June 14, 2022

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.

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June 14, 2022

How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them

By
Denim Social

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.

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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

Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
Book a Demo
GUIDES

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.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Download Guide
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
ALL GUIDES:

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.

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.

Instant Download

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:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • 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.

    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.

    Download Here
    GUIDES

    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.

    Download the Guide

    Thank you! Your submission has been received!
    Download Guide
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    Download Guide
    ALL GUIDES:

    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.

    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.

    Instant Download

    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:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • 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.

    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.

    Download Here
    GUIDES

    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.

    Download the Guide

    Thank you! Your submission has been received!
    Download Guide
    Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
    Download Guide
    ALL GUIDES:

    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.

    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.

    Instant Download

    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:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • 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.

    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.

    Download Here
    GUIDES

    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.

    Download the Guide

    Thank you! Your submission has been received!
    Download Guide
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    ALL GUIDES:

    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.

    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.

    Instant Download

    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:

  • Is it important to equip your sales personnel with social media accounts?
  • Does your bank measure the impact of your social media use?
  • 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.

    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.

    Download Here

    RESOURCES

    NEWS
    June 14, 2022

    How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them

    By
    Denim Social

    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.

    Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest sent to your inbox.
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    OTHER NEWS:

    There’s no doubt about it: Firms that prioritize digital connections with clients are the ones who will succeed in the future. 

    I was thrilled to speak at this year’s SIFMA Social Media & Digital Marketing Seminar. From compliance pros to financial advisors, we were all there to learn more about digital transformation and what’s next for the client experience. I was there to speak, sure, but I most enjoyed listening to how financial services leaders are navigating the real-world digital challenges and building strategies that enable their institutions to thrive.  The common thread in every discussion was there – relationships will always be the top priority for firms and advisors.  

    Here are a few other key trends I saw emerge from the discussions: 

    1. Social media is an integral part of digital transformation. As the industry undergoes massive digital transformation, social media will continue to play an important role in the client experience. For industries that go to market through intermediaries, it’s an essential communications channel. Helping your team understand the importance of social media and its value in creating real business results should be a pillar in a more robust digital transformation. .
    2. Education and training are necessary for advisor success. While most financial advisors see the power of social, they need support from marketing teams to be successful. From content resources to functional training, advisors are hungry for marketing guidance to optimize their strategies. 
    3. Compliance and marketing have to work together. Teams need to work for, not against, one another in order to be successful in any social media or digital marketing strategy. There will always be risk for financial services providers sharing information online, but with a coordinated approach, marketers can be confident that anything being shared is approved. 

    The future of the industry is bright and digital transformation offers the opportunity to reach even more potential clients. Marketers can use the power of social media to support advisors and provide clients an experience that converts. Denim Social can help institutions with tools and resources to make building those meaningful relationships easy. See how social selling works in our Social Selling Guidebook for Financial Institutions

    Personalization isn’t new to marketing. The process of connecting with customers has been moving in that direction for years, and for good reason. One survey found that 80% of respondents would be more likely to do business with companies that offered personalized experiences. But it seems many financial institutions haven’t yet gotten the news.

    If you dig through the numbers, you’ll find that personalization applies to the financial industry. In fact, 72% of consumers rate personalization as highly important in finance. They value text alerts, customized tasks and opportunities to transact more efficiently. They also want digitally driven features that save them time with routine tasks and the ability to track multiple accounts using a single dashboard.

    Financial marketers’ job is figuring out how to use personalization to gain (and retain) customers — and how to get leadership to buy in. It’s an easy sell: Personalization enhances the customer experience and also helps teams use social media marketing budgets more efficiently.

    But financial marketers are often up against a knowledge gap. Senior management doesn’t always understand a digital-first strategy focused on personalization. Financial institutions historically aren’t known to be early adopters or quick to change, which can leave marketers spending years advocating for updates.

    The question is, how exactly do you get buy-in from leadership to start personalizing and investing more money for social media marketing. The following strategies can help you get started:

    Target the right people: Social media marketing is about identifying target audiences and catering strategies accordingly. The same applies when securing your social media marketing budget. When looking for buy-in, target those on the leadership team who are likely to understand what excellence in personalization looks like.

    Great personalization is omnichannel; it engages consumers on the channels of their choice and it’s deeply human. To humanize marketing beyond the brand level, financial institutions need to reach out to leaders who would be open to highly personalized tactics such as social selling, which puts employees and producers on the frontlines to build relationships for the brand.

    Craft the right message: Messaging is critical in marketing — and that goes double for selling the idea of a more personalized social strategy. Your message needs to resonate with your audience, even if your audience is one decision-maker. Link everything back to ROI by explaining that customers weigh bank reputation and online presence when deciding among financial institutions.

    Be prepared to explain how you’ll track and increase customer conversion metrics through your campaigns. When arguing for more money toward paid social media advertising, for example, you’ll want to explain how it can boost conversion rates, meaning more customers (and revenue) coming in from your ads. Framing your message in business terms will help you advocate for funds to support personalization at scale.

    Present the right data: Use compelling data to bring your message home. With 75% of B2B buyers using social media to make buying decisions, social selling is powerful for attracting new customers. But it’s important to understand whether your customers want to talk to your brand. Your audience is likely more comfortable engaging with brand intermediaries instead; people buy from other people.

    That’s why so many financial institutions find it valuable to launch social selling programs that position agents, advisors and loan officers to build customer relationships. Social media is thick with prospects, as 54% today use social networks to conduct product research. Your team can capture prospects where they are with the right strategies, processes and technology.

    Decide the right timing: The time to start advocating for personalization is now. Approach leadership about earmarking money for personalization in the budget for social media marketing.

    Remember that most financial institutions establish their fiscal budgets for the year and often don’t revisit those budgets for another year. 41% of marketing budgets are based on the previous year, with only 10% revisited quarterly, meaning you should plan ahead for social initiatives that might take more money down the line. You likely won’t get another chance to advocate for that money once the budget is set.

    Personalized relationships matter, and it’s time to make the case for an expanded marketing budget to support better personalization. With any marketing strategy, you want to approach the right audience with the right message at the right time. Then, with funds secured, your team can get to the exciting part: attracting prospects with education, keeping customers engaged with personalized messaging, and driving bottom-line impacts.

    *This article was originally published in BAI.

    With a less than rosy outlook, it’s essential that every mortgage loan officer maintain an edge on the competition. The marketing tactics of the past may not be successful when there are fewer buyers in the pool of prospects. Now is the time to be more strategic and paid social advertising can help loan officers make the most of every marketing penny.

    One-third of internet users find new products and brands through paid ads. That’s a lot of opportunity. Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your loan officers to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.

    Let’s start with some good news. Although paid social media may feel intimating, if you’re already doing organic social media, you’re off to a great start. But if you’re not using paid social advertising, you’re missing out. Here are three reasons to add it to your marketing strategy:  

    1. Understand what’s working in social media

    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 and make improvements for the future. A/B testing helps you isolate what elements of your ads need to change by showing what resonates and what doesn’t. This means you’ll never waste a dollar on the wrong creative or message.

    Think about it this way, does a billboard ever provide performance data? Didn’t think so.

    Further, paid social media insights can even be applied to your organic social media strategy. Did a paid post have unexpectedly high engagement? Use it as a blueprint to try to isolate why. As you see what’s performing, invest more dollars into posts that convert while cutting or changing content that doesn’t.

    2. Reach new audiences

    Another reason paid social is so important is that organic content only reaches an average of 2.2% of followers of social media platforms. But this doesn’t mean it’s time to ditch organic social media and put all your eggs in the paid basket.

    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.

    Both organic and paid social media can help increase your reach on social media, and it starts with activating loan officers. A social selling approach can increase your results tenfold and drive higher engagement. Paid social then supercharges your social strategy and helps you reach new prospects.

    Complementary paid advertising, breaks through a loan officer’s first-degree social connections to reach second- and third-degree connections, who will include important professional referral sources.

    3. Drive leads into conversions.

    Don’t let your marketing funnel lead to dead ends. Make sure loan officers are linking back to a website or other relevant brand content. Paid social media ads can generate leads by offering call-to-action options that get attention and clicks.

    With the right technology, clicks on social media ads can trigger a loan officer’s CRM. That’s warm leads in their inbox.

    With spring buying season on the horizon, now’s the right time to start formulating a plan to differentiate. Paid social media advertising can give loan officers a leg up on the competition. Ready to learn how to start? Check out Denim Social’s guidebook, Getting Started with Paid Social Media Advertising for Financial Institutions.

    *This article was originally published in MBA Newslink.

    People buy from people. It’s an old adage in business that still holds true today: Trust and relationships are the bedrock of insurance. A deeper agent-customer relationship means more products sold over a longer period. It’s crucial to understand that trust extends to the world of digital, especially social media.

    In today’s environment, it’s not enough to release content from your carrier’s social accounts and hope that consumers will connect with it. Your strategy needs to include agents, the advisors building customer relationships in their communities. Enabling agents to leverage social media to engage and form bonds with existing and potential customers opens the door to agent-centered digital sales. As part of a bigger digital strategy, a social selling program for intermediaries helps establish their presence within the digital landscape, showcasing thought leadership, building relationships, and ultimately growing business.

    Why Is Social Selling Important for Building Trust in Insurance?

    As digitization continues to be a hot topic, one thing has remained steady: the agent’s role. Although many customers are accustomed to buying auto coverage online, for example, that isn’t the case as their needs mature. Just because a customer is digital-first doesn’t mean they don’t want human guidance, especially when protecting their futures.

    Social selling is a powerful addition to an agent’s toolbox (and your marketing toolbox!). After all, most consumers spend roughly two and a half hours online daily. So, agents who engage their online networks through social media are more likely to expand their prospect and customer relationships.

    However, it’s not enough to show up in digital spaces. “Being there” is a great first step but doesn’t ramp up trust-building in a systematic, measurable way. Instead, you need to establish digital marketing strategies that lean on social media and social selling as powerful sales tools (which they are!).

    Here are some key steps:

    1. Identify your agents’ social maturity.

    There will always be varying levels of social media experience from the agent perspective. From naysayers to dabblers to experts, evaluating and segmenting your agent group is critical before constructing a social selling program.

    The agents most comfortable and active on social media often become early adopters and champions of internal social selling programs and digital marketing strategies. With some education and profile optimization, this elite team is an incredible tool for securing more buy-in. Getting them started on social selling before their peers allows them to gain experience with the process, build interest, and better advocate for the strategy.

    2. Educate agents on the value of social media as a sales tool.

    Agents might assume that because they have social accounts for their business, they must be social selling. They’re not. Social selling is much more than “keeping up” a social media account. It’s consistently posting organic content, strategically weaving in paid advertising, and engaging with an audience. Just like in-person relationship building, the value comes in the conversations and connections. Agents should continually engage and turn those conversations into digital-first relationships to grow their business.

    It’s worth the effort to teach your agents about the unique benefits social selling can bring to their roles. Patience and demonstrating value are key. One way to demonstrate that value is by sharing a striking social selling statistic: 80% of salespeople who hit at least 150% of their goals say they’ve leveraged technology consistently to connect with consumers. That statistic is hard for ambitious, high-performing agents to ignore. More agents will be willing to get on board with social selling when they believe it can directly affect their paycheck, promotions, and commissions. (And it can!)

    3. Invest in a comprehensive social selling platform.

    Social selling at scale can seem overwhelming for even the most seasoned leaders. Understanding that not all social media management tools are created equal is the best place to start. Finding a platform dedicated to social selling, especially one that’s industry-specific, is key.

    A solid social selling tool should do several things. It should enable a small and mighty team of marketers to manage a robust content library, analyze the broader story of the value of agent social selling, and monitor and archive from a compliance and regulatory perspective. Most of all, it needs to be easy for agents to use.

    After choosing a social selling platform that does all these things, it’s good to run some test drives with your expert social media users (the agents who were first identified as being active on social media). Beginning with a concentrated group of agents allows everyone involved to learn the social selling tool’s nuances before scaling. After the initial user group is up and running, it’s easy to fold more agents into the process.

    4. Collect data and optimize over time.

    Getting your agents to believe in social media as a powerful relationship-building tool is the foundation of any successful social selling program. Building a content library to help position them as thought leaders within their social networks is the next layer. Once agents have adopted the concept of social selling and are posting regularly, you can establish benchmarks for what social selling means for your organization.

    It’s important to track social selling like any other marketing or sales program. You can set general KPIs to start, such as agent adoption, basic content usage, and engagement. More KPIs can be added to the mix later, such as return on ad spend and leads generated.

    Finally, it’s essential to make sure agents know social selling is a slow-and-steady process. The power of social selling grows over time — the way trust and good relationships do. When done correctly and patiently, it can move the sales needle in trackable ways.

    Whether in person or online, consumers will always value the guidance of a trusted advisor. Building that trust and providing value through an effective social selling strategy with the above steps is crucial to establishing your agents’ positions within the digital landscape. Some things change in business, but others never do: “People buy from people” will always be true.

    *This article was originally published in Digital Insurance.

    Next year’s marketing budget” has quickly become “this year’s marketing budget.” How you allocate your dollars could mean the difference between a record-breaking 2023 or one to forget.

    No pressure. Social media can help you reach your marketing goals, but an organic-only strategy is a recipe for under-performance, considering organic content alone only has a 2.2 percent reach on Facebook, 5.3 percent on LinkedIn, and 9.4 percent on Instagram. To crush social media goals this year, your team needs to invest in paid social media advertising.

    Determining where to earmark money has always been a challenge for marketers. In a digital world, it’s even more complex because there are so many avenues to take, including both organic content and paid advertising. Don’t overlook either, yet it is important to ensure that your marketing budget breakdown is designed to help you meet (and exceed) your goals.

    Here are five tips for bank marketing teams to make the most of paid social media advertising in 2023.

    1. Expand your social platform mix

    Generation Z is moving deeper into adulthood and significant financial events, such as snagging full-time employment, buying cars, and purchasing homes. With this in mind, your digital advertising content needs to be where young people “live” online. Here’s a hint: They don’t live on Facebook.

    That doesn’t mean you should abandon your Facebook page—far from it. Your Facebook business page is where you’ll connect with consumers from older generations and drive engagement with customer support and personable branded content. Your social sellers are just as valuable on Facebook, too, when their posts are targeted toward the needs of older consumers.

    To get the most out of your strategy, you need to use a mix of channels for organic and paid advertising. An excellent way to determine which platforms to try first is to research your competitors. Find out where they’re making inroads and seem to be outshining your brand, then use those insights to drive growth in the areas where you want to be more competitive. We’re seeing more and more brands have success with Instagram. This might be your year to expand.

    2. Incorporate short-form videos into your social content

    From YouTube to Instagram, algorithm-driven, short-form video content will conquer all else in 2023. Almost half of Gen Z uses video sites, such as TikTok and YouTube, to search before Google. Video posts rank higher in searches, keep viewers connected with your posts longer and give you opportunities to humanize your brand while advertising. If you haven’t folded video into your bank’s paid advertising strategy, you need to explore its power sooner rather than later. Remember, though, that consumers no longer gravitate toward long-form content. They like “snackable” videos, such as Instagram Reels.

    Of course, not all content has to be released in a video format. Aim for a mixture of video, image, interactive and text formats when you post. Then, track to see which type of content drives the highest metrics for target audiences. As you become more confident in social video advertising, you should see a boost in responses.

    3. Think beyond brand advertising with social selling

    Building strong, trusting relationships with customers is the foundation of financial marketing. Now is the time to take advantage of social selling. Put simply, social selling is the practice of using associates to post authentic content, humanizing your brand and leveraging their personal networks to form stronger connections with customers.

    A successful social selling program involves intermediary-led organic social media publishing, but that shouldn’t be the only angle. Organic content helps cultivate richness and authenticity for the bank brand, but it doesn’t provide value for people who don’t know anything about your institution. A paid social selling strategy is an effective way to get in front of customers you haven’t met and who might not be following your social sellers yet. Organic social strategies build first-degree connections and engagement, while paid strategies provide wider reach and tailored audiences.

    These two symbiotic strategies can have a significant effect on ROI in financial services marketing. According to LinkedIn, employees who regularly share content are 45 percent more likely to exceed their quotas, and their companies are 57 percent likelier to generate leads. Which is nothing to scoff at.

    4. Experiment with ways to personalize your customer interactions

    Paid advertising allows you to do more than just show ads to potential customers;. It also provides a level of personalization that’s hard to attain in organic posts. Whether you’re greeting them by name or collecting location data to recommend a specific bank branch near them, one in seven customers wants their engagements with financial institutions to feel personalized.

    How can bank marketers ensure their paid social advertising feels more personalized and genuine? One solution is through highly targeted ads and corresponding landing pages. The more paid advertising content is targeted, the more pertinent and customized it will seem to readers. And remember, the right tech stack platform and tool can help you automate without overspending, so you don’t have to waste staff time and energy on routine tasks.

    5. Double down on re-targeting

    Privacy laws are moving toward limiting the use of third-party cookies, but you can still re-target ads via popular social media networks. Re-targeting lets you stay in front of a prospect or customer throughout their entire digital journey. With the right content and calls to action, you can drive more traffic back to your bank’s landing pages—and drive new leads into your pipeline.

    The conversion rates and ROI of comprehensive re-targeting campaigns can be major. Compared to basic social paid advertising, re-targeting your ads can give you a considerable boost.

    Juggling marketing budget allocation from year to year can feel overwhelming. Nevertheless, it is important to determine where to place resources to get the highest possible ROI across the board. Banks benefit when their advertising strategies include investment in expanding social platform presence, incorporating videos into  content, adding social selling to your lineup, personalizing customer interactions and leveraging re-targeting options.

    *This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing Journal.

    Consumers’ relationships with banks have changed a lot in the last decade. EY found that more than a quarter of bank customers worldwide tried neobanks in 2021 alone. According to Capco, 53 percent of millennials moved their funds to different banks from May 2019 to May 2021, and 42 percent of Gen Zers did the same.

    Today’s consumers are quick to change services when something does not suit them. Though this shift has the potential to affect customer retention rates, it also provides an opportunity for institutions looking to acquire new customers.

    Banks need to be using the most effective, up-to-date tools and tracking metrics if they want to stay competitive and gather valuable intel about conversions. That does not mean banks should be just capturing how many likes or comments their social sellers’ posts receive. They certainly should, but it’s more about shifting understanding of some of these vital metrics to leverage them to convert more customers. Tracking click-through rates, reach and how your offline conversions factor into customer acquisition are all critical for making the most of your bank’s social selling strategy.

    Let’s get into the details.

    Social selling: Now is the time to start.

    First and foremost, if your social media goal is to increase customer acquisition to grow revenue, then a social selling strategy that measures conversions is best. If you are reading this, your bank is probably employing social selling already and you have realized what a boon it can be to your marketing efforts.

    For those unfamiliar with social selling, however, it is the process of using associates’ social posts to lay a foundation for your brand and build relationships with customers. People want to communicate with other people (not a corporate account), and social selling allows your officers, advisors and more to connect with your audience on a more human level and engage within their own community networks.

    What metrics are important in social selling strategies focused on conversions?

    Leveraging a social selling strategy for customer acquisition is all about being able to gather and analyze more data about your customers. The more knowledge you have about how customers interact with your social selling efforts, the easier it is to adjust your approach to get the most conversions. By tracking important metrics and understanding how they impact customer acquisition, that data can inform your social selling strategies and bring in more customers.

    To use social selling to its full potential and give your conversion rates a boost, focus on the following metrics:

    1. Reach

    You might be wondering why we’re talking about such a basic metric, but a combination of reach and following can be a strong measure of your conversion-driving social selling strategy. LinkedIn reports that associates have social networks 10 times larger than most brands.

    Access to your social sellers’ connections is part of the beauty of social selling. Naturally, these connections extend your reach. With the right tools, your bank can measure its reach as a brand and as a collective of social sellers and then use that information to shape the social conversation, engage more deeply and drive more conversions.

    2. Click-through rate

    The click-through rate (or CTR) of any given post might be the most important number to track when it comes to building a social strategy that converts. After all, you want people to not just read your content; you want them to take action by clicking through to your landing page.

    So, a good landing page is also essential. Your page should include all the benefits you can offer customers right away. It should also have an easy-to-spot form where users can input their information in return for educational content. The customer gets to download something that improves their business or life, and your loan officers or advisors get their contact information—it’s that easy.

    The good news is that social selling can provide a major advantage here, too: Employee posts consistently have double the CTR of corporate brand accounts, according to LinkedIn.

    3. Offline conversions

    One thing to remember when you’re dialing in your social selling metrics is that your strategy still needs to connect with other tools (such as your CRM) that can tie back to and measure offline conversion and acquisition activities. It’s important to track metrics such as customer churn, net promoter scores and customer retention costs. This data is still vital in conjunction with traditional digital metrics.

    Online, this connection to deeper institutional systems allows you to easily monitor and flag important actions, such as downloads, click-throughs and renewal rates. Then, you can create attribution data that ties conversions back to your social selling efforts. Without this connection, you would be unable to accurately measure offline conversions and how those numbers affect your larger social selling strategy.

    In today’s tech-savvy environment, banks benefit by using the most effective, up-to-date tools and metrics to drive conversions with their social selling. Customer acquisition is essential to the health of any financial institution and there is no better way to meet those customers than by leveraging your social selling strategy to the max. Tracking critical metrics such as offline conversions, CTRs and overall reach must be part of that strategy if you want to take advantage of insights to convert customers.

    This article was originally published in ABA Banking Journal.

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    June 14, 2022

    How to Find the Right Target Audiences for Your Paid Ads — and Then Reach Them

    By
    Denim Social

    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.

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    There’s no doubt about it: Firms that prioritize digital connections with clients are the ones who will succeed in the future. 

    I was thrilled to speak at this year’s SIFMA Social Media & Digital Marketing Seminar. From compliance pros to financial advisors, we were all there to learn more about digital transformation and what’s next for the client experience. I was there to speak, sure, but I most enjoyed listening to how financial services leaders are navigating the real-world digital challenges and building strategies that enable their institutions to thrive.  The common thread in every discussion was there – relationships will always be the top priority for firms and advisors.  

    Here are a few other key trends I saw emerge from the discussions: 

    1. Social media is an integral part of digital transformation. As the industry undergoes massive digital transformation, social media will continue to play an important role in the client experience. For industries that go to market through intermediaries, it’s an essential communications channel. Helping your team understand the importance of social media and its value in creating real business results should be a pillar in a more robust digital transformation. .
    2. Education and training are necessary for advisor success. While most financial advisors see the power of social, they need support from marketing teams to be successful. From content resources to functional training, advisors are hungry for marketing guidance to optimize their strategies. 
    3. Compliance and marketing have to work together. Teams need to work for, not against, one another in order to be successful in any social media or digital marketing strategy. There will always be risk for financial services providers sharing information online, but with a coordinated approach, marketers can be confident that anything being shared is approved. 

    The future of the industry is bright and digital transformation offers the opportunity to reach even more potential clients. Marketers can use the power of social media to support advisors and provide clients an experience that converts. Denim Social can help institutions with tools and resources to make building those meaningful relationships easy. See how social selling works in our Social Selling Guidebook for Financial Institutions

    Personalization isn’t new to marketing. The process of connecting with customers has been moving in that direction for years, and for good reason. One survey found that 80% of respondents would be more likely to do business with companies that offered personalized experiences. But it seems many financial institutions haven’t yet gotten the news.

    If you dig through the numbers, you’ll find that personalization applies to the financial industry. In fact, 72% of consumers rate personalization as highly important in finance. They value text alerts, customized tasks and opportunities to transact more efficiently. They also want digitally driven features that save them time with routine tasks and the ability to track multiple accounts using a single dashboard.

    Financial marketers’ job is figuring out how to use personalization to gain (and retain) customers — and how to get leadership to buy in. It’s an easy sell: Personalization enhances the customer experience and also helps teams use social media marketing budgets more efficiently.

    But financial marketers are often up against a knowledge gap. Senior management doesn’t always understand a digital-first strategy focused on personalization. Financial institutions historically aren’t known to be early adopters or quick to change, which can leave marketers spending years advocating for updates.

    The question is, how exactly do you get buy-in from leadership to start personalizing and investing more money for social media marketing. The following strategies can help you get started:

    Target the right people: Social media marketing is about identifying target audiences and catering strategies accordingly. The same applies when securing your social media marketing budget. When looking for buy-in, target those on the leadership team who are likely to understand what excellence in personalization looks like.

    Great personalization is omnichannel; it engages consumers on the channels of their choice and it’s deeply human. To humanize marketing beyond the brand level, financial institutions need to reach out to leaders who would be open to highly personalized tactics such as social selling, which puts employees and producers on the frontlines to build relationships for the brand.

    Craft the right message: Messaging is critical in marketing — and that goes double for selling the idea of a more personalized social strategy. Your message needs to resonate with your audience, even if your audience is one decision-maker. Link everything back to ROI by explaining that customers weigh bank reputation and online presence when deciding among financial institutions.

    Be prepared to explain how you’ll track and increase customer conversion metrics through your campaigns. When arguing for more money toward paid social media advertising, for example, you’ll want to explain how it can boost conversion rates, meaning more customers (and revenue) coming in from your ads. Framing your message in business terms will help you advocate for funds to support personalization at scale.

    Present the right data: Use compelling data to bring your message home. With 75% of B2B buyers using social media to make buying decisions, social selling is powerful for attracting new customers. But it’s important to understand whether your customers want to talk to your brand. Your audience is likely more comfortable engaging with brand intermediaries instead; people buy from other people.

    That’s why so many financial institutions find it valuable to launch social selling programs that position agents, advisors and loan officers to build customer relationships. Social media is thick with prospects, as 54% today use social networks to conduct product research. Your team can capture prospects where they are with the right strategies, processes and technology.

    Decide the right timing: The time to start advocating for personalization is now. Approach leadership about earmarking money for personalization in the budget for social media marketing.

    Remember that most financial institutions establish their fiscal budgets for the year and often don’t revisit those budgets for another year. 41% of marketing budgets are based on the previous year, with only 10% revisited quarterly, meaning you should plan ahead for social initiatives that might take more money down the line. You likely won’t get another chance to advocate for that money once the budget is set.

    Personalized relationships matter, and it’s time to make the case for an expanded marketing budget to support better personalization. With any marketing strategy, you want to approach the right audience with the right message at the right time. Then, with funds secured, your team can get to the exciting part: attracting prospects with education, keeping customers engaged with personalized messaging, and driving bottom-line impacts.

    *This article was originally published in BAI.

    With a less than rosy outlook, it’s essential that every mortgage loan officer maintain an edge on the competition. The marketing tactics of the past may not be successful when there are fewer buyers in the pool of prospects. Now is the time to be more strategic and paid social advertising can help loan officers make the most of every marketing penny.

    One-third of internet users find new products and brands through paid ads. That’s a lot of opportunity. Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your loan officers to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.

    Let’s start with some good news. Although paid social media may feel intimating, if you’re already doing organic social media, you’re off to a great start. But if you’re not using paid social advertising, you’re missing out. Here are three reasons to add it to your marketing strategy:  

    1. Understand what’s working in social media

    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 and make improvements for the future. A/B testing helps you isolate what elements of your ads need to change by showing what resonates and what doesn’t. This means you’ll never waste a dollar on the wrong creative or message.

    Think about it this way, does a billboard ever provide performance data? Didn’t think so.

    Further, paid social media insights can even be applied to your organic social media strategy. Did a paid post have unexpectedly high engagement? Use it as a blueprint to try to isolate why. As you see what’s performing, invest more dollars into posts that convert while cutting or changing content that doesn’t.

    2. Reach new audiences

    Another reason paid social is so important is that organic content only reaches an average of 2.2% of followers of social media platforms. But this doesn’t mean it’s time to ditch organic social media and put all your eggs in the paid basket.

    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.

    Both organic and paid social media can help increase your reach on social media, and it starts with activating loan officers. A social selling approach can increase your results tenfold and drive higher engagement. Paid social then supercharges your social strategy and helps you reach new prospects.

    Complementary paid advertising, breaks through a loan officer’s first-degree social connections to reach second- and third-degree connections, who will include important professional referral sources.

    3. Drive leads into conversions.

    Don’t let your marketing funnel lead to dead ends. Make sure loan officers are linking back to a website or other relevant brand content. Paid social media ads can generate leads by offering call-to-action options that get attention and clicks.

    With the right technology, clicks on social media ads can trigger a loan officer’s CRM. That’s warm leads in their inbox.

    With spring buying season on the horizon, now’s the right time to start formulating a plan to differentiate. Paid social media advertising can give loan officers a leg up on the competition. Ready to learn how to start? Check out Denim Social’s guidebook, Getting Started with Paid Social Media Advertising for Financial Institutions.

    *This article was originally published in MBA Newslink.

    People buy from people. It’s an old adage in business that still holds true today: Trust and relationships are the bedrock of insurance. A deeper agent-customer relationship means more products sold over a longer period. It’s crucial to understand that trust extends to the world of digital, especially social media.

    In today’s environment, it’s not enough to release content from your carrier’s social accounts and hope that consumers will connect with it. Your strategy needs to include agents, the advisors building customer relationships in their communities. Enabling agents to leverage social media to engage and form bonds with existing and potential customers opens the door to agent-centered digital sales. As part of a bigger digital strategy, a social selling program for intermediaries helps establish their presence within the digital landscape, showcasing thought leadership, building relationships, and ultimately growing business.

    Why Is Social Selling Important for Building Trust in Insurance?

    As digitization continues to be a hot topic, one thing has remained steady: the agent’s role. Although many customers are accustomed to buying auto coverage online, for example, that isn’t the case as their needs mature. Just because a customer is digital-first doesn’t mean they don’t want human guidance, especially when protecting their futures.

    Social selling is a powerful addition to an agent’s toolbox (and your marketing toolbox!). After all, most consumers spend roughly two and a half hours online daily. So, agents who engage their online networks through social media are more likely to expand their prospect and customer relationships.

    However, it’s not enough to show up in digital spaces. “Being there” is a great first step but doesn’t ramp up trust-building in a systematic, measurable way. Instead, you need to establish digital marketing strategies that lean on social media and social selling as powerful sales tools (which they are!).

    Here are some key steps:

    1. Identify your agents’ social maturity.

    There will always be varying levels of social media experience from the agent perspective. From naysayers to dabblers to experts, evaluating and segmenting your agent group is critical before constructing a social selling program.

    The agents most comfortable and active on social media often become early adopters and champions of internal social selling programs and digital marketing strategies. With some education and profile optimization, this elite team is an incredible tool for securing more buy-in. Getting them started on social selling before their peers allows them to gain experience with the process, build interest, and better advocate for the strategy.

    2. Educate agents on the value of social media as a sales tool.

    Agents might assume that because they have social accounts for their business, they must be social selling. They’re not. Social selling is much more than “keeping up” a social media account. It’s consistently posting organic content, strategically weaving in paid advertising, and engaging with an audience. Just like in-person relationship building, the value comes in the conversations and connections. Agents should continually engage and turn those conversations into digital-first relationships to grow their business.

    It’s worth the effort to teach your agents about the unique benefits social selling can bring to their roles. Patience and demonstrating value are key. One way to demonstrate that value is by sharing a striking social selling statistic: 80% of salespeople who hit at least 150% of their goals say they’ve leveraged technology consistently to connect with consumers. That statistic is hard for ambitious, high-performing agents to ignore. More agents will be willing to get on board with social selling when they believe it can directly affect their paycheck, promotions, and commissions. (And it can!)

    3. Invest in a comprehensive social selling platform.

    Social selling at scale can seem overwhelming for even the most seasoned leaders. Understanding that not all social media management tools are created equal is the best place to start. Finding a platform dedicated to social selling, especially one that’s industry-specific, is key.

    A solid social selling tool should do several things. It should enable a small and mighty team of marketers to manage a robust content library, analyze the broader story of the value of agent social selling, and monitor and archive from a compliance and regulatory perspective. Most of all, it needs to be easy for agents to use.

    After choosing a social selling platform that does all these things, it’s good to run some test drives with your expert social media users (the agents who were first identified as being active on social media). Beginning with a concentrated group of agents allows everyone involved to learn the social selling tool’s nuances before scaling. After the initial user group is up and running, it’s easy to fold more agents into the process.

    4. Collect data and optimize over time.

    Getting your agents to believe in social media as a powerful relationship-building tool is the foundation of any successful social selling program. Building a content library to help position them as thought leaders within their social networks is the next layer. Once agents have adopted the concept of social selling and are posting regularly, you can establish benchmarks for what social selling means for your organization.

    It’s important to track social selling like any other marketing or sales program. You can set general KPIs to start, such as agent adoption, basic content usage, and engagement. More KPIs can be added to the mix later, such as return on ad spend and leads generated.

    Finally, it’s essential to make sure agents know social selling is a slow-and-steady process. The power of social selling grows over time — the way trust and good relationships do. When done correctly and patiently, it can move the sales needle in trackable ways.

    Whether in person or online, consumers will always value the guidance of a trusted advisor. Building that trust and providing value through an effective social selling strategy with the above steps is crucial to establishing your agents’ positions within the digital landscape. Some things change in business, but others never do: “People buy from people” will always be true.

    *This article was originally published in Digital Insurance.

    Denim Social has been named to the HousingWire 2023 Tech100 list for mortgage. The exclusive list of honorees recognizes the most innovative technology in the mortgage industry. 

    The Tech100 program provides housing professionals with a comprehensive list of the most innovative and impactful organizations. The list can be leveraged to identify partners and solutions to the challenges that mortgage lenders and real estate professionals face every day.

    “In a competitive environment, every edge matters for mortgage loan officers,” said Doug Wilber, CEO at Denim Social. “A social selling program managed with our platform empowers mortgage loan officers to use social media to reach prospects, build relationships and close more deals.”

    This is Denim Social’s first appearance on the HousingWire list. The platform is used by more than 250 institutions in mortgage, banking, wealth management and insurance. 

    To learn more about how Denim Social can help mortgage loan officers activate social selling, read our guidebook, Helping Mortgage Loan Officers Achieve Success with Social Media Marketing.

    Next year’s marketing budget” has quickly become “this year’s marketing budget.” How you allocate your dollars could mean the difference between a record-breaking 2023 or one to forget.

    No pressure. Social media can help you reach your marketing goals, but an organic-only strategy is a recipe for under-performance, considering organic content alone only has a 2.2 percent reach on Facebook, 5.3 percent on LinkedIn, and 9.4 percent on Instagram. To crush social media goals this year, your team needs to invest in paid social media advertising.

    Determining where to earmark money has always been a challenge for marketers. In a digital world, it’s even more complex because there are so many avenues to take, including both organic content and paid advertising. Don’t overlook either, yet it is important to ensure that your marketing budget breakdown is designed to help you meet (and exceed) your goals.

    Here are five tips for bank marketing teams to make the most of paid social media advertising in 2023.

    1. Expand your social platform mix

    Generation Z is moving deeper into adulthood and significant financial events, such as snagging full-time employment, buying cars, and purchasing homes. With this in mind, your digital advertising content needs to be where young people “live” online. Here’s a hint: They don’t live on Facebook.

    That doesn’t mean you should abandon your Facebook page—far from it. Your Facebook business page is where you’ll connect with consumers from older generations and drive engagement with customer support and personable branded content. Your social sellers are just as valuable on Facebook, too, when their posts are targeted toward the needs of older consumers.

    To get the most out of your strategy, you need to use a mix of channels for organic and paid advertising. An excellent way to determine which platforms to try first is to research your competitors. Find out where they’re making inroads and seem to be outshining your brand, then use those insights to drive growth in the areas where you want to be more competitive. We’re seeing more and more brands have success with Instagram. This might be your year to expand.

    2. Incorporate short-form videos into your social content

    From YouTube to Instagram, algorithm-driven, short-form video content will conquer all else in 2023. Almost half of Gen Z uses video sites, such as TikTok and YouTube, to search before Google. Video posts rank higher in searches, keep viewers connected with your posts longer and give you opportunities to humanize your brand while advertising. If you haven’t folded video into your bank’s paid advertising strategy, you need to explore its power sooner rather than later. Remember, though, that consumers no longer gravitate toward long-form content. They like “snackable” videos, such as Instagram Reels.

    Of course, not all content has to be released in a video format. Aim for a mixture of video, image, interactive and text formats when you post. Then, track to see which type of content drives the highest metrics for target audiences. As you become more confident in social video advertising, you should see a boost in responses.

    3. Think beyond brand advertising with social selling

    Building strong, trusting relationships with customers is the foundation of financial marketing. Now is the time to take advantage of social selling. Put simply, social selling is the practice of using associates to post authentic content, humanizing your brand and leveraging their personal networks to form stronger connections with customers.

    A successful social selling program involves intermediary-led organic social media publishing, but that shouldn’t be the only angle. Organic content helps cultivate richness and authenticity for the bank brand, but it doesn’t provide value for people who don’t know anything about your institution. A paid social selling strategy is an effective way to get in front of customers you haven’t met and who might not be following your social sellers yet. Organic social strategies build first-degree connections and engagement, while paid strategies provide wider reach and tailored audiences.

    These two symbiotic strategies can have a significant effect on ROI in financial services marketing. According to LinkedIn, employees who regularly share content are 45 percent more likely to exceed their quotas, and their companies are 57 percent likelier to generate leads. Which is nothing to scoff at.

    4. Experiment with ways to personalize your customer interactions

    Paid advertising allows you to do more than just show ads to potential customers;. It also provides a level of personalization that’s hard to attain in organic posts. Whether you’re greeting them by name or collecting location data to recommend a specific bank branch near them, one in seven customers wants their engagements with financial institutions to feel personalized.

    How can bank marketers ensure their paid social advertising feels more personalized and genuine? One solution is through highly targeted ads and corresponding landing pages. The more paid advertising content is targeted, the more pertinent and customized it will seem to readers. And remember, the right tech stack platform and tool can help you automate without overspending, so you don’t have to waste staff time and energy on routine tasks.

    5. Double down on re-targeting

    Privacy laws are moving toward limiting the use of third-party cookies, but you can still re-target ads via popular social media networks. Re-targeting lets you stay in front of a prospect or customer throughout their entire digital journey. With the right content and calls to action, you can drive more traffic back to your bank’s landing pages—and drive new leads into your pipeline.

    The conversion rates and ROI of comprehensive re-targeting campaigns can be major. Compared to basic social paid advertising, re-targeting your ads can give you a considerable boost.

    Juggling marketing budget allocation from year to year can feel overwhelming. Nevertheless, it is important to determine where to place resources to get the highest possible ROI across the board. Banks benefit when their advertising strategies include investment in expanding social platform presence, incorporating videos into  content, adding social selling to your lineup, personalizing customer interactions and leveraging re-targeting options.

    *This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing Journal.

    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
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    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
    Book a Demo

    Connect & Convert on Social

    Successfully scale conversion optimized campaigns across all social media channels with built-in compliance, publishing tools, and more.
    Book a Demo