How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them
Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them

Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.
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.

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:
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.
Connect & Convert on Social
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them
Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social 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.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
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.
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.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them
Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.

Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social 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.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
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.
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.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them
Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.

Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social 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.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
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.
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.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them
Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.

Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social 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.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
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.
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.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
Find out how more than 400 financial institutions across asset classes, geographies, and more used social media in 2020 to effectively support their business objectives. We’ve also outlined key trends to inform your social media future.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
Download this guidebook to learn how marketers are using social media to:
- Drive business with the lowest digital spend compared to traditional media
- Position employees as thought-leaders while leveraging their collective reach of their social media presence
- Ultimately, build trust with their communities and customers that translates to positive business results
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them

Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.
Employee advocacy is past; social selling is now. Whatever you call it, brands have long relied on employees to promote their offers, whether by word of mouth or incentive programs. But modern employee advocacy tactics that rely on employees sharing preapproved content fall short in one crucial arena: trust and authenticity.
Reposting brand content isn’t enough. Sure, it gives clients and prospects access to reliable financial advice from trusted sources. Still, it’s no way for financial advisors or wealth managers to build relationships on social media. Reposting is better than nothing but lacks the human connection to transform everyday transactions into meaningful exchanges. Today’s social media users know better.
Half of investors say social media influences who they hire as their financial professionals. Advisors need to post purposefully and make their social profiles an extension of themselves, not just a brand repost feed. The solution? Increase your reach, humanize your brand and build relationships with clients and prospects with social selling.
What Is Social Selling?
Social selling is a savvy marketing strategy where brand intermediaries (financial advisors and wealth managers) post authentic content on their social media accounts. Social selling lets you leverage associates’ networks to showcase thought leadership, engage with clients and build trusting relationships. These authentic touchpoints increase the chances of lead conversion by making the most of advisors’ relationship-building skills online.
You get it: In financial services, products go to market through intermediaries. The same goes for social media. Consider this: Employees have 10 times the reach and double the click-through rate than brand pages have. Social selling can humanize your brand and transform social media into a revenue driver for your institution.
Moreover, social selling enables clients and prospects to meet your advisors on whichever social channels they prefer. They don’t have to take time out of their day and come into an office just to get to know their advisor or start financial planning. Social media has no office hours, so advisors and clients can interact on their terms and time.
At this point, you might be wondering how to pull off social selling in a heavily regulated industry like wealth management. Compliance is the key, not just to staying open for business but also to building trust with your prospects and clients. Luckily, compliant social selling is manageable at scale with supportive tech, teamwork and training.
So, how do you develop and scale a social selling program for your financial institution?
1. Push social selling internally.
Social selling is everyone’s responsibility, not just marketing. It’ll take a group effort to get the initiative started. Unless you win the support of others—including leaders and intermediaries—your social selling vision won’t thrive. Prepare your pitch by gathering data that proves intermediaries can reach your audience. Offer examples of how social selling can amplify your messaging. Create a test group of intermediaries, then gather data to bolster the case.
Compliance is another top concern. Your pitch must clarify that you’ve considered the risks/rewards and the guardrails needed to maintain compliance. Building support for your social selling venture will be the foundation for any momentum going forward. Marketing and compliance teams must work together to get early buy-in.
2. Find the right technology.
Once you’ve got buy-in from internal teams, start finding the right social selling tech. When searching, find a platform that creates efficiencies for your people. Does it leverage organic and paid capabilities? Look for a partner that understands your industry and all its nuances and regulations.
Compliance should be another top priority when considering tech options. How do you ensure content is compliant? Manual labor is an option, but it’s slow. To ensure complete compliance, look for a tech solution to streamline approvals and offer compliance protection at every step. The right tech should support your compliance needs, increase efficiency and empower users to make an impact through social selling.
3. Train and launch.
Once your group of social sellers is ready to go, it’s time to train them. Depending on skill, training could mean starting from the basics or jumping right into strategy. A solid social selling platform will include training on the basics of social selling and how to maximize its potential.
Training intermediaries to understand their role in compliance is another priority that shouldn’t be ignored. Instruct your intermediaries on responding to messages, getting content approval and archiving communication. (Hint: The right tech will help support your training.) Compliance is key to trust-building, so every associate should be empowered to participate.
Next, it’s time to launch. Alert everyone in your institution that your social selling program is live and tell them how they can help. A simple like, share, or follow can help boost your social selling efforts. With the organization behind you, you can start creating and posting branded content with support and momentum.
It might look different, but social selling includes the best parts of employee advocacy. Where it differs is how much farther it can take you toward meaningful relationships with clients and prospects. Social selling allows organizations (like yours) to leverage authenticity, grow thought leadership, ensure compliance and get to know clients on a new level. Don’t wait to get started.
This article originally appeared in Wealth Management on April 27, 2023.

As social media becomes more important for financial services, employee advocacy has become a buzzword for many marketers and their tech providers. Simply put, employee advocacy means the promotion and awareness of an institution by the employees who work there. For example, an employee could share a post on LinkedIn about why they love working at their bank or insurance agency. The focus is at the brand level, and often marketing teams provide their employees with pre-written messages or graphics to share on the company’s behalf.
However, employee advocacy is only surface level and does not truly get to the heart of human interactions and customer relationships that drive the industry. As consumers spend more time online and their expectations evolve, social media is quickly becoming a main channel for interactions with financial professionals. This is particularly true with young people, as Generation Z are almost five times more likely to get financial advice from social media. Instead of employee advocacy, marketing teams should be empowering their agents, loan officers, and advisors with a social selling strategy to drive real, authentic relationships.
What is social selling? It’s just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product
or service. It’s leveraging social 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. Social selling offers a better, more effective solution that empowers producers like loan officers, agents, and advisors to have a voice on social and build their networks.
Not sure how to tell the difference? Let’s take a look at a few reasons why social selling is more effective than employee advocacy.
- Social selling gives intermediaries a voice. With social selling, loan officers, agents, and advisors can find their voice and create authentic relationships with their customers. It means much more than a marketing team putting words in their mouth or posting generic brand content. Financial professionals have the opportunity to build thought leadership and even become financial influencers in their communities with social selling. For the marketers that run social selling programs, it also takes the pressure of constantly generating content off their shoulders, giving their teams room for individuality.
- Social selling fosters real relationships. Essentially, social selling is just bringing those all-too-important in-person human connections online. In an age where financial professionals have to meet customers where they are, they can stay in close touch and communicate on multiple channels. All of those interactions work together to build trust and showcase authenticity. It all adds up, too: for instance, half of investors say that social media plays a vital role in who they choose as an advisor. The more that intermediaries get comfortable with social media, the more community they will be able to grow. The opportunity is there, too: 80% of young adults get financial advice from social media.
- Social selling puts a focus on sales. At the end of the day, closing business is the top priority for professionals. It’s called social selling for a reason: intermediaries can engage with prospects at various touch points to move them along the customer journey from start to sale. Social media can be a powerful catalyst for that next step. Over time, institutions can clearly see how much revenue and business social media can bring in based on social growth. Don’t believe it? See how this bank drove a 230% increase in its audience in just a few months of activating a social selling program. The more successful an institution’s agents, advisors, or loan officers are, the stronger it will be as a whole. Social selling is truly a win-win for intermediaries, their institutions, and the customers that will feel valued and heard as a result.
While employee advocacy can be an important first step in getting employees excited about and comfortable with social media, it’s just one part of the puzzle. To truly unlock the power of social media and build relationships that matter online, institutions should look to social selling as a more robust option. Though it can seem overwhelming to take on, building a social selling program can be done with the right tools and resources. See how it works with our Social Selling Playbook for Financial Institutions.

Every social circle contains a few people whose ideas seem to carry more weight and gravitas. These people are influencers. They just seem to know what they’re talking about, and others actively seek their thoughts and opinions.
The same goes for digital social circles. If loan officers from your institution can establish themselves as thought leaders—specifically in loan origination—they can become sought-after sources for financial advice. Thought leadership demonstrates to readers that the person is knowledgeable and trustworthy, which will influence current and prospective clients.
When done right, a thought leadership strategy can be incredibly impactful. In a 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman survey, 65 percent of respondents said a piece of thought leadership content changed their perception of a company for the better, and 64 percent said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for gauging capabilities and competencies than marketing materials and product sheets. For banks especially, financial services thought leadership is a powerful way to foster trust and rapport with prospective clients.
The combination of thought leadership and social media augments these effects considerably. Unfortunately, banks tend to use social channels solely for marketing purposes and basic customer service.
Social selling is the use of social media to sell a product or service. It leverages social channels to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers and ultimately build sales-encouraging trust and rapport. It’s not enough to just “be online;” social selling empowers loan officers to become thought leaders, share with their networks and add humanity and authenticity to branded content.

Why should social selling techniques matter to your bank?
There’s a lot of bad financial advice online. Building thought leadership (especially in finance) allows loan officers to demonstrate that they are trusted, credible experts with clients’ best interests at heart. Prospective clients want to know they can trust your loan reps as human beings. Providing helpful, educational content is a great way to show them your business cares about delivering real value and connection. As a marketer for your brand, it’s your job to empower loan officers to start building those relationships through social selling.
Here are three tips for how to leverage social selling in your bank’s thought leadership strategy:
1. Build trust with prospects
Finance is a deeply personal business, and prospects want to know they can trust loan officers before feeling comfortable talking financial situations and goals. Social selling allows the brand’s loan officers to build direct, personal relationships with customers and prospects.
In times of market volatility or transition within a client’s life, the right thought leadership strategy can really connect. For instance, a blog post or LinkedIn video about debt consolidation loans could resonate with prospective clients who need help organizing their expenses. Or a reassuring Instagram reel about taking out a mortgage in a time of rising interest rates could be just what a first-time homebuyer needs to hear. Empowering your officers to start building these relationships via social selling content is one of your most important jobs in marketing for a banking brand.
2. Stay top of mind with clients
Financial services thought leadership helps your bank stay top of mind and engaged with existing clients. While there aren’t enough hours in the day for your brand’s loan officers to check in with every single client, social selling techniques can help them stay connected and deepen relationships without overworking. Social selling content can provide value to customers while loan officers are doing other vital work to close more loans.
Plus, when marketers help loan officers continually demonstrate their expertise online, the chances of gaining client referrals just increases. For example, offering services for business owners might encourage a social seller to post a guidebook about business loans and prompt an existing client to consider a loan to cover expansion. This guidebook can then serve as a handy piece of content for referrals.
3. Help intermediaries build expertise
While it’s not easy to confront, there is significant personnel movement in every industry today. Loan officers are concerned about their long-term career plans, and thought leadership is a great way to build your team’s reputation—regardless of where they work. Thought leadership content retains its value, even if employees move to another bank or financial institution. You might not be able to allow them to take their book of business, but their expertise and social media networks are intangible.
For these reasons (and more), thought leadership is essential to remaining competitive in today’s marketplace and building trust with clients. By leveraging social selling for loan officers, you’ll amplify your brand-building efforts with prospective clients, other industry experts and even potential employees. A solid thought leadership strategy through social selling will help build brand recognition, support lending teams, and establish lending officers as industry experts. Don’t wait to get started.
This article was originally published in ABA Banking Journal.
It’s not easy out there this spring – for lenders or for buyers. As you consider your marketing strategy, don’t underestimate the potential in social media.
Between market volatility, ever-changing rates and low inventory, there’s plenty of uncertainty. But one thing is certain; market conditions are making it that much more competitive. That means investing in relationships matters more than ever. And today, that means loan officers need to be proactive and stay in touch via social media.
Considering 77% of borrowers move forward with the first lender they speak to when they’re looking for a loan, showing up in a prospect or existing clients’ social media feed can not only build trust, it can help you close more deals.
After months of economic headlines and the break-neck pace of rate change, loan applicants are discouraged. This is a critical time for loan officers to educate prospects about loan options and the realities of today’s market. By doing so, you can strengthen relationships, build trust and communicate your expertise, all of which can create short and long term ROI.
Social media is an essential channel to create connectivity and trust with prospects. Whether you’re just getting started with social selling or are a well-oiled social selling team, it’s important to be aware of present market conditions and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Here are a few tips to stand out on social this spring buying season:
Be an empathetic person, not a brand
This is not an easy market for buyers or sellers. Homebuying is inevitably emotional and as many buyers navigate complexity and uncertainty, they may be understandably frustrated. This is why it’s so important that loan officers show up as humans on social media, not just logos.
Relationships are the heart of the business – people buy from people, after all. You should be a friendly face and trusted confidante on social media.
It’s about more than having a social media profile. Loan officers need to be their authentic selves when posting too. It’s not enough to share brand content, you need to post personalized content. In other words: be a real human on social.
You should extend the same humanity and empathy on social media as you would to applicants in real life. Acknowledging their frustrations is a great place to start. Ask about their concerns. Provide reassurance.
Educate applicants
Use social media content as an opportunity to educate applicants. While you might hang on every rate update, everyday applicants are likely confused and overwhelmed by changing mortgage news. Social selling can help establish loan officers as thought leaders.
You should be on social talking about what’s happening in the market this spring, but remember to use plain, conversational language with the aim to educate followers. In doing so, you’re not only providing value to followers, but also showing off your expertise.
In practical terms, this could mean posting a current news article on Facebook with a “what it means” POV in the caption. Alternatively, you could share a commentary on a rate change in a quick Instagram video. Regardless of the format, loan officers will have success on social media when you personalize the content and simplify complex concepts for followers.
Consistently be part of the conversation
If the past few years in the housing market have taught us anything, it’s that things change fast. The same holds true this spring and that means you need to be there for all the ups and downs on social media too. Consistency has always been key for social media success, but when navigating changing market news, it’s more important than ever.
Social media algorithms favor those who post often and with consistency. That doesn’t mean you have to post every day or try to time the algorithms, but does mean you should stay active and in the conversation. It’s not a set it and forget it kind of thing.
Don’t be afraid to try something new
The marketplace is unpredictable and social media can be too. When it comes to your social selling strategy, don’t be afraid to try something new. This season may be the perfect time for loan officers to adopt a new social media network, like Instagram for example, or try out new post formats. If you’re not seeing the desired results, try mixing it up.
Social selling is a critical strategy to keep loan officers competitive in a tight lending environment. Not sure where to start with social selling? Check out our Denim Social guidebook, How to Launch a Social Selling Program for a Financial Institution.
This article was originally published in MBA Newslink.
Our team recently attended the Global Insurance Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, which is an educational and networking opportunity that brings together over 500 insurance and financial professionals, along with technology solutions. It was clear that tech-enablement is top of mind for insurance leaders and providers, as the demand for tools and resources that enhance digital customer communications increase.
As a compliant platform that empowers insurance intermediaries on social media, Denim Social is a perfect solution for carriers and agencies that are ready to take the next step toward a modern marketing strategy. As their expectations shift to digital, so should the industry .
Coming out of the GIS conference, our team saw three big trends at the intersection of insurance and technology.
- Uncertain economic conditions are creating new challenges for the industry at large. Now more than ever, agents need to be equipped to be resilient and available to their clients across multiple communications channels.
- Client education is vital. With more and more prospects looking to social media for financial and planning advice, agents have a unique opportunity to educate their communities on basic financial literacy.
- As online insurance transactions grow in popularity, agents must double-down on relationships to avoid losing out.
Despite these changes, insurance agents and agencies that make the client experience their top concern will thrive. No technology can replace the human interaction and care between an agent and their client. To counteract an impersonal approach, agents can find a solution in meeting clients and prospects where they are, when they need it. Social media is essential for doing this in an ever-connected world. By creating personal (and helpful) networks, agents can find that their relationships are stronger than ever.
See how to give agents a voice on social media with this practical guide on Social Selling for Insurance. It’s a non-negotiable for any modern marketing strategy.

Insurance leaders know the value of agents when it comes to product distribution, but smart marketers should be making the case to invest in digital enablement at the agent level. This means extending social media efforts beyond the brand and to the intermediaries building relationships at the local level.
Helping agents feel comfortable on social media and weaving it into their everyday sales mix is much different than managing a social presence at the brand or company level. But when your business goes to market through intermediaries, empowering them on social media is crucial.
Unsure where to start with a social selling program? It can feel daunting, but Denim Social can help. Learn how to set the right tone, train, create content and more in the latest guide from Denim Social: Guide To Social Selling for Insurance.

Connect & Convert on Social
How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them

Social marketing can be customized to fit virtually every advertiser’s need, thanks to its wide array of targeting options. However, it can also be overwhelming for financial institutions to understand how to harness the full benefits of paid social media advertising. With the tools now available, how do financial institution marketers find the right target audiences and expand reach effectively?
By tapping into paid social advertising, financial institutions can put their ads in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s reaching new customers or addressing the needs of existing customers, paid ads help financial institutions find customers who not only fit the demographics they are looking to target, but also who are actively interested in the products or services they’re offering.
While different social media networks may have different rules or regulations for financial institutions, social media advertising drives results that make risk well worth it. And with Denim Social’s platform, you can be confident that no post will go live without being fully compliant.
How to Create Effective Campaigns to Reach Your Target Audience
Once you’ve chosen a social media network, you need to understand how to best utilize it. Social media’s power isn’t just in finding the people most receptive to your message. It’s also in helping you deliver the most effective advertising possible. As one of the top players in paid social advertising, Facebook offers a few different tools to help you do this, and other social media channels have similar features.
Facebook’s Audience Insights feature provides you with aggregate data on current followers and other Facebook users. Here, you can see a breakdown of useful information, such as relationship statuses, job titles, hobbies, and interests. This data can be channeled into creating content that’s more likely to capture your audience’s attention and keep them engaged.
Also useful are its Page and Video Insights, which show how your audience responds to your content and who your most active followers are. By looking at metrics like how long people watch your videos, who clicked on certain links, or where your most engaged users are from, you can continuously improve the effectiveness of your paid social advertising and your social media content in general.

3 Steps for Finding and Reaching Your Most Profitable Audience
Whatever platforms and tools you use, remember that experimentation is one key to reaching audiences effectively. Another is using those tools to create target audience profiles with data-based strategies. Begin with these steps:
1. Start with your Core Audience.
Your Core Audience is the foundation upon which you’ll build your social media marketing strategy. It should be made up of people who align with your broader business and marketing objectives — as well as those who already follow you on social media.
On Facebook, there are five simple but powerful criteria you can use to flesh out this audience: location, demographics, interests, behavior, and connections. For example, in the mortgage industry, you would limit your Core Audience to those who live in the geographic area you serve. You could also target those whose behavior indicates a recent interest in home financing.
2. Use Custom Audiences to reach out to people engaging with your content.
Now that you have a solid foundation, you need to build on that by adding those who have shown interest in your content. That’s where Custom Audiences come into play. With this feature, you can connect with people who have not only liked your page, but also have visited your website or downloaded your app. Custom Audiences also make it possible for institutions to include existing lists of leads and targets, ensuring that your targeted ads reach the maximum number of interested parties.
A mortgage loan officer, for instance, could take advantage of this feature by targeting ads to people who’ve visited their financial institution’s website, rather than only relying on the same basic demographics that other loan officers in the area are probably using.
3. Disrupt your competition with Lookalike Audiences.
The first two steps of this social marketing process should give you a reliable, engaged pool of potential customers to whom you can advertise. However, if you stop there, your ability to grow that pool will be limited. To reap the full benefits of paid advertising, you need to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithms with Lookalike Audiences.
This feature allows you to find people with similar interests, behaviors, and characteristics to your Custom and Core Audiences. By picking a percentage range of how much you want your new audience to match your current one, you can choose to either reach a wider, more general audience, or find people almost identical to your current target. It’s completely up to you.
This can be a very effective tool, especially in financial services. The ability to launch a lookalike ad campaign for a particular location and demographic could help you connect with high-quality targets who may have never connected with you if they hadn’t seen your ad. In many cases, these new leads are already seeing ads from similar institutions, which means you’re now getting a chance to bring your brand top of mind.
Paid social media ads can be some of the most effective advertising out there, both in terms of the number of conversions and cost-effectiveness. For financial institutions who want to be strategic about their target audience and expand their reach, there’s no better place to start than with paid social media advertising. Ready to launch your own paid social advertising campaign? Request a demo to find out how Denim Social can help.
Employee advocacy is past; social selling is now. Whatever you call it, brands have long relied on employees to promote their offers, whether by word of mouth or incentive programs. But modern employee advocacy tactics that rely on employees sharing preapproved content fall short in one crucial arena: trust and authenticity.
Reposting brand content isn’t enough. Sure, it gives clients and prospects access to reliable financial advice from trusted sources. Still, it’s no way for financial advisors or wealth managers to build relationships on social media. Reposting is better than nothing but lacks the human connection to transform everyday transactions into meaningful exchanges. Today’s social media users know better.
Half of investors say social media influences who they hire as their financial professionals. Advisors need to post purposefully and make their social profiles an extension of themselves, not just a brand repost feed. The solution? Increase your reach, humanize your brand and build relationships with clients and prospects with social selling.
What Is Social Selling?
Social selling is a savvy marketing strategy where brand intermediaries (financial advisors and wealth managers) post authentic content on their social media accounts. Social selling lets you leverage associates’ networks to showcase thought leadership, engage with clients and build trusting relationships. These authentic touchpoints increase the chances of lead conversion by making the most of advisors’ relationship-building skills online.
You get it: In financial services, products go to market through intermediaries. The same goes for social media. Consider this: Employees have 10 times the reach and double the click-through rate than brand pages have. Social selling can humanize your brand and transform social media into a revenue driver for your institution.
Moreover, social selling enables clients and prospects to meet your advisors on whichever social channels they prefer. They don’t have to take time out of their day and come into an office just to get to know their advisor or start financial planning. Social media has no office hours, so advisors and clients can interact on their terms and time.
At this point, you might be wondering how to pull off social selling in a heavily regulated industry like wealth management. Compliance is the key, not just to staying open for business but also to building trust with your prospects and clients. Luckily, compliant social selling is manageable at scale with supportive tech, teamwork and training.
So, how do you develop and scale a social selling program for your financial institution?
1. Push social selling internally.
Social selling is everyone’s responsibility, not just marketing. It’ll take a group effort to get the initiative started. Unless you win the support of others—including leaders and intermediaries—your social selling vision won’t thrive. Prepare your pitch by gathering data that proves intermediaries can reach your audience. Offer examples of how social selling can amplify your messaging. Create a test group of intermediaries, then gather data to bolster the case.
Compliance is another top concern. Your pitch must clarify that you’ve considered the risks/rewards and the guardrails needed to maintain compliance. Building support for your social selling venture will be the foundation for any momentum going forward. Marketing and compliance teams must work together to get early buy-in.
2. Find the right technology.
Once you’ve got buy-in from internal teams, start finding the right social selling tech. When searching, find a platform that creates efficiencies for your people. Does it leverage organic and paid capabilities? Look for a partner that understands your industry and all its nuances and regulations.
Compliance should be another top priority when considering tech options. How do you ensure content is compliant? Manual labor is an option, but it’s slow. To ensure complete compliance, look for a tech solution to streamline approvals and offer compliance protection at every step. The right tech should support your compliance needs, increase efficiency and empower users to make an impact through social selling.
3. Train and launch.
Once your group of social sellers is ready to go, it’s time to train them. Depending on skill, training could mean starting from the basics or jumping right into strategy. A solid social selling platform will include training on the basics of social selling and how to maximize its potential.
Training intermediaries to understand their role in compliance is another priority that shouldn’t be ignored. Instruct your intermediaries on responding to messages, getting content approval and archiving communication. (Hint: The right tech will help support your training.) Compliance is key to trust-building, so every associate should be empowered to participate.
Next, it’s time to launch. Alert everyone in your institution that your social selling program is live and tell them how they can help. A simple like, share, or follow can help boost your social selling efforts. With the organization behind you, you can start creating and posting branded content with support and momentum.
It might look different, but social selling includes the best parts of employee advocacy. Where it differs is how much farther it can take you toward meaningful relationships with clients and prospects. Social selling allows organizations (like yours) to leverage authenticity, grow thought leadership, ensure compliance and get to know clients on a new level. Don’t wait to get started.
This article originally appeared in Wealth Management on April 27, 2023.

As social media becomes more important for financial services, employee advocacy has become a buzzword for many marketers and their tech providers. Simply put, employee advocacy means the promotion and awareness of an institution by the employees who work there. For example, an employee could share a post on LinkedIn about why they love working at their bank or insurance agency. The focus is at the brand level, and often marketing teams provide their employees with pre-written messages or graphics to share on the company’s behalf.
However, employee advocacy is only surface level and does not truly get to the heart of human interactions and customer relationships that drive the industry. As consumers spend more time online and their expectations evolve, social media is quickly becoming a main channel for interactions with financial professionals. This is particularly true with young people, as Generation Z are almost five times more likely to get financial advice from social media. Instead of employee advocacy, marketing teams should be empowering their agents, loan officers, and advisors with a social selling strategy to drive real, authentic relationships.
What is social selling? It’s just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product
or service. It’s leveraging social 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. Social selling offers a better, more effective solution that empowers producers like loan officers, agents, and advisors to have a voice on social and build their networks.
Not sure how to tell the difference? Let’s take a look at a few reasons why social selling is more effective than employee advocacy.
- Social selling gives intermediaries a voice. With social selling, loan officers, agents, and advisors can find their voice and create authentic relationships with their customers. It means much more than a marketing team putting words in their mouth or posting generic brand content. Financial professionals have the opportunity to build thought leadership and even become financial influencers in their communities with social selling. For the marketers that run social selling programs, it also takes the pressure of constantly generating content off their shoulders, giving their teams room for individuality.
- Social selling fosters real relationships. Essentially, social selling is just bringing those all-too-important in-person human connections online. In an age where financial professionals have to meet customers where they are, they can stay in close touch and communicate on multiple channels. All of those interactions work together to build trust and showcase authenticity. It all adds up, too: for instance, half of investors say that social media plays a vital role in who they choose as an advisor. The more that intermediaries get comfortable with social media, the more community they will be able to grow. The opportunity is there, too: 80% of young adults get financial advice from social media.
- Social selling puts a focus on sales. At the end of the day, closing business is the top priority for professionals. It’s called social selling for a reason: intermediaries can engage with prospects at various touch points to move them along the customer journey from start to sale. Social media can be a powerful catalyst for that next step. Over time, institutions can clearly see how much revenue and business social media can bring in based on social growth. Don’t believe it? See how this bank drove a 230% increase in its audience in just a few months of activating a social selling program. The more successful an institution’s agents, advisors, or loan officers are, the stronger it will be as a whole. Social selling is truly a win-win for intermediaries, their institutions, and the customers that will feel valued and heard as a result.
While employee advocacy can be an important first step in getting employees excited about and comfortable with social media, it’s just one part of the puzzle. To truly unlock the power of social media and build relationships that matter online, institutions should look to social selling as a more robust option. Though it can seem overwhelming to take on, building a social selling program can be done with the right tools and resources. See how it works with our Social Selling Playbook for Financial Institutions.

Every social circle contains a few people whose ideas seem to carry more weight and gravitas. These people are influencers. They just seem to know what they’re talking about, and others actively seek their thoughts and opinions.
The same goes for digital social circles. If loan officers from your institution can establish themselves as thought leaders—specifically in loan origination—they can become sought-after sources for financial advice. Thought leadership demonstrates to readers that the person is knowledgeable and trustworthy, which will influence current and prospective clients.
When done right, a thought leadership strategy can be incredibly impactful. In a 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman survey, 65 percent of respondents said a piece of thought leadership content changed their perception of a company for the better, and 64 percent said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for gauging capabilities and competencies than marketing materials and product sheets. For banks especially, financial services thought leadership is a powerful way to foster trust and rapport with prospective clients.
The combination of thought leadership and social media augments these effects considerably. Unfortunately, banks tend to use social channels solely for marketing purposes and basic customer service.
Social selling is the use of social media to sell a product or service. It leverages social channels to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers and ultimately build sales-encouraging trust and rapport. It’s not enough to just “be online;” social selling empowers loan officers to become thought leaders, share with their networks and add humanity and authenticity to branded content.

Why should social selling techniques matter to your bank?
There’s a lot of bad financial advice online. Building thought leadership (especially in finance) allows loan officers to demonstrate that they are trusted, credible experts with clients’ best interests at heart. Prospective clients want to know they can trust your loan reps as human beings. Providing helpful, educational content is a great way to show them your business cares about delivering real value and connection. As a marketer for your brand, it’s your job to empower loan officers to start building those relationships through social selling.
Here are three tips for how to leverage social selling in your bank’s thought leadership strategy:
1. Build trust with prospects
Finance is a deeply personal business, and prospects want to know they can trust loan officers before feeling comfortable talking financial situations and goals. Social selling allows the brand’s loan officers to build direct, personal relationships with customers and prospects.
In times of market volatility or transition within a client’s life, the right thought leadership strategy can really connect. For instance, a blog post or LinkedIn video about debt consolidation loans could resonate with prospective clients who need help organizing their expenses. Or a reassuring Instagram reel about taking out a mortgage in a time of rising interest rates could be just what a first-time homebuyer needs to hear. Empowering your officers to start building these relationships via social selling content is one of your most important jobs in marketing for a banking brand.
2. Stay top of mind with clients
Financial services thought leadership helps your bank stay top of mind and engaged with existing clients. While there aren’t enough hours in the day for your brand’s loan officers to check in with every single client, social selling techniques can help them stay connected and deepen relationships without overworking. Social selling content can provide value to customers while loan officers are doing other vital work to close more loans.
Plus, when marketers help loan officers continually demonstrate their expertise online, the chances of gaining client referrals just increases. For example, offering services for business owners might encourage a social seller to post a guidebook about business loans and prompt an existing client to consider a loan to cover expansion. This guidebook can then serve as a handy piece of content for referrals.
3. Help intermediaries build expertise
While it’s not easy to confront, there is significant personnel movement in every industry today. Loan officers are concerned about their long-term career plans, and thought leadership is a great way to build your team’s reputation—regardless of where they work. Thought leadership content retains its value, even if employees move to another bank or financial institution. You might not be able to allow them to take their book of business, but their expertise and social media networks are intangible.
For these reasons (and more), thought leadership is essential to remaining competitive in today’s marketplace and building trust with clients. By leveraging social selling for loan officers, you’ll amplify your brand-building efforts with prospective clients, other industry experts and even potential employees. A solid thought leadership strategy through social selling will help build brand recognition, support lending teams, and establish lending officers as industry experts. Don’t wait to get started.
This article was originally published in ABA Banking Journal.
It’s not easy out there this spring – for lenders or for buyers. As you consider your marketing strategy, don’t underestimate the potential in social media.
Between market volatility, ever-changing rates and low inventory, there’s plenty of uncertainty. But one thing is certain; market conditions are making it that much more competitive. That means investing in relationships matters more than ever. And today, that means loan officers need to be proactive and stay in touch via social media.
Considering 77% of borrowers move forward with the first lender they speak to when they’re looking for a loan, showing up in a prospect or existing clients’ social media feed can not only build trust, it can help you close more deals.
After months of economic headlines and the break-neck pace of rate change, loan applicants are discouraged. This is a critical time for loan officers to educate prospects about loan options and the realities of today’s market. By doing so, you can strengthen relationships, build trust and communicate your expertise, all of which can create short and long term ROI.
Social media is an essential channel to create connectivity and trust with prospects. Whether you’re just getting started with social selling or are a well-oiled social selling team, it’s important to be aware of present market conditions and adjust your strategy accordingly.
Here are a few tips to stand out on social this spring buying season:
Be an empathetic person, not a brand
This is not an easy market for buyers or sellers. Homebuying is inevitably emotional and as many buyers navigate complexity and uncertainty, they may be understandably frustrated. This is why it’s so important that loan officers show up as humans on social media, not just logos.
Relationships are the heart of the business – people buy from people, after all. You should be a friendly face and trusted confidante on social media.
It’s about more than having a social media profile. Loan officers need to be their authentic selves when posting too. It’s not enough to share brand content, you need to post personalized content. In other words: be a real human on social.
You should extend the same humanity and empathy on social media as you would to applicants in real life. Acknowledging their frustrations is a great place to start. Ask about their concerns. Provide reassurance.
Educate applicants
Use social media content as an opportunity to educate applicants. While you might hang on every rate update, everyday applicants are likely confused and overwhelmed by changing mortgage news. Social selling can help establish loan officers as thought leaders.
You should be on social talking about what’s happening in the market this spring, but remember to use plain, conversational language with the aim to educate followers. In doing so, you’re not only providing value to followers, but also showing off your expertise.
In practical terms, this could mean posting a current news article on Facebook with a “what it means” POV in the caption. Alternatively, you could share a commentary on a rate change in a quick Instagram video. Regardless of the format, loan officers will have success on social media when you personalize the content and simplify complex concepts for followers.
Consistently be part of the conversation
If the past few years in the housing market have taught us anything, it’s that things change fast. The same holds true this spring and that means you need to be there for all the ups and downs on social media too. Consistency has always been key for social media success, but when navigating changing market news, it’s more important than ever.
Social media algorithms favor those who post often and with consistency. That doesn’t mean you have to post every day or try to time the algorithms, but does mean you should stay active and in the conversation. It’s not a set it and forget it kind of thing.
Don’t be afraid to try something new
The marketplace is unpredictable and social media can be too. When it comes to your social selling strategy, don’t be afraid to try something new. This season may be the perfect time for loan officers to adopt a new social media network, like Instagram for example, or try out new post formats. If you’re not seeing the desired results, try mixing it up.
Social selling is a critical strategy to keep loan officers competitive in a tight lending environment. Not sure where to start with social selling? Check out our Denim Social guidebook, How to Launch a Social Selling Program for a Financial Institution.
This article was originally published in MBA Newslink.
Our team recently attended the Global Insurance Symposium in Des Moines, Iowa, which is an educational and networking opportunity that brings together over 500 insurance and financial professionals, along with technology solutions. It was clear that tech-enablement is top of mind for insurance leaders and providers, as the demand for tools and resources that enhance digital customer communications increase.
As a compliant platform that empowers insurance intermediaries on social media, Denim Social is a perfect solution for carriers and agencies that are ready to take the next step toward a modern marketing strategy. As their expectations shift to digital, so should the industry .
Coming out of the GIS conference, our team saw three big trends at the intersection of insurance and technology.
- Uncertain economic conditions are creating new challenges for the industry at large. Now more than ever, agents need to be equipped to be resilient and available to their clients across multiple communications channels.
- Client education is vital. With more and more prospects looking to social media for financial and planning advice, agents have a unique opportunity to educate their communities on basic financial literacy.
- As online insurance transactions grow in popularity, agents must double-down on relationships to avoid losing out.
Despite these changes, insurance agents and agencies that make the client experience their top concern will thrive. No technology can replace the human interaction and care between an agent and their client. To counteract an impersonal approach, agents can find a solution in meeting clients and prospects where they are, when they need it. Social media is essential for doing this in an ever-connected world. By creating personal (and helpful) networks, agents can find that their relationships are stronger than ever.
See how to give agents a voice on social media with this practical guide on Social Selling for Insurance. It’s a non-negotiable for any modern marketing strategy.

Insurance leaders know the value of agents when it comes to product distribution, but smart marketers should be making the case to invest in digital enablement at the agent level. This means extending social media efforts beyond the brand and to the intermediaries building relationships at the local level.
Helping agents feel comfortable on social media and weaving it into their everyday sales mix is much different than managing a social presence at the brand or company level. But when your business goes to market through intermediaries, empowering them on social media is crucial.
Unsure where to start with a social selling program? It can feel daunting, but Denim Social can help. Learn how to set the right tone, train, create content and more in the latest guide from Denim Social: Guide To Social Selling for Insurance.

Connect & Convert on Social