It’s that time of year again. Nope, not Christmas (not yet, anyway). Instead, it’s time for marketers everywhere to reflect on the past year and plan their social media strategies for the year ahead. As consumer expectations for personalization rise, meeting customers’ needs for connection is no longer just a “nice to have.” It’s essential for building trusting business relationships. The financial services industry already understands the power of personal connection through intermediaries. That’s why empowering them through social selling — helping them forge connections with customers and prospects alike — should take center stage in your 2023 marketing strategy.  

Need some extra convincing? First, consider that social media has become entrenched in consumers’ lives and wallets. Accenture expects social commerce to grow to $1.2 trillion in just three years, with Millennials and Gen Zers propelling most of that growth. And their spending power continues to skyrocket. Most important? They’re using social media like search engines when researching financial products and services. In fact, about 40% of Gen Zers said they’d sooner use TikTok and Instagram for search than Google. Whether you’re in insurance, banking, or mortgage, both your brand and your individual experts need to be discoverable on the channels that matter, building trust with authentic and educational content.

With that in mind, here are three tips for building a successful 2023 social selling strategy:

1. Expand to Short-Form Video

Short-form video is taking over social channels such as YouTube and Instagram — not to mention the meteoric rise of TikTok. Now more than ever, social users expect their feeds to include short, easy-to-watch clips that educate and entertain them. It’s called “edutainment,” and it can be a powerful (and authentic) tool in a social selling strategy. Whether you’re planning to adopt TikTok or post content on an existing network such as Instagram, your social selling strategy for 2023 can include video to set up your intermediaries as experts who can influence their prospects and customers.

Need content ideas? Empower your social sellers to provide financial planning ideas or market trend analyses, for example, to get the wheels turning for prospects and customers. Your marketing team should ask themselves questions such as: What topics confuse your target audiences? What questions do prospects and customers have? How can your intermediaries break down these confusing topics into “snackable” content? Younger audiences are looking to channels such as Instagram to find personalized content like this. Your social sellers should meet them there, ready to engage (and entertain!) with authenticity and empathy.

2. Combine Organic and Paid for Maximum Impact

If 2022 taught us anything, it should be that it’s a matter of when — not if — social media algorithms change, so you need to be ready to adapt your marketing strategy accordingly. For instance, as social networks continue to show a preference for individuals over brands, you can and should funnel more resources into social selling for your intermediaries. However, investing in paid social media advertising is also a good idea, especially as search-driven social behavior accelerates.

You cannot control the organic algorithm, but with paid social advertising, you can manage who you reach and with what message. Don’t worry, your social sellers don’t need to become paid social experts. We recommend marketers execute paid on behalf of their social sellers. This allows you to maintain control of your budget and frees up intermediaries to engage with their audiences through their organic posting or leads generated from paid. Be sure to advocate for your social sellers as you negotiate your paid social budget for the year. Consider redirecting brand funds or advocating for additional spend for your intermediaries. (Need help marrying your organic and paid strategies? We have resources for that!)

3. Keep It Consistent

Your social selling strategy will only be as impactful as it is consistent. Maintaining a consistent posting cadence is absolutely paramount. For one thing, it will help you overcome some of those tricky algorithmic changes. Plus, if your social sellers aren’t posting at least a few times a week, their audience engagement will quickly peter out as other content fills the void.

Consistency in messaging is just as — if not more — important. Your social sellers should stay on message for the brand or brands they represent, but staying compliant in a regulated industry is also crucial. The good news is that Denim Social makes consistency and compliance easy. For example, our content approval workflows ensure that nothing goes live without your team’s permission, protecting your brand voice and keeping your intermediaries compliant. On top of that, our shared libraries of preapproved and customizable content mean your intermediaries’ social feeds stay full. The result? You’ll never face content logjams again, and your intermediaries’ audiences will remain engaged.

The 2023 tea leaves are clear: You’d be wise to invest your resources in social selling to connect with and serve an engaged online audience. Want to build your 2023 social selling strategy but don’t know where to start? Check out the Denim Social 2023 Trend Report.

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What’s your top marketing priority? If you’re a marketer at a large financial institution, it’s probably winning new customers. And a big part of achieving that means growing your audience online. Your organization might have embraced effective lead generation strategies such as social selling and coached producers into successfully engaging with prospects. But what happens when those brand intermediaries have exhausted their first-degree connections? Your marketing efforts could stagnate unless you consistently guide new audiences to the top of the sales funnel. Thankfully, paid social advertising is a tried-and-true way to get more eyes on your brand.

You can’t sleep on paid ads. Working only on organic content will limit your social reach compared with incorporating a paid social strategy, which is why 80% of brands surveyed by HubSpot were using paid social media advertising. Their reasoning? Though great to lead top-of-funnel viewers further down the marketing funnel through education and relationship-building, they’ll eventually run out of leads if they’re not actively working to attract more. That’s where paid advertising can really boost your efforts. Whether you’re furthering the reach of your brand page or specific intermediaries (for that human touch!), paid advertising will help you reach more audiences within their natural environments.

Unsure where to begin? Don’t worry — from the first steps of audience targeting to coordinating with organic content to using analytics to optimize and scale, Denim Social is here to help you get started with paid social advertising.

How to Advertise Financial Services on Social Media

Paid advertising is a bit of a cheat code for financial marketers. Instead of pushing out only organic content and waiting and hoping that your target audience sees it, you can use paid ads to make sure your content hits the right audiences at the right times. This also means ads can be tailored to niche audiences and specific demographics, allowing for more precise targeting. Paid ads mean you can tweak your messaging for different demographics — whether that’s first-time homebuyers, retirees looking for life insurance, etc. — and know that those ads will reach them.

But before you can start crafting marketing magic, you need to decide on both your audience and digital channel of choice. Understand the neighborhood you’re building your presence in. Visual channels such as Instagram, for example, reach younger Gen Z audiences, while LinkedIn is consistently trusted across all generations. Each requires different types of content, hashtags, and formatting to appeal to the target demographic.

Channels such as Facebook and Twitter have refined tools that guide you through social marketing bid strategies. Social ad campaigns cost money, and a proper scope is important for the campaign to be successful. Set a budget, along with defined start and end dates, while targeting your ads.

Of course, your work doesn’t end once the ads are running. Consider A/B testing to make sure you’ve matched the right messages to the right audiences. Don’t be afraid to try different variations — phrasing, hashtags, visuals, or anything else — until you find exactly what works for your audiences. Any time you improve your content, you’re also improving your paid ad ROI.

Optimizing Your Social Media Strategy for Both Paid and Organic Content

Paid social ads are crucial for targeting the right customers, but it’s important to remember they rest on a foundation of consistent organic content. Like bread and butter, paid and organic social strategies work best together. After all, if you’re using social selling tactics (and you should be!), you know how effective intermediaries’ organic posts can be with early-stage leads — those who are aware of your intermediaries but aren’t ready to make a purchase — to show the heart and humanity of your brand. As a financial marketer, you also understand how organic publishing of curated social content helps you distribute your targeted messages to wide audiences.

But what about the narrower audiences you’d like to reach? To get in front of more specific (and new-to-you) audiences, you can create a specific strategy to attract top-of-funnel prospects with your paid ads. Within this strategy, you’ll find and speak to your core audience, connect with people who have shown past interest in your content, and target “lookalike” audience members who are most similar to your best customers. All the while, make sure your organic content continues audiences’ journeys toward conversion.

Remember that your paid ad strategy isn’t limited to message-boosting at the brand level — in fact, it should amplify your team’s social selling posts, too. Even though tapping intermediaries as social media brand ambassadors is a people-first approach, social selling isn’t constrained to organic content alone. Your intermediaries’ posts are prime for paid amplification because they likely feel more authentic to your audiences, generating more trust in your intermediaries (and, by extension, your financial institution).

So, be certain your digital marketing strategy has a two-pronged approach to keep your organic and paid online advertising working hand in hand. The paid social posts put a megaphone on your message, breaking through the noise of newsfeeds to reach the right people at just the right time. And don’t leave behind other types of content! When creating blog posts for the company website, take your best lines and gold nuggets and repurpose them as standalone social posts tailored to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. That way, you’ll get the most value out of each piece of content you create.

Using Analytics to Scale

So, you’ve got a couple of paid ad campaigns running, and you’ve coached your intermediaries to create organic posts to complement them. Now you can sit back, relax, and watch the conversions come rolling in ... is what we’d like to say. But of course, a marketer’s job is never done; we can’t ignore advertising tracking.

To keep growing your ROI, your financial institution will need to track quantitative metrics about how the campaigns are going. Some common key performance indicators are click-to-open rates, new customer acquisitions, and other conversion targets.

Once you understand which metrics make the most sense for your specific institution, you can set growth objectives. When you add tracking for multiple social channels to the mix, it can get a little messy trying to organize everything — especially because what you track can change depending on your goals for each channel.

When tracking brand awareness, for example, you need to understand impressions, likes, comments, and followers. This will capture who was exposed to your messaging and who was moved enough by it to engage in some way. But if brand awareness isn’t your only goal, you’ll have a whole other set of metrics to capture as well. If you’re monitoring customer engagement, then metrics such as shares, messages, and click-throughs will be important. These actions show that your call to action was effective at driving users through your social media content funnel.

This can feel like a lot of moving parts (and it is!), but having a unified, user-friendly analytics dashboard can keep the data from becoming number soup. By benchmarking these metrics with regular reporting, you’ll be able to quantify the effectiveness of paid campaigns over time. Not only will this help you identify the most effective campaign strategies, but it will also provide a wealth of data proving how your efforts are furthering business goals. Throw those numbers in a PowerPoint — it’s a great resource to bring before the bosses when it’s time to allocate paid advertising spend.

As your ROI grows, your advertising budget will hopefully follow. Use the data to inform your next steps, and invest in marketing tools that let you easily carry out campaigns — the result will be more leads, more conversions, and a more successful business.

Moving Forward With Denim Social

As a marketer, you’ve already got a lot on your plate. Don’t let inefficient social media management add to that. The Denim Social platform is built specifically for financial institutions. That means compliance, advertising, content curation, and publishing are all rolled into one easy-to-use solution. Let Denim Social’s software do the heavy lifting, so you can spend more time helping intermediaries nurture leads. After all, if your institution isn’t building out its social media community, someone else might be.

With power analytics and an intuitive interface, Denim Social provides simple, scalable social media marketing for financial institutions. From ideating paid campaigns to scaling up successful social media strategies, our platform will walk you through every step of the way. For more information on how Denim Social fits your institution, reach out for a free software demo today.

Most mortgage marketers have gotten comfortable with organic social media, but if you’re noticing your results are down, you’re not alone. Changing algorithms on social media platforms mean that an organic-only strategy is no longer viable today. To stand out in today’s social media environment, mortgage marketers need to invest in social selling and paid social advertising.

In this session with the Mortgage Bankers Association, we look at next-level social strategies and key considerations for driving ROI (and deals) with social selling and paid social. We're joined by experts from GoPrime Mortgage to discuss real world examples.

Watch the full webinar below: 

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If you're ready to learn more about social selling, check out our e-book, A Guide to Helping Mortgage Loan Officers Achieve Success with Social Media Marketing.

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.

The ability to collect, interpret, and act on current customer data to cross-sell targeted products and services is a critical driver of revenue for banks, especially for mortgage lenders. Borrowers purchase an average of 11 mortgages in their lifetime, yet lenders retain fewer than 20 percent of past customers on average. That’s a lot of missed opportunity.

One survey of nearly 300 financial institutions found that 64 percent of respondents are not using data to cross-sell to existing customers. It makes sense: In today’s fast-paced landscape, many financial services marketers have enough on their hands.

Digital marketing changes at a breakneck pace, and it can be difficult to keep up with constant developments, let alone all the data. Many marketers do not know how to access or analyze customer data to capitalize on cross-selling opportunities. Further complicating the situation, significant structural barriers, such as siloed teams, can limit communication between data analysts and marketers.

Many marketers pour the time and resources they do have into new customer acquisition, but cross-selling within the ranks of existing customers is a much more lucrative strategy. Acquiring new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining existing ones. An increase in customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can boost profits by 25 to 95 percent.

Social media marketing strategy for cross-selling in banking

Fortunately, collecting the right customer data to fuel cross-selling efforts does not have to be a daunting task. A strong social media marketing strategy is an excellent means of collecting and acting on valuable data, and with the right approach, can be easy to pull off at scale. Consider the following key principles to effectively gather and integrate data from social media and up your cross-selling game:

1. Understand your audience and what’s important to them. Social media is an excellent listening tool. By tracking likes, comments, shares and click-throughs, you can gain valuable insights about what content is resonating with existing customers and where your cross-selling opportunities lie. Remember that tracking existing customer engagement is key; while the probability of selling to a new lead is just 5 to 20 percent, the probability of cross-selling to a customer is 60 to 70 percent.

Consider, for example, you’ve shared a post with tips for first-time homebuyers. the post gets a lot of engagement from your current followers, many of which have accounts with you. This could indicate that those customers are interested in securing their first mortgage.

2. Target your messaging strategically. Social media is also a strong targeting tool. Once you’ve gathered engagement data, create custom lists within your customer roster, and retarget those customers with paid social media ads for relevant cross-selling opportunities. Retargeting is a great way to add power to your existing organic social media strategy. Building onto the example above, this could look like targeting ads for first-time mortgage seekers to the existing customers who engaged with your first-time homebuying post.

When targeting paid ads, remember that timing can go a long way toward effectiveness and efficiency. You want to personalize ads to land the right messages at the right time. For example, a year after someone closes a mortgage with your institution, you know that they already own a home, trust your institution, and may be looking to do some home renovations. You can capitalize on the cross-selling opportunity by serving them an ad about home equity loans for improvements right when they’re likely considering diving into a new project.

3. Use content to keep customers engaged. You can also use engagement data to see which customers have not engaged with your team lately. Use paid social as an opportunity to remind these customers why they chose you in the first place and show them what you still have to offer with valuable digital journeys. Re-engagement initiatives shouldn’t create digital dead ends—they should lead your customers to engage further with your brand.

Link to personalized landing pages from both paid and organic posts to guide customers to valuable content and gate the content behind contact submission forms to collect more valuable data from customers. For example, your homebuying tips post will pique the interest of customers who are looking to secure their first mortgage. Include a link in the post to a landing page on your website that houses a guidebook on first-time mortgage seekers. Customers can put their information into the contact submission form in exchange for the guide, and the form can alert your team to make a follow-up call. The customer gets valuable information, and your team gets a cross-selling opportunity right in their hands.

Combined, these principles aim to boost revenue and build stronger relationships. When you use data to understand your customers, deliver content when it matters most and personalize the digital journey, you can keep customers engaged and offer them more and more value through targeted cross-selling opportunities.

This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.

According to a 2021 CMO survey, 59% of CMOs reported increased pressure from CEOs to prove the impact of their marketing efforts. As the world grows increasingly digital, markers at financial institutions have likely been feeling that pressure when it comes to their social media marketing strategies in particular.

Marketing managers might understand the power of social, but many financial institution leaders are simply more accustomed to traditional marketing tactics. While it’s clear how old efforts contributed to their bottom lines, social media can be a bit vaguer on the surface. Non-marketers in the financial space often see it as a personal channel for memes and political arguments rather than a valuable tool for achieving business outcomes.

But social media can drive business results for financial institutions. With adequate effort, investment, and resources, organic and paid social media will fit into the sales funnel and drive conversion. And when leadership calls the shots on the social media marketing budget, marketers must prove to them that further investment is a lucrative move.‍

How to Prove the Power of Social Media‍

So how can marketing managers show leadership teams that social media strategies are worthy of more investment? By measuring the success of their social media programs and getting metrics in front of leadership.

When it comes to proving what social can do to drive a financial institution quickly toward its goals, data tells a powerful story. The truth — and the proof — is in the analytics. Focus on these key points to make your strongest case to leadership:‍

1. Efficiency‍

Social media measurement in itself is nearly impossible to do manually. If you’re trying to get telling analytics with a spreadsheet, you won’t have much luck. Social media measurement, like most analytics, requires the right tools.

Quantify the time you spend on measurement to appeal to management. The right analytics tools can help you collect valuable marketing data faster and easier. Data shows that simplifying workflows with technology can free up 20–30% of employees’ time, so show leadership that with the right tools, you can up your efficiency to do more faster.

Another reason leaders might shy away from the idea of a robust social media marketing strategy is compliance. Financial services is a heavily regulated industry, and electronic communication is certainly not exempt from regulatory scrutiny. Again, the right tools can help. Denim Social’s platform, for example, enables marketers to keep social media compliant in an efficient way. Among other compliance features, the platform automates approval workflows so the right people can sign off on the right social content with ease before it ever goes live.‍

2. Targeting‍

As algorithms change and organic social media is no longer a promising strategy on its own, marketers need to persuade leadership teams to invest in paid social media. Not only will paid get your messages in front of the right people with direct targeting capabilities, but it can also provide more data to help you understand what your target audience groups want and need.

By tracking paid performance by target audience group, you can better understand who’s connecting with what content and hone your social media strategy to connect with more prospects. Show leadership teams that when every message lands in front of exactly the right people, you’re maximizing social media marketing budget dollars — instead of wasting them on irrelevant or unengaged audiences.‍

3. Competitor tracking‍

Help leaders understand that, while measuring your own social media performance offers valuable insights, measuring your competitors’ performance can take your marketing game to the next level.

With social listening tools that enable you to track competitors’ social media activity, leaders can see your organization’s performance benchmarked against competitors and get a clear picture of where social needs more investment to stay competitive.

What’s more, social listening tools offer financial institutions a clear line of sight into how other brands are resonating with customers and encouraging engagement on social. Your brand can use those insights to craft even more relevant messaging and keep a leg up on the competition at all times.‍

4. Conversion opportunities‍

Landing page linking strategies on social media drive conversions, and nothing is more compelling to a leadership team than a direct line from marketing spend to sales. Track form completion rates to present a clear picture of how many viewers have deemed your content valuable enough to exchange their information for. Then, tie that to sales data to see how many prospects who submitted their information and received follow-ups from sales teams eventually signed on.

When you can draw that clear line from social post all the way to conversion, the bottom-line impact is clear to see. Compare that to traditional marketing tactics — has your leadership team ever seen a recorded, data-backed customer conversion metric from a billboard? Not likely.

Marketers know that staying relevant in today’s digital world requires a strong approach to social media marketing. Show leaders how upping efficiency, performance metrics, and competitive insight can empower your marketing team to elevate a data-driven social media strategy that delivers clear, measurable results.

Interested to learn more about how to track your social media results? Sign-up for a demo with Denim Social to explore our Analytics tools.