#FinancialMarketing – Online Marketing Juice

How to Acquire Financial Services Leads using Social Media & Tips to Help you Stay Compliant

Social media is a powerful tool for acquiring financial service leads. With billions of users on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, it’s no wonder that businesses are turning to social media to reach potential customers. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the best ways to acquire financial services leads using social media.

Create a strong presence on social media

Before you can start acquiring leads on social media, it’s essential to establish a strong presence on the platforms you plan to use. This means creating a professional profile, posting high-quality content, and interacting with your followers. By creating a strong presence, you’ll be more likely to attract potential leads who are interested in your financial services.

Use targeted ads

One of the most effective ways to acquire leads on social media is through targeted ads. By targeting specific demographics, locations, and interests, you can ensure that your ads are being seen by the people most likely to be interested in your financial services. For example, if you offer mortgage services, you could target ads to homeowners in a certain location.

Utilize social media groups and communities

Another way to acquire financial services leads on social media is by joining groups and communities related to your industry. By participating in these groups and communities, you can connect with potential leads looking for financial advice or services. Just be sure to follow any group rules and guidelines and be respectful of other members.

Share valuable content

Sharing valuable content on social media is a great way to attract leads. This could be industry news, tips, and tricks, or educational resources. By consistently sharing high-quality content, you’ll position yourself as a thought leader in your industry and build trust with potential leads.

Use social media to answer questions and offer advice

Social media is a great place for people to ask questions and seek advice. By actively participating in these conversations and offering helpful information, you can establish yourself as an expert in your field and attract leads. Just be sure to follow any guidelines and policies set by the social media platform and always provide accurate and helpful information.

Social media is a powerful tool for acquiring financial services leads. By creating a strong presence, using targeted ads, participating in groups and communities, sharing valuable content, answering questions, and offering advice, you can attract potential leads and grow your business.

Also, as a financial advisor, it’s important to adhere to all regulatory requirements, including those related to social media (FINRA & SEC). Here are some tips to help you stay compliant when using social media as a financial advisor:

Understand the rules: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and FINRA has specific rules (Guidance) that apply to financial advisors using social media. It’s important to familiarize yourself with these rules to ensure that you’re not breaking any regulations. Some key things to keep in mind include:

Disclosing any material conflicts of interest
Not making false or misleading statements
Not using social media to advertise your services without providing the required disclosures
Retaining all relevant communications and records for a specified period of time

Use caution when posting: Be careful about what you post on social media as a financial advisor. Even if you’re not intentionally trying to break the rules, it’s easy to accidentally make a statement that could be perceived as misleading or inappropriate.
Keep it professional: Social media is a public forum, so it’s important to maintain a professional image. Avoid posting personal or inappropriate content, and always be respectful and courteous in your interactions with others.
Disclose your relationship: If you’re posting about a specific investment or product, be sure to disclose your relationship to that product or investment. This could include disclosing whether you own the product or are being compensated for promoting it.
Use proper disclaimers: If you’re posting content that could be perceived as investment advice, be sure to include appropriate disclaimers. This could include a statement that the content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

By following these tips, you can help ensure that you’re staying SEC & FINRA-compliant on social media as a financial advisor. Remember, it’s always better to err on the side of caution when it comes to regulatory compliance.

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Website Optimization – Heatmaps in 2022

The use of “heatmaps” is a great tool when optimizing your website for maximum success. Heatmaps are just one of the many tools (Google Analytics, A/B testing, conversion funnel) in your arsenal to help identify and fix certain sections of your company’s website. Heatmaps are a way to visualize different types of data, including where people’s eyeballs first land on your site and how likely your visitors are to click on different areas of your pages.This type of information can be especially useful in showing you where to place your most important links, as well as which elements on your site should be linked. A heatmap is a snapshot look at where your website visitors are focusing their attention.

Another good tool is the “mouse” movement heat map. This type of information can be especially useful in showing you where to place your most important links, as well as which elements on your site should be linked. This type of heatmap can be extremely useful to internet marketers, as they help to determine the ideal placement for any promotional information. Most heat map tools are not free. However, the free tools are really low quality. Go with the paid tools.

Tip: I like Crazy Egg heatmap reports. Its a reasonable, paid tool with quality heat mapping options. The use of heatmaps is crucial in making content creation and website design decisions!

A heatmap is one of the most powerful and efficient diagnostic tools with which you can uncover a large amount of insights on how visitors interact (travel) with your web pages and use those insights to improve your website’s engagement funnel journey.

The Importance of Basic Content Marketing in 2022

Besides driving traffic to your company’s website, good sticky content reinforces your brand – The brand becomes a more noticeable name online as people share your content and start commenting on it, retweeting it, and helping it to build trust. These effects “gel” over time and you will see the website traffic increase, SEO benefits (rank higher on Google) and hopefully a conversion (website funnel strategy) in the end. Strong pieces of content can help you become more visible online, both on search engines and in social media. Your social media platforms are one of the best ways to connect and share content with your target audience.

Content creation success is measured many ways including:

– Spike in visitor traffic and page views on a specific content post.
– The number of Shares, Likes, Pins, ReTweets on Social Media.
– Media mentions and stories covering your business or firm.
– Website ranking (SERPs) increase.
– Conversions. Actual product sales or new clients (example: Financial Services).

If you lack the resources for generating content, outsource to an agency or freelancer for help. The basic purpose is to create content and try to post at least 2-3 times per week. Content is scalable and you can add as needed or when more resources become available. Content Marketing is important! Without it, you’re going to struggle to attract the attention you need to collect leads and convert them into sales or clients!

Financial Advisors: 6 critical metrics to measure business blog performance in 2022 (updated)

Measure Visitors. Traffic measures the number of people who visit your blog.
Measure Leads. Measuring “leads” can be as easy as a vistor filling out a contact form. Set up a goal in Google Analytics. Goals in Google Analytics measure actions you want visitors to take after reading one of your blog posts. That might be signing up for your newsletter, or filling out a content form. Looking at how many people subscribe to your blog or newsletter provides a solid indicator of the quality of your content.
Measure Social Media Shares, retweets, likes or clicks. Social media can be a key driver of short-term traffic. Keeping an eye on your social analytics can help you understand spikes in your shares and the impact of your shared blog content on your overall engagement rate.
Average length of stay. The average length of stay on the blog post’s web page is a metric that gives you an indication of how compelling your blogging is to the reader.
Page views per visit. Page views per visit is a metric that quantifies your success at encouraging multiple interactions.
Inbound links. You need to get well respected, “authoritative” domains linking to your content. More inbound links occur when another website links back to your site. Inbound links is an indicator that your site has high-quality content, making these links one of the most important elements in search engine optimization (SEO).

Protecting Your Online IP (Intellectual Property)

Intellectual property (IP) are legal property rights over creations of the mind, both artistic, commercial, and the corresponding fields of law. Common types of intellectual property include copyrights, trademarks, patents, industrial design rights and trade secrets. (WikiPedia)

If you have an innovative, brilliant Marketing campaign(s) or Strategy and you want to tell the world about them (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, conferences) you may want to think again. It’s called “competitive advantage” and you want to keep it “close to the cuff” as much as possible. Why? So your competitors won’t jump on your coattails and follow the same tactic. Why would you want to give out your marketing strategies? Ego perhaps, or to generate traffic to your blogs, corporate website or increase your Twitter following? Forget it. Again, think about your competitors and think about your sales or services business.

*This blog entry is for most companies or service oriented businesses and not necessarily for Marketing + Social Media blogs (like mine) that give out basic digital marketing strategy.

Below are some important tips for making sure your ideas are preserved. I have only listed a few but there are many more safeguards that can be set up in the “process”:

Create a policy. Establish a policy for all of your intellectual property – including all patents, logos, designs, trademarks, copyrights and domain names. Policy comes first. Give yourself a competitive advantage. Just because you think there’s no competition out there for your business, don’t use that as an argument not to spend the money to protect your idea.
Keep all marketing strategy and reports under a “red cover” confidential. If the IP is printed on hard copy, always have a red cover sheet up front to remind everyone that this information is confidential. If you’re marketing strategy (or IP) is distributed by email or document files, make sure everyone one on your team knows and writes (sig file) “confidential”. Clearly label sensitive data as “confidential” (or put a “watermark” right on the document), and explicitly state this fact in your email. Perhaps go as far as hold a team/staff meeting and explain the fact that if ANY confidential strategy IP gets outside of the company, that person will be fired. Example of setting up a confidential watermark in MS-Word below.

Copyright. Have you written an article, eBook, created a video or made a podcast? You’ll want copyright protection. Once you have created the work, you have the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, perform and display it.
Trademark/Service mark. Got a logo or tagline you want to use? Look into trademark protection. Service marks provide the same protection for intangible things such as services.
Non-disclosure Agreement (NDA). A common approach is to make sure that anyone you share the IP information………..signs a “non-disclosure agreement” (NDA) prior to your disclosure. Typical NDAs contractually obligate signatories to refrain from disclosing confidential information without the disclosing party’s express consent.
If you have client newsletters or email blasts, do not go into details of your marketing strategy. Leave that for your face-to-face meetings.

Company marketing strategy should be guarded. Share your strategy on a need-to-know basis, and make sure everyone with access understands the importance of keeping this information confidential.

Social Media Post Lifespan for 2023

Tweet post lifespan = 15 minutes (Avg.)

Facebook post lifespan = 6 hours

LinkedIn post lifespan = 24 hours

YouTube post lifespan = 20+ days

Make sure you optimize your posts for retweets and shares. You can also try to “boost” a Facebook post with an ad to extend lifespan. With Twitter, “pin” tweets to the top your profile page to guarantee a greater lifespan. For a LinkedIn post, add content to your profile and join groups to share that content there. Add relevant keywords in your YouTube video title, description, & tags.

Lastly, #Hashtags can help extend or “stretch” lifespan for all social media platforms posts.

Reducing Support Costs by Leveraging the YouTube Platform

In these tough Covid economic times where there are layoffs, companies are looking to cut or reduce costs anywhere they can. One of numerous ways to cut costs is in the “support” department. Many joke that Marketing departments are cut first when it comes to layoffs. Not true anymore as EVERYONE now is vulnerable. A colleague of mine who is a product manager for a Silicon Valley firm recently lost ½ his technical support staff due to layoffs. The company, and the product support group, is now overwhelmed with customer “issues.” With half the staff gone, there ways to “bridge the gap” for his small support team. He asked me for any recommendations. I told him straight up to look at a video sharing platform to alleviate the tech support crunch, specifically YouTube.

Leveraging YouTube

Create a YouTube channel specifically geared towards your company, product or service you need to support. Smartphones these days come with hi-res video built in. Leverage that smartphone feature for free without buying digital video equipment. Dig through the support “issue” database and sort out the top 10 topics or questions that customers submit to you via email, contact form or through social media. Sit down in front of a computer with the smartphone and record how to resolve each issue (or submitted question) step by step and narrate.

This can work for hardware, software, or services that needs support. Sit down and go over frequently asked questions (FAQ’s). They can be simple setup questions or advanced features questions. Get CREATIVE in your videos. Record all possible workarounds surrounding your product bugs or customer general questions.

Post the link to your YouTube channel from the technical support site section on the company’s web page. One advantage of using the YouTube platform is that you do not have to incur the cost of hosting the videos yourself. Make sure to optimize your YouTube Channel.

The YouTube Advantage

Zero MB/month traffic usage costs
Zero hosting costs associated with these videos taking up space on your servers
24/7 YouTube up time for customers around the world

You get the idea. This is a major value-add if your support team is understaffed. Hopefully, in time, the technical support call volume (email) will decline.