Financial Advisers Should Stop Using LinkedIn For Lead Generation

Why should financial advisers stop using LinkedIn for lead generation?

Well, on the face of it, this would seem like a pretty stupid thing to do. LinkedIn, after all, is one of the largest social media platforms on the planet and is the largest business specific networking platform online. 

It’s super easy to do a quick search for the job title, company and country of your ideal prospect and then immediately reach out to them. It is quite literally the financial advisers dream, using LinkedIn for lead generation. A seemingly never ending list of new prospects of the exact profile you’d like to speak to right at your fingertips with very little effort to find and reach out to them.

If you have a premium account, as many financial advisers do, then you are able to push your message into their inbox, almost guaranteeing delivery of your message. Once you have managed to connect with someone, you are also able to see their network and potentially get an introduction referral from your new contact. What’s not to love about using LinkedIn for lead generation as a financial adviser?

So why would this not be the best place to find new business? 

The thing with LinkedIn, is that people are on there to do business. Yes, as a financial adviser you are there to do business, but it’s business on your terms. You’re reaching out to someone because you want to do something that benefits you. 

You aren’t reaching out to someone to see if you can acquire their services, learn more about how their business could be useful to what you do or who they work with. You’re reaching out because you want to transfer their pension or make money from commissions selling them savings plans.

LinkedIn is about networking. People using the platform want to speak to like-minded individuals who may be able to benefit from a business partnership or gain some other value from connecting with them. It’s not really hard for people to see what your job is, never mind wonder what your reason for connecting with them is. You think you’re the only financial adviser using LinkedIn for lead generation? 

If you’ve found what would be your ideal prospect, you can bet your bottom dollar that literally hundreds of other financial advisers have done the same thing and have probably reached out with the same lack luster intro line as you have. Wonder why no one ever seems to want to connect with you? It’s because you’re doing exactly what everyone else is doing and guess what? Your prospects HATE it.

Value Ad Using LinkedIn For Lead Generation

Social media platforms are, at the end of the day, designed for connecting and creating value. Effectively, financial advisers are still using old school cold calling tactics. At least when the prospect answered the phone in the past, you had a short period of time to introduce yourself and make your case for why you were calling. 

Now you don’t even give yourself that chance because the people you’re reaching out to can already see your agenda. If you are going to use LinkedIn for lead generation as a financial adviser then you have to provide value. 

If you consider a small market like that of the UAE, there are only a very small number of people here in the country that most advisers want to deal with. The British expat community numbers around 100,000. Of whom, only a small percentage will be viable leads, at least, based on the criteria that you would normally identify as a prospect. 

With that in mind, imagine how many BDM’s there are sending out LinkedIn requests to British expats working in Dubai every day. Still think LinkedIn for lead generation is a good idea? 

Prospects are sick to death of financial advisers reaching out to them trying to sell them something they think they don’t need. 

LinkedIn For Lead Generation Is Dead

Alright, we may be exaggerating a little bit here. However, there are plenty of other platforms that are far less labour intensive that will allow financial advisers to reach their prospects in a far less intrusive way, all whilst providing immediate value. 

For the sake of a few hundred dirhams per month, it’s possible to reach your ideal prospect with an offer that makes them come to you. LinkedIn doesn’t have anywhere as near as many data points your prospects as Facebook does and it’s literally a fraction of the price.

The financial services industry is a behemoth run by old school dinosaurs. Innovation is seldom driven from the top in this sector. It’s usually agile, motivated and much younger individuals who drive change within the organisation. 

That’s not to say that some of the large finance firms aren’t making an effort, they are. The problem with it is, they have generally don’t tend to have very targeted campaigns and leads are often distributed at seemingly random. With an organisation of say 200 advisers, who gets what and when?

In an industry where no one wants to share and you eat what you kill, you need to moving forwards, lest you go the way of the dinosaurs.

Want to learn more about using Facebook to generate leads on a daily basis? See our lead generation services here.

Should You Stop Using LinkedIn For Lead Generation Entirely?

So here comes the contradiction. No, LinkedIn for lead generation can still provide high-quality results. The Adviser Leads team uses it all the time and have picked up several of our clients this way. However, we create value in our connections. We offer something that is of extreme value to our prospects and is simply too good to ignore. 

We don’t spend hours trawling through the search filters though. We recognise that we can be putting our data to work for us and allowing other platforms to leverage their AI systems for us. We’ve created a systematic lead generation booking system that allows us to spend time managing our client campaigns and delivering repeatable, scalable results for our clients, rather than struggling to speak with new prospects.

An Automatic Lead Generation System

Ultimately, you want to be generating prospects every day that it takes you no time to generate. You want leads in your inbox without having to do anything and the phone calls you make are the ones that help to make you money. If you’re spending more time with people who want and need your services, then everyone is happy.

Are you still ploughing through LinkedIn for lead generation? How successful has it been for you? Let us know in the comments below.

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