Doug Wilber helps financial institutions communicate through social media.

Wilber is the CEO of Denim Social, a Clayton, Missouri-based company that can help life insurers, banks, wealth management firms and other highly regulated clients reach out with ordinary posts and ads on services such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The company has about 250 clients. In 2021, it attracted $5 million in financing from an investor group that included Fintop Capital.

Wilber has a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in business from Penn State University.

He has been involved with financial services marketing and startup management since 2006, when he became a prepaid card marketer at Discover Financial Services. For about 10 years, he has served on the investment committee of SixThirty Ventures, a business development program for financial technology startups.

He took over as the top executive at Denim Social in April 2020.

Wilber answered questions via email about how he thinks financial professionals should go about creating, using and sharing social media content.

The interview has been condensed and edited.‍

THINKADVISOR: Can efforts to reach out through social media be compatible with all of the compliance concerns that financial professionals face?

DOUG WILBER: Social media compliance keeps people up at night for a reason, but it doesn’t have to.

The right social media management tools can help ensure any post — whether it’s directly from a financial professional or a partner — is compliant.

Look for tools that offer approval workflows and keyword red flags.

What do you think, generally, about financial professionals sharing the content used in consumer awareness and outreach campaigns?

Shared content strategies can be effective, but only if the content is useful and the financial professional is being authentic.

Social media is really about relationships, and that means financial professionals need to engage with their communities online.

If partner content educates investors and showcases an advisor’s expertise, that can be a nice addition to their social feed. But shared content shouldn’t be the only thing they are posting.

Ideally, their social posts would primarily be personal, authentic content, with a measured amount of promotional and partner content.

Just like in real life, advisors need to educate first and sell second.

Are there some situations in which using shared outreach content makes more sense than others?

Shared content can be useful for broader topics, like financial education or market updates.

Financial professionals should avoid using partner content as their sole content source, though. Social media should be an extension of a professional’s real-life relationships.

Think about it this way: If you wouldn’t have a solely promotional conversation in real life, you shouldn’t do it on social media either.

Is creating a post from scratch different from sharing someone else’s post?

Whether a financial professional is creating or sharing a post, they should consider themselves and their firm responsible for the content.

One financial professional’s social media can impact the entire firm brand, after all.

Social media compliance is complex and requires marketing, compliance, and individual advisors to work together.

While we recommend every advisor be active on social media to share thought leadership and amplify the brand, they definitely shouldn’t go it alone or execute a strategy by posting natively to social media networks.

A social media management tool built for compliance can ensure every new and shared post is reviewed and approved by the right experts.

How can financial professionals avoid complaints about use of other people’s content?

Whether it’s financial information or cat videos, it’s good social media etiquette to give credit to the original creator.

The greater risk is a financial professional posting misinformation that could damage the reputation of a firm or non-compliant content that draws the attention of regulators.

What should financial professionals do if they see standard, compliance-approved social media content and want to personalize it?

Financial professionals should definitely be personalizing content. This is a great way to make social media posts more authentic, but an approval workflow in a social media management tool is essential.

Once a financial professional personalizes a post, they can submit it for approval to ensure their commentary is factually correct and compliant.

Without the right tools, scaling a review and approval process is impractical (if not impossible) and opens up a financial institution to risk.

In your opinion, are there any drawbacks to financial professionals using packaged content from outside content? If so, how can financial professionals address those challenges?

Standard and packaged content can be a great tool, but it has to be personalized and useful to be effective. Think about the value a follower is getting from the post. It needs to matter to them.

Today’s financial professionals must be social selling, not just building the brand by sharing content.

Smart financial professionals are using social media to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.

Reality check: One-third of all internet users (102.4 million people!) find new products and brands through paid ads. That’s a big opportunity for marketers to reach prospects and customers. Paid social media advertising is a highly effective way to introduce people to financial institutions, loan officers, agents, and advisors. Today, organic social media only reaches 2.2% of a page’s followers, but paid social can make your social selling program even more effective by reaching larger, more tailored audiences. 

We get it, launching a paid social media strategy can feel daunting, but Denim Social can help. Check out our guidebook, Getting Started with Paid Social Media Advertising for Financial Institutions, to learn how paid works and understand how to launch your own program. With the latest insights from Denim Social, you’ll be ready to supercharge your social selling program with paid social media advertising. Download today.  

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For any marketer planning a social selling program, proving return on investment to leadership is key to ongoing success. Sometimes proving the profitability of social media can be tricky, but there’s a solution. Paid social media advertising is an effective way to show clear, measurable results in real time. 

Marketers looking to make the case for their budgets are often faced with questions about impact: whether time and money spent on social selling is actually bringing in leads or new business. After all, it takes training, resources, and ongoing user adoption to make it work. Smart marketers know that having their intermediaries engage on social media is useful for brand awareness and building connections, but paid advertising can show exactly how many new customers come directly from those efforts. 

Some marketers might balk at the idea of paid social media advertising (it’s pay to play), but the right strategy is worth the investment. Paid ads will guide audiences along the buying journey, leading them to make the final purchase decision in a targeted, intentional way. With the help of metrics that paid ads provide, marketers can feel confident in promoting social selling as a viable and worthy strategy to leaders .

Looking for the best way to prove value? Here are four paid social media advertising metrics that can help financial marketers to show off social selling success: . 

1. Impressions: Impressions are the number of times content was seen on a given network. When marketers create paid advertisements, this is one of the first ways to assess the level of interest in a given campaign. Impressions are a clear measure that paid ads are getting eyeballs. It often takes multiple exposures before audiences start to recognize or notice content, so the more impressions, the better. For institutions with many social sellers, paid advertisements can multiply awareness across many regions and to an even wider audience. It may feel like posting content on social media networks is inconsequential; many marketers post and cross their fingers that it will be seen. With paid impressions, there’s no question about how often a paid ad is generating awareness and boosting social selling efforts. 
2. Reach: Reach is the number of people who saw your content. While having a large number of impressions is important, it’s just as important to have those impressions spread across a wide audience. If an institution has agents, loan officers, advisors, or other intermediaries in a variety of geographic locations, reaching the right audiences supports social selling in a specialized way. The ability to target with paid content is one of the greatest strengths over organic publishing. For marketers, knowing the reach of an ad provides key insight into the number of available leads for any social seller’s campaign.
3. Click Through Rate (CTR): CTR is the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of impressions. Basically, it shows how often something was seen in order for an audience member to click the call to action. Even if an institution runs ads for many different social sellers, links and landing pages can be unique to each one, giving marketers more leverage to customize based on a variety of factors. Knowing the click through rate shows marketers how relevant an ad is to its audience. For financial services, a good CTR can be anywhere from 0.5%-3%; over time, this will clearly show how successful ads are at sparking interest and driving viewers to to take action. 
4. Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of audience members that saw an advertisement, clicked on it, and completely followed through with the call to action. More often than not, ads lead to a form or gated content to collect prospect information.This step is the most exciting for marketers and social sellers, because with these new leads come new opportunities to grow relationships and close more deals. This way, intermediaries know exactly how much their own business brings in from paid outreach. It’s also a step that requires patience and personalization, because it takes time and effort for the cumulative effect of impressions, reach, and clicks to drive audiences forward. For leadership, this is an important metric to prove that ads can and will bring the right business in at the brand and individual team member levels.

It can be hard to prove ROI of a social selling program, but paid ads provide marketers with the metrics they need to prove success.  With the proof  paid advertisement metrics provide, leaders can rest easy  knowing that resources are being put to the best use possible. Even better, knowing these metrics can help to pivot based on performance, continually improving value. 

Want to learn more about social media ads? Download our guide, Getting Started with Paid Advertising.

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Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business. 

Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships. While this has traditionally been done in person for financial services, the digital landscape offers endless possibilities for relationship building. 

By now marketers and business leaders are familiar with social media and see the opportunity to build their brand, but most have only scratched the surface. To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.

Click below to get started on your social selling journey:

How To Launch A Social Selling Program For A Financial Institution

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Financial institutions often play it safe when it comes to marketing — and for good reason. They need to be certain they follow all compliance and governing regulations. But problems can also arise when firms play it too safe with their marketing mix and forgo largely effective modern tactics, such as paid social media advertising.

Organic social media should still have a place in your strategy, especially in a social selling program. Cultivating organic posts from your associates' accounts is a great way to add context, richness, and humanity to your brand. For current customers, organic social media posts can be a way to demonstrate the heart and culture of your company as you provide “behind the scenes” and in-office content that speaks to the personalities and values of your employees and institution.

For prospective customers, organic social can serve as a "verifier." A strong social media presence signals to prospects that your company and employees are legitimate and lends more insight into your value proposition.

However, what’s missing in this social media marketing strategy is the value for top-of-funnel leads — those who don’t know anything about your institution yet. According to a recent study, only 2.2% of your followers see your posts on Facebook, 5.5% on LinkedIn, and 9.4% on Instagram. Paid social media advertising is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, loan officers, or advisors to your institution at the right place and the right time.

Organic and Paid: Better Together

Organic and paid social have a symbiotic relationship. Organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, while paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.

For instance, if you’re working for a wealth management firm, your top-of-funnel leads are unlikely to find your firm by searching Facebook, but if they happen to be scrolling and see your Facebook ad for a financial advisor's retirement planning services, they are more likely to navigate to your social and landing pages. There, your organic posts, which have been building over time, can show off the legitimacy of your brand and your advisor's expertise.

The question, then, is how to marry existing organic strategies with paid campaigns in your social media strategy for the highest return. Start here:

1. Amplify what works (and drop what isn't).

With paid social media ads, you can see immediate results, which makes them great for testing. If a post is underperforming, use A/B testing to experiment with different images, copy, and calls to action to make improvements for the future. A/B testing helps you isolate what elements of your ads need to change by showing which ones resonate and which don’t.

This method can even be applied to previously organic content: Did an employee's post have unexpectedly high engagement? Use it as a blueprint to try to isolate why. A paid ad will bring the post in front of greater audiences, and changing a few aspects can help identify why it was so successful in the first place.

As you see what’s performing, invest more dollars into posts that convert while cutting or changing content that doesn’t. With paid social media ads, you can see immediate results versus organic’s longer-term commitment. That makes paid ads well-suited to testing.

2. Expand your audience base.

Both organic and paid social media can help increase your reach on social media, and it starts with activating advisors in addition to brand pages. A social selling approach can increase your results tenfold and drive higher engagement. Facebook ads reach 1.95 billion average monthly users, and an average user clicks 12 ads per month, so significant reach is up for grabs.

With an organic social selling strategy, you can reach more people in your existing social and professional communities. But with a complementary paid ad strategy on top of that, you can break through your first-degree social connections to reach second- and third-degree connections, who will include important professional referral sources.

Utilize paid amplification of employee posts to benefit. Your advisors should be your brand's ambassadors, so up your social selling game by maximizing the reach of their posts.

3. Drive leads into conversions.

Don't let your marketing funnel lead to dead ends. Make sure employees are linking back to your site or other relevant brand content. A well-crafted organic post that drives to a landing page can be the start of a meaningful digital experience that creates business results. Combine this with paid social media ads, which can generate leads by offering call-to-action options that get attention and clicks.

For instance, an organic post can drive a prospective customer to a first-time homebuyer guide. But a paid social post lets you experiment further with a call-to-action button that makes taking the next step easy for potential customers.

Organic and paid social advertising work best in tandem. To ensure you're getting the most out of your social selling strategy, check out our Social Selling Playbook for Financial Marketers.

Marketing professionals understand the necessity of numbers. Click-to-open rates, qualified leads, and new customer acquisition are just a few metrics marketers are keen to monitor when launching a new marketing initiative. But measuring the success of any campaign always goes back to one thing: objectives. Your goals should give you a clearer understanding of what you are trying to achieve with a campaign — organic search, paid advertising, or otherwise. And how efficiently you hit your goals directly impacts the scalability of your social media efforts.

Depending on your goals, you’ll be looking at a select few metrics. The most common in marketing for financial institutions is often click-through rates. They almost always top the list because they represent the percentage of consumers who’ve clicked on an ad, opting into a next step. Engagement can also be of interest, as it tracks likes, shares, and comments on a post.

But keeping track of a few metrics doesn’t equate to a sound marketing strategy. In the digital age, financial institutions need to understand how to best use tactics specific to social media marketing. It’s not enough to see what’s working; those data insights must inform new iterations of content to increase reach and nurture leads. This is what creates a successful, scalable social media advertising strategy.

The question then is, which metrics make the most sense to follow for a social media advertising campaign for financial institutions? And how can you best collect data to scale marketing efforts and drive engagement between your financial institution and its customers? Below, we’ll cover how to start choosing the right metrics for your goals and scaling your marketing efforts based on the information available to you.

Choosing the Right Metrics for Your Goals

Your metrics should be your North Star key performance indicators of your goals. Always select these based on what your financial institution wants to achieve. Consider brand awareness: Reach will be a metric to track, as will likes and followers. If you’re running paid ads on social media, you want to capture the number of people who’ve been exposed to your messaging. You also want to track the number of people who’ve engaged with that ad and are looking for updates from your social media page. Make sure to benchmark these metrics regularly, and always consult them prior to running a new campaign.

If customer engagement is the goal for a social media ad campaign, you’ll also be monitoring likes in addition to shares, comments, and messages. Because social media is about being social, these metrics can tell you what resonates with a target audience and can help shape conversations with potential customers going forward.

Should conversion be an overarching goal, your attention would turn to clicks. Clicks show intent on the customer’s part to act. Depending on the content associated with those clicks, you can also understand what products or services are of interest to specific consumers. As with likes, shares, and comments, this information can inform your conversations with these prospects because it tells you what content they might need to receive in order to move further down the sales funnel.

How to Scale Your Marketing With the Right Data

Once you’ve settled on your goals and associated metrics, the task at hand becomes scaling your marketing efforts based on the information available to you. Though tactics will vary from one financial institution to the next, a few strategies almost always prove beneficial:

1. Use social listening to optimize in real time.

With digital interactions growing in importance, financial institutions must take greater care in the messaging and content of each exchange. It’s here where social media can be of real value, and integrating insights gathered from social chatter can help improve the performance of your next paid social media advertising campaign.

Let’s say your institution starts using social listening tools to understand what’s on the mind of prospects. That lets your team get a jump on the competition by posting social media content sooner when a trend emerges — even if it has nothing to do with paid online advertising. Social chatter also can be beneficial for budget planning and allocating spend on specific audiences and marketing activities with the greatest likelihood of engagement. If you were to run a social media ad campaign around 529 planning, for example, it wouldn’t resonate with audiences not intent on going to college.

Capturing and using social media data allows you to target your campaign in those areas of greater interest to consumers. That same information can also help decrease spend in areas where the message isn’t connecting.

2. Use social media data to inform your marketing content.

For many institutions, social media is a marketing dead end because they haven’t considered their audiences’ post-click experience. Your social media should connect to other customer acquisition tools such as landing pages, contact forms, guides, or a recent blog post so these resources can serve as next steps in the customer journey.

Knowing which content is interesting to your audience requires mining your social media data. Specifically, click-through data can tell you more about where to focus future paid advertising campaigns and content development efforts. If customers are spending their time with articles on loan options, down payments, or financial assessments, don’t spend money promoting an e-book on “living well in retirement” to them. Using data will increase the likelihood that your consumers continue through the consumer funnel.

3. Advocate for your paid ad budget with success data.

Justifying a marketing budget, let alone an increase in spend, can leave many marketers in a quandary. Even when you come in with a set of paid social media advertising goals tied to the overarching goals of the institution, buy-in isn’t a guarantee. Without the right metrics, changes to the budget will be difficult to implement.

According to Harvard Business Review, 41% of marketing budgets are based on the previous year, while only 10% are revisited quarterly. Employing the most current information available to shape marketing conversations will allow others in your company to see the value of your proposed ad spend plan, so it’s important to use your social media data judiciously.

4. Invest in marketing tools.

Marketing tools are now becoming a dime a dozen. If you hope to access and use the data available from social media, selection is critical. Choose one designed for your industry, making sure that it can measure organic activities and paid online advertising initiatives.

Denim Social offers a solution. Our platform, services, and analytics features were built specifically with regulated institutions in mind. Real-time analytics are compiled from user data across several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), offering not only actionable insights on target audiences but a greater understanding of the effectiveness of current social media ad campaigns.

Make messaging or content adjustments immediately if need be — or simply use the analytics to inform the direction of future campaigns. Should the leadership team call for an update, presentation-ready reports are just a few clicks away.

Social media and paid social media advertising campaigns provide an opportunity to get to know potential customers but will be ineffective without the proper strategy. It’s all about capturing and tracking the right data to inform the direction of each interaction along the path to purchase. Your institution will be better off, and so will your customers.

It takes a lot of data to craft a top-tier social media strategy. That’s why Denim Social is here to help. Reach out for your personalized platform demo today.