creating a social media strategy for financial services. It seems quite obvious but for those that are new to using social media as a marketing and sales channel, it can be tempting to use it in this way. Don’t use your social media channels as a way to shamelessly promote your services. People don’t care. 

If you’ve read our 3 step funnel strategy guide, then you’ll know the first thing you need to do is think about your buyer personas and what challenges they have. In now way shape or form does letting someone know you help people with pension transfers, retirement planning or life insurance help someone make a decision that they want you to manage their money.

Do You Really Need A Social Media Strategy?

Is social media something you really need as a business? This is a question that really only you as a firm can answer. You undoubtedly will need some social media presence, but a social media strategy for financial services is something that requires a great deal of time and investment, either through effort or money. Consistency is key to all of this so running something for a month and seeing how it goes is a massive waste of time. If you aren’t committed to developing a social strategy the don’t even bother. If you’re going to do it organically, you’ll need to be consistent over a period of at least 6 months. Anything less than that and you won’t have done enough to make any sort of impact.

The reality is there are lots of other channels that you can use and so building a social media strategy for financial services may not be the most effective route for you. The only one that is going to be able to produce results for you very quickly is going to be paid advertising. Either way there’s a considerable investment involved. 

What Social Platforms Should You Be Using?

There are lots of different social platforms, as we’re sure you are aware. We often get clients asking us, ‘should we really be advertising on Facebook and Instagram?’ as they don’t feel as though their audience uses those platforms. The reality is this. You need to be looking at the platforms where your audience exists. 

Now, the key thing here is that we are talking about a social media strategy for financial services. You have to assume that everything we do is going to be organic, i.e. not using any paid advertising. With this in mind, you want to return to your buyer personas. What demographic do they fall under? What challenge are you trying to help them with? Using this insight you’ll be able to determine where you should invest your time.

Now, whilst we don’t advocate using LinkedIn for cold lead generation, we would recommend using it to build a network and distribute highly valuable content through a business and personal page. We’re going to break down the type of content you want to be thinking about a bit later but the major platforms you will want to be looking at are:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• YouTube

You may want to look at Twitter and Instagram, depending on your objectives and overall strategy. YouTube may not even be one of the platforms you think about, depending on whether or not you want to create videos.

Stay away from channels like Snapchat and Tick Tock. Unless you are very capable on those channels and really understand how to create content for them, it will be a colossal waste of your time to even post on them.

What Should You Be Posting?

This is the crux of your social media strategy for financial services. In this part of the guide we’re going to show you what types of content to create and in what format, based upon the channel and the overall strategy.

Remember when we said don’t post any promotions or info about your product and service? This still remains true, but there will come a time when you will need to do this. You’ll need to have built up significant trust and following before you can do this. You must shower your audience with value before you can get to the sale. 

Again, we return to the buyer persona. Who are you trying to help? What challenge are they trying to overcome? With this in mind, you will need to create some topic pillars that will be the basis for your whole social media strategy for financial services. Let’s say that we are trying to help people who are looking to build a retirement fund. 

You’ll probably want to be targeting people in their late 20’s and early 30’s as those who are close to retirement won’t have that much time left to be able to build something significant. If we think about our ad grid, we will have built out an understanding of what their daily life looks like, as well as how they think and feel about the prospect of retirement at such an early age.

Our key topics pillars may be:

• Lifestyle
• Saving ideas
• Statistics

Within each one of these key topics you would want to write down a few ideas on each one with a focus on how it helps them with their end goal. Now, you’re going to want to go into far more detail than this, but a good guideline would be to create 3 posts per week for the selected channel. Try and plan as far out as possible in advance. If you can create 10 posts for each subject, you have 3 months worth of content ready to be scheduled and published.

The right image and graphics should be determined for each platform as each one uses very different dimensions. You can find a list of these here and then build out a template for yourself. Alternatively, you can go to canva.com and select the platform options that are available to choose from there. 

Video Content

Video is a very powerful tool that you can use as part of a social media strategy for financial services. A lot of time, this can be entirely substituted for any traditional social content, such is the power of video.

Creating a YouTube channel where you post videos about your chosen subjects is a great way to build up trust and an audience. Video is by far and away the most preferred type of content to consume. Adding in subtitles to each video is a way to give your content an added kick, as a large majority of people watch videos on their phone with no sound. 

Don’t get too hung up on the quality of the video production. It’s the content that is most valuable. If you’re an individual adviser, people would prefer to see a less well produced video that has loads of value that a very high production video that does little to serve your target audience’s needs. As long as this content is produced with regularity and you are committed to continuing to produce it, you will get huge rewards from this.

How Much Time Should You Be Spending On Social Media?

How long is a piece of string? The more time you spend on this, the more likely you are to produce lots of high quality content. Conversely, the more time you spend on it, the less time you are able to spend actually doing your job. 

As with most things, the more effort you put in up front, the easier things will be later on down the line. Initially it can be quite a lot of hard work creating your social media strategy for financial services, but once it has all been planned you’ll find that maintaining the output is quite easy.

The initial development and time frame, including all of the research and thought processing would be about 30 hours all in all. That will include building out your buyer personas, creating your ad grids, developing the topic pillars and fleshing out all of the content subtopics. As well as actually writing the copy for each post and creating the graphic to go with it. 

On a monthly basis, assuming that you have pre-loaded your content and scheduled it, you should be looking at no more than 10-15 minutes per day of checking the comments and engaging with people. Every quarter you’ll probably need to spend about 3 hours building out new social media content.

How Much Time Should You Spend On Video Content?

How long do you want your videos to be? How much production value are you going to give them? Your videos will be the very nature of the format, take longer to create than a standard social media content calendar. The editing of the videos takes quite a lot of time and is very skill and labour intensive. You can learn to do this yourself, but it’s not really worth your time. Just pay someone to do this for you.

You may want to block out an entire day to get the majority of your filming done for your calendar. Eventually you will get better at the process and getting the right footage done in one take. You can still expect to be spending considerably more hours on this kind of content, but with that, comes the benefit of something more engaging being created.

Creating A Social Media Strategy For Financial Services

In this section we are going to show you the step by step process for creating a social media strategy for financial services. We are also going to show you how to implement this and build out the content needed to deliver it in its entirety. 

Setting Objectives

The very first thing you will want to decide and agree upon is what the objectives of having a financial services social media strategy are. You will want to have measurable goals and KPI’s in place that allow you to track the progress of the campaign. Brand awareness is not a goal or KPI. Traffic, leads and conversions are goals and KPI’s, so stick with these. Forget about engagement, likes and shares, these are secondary to your overall business objectives. No one’s mortgage ever got paid with likes, so make sure that you are looking at something tangible.

Know Your Target Audience

We harp on about buyer personas, but they are so important. Try selling a cat bed to a dog owner. Understanding exactly who you are targeting is critical to the rest of the process. Understand who they are, what they have issues with and how you can resolve them. This will inform the area of content focus for you and ensure success later on down the line.

Select Your Channels

Because you know your buyer personas are, you know where they spend most of their time online and how they like to consume their content. You should be able to select the main channels that you will be delivering your content on. You will also be able to pre plan the format of the content and plan templates in advance.

Create Your Topic Pillars

This is where you will spend the majority of the set up. Research your main areas of interest that your audience wants to learn about. Think about what information these people would want to consume from your channel and how it would bring value to them. Once this is done you will be able to create the subtopics and split them across your weekly schedule. 

Build Out A Month’s Worth

Allocate an hour or two to sit down and actually write the content for each post. These will be the actual posts and images that will be published across your social media channel. Using your preferred graphic design tool, your images and graphics will complete the content calendar. 

Schedule The Content

You will be able to schedule your social media content on your chosen platform. Most will allow you to create a post directly on the platform and schedule it to be posted at a date in the future. There are also tools that will help you to do this, such as Hootsuite, Falcon Social and Sprout Social. Space them out over the course of the week to make your content last as long as possible. 

 

Summarising Social Media Strategy For Financial Services

Social media is a serious thing. It can have a massive impact on the way your business is able to interact with its target audience, how it is perceived and generate new leads. However, it needs to be done professionally, be planned with clear goals and objectives in mind and with a view that it is not a test or trial, but something that will be invested in for the foreseeable future. 

As with all marketing, value must be given at every stage so it’s imperative that the content you produce is focused on helping rather than selling. A social media strategy for financial services is not something you can set and forget. Real thought must be given to it and if you do this and continue to deliver high value social content it’s likely to pay off in the future.

To learn more about creating a lead and sales funnel for your financial services firm or mortgage brokerage, download our ultimate funnel guide by clicking the image below.