The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
Denim Social is proud to be featured in the American Banker Association’s 2023 report on The State of Social Media in Banking.
In the report, the American Bankers Association asked over 330 banks what they are doing with social media, where they see challenges and opportunities and what the future is likely to bring.
The report incorporates the survey findings with insight and best practices from other banks from across the U.S. and provides a list of 10 top takeaways to consider.
“Social media is the heart of social selling,” said Doug Wilber, CEO of Denim Social, which offers the only ABA-endorsed social media management platform for financial institutions. Social selling is the process of building relationships and brand awareness through selected social media platforms, with the aim of boosting not just awareness, but the bank’s sales results. It’s a way of connecting directly with prospects, and can be a powerful complement to tried-and-true methods such as cold calling and email marketing.”
Learn more about social media opportunities for banks by downloading the report here.
Where Are the Biggest Opportunities to Use Social Media in Financial Services?
Denim Social's Guide To Social Selling For Financial Services shows that most financial professionals — 83% of those surveyed — have a social media presence. It’s a great place to start, but having a profile is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what benefits financial institutions can enjoy from social media. Smart financial marketers and their teams should be optimizing their social selling efforts on every network to get the most out of what social media has to offer.
Customers are active in many other places online, so why not meet them there? After all, 79% of people look to social media for financial advice. By meeting customers where they are on the main 4 networks, financial institutions can stay top of mind and grow real, authentic connections. Let’s dive into what Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook have to offer and how financial services marketers can best use each platform.
1. Instagram
As far as major social media platforms in financial services go, Instagram tops the list. While many financial professionals might not at first think of the photographic and visual network as prime business territory, its popularity makes it an excellent place to strengthen real relationships.
Instagram is one of the best ways to get in front of younger audiences, which is a worthwhile goal, considering that many Millennial customers will likely be on the search for new financial services providers as Baby Boomers pass their wealth on to the next generations. What's more, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account and 80% use the platform to discover new products.
Even better, getting started on Instagram is a breeze. Instagram ads also allow hyperlinks, so you can lead readers right from their feeds to your website with specific calls to action to learn more. Lead them to a personalized and well-designed landing page on your site, for instance, and you'll be drawing each follower who clicks through one big step closer to conversion.
2. LinkedIn
The majority of financial services providers already use LinkedIn, and there are many ways to make it perhaps the most successful social selling platform out of all the networks. Employees at institutions of all sizes and financial industries can use this professional network to cultivate thought leadership and educate their customers.
For financial services marketers, a brand profile is a necessary starting point. Getting the most out of the platform, however, requires activating your employees in a social selling strategy. They can share relevant content, such as videos and published articles from trusted media outlets, as well as engage with customers and prospects one-on-one via direct messaging to establish themselves as experts and build trusting relationships. People want to engage with other people, not with general brand pages. It’s no wonder that employees on social media can garner 10x the engagement of brand pages alone.
3. Twitter
Like LinkedIn, Twitter is also a great place for agents, loan officers, and advisors to share their expertise. Understandably, financial services marketers might be intimidated by the fast-paced nature of the platform and fear they don’t have enough resources to keep up. However, with the proper social media management tools, maintaining compliant engagement on Twitter is totally possible — and worth it.
One of the greatest benefits of social media marketing for financial services is the ability to provide more value to customers. Twitter makes this incredibly easy to do. Marketers can follow all relevant news media outlets and keep an eye out for any articles that might benefit their clients or prospects. For example, an explainer piece on recent changes in tax legislation may be helpful come tax season. Retweeting such helpful resources educates followers on financial topics and builds trust in the brand and its employees.
There’s no single best social media platform for marketing. Each one has a unique opportunity to reach and engage current and future customers. If you’re already on social media, it’s time to level up your social media marketing strategy by diving into Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in more depth. No matter the size of your financial institution, extending your social media strategy to encompass these platforms can help grow your audience, build trust, and maintain solid customer relationships.
When my father worked in insurance decades ago, he’d sit down with people at their kitchen tables and listen. He’d share. He’d build the relationship. And he’d sell.
Fast forward to the digital age, and authenticity still has just as much relevance, if not more. The only difference? Social media platforms replaced the kitchen table. Instead of coming to people’s front doors, agents are coming in through Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. These exchanges are no less real to potential clients — and no less critical to the relationship-building model that succeeds time and again in the insurance industry.
Most intermediaries and their carriers know the importance of social media by now, while others might need more guidance around strategy and how to implement it at the agent level. Even new agents from digitally native generations can find the “hows” of fully leveraging social media confusing and intimidating.
Whether an agent is new to social or has been running personal accounts for years, it’s essential to use social media as more than a digital billboard. Instead, agents must use social media as a vehicle to take their relationship-building and thought leadership into the digital world. And most importantly, they must be authentic when doing it.
The advantages of being authentic in social
You establish an invaluable foundation of trust when you are human on social media. It’s no secret that trust remains essential in insurance; people who don’t trust a brand, an agent, or a product will go elsewhere. Competition is fierce, and today’s consumers don’t care about brand loyalty; they care about whether or not you can meet their needs. Trust is the glue that keeps a client or prospect from saying goodbye.
Many opportunities open up when agents use social media to get closer to your clients. For instance, a lead might mention a significant life moment on their social channel, like the birth of a child. If savvy agents follow and listen to the lead, they can drive meaningful connections with a friendly response, continually building the relationship. It’s not about closing a sale on a social post; it’s creating conditions that may eventually lead to an opportunity to present new insurance options that make sense for their new bundle of joy.
When interactions like this are genuine and timely, they can lead to more business and even stronger ties between agents and clients.
A final benefit of deepening relationships on social media is that you humanize your brand. Every agent should focus on showcasing their authentic personality, whether underneath a carrier banner or not. Agents whose followers see them as “the local expert” or “a trusted friend” set themselves up to become go-to resources that prospects will consult when they have insurance-related concerns. Authenticity builds relationships, which will help you connect with more of your customer base.
Get started with social selling
Social selling is essentially what it sounds like: Using social media to build credibility, thought leadership and trust, which help to sell a product or service. This savvy marketing strategy enables intermediaries — such as agents and brokers — to bring more value to the customer journey.
Individual content posted to social media is said to have 10 times the reach and drive double the engagement compared to content shared by brands. Consumers want to work with trusted individuals when making big decisions related to finances and insurance. As an agent, you need to be empowered to use social media in your sales mix; otherwise, you’re leaving opportunities on the table.
So, how do you seize these opportunities? Start here…
No. 1: See yourself as an influencer.
In 2023, everyone’s heard of social-media influencers. These ambassadors use their personal talents and creativity to build loyal followings and offer sway and endorsement to brands. To get in the right mindset, you should try to see yourself as a micro-influencer for your community. This perspective can help you grow your following and prioritize your engagement strategy (think commenting, replying and liking posts).
Consumers are turning their backs on traditional advertising. They’re not turning their backs on influencers, however, especially when they’re local. In fact, micro-influencers have been found to have even higher follower engagement than their macro counterparts. Fewer followers mean more time to interact with each one, leading to stronger relationships. Some even see them as the voice of reason and truth. Agents who adopt practices that get creative, showcase their personalities, offer value and aim to solve followers’ problems will quickly find a loyal, influencer-like audience.
No. 2: Get personal.
Plenty of agents live and work in the neighborhoods they serve. This allows you to craft locally specific posts that are relevant to prospects and clients but not overtly promotional or self-serving. It’s OK to talk about statistics, sales or promotions occasionally, but you will find more success in the community by sharing content relevant to where you work and live.
This could mean anything from giving a quick shout-out to a favorite small-business coffee shop to discussing how a product helped a client. (Always following all regulations, of course.) Putting a regional flavor and human face on social media content reinforces that you’re an actual person, not just an automated bot posting pseudo-advertisements at pre-arranged intervals.
No. 3: Aim to educate.
As an insurance agent, you are selling a promise to consumers. A promise that many people can find confusing. Many consumers are also unaware of the life milestones that should trigger a new insurance decision.
Using social media to demystify insurance and educate on these milestones not only highlights your expertise but puts this valuable information in the path of the consumer, who is likely starting their buying journey with self-guided research online.
Social media can have the same intimate, relationship-boosting effect on agents and consumers as the kitchen table once did. Luckily, the secret to making social selling work isn’t all that different: Focus on authentic, genuine relationships, and you’ll find your following.
Want to understand how it works in real time? See how Shelter Insurance® found success with social selling in this case study.
This article was originally published in PropertyCasualty360.
Digital transformation means that social media has become an integral part of everyday life. It has changed the way we communicate and connect with others, and it has also transformed the way financial professionals operate. Loan officers, insurance agents, and financial advisors will find that social media networks like LinkedIn have immense potential in terms of building connections, establishing thought leadership in the industry, and supporting their business.
LinkedIn has quickly become a need for financial professionals: in fact, 9 out of 10 financial advisors are currently using LinkedIn for their business, and other industries can show similar numbers, too. To leverage the full potential of LinkedIn, intermediaries should create a strong social media content and post strategy. Here’s how to get started:
Define Your Target Audience
Before creating any content or posting anything on LinkedIn, it is essential to define the right target audience. By knowing this audience, it’s easier and more effective to craft content that resonates with them, and to also tailor any message to their needs and preferences. For the financial services industry, understanding clients and prospective clients is crucial to growing connections on social media.
Develop a Content Strategy
Once the target audience is identified, the next step is to develop a content strategy that aligns with business objectives. The content strategy should focus on creating value for the audience and positioning oneself as an expert in the financial industry, be it insurance, mortgage, banking, or wealth. It’s always helpful to create a mix of content, including articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts, depending on current events and what the target audience would prefer.
Some themes to consider using in the content strategy are:
- Industry news and trends
- Tips and advice for financial planning and investments
- Case studies and success stories
- How-to guides and tutorials
- Thought leadership pieces on industry-specific topics
Optimize The LinkedIn Profile
A LinkedIn profile is the first thing that potential connections will see. Therefore, it is essential to optimize the profile to make a good impression and establish credibility. Some tips for making a LinkedIn profile stand out are:
- Use a professional headshot
- Write a compelling headline that reflects expertise
- Craft a well-written summary that highlights skills and experience
- Add relevant keywords to the profile to make it easier for people to find in search results
- Include media such as videos, infographics, and presentations to showcase work
Engage With Connections
LinkedIn is a social media platform, and like any other social network, engagement is key. Engaging with connections demonstrates real interest in building important relationships and sharing valuable insights. Some meaningful ways to engage with connections might include:
- React to and comment on posts
- Share posts with existing network
- Send personalized messages to build rapport and establish connections
- Participate in LinkedIn groups relevant to industry
Measure and Refine Your Strategy
Finally, it is crucial to measure any LinkedIn strategy's effectiveness and refine it over time. Using social media analytics is a smart way to track an audience's engagement with posted content, such as views, likes, shares, and comments. Based on this data, it’s simple to refine an existing strategy, identify what works and what doesn't, and adjust the tactics accordingly.
In conclusion, creating a social media content and post strategy for LinkedIn can help financial professionals build connections, establish thought leadership, and support their business. By defining the right target audience, developing a content strategy, optimizing the profile, engaging with connections, and measuring and refining the approach, anyone can leverage the full potential of LinkedIn and make social media a priority.
Ready to start building your social selling game plan? Check out this Social Selling Playbook for Financial Institutions.
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
There are plenty of AI skeptics out there, but there’s no doubt about it: these tools are here to stay! Marketers that don’t embrace the features of AI and how they can make your content work smarter, not harder, will fall behind those that don’t. There are many ways that AI can boost an institution’s social media strategy, and combined with other social selling tools, it can be an invaluable asset for your team.
Running a social selling program is no easy feat, and one of the main challenges to overcome is giving users guidance and content to create their own engaging social media posts. That’s where AI comes in! It’s not about replacing people or taking away their voices: it’s about giving them assistance to do more with less. AI like Denim Social’s Social Sidekick take off the pressure of crafting the perfect message. That way, loan officers, insurance agents, and financial advisors can build a presence on social media without having to spend too much time on it (and so they can focus on their business!).
If you’re hesitant to adopt AI in your social media strategy, consider these three ways that it can make your content stronger than ever.
- AI can help you start a post. The proverbial writers’ block: even the most seasoned marketers can experience it, and for those that aren’t trained in social media writing, it can be a serious issue when trying to convey a message. Oftentimes, social sellers know what they want to say, but aren’t sure how to say it or how to begin. AI should never replace authentic, human content, but it can give users something a launch pad for what they need to say. Having that initial push can open the door to future content success for inexperienced users, especially.
- AI can help you build a content library. For many institutions, a major key to social selling success is providing team members with guidance on what to post. If you are the administrator for your institution’s program, that’s a lot of pressure, time, and effort spent building up content to share with users. With AI, it’s much easier to increase the quantity of content without increasing any individual’s overall output. Having a more robust library means more social media posts going out and more access to valuable resources for brands and their users.
- AI can fine tune your messaging. Sometimes a post just isn’t quite right. Especially when complex subjects around financial services are up for discussion, getting the right tone and wording is hard to do. You want to be both educational and entertaining, so it’s always about striking the right balance with the message. It’s easy to be either too vague or too wordy. With AI, you can easily reword and regenerate a message to be more clear and concise if needed. Even better, you can be assured that your post is grammatically correct and formatted as needed. It’s perfect for social sellers that are just starting out or worried about posting the right way.
Don’t let uncertainty about AI keep you from taking advantage of such a powerful and helpful tool. It can work wonders for institutions that are trying to drive user adoption, make the most of limited resources, or simply trying to boost their social media presence. There are many functions AI can serve, but most importantly, it can increase your social selling efficiency. Thanks to the Denim Social platform’s integrated AI compliance workflows, you can also control what’s being posted across all users and networks, too.
Sign up for a demo today to learn more about how it works and what it can do for your institution.
Connect & Convert on Social
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
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!
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.
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!
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
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!
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.
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!
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
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!
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.
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!
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
Instagram stands out as the shining star of social media platforms. While Facebook still reigns supreme and TikTok grows, Instagram is quickly catching up fast with more than 2 billion users worldwide.
With users under age 34 making up nearly 60 percent of this user population, financial services marketers looking to reach younger generations should take note. And with an estimated sum of $68 trillion in wealth expected to transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials in the next couple of decades, Millennials are a worthwhile target.
Studies predict that, after inheriting wealth, 80% or more young heirs will seek out a new financial advisor. Considering that 9 in 10 accounts follow at least one business on Instagram and 8 in 10 users find new products and services in the app, it’s a safe bet that Instagram will be a place to influence many Millennials. Wise financial services marketers will meet them where they are with strong Instagram marketing strategies, and the following tips can help:
1. Focus on paid ads
Instagram is a visual platform for sharing photos and videos, so it’s important for brand pages to populate their profiles with organic posts. While this presence is important, organic content isn’t what will move the needle on business goals. Financial services aren’t exactly visually interesting, and organic posts tend to have low reach as they only show up in the feeds of a brand’s current followers. Without the ability to include hyperlinks in captions, they also won’t drive any traffic back to your site. If you want to build the type of following needed to generate new business, including paid advertising in your Instagram marketing strategy is your ticket.
With Instagram advertising, institutions and advisors can target ads to land with exactly the right audience — even outside their follower base — and include links in posts to drive more traffic to the brand. With a specific call to action that directs consumers to learn more about a topic, Instagram ads offer a straight-line path to giving customers the valuable information they desire — in their own time and at their own place. What’s more, Instagram advertising is seamlessly integrated directly into Instagram feeds and stories, creating a smoother user experience all around.
2. Connect with consumers on a local level
Instagram marketing on the corporate brand level is a great starting point, but advertising on behalf of your individual advisors can take your strategy to the next level. Think of it this way: If a consumer sees a well-known brand on social media, they might recognize the name, but they won’t feel an intrinsic connection beyond initial familiarity. In contrast, they’ll feel familiarity and an immediate connection when they see a post from an advisor in their own community. Consumers want to build relationships with brands, and a shared community is a great starting point.
Of course, most advisors and other financial services employees are not experts on how to market the business on Instagram. And marketers know they must keep all social media marketing for their financial institutions compliant to avoid heavy regulatory reprimands. To keep posts compliant, save employees time, and help them build relationships with consumers in their physical communities, financial services marketers can set up and run ads on their behalf.
3. Micro-target content to your audience
As big-name brands like Amazon continue to elevate the digital customer experience with seamless customer service, purchasing, and delivery, customer expectations are higher than ever before. When customers evaluate a financial institution, they compare it not only to other organizations in the industry, but also to tech giants in any industry that give them exactly what they need when they need it.
They expect a high level of personalization and convenience, and Instagram marketing with paid advertising can help you give it to them. Match basic behavioral and geographic data to potential customers on Instagram to target ads, and then track clicks, engagements, and post-click actions. These data points don’t indicate much on their own, but together they offer a rich story about what consumers want. Continually refine your strategy with these data points in mind to deliver the kind of highly personalized experiences your audiences want on Instagram.
With a large Millennial user base that engages actively with brands online and the ability to target highly personalized ads to exactly the right audiences, Instagram is a must-have in any financial services marketing strategy. To learn more about how Instagram marketing can work to drive your business forward, download our guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram for free today.
“If you build it, they will come.”
While this advice may work in fictional baseball movies, it’s a bad strategy for building your Facebook business page following.
Successfully growing your page likes and follows requires ongoing attention, but it pays off.
More followers indicates greater popularity and trust in your brand and also means more eyeballs on your content.
Follow these tips to start growing your following today.
1. Share meaningful content. Before posting anything on your page, make sure it provides value to your audience. When you do this consistently, your existing followers will share it with their friends, attracting more followers. As you plan your content strategy, think about the topics you can speak to with authority. Then look for gaps in the content already being shared with your audience. Where these two intersect is a great place to focus your thought leadership efforts.
2. Be consistent. It goes without saying that consistency in voice, tone and style should be inherent in any marketing message. As you work to grow your Facebook page following, it’s also important to aim for consistency in when and how often you post content. When your content quality, quantity or schedule isn’t consistent, it can confuse your audience. Staying on a schedule will improve the experience you deliver and build your business’s credibility and reputation. Use a tool like Denim Social’s Analytics to test and monitor when engagement is at its highest, and design your content schedule accordingly.
3. Invite friends. One of the quickest, most efficient ways to start driving awareness and growing your audience is to invite your friends to follow your page. Remember, your friends have friends, and they might be interested in following your business and your new page.
4. Run ads. A surefire way to grow your following is to run Facebook ads. Ads are an effective tool for promoting your page, boosting your posts, getting more leads, increasing conversions and performing a number of other actions. Keep in mind, however, that it may not always be in your best interest to grow your following just for the sake of a bigger number. You want to attract people who are interested in your products and services (and, in turn, more likely to engage with your content). Using audience targeting strategies will help you reach the right consumer with the right message.
A Facebook business page is an easy and effective way to grow your brand awareness and credibility. Although it’s not as simple as set-it-and-forget-it, if you follow the tips outlined above, you will be well on your way to growing your Facebook fan base. If you need help engaging your audience on social media, get in touch with us today.
Known as the professional social networking platform, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for social selling, allowing your team to foster strategic customer relationships and build credibility. An important part of your online brand, your LinkedIn profile is a key source of information for people looking to learn more about you.
A strong LinkedIn profile creates opportunities for meaningful connections and interactions with other professionals. But how do you make LinkedIn a successful part of your marketing strategy? Well, for starters, you need to build trust. Use the following best practices to do just that.
1.) Add professional profile and cover photos. According to LinkedIn, a professional headshot makes your profile 21x more likely to be viewed, and profiles with photos get a 40% better message response rate. For best results, upload JPEG or PNG images sized as follows:
- Profile photo: 400x400 pixels
- Cover photo: 1584x396 pixels
Pro Tip: Bookmark our Up-to-Date Social Media Sizing & Resource Guide to optimize your images on every social media platform.
2. Write a compelling headline and summary. Your headline and summary should clearly and succinctly state who you are and why someone should connect with you.
- Headline: More than simply your job title, your headline should answer these two questions:
- Who do you help?
- How do you help?
- Summary: Use the following framework to write a compelling professional summary:
- Paragraph 1: In three sentences or less, what is your value prop to your prospective customers? Reiterate your purpose from your headline.
- Paragraph 2: In three sentences or less, how do you help customers achieve results?
- Paragraph 3: In three sentences or less, what is your call-to-action for the prospective customer?
Pro Tip: In your headline and summary, be sure to include keywords prospective customers might search for.
3. Engage frequently and consistently. Every week, apply consistent effort to LinkedIn to build credibility and keep content relevant and valuable for customers. Below is checklist of activities we recommend performing on a weekly basis:
- Post relevant content: Check your content library or search for trending topics in the LinkedIn search bar. You can find some great recent inspiration from others in your field.
- Post/schedule content at the right time: Generally, the best time to post on LinkedIn is Tuesday through Thursday between 10 and 11 a.m. Content posted in the evenings and on weekends tends to get less engagement. Check out this guide in our Help Center for more information on when to post on various social media channels.
- Seek recommendations from customers and share success stories: What’s better than telling your networks how great you are? Someone else saying it for you! Positive testimonials, endorsements and reviews go a long way in building your credibility.
- Check likes, follows, shares, hashtags and comments. Be sure to engage and respond as appropriate. Set weekly or monthly goals for growth and track progress.
- Grow your network: Join relevant groups in your industry to gain customer insights about needs and interests, follow influencers and connect with others.
Pro tip: Add a 30-minute weekly recurring event on your calendar to go through the above checklist.
LinkedIn should be an essential part of your team’s social selling strategy. Stay visible and build trust with consistency and an optimized profile.
Looking for a quick reference for all of this information? Check out this infographic.
A consistent and full social media calendar is essential for the success of your strategy, but feeling stumped about what to post in 2024? From news articles to gifs, your social posts need to resonate with your audience. But you don’t have to go it alone… Denim Social can help your team with content ideas.
An easy way to create engaging content? Post around Holidays! And as we know, there is a day for everything. From "National Clean Off Your Desk Day" to "National Trivia Day," these days are ways you can create authentic content and have fun with your followers.
We've compiled a list of 2024 Holidays you can celebrate with your audience all year round. Download our PDF calendar to be ready with content all year that is sure to create engagement.
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Make the most of your social media pages and posts by optimizing your images and including essential information about your business on each platform. By giving customers an optimal digital experience, you can broaden reach and provide better customer service through your digital platforms.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 176 x 176px (desktop), 196x 196px (smartphones)
Cover photo: 820 x 312px (desktop), 640 x 360px (smartphones)
Keep the main content of your image centered. On a desktop the photo will display as 840x312px, but on mobile will size down to 640x360px.
Facebook post image: 1200 x 630px
The ideal width for a Facebook post image is 1200px, but height can vary based on what type of device the image display is optimized for. We recommend keeping it at the recommended size to keep consistency on all devices.
When creating a Facebook Ad graphic, any text should not take up more than 20% of the photo. You can find a cheat sheet here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay.
Facebook Video: 1280 x 720px
The optimal length for a short-form video on Facebook is 15 seconds to 1 minute; for a long-form video, it is 3 minutes. The maximum file size is 10GB.
Facebook Link Image: 1200 x 630px
Make sure to claim ownership of your links for the ability to change the link preview photo. You can find more info on that here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/528858287471922?id=708699556338610.
Carousel Post: 1080 x 1080px
Carousel posts are a great way to display multiple services or features that you offer to your customers. When placing a Facebook ad you can link each carousel photo to a different link, making it easy for people to navigate to your specific products.
Facebook Story: 1080 x 1920px
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION:
Page name:
This is where you can name your Facebook Page, but be sure to keep it shorter than 75 characters.
Page username:
Customize your page URL by adding a username, making it easier for people to locate and navigate people from other digital platforms. Your Facebook URL can include up to 50 characters.
Page call to action:
Facebook gives you a variety of choices on calls to action. For example, if you’d like customers to contact you by email, you can set up a “Send Email” button with your email address connected and ready to go.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo here to personalize your profile. If this page is for an individual, this is where you will upload their headshot.
Cover Photo: 1584 x 396px
Having a personalized business cover photo will make your profile look more professional and give you the opportunity to provide page visitors with more of the look and feel of your business. This can include an image related to your business or a graphic with information on services you provide or your business slogan.
LinkedIn post photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
When targeting an audience on both desktop and mobile, make sure that you optimize for mobile to give people the best experience.
LinkedIn Link Photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
Providing an image with your link preview can help give viewers a better idea of article content and improve your click thru rates.
LinkedIn Link Video: 4096 x 2304px maximum, 256 x 144 pixels minimum
The optimal video length for LinkedIn is 30-90 seconds and the maximum file size is 5GB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Page name:
This is where your business name is located, as well as your company industry, location, and number of followers.
Page description:
Add your business slogan, mission, or a short description that tells people what your company, products, and services can do for them.
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
IMAGE SIZING
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo or headshot to personalize your profile.
Cover photo: 1500 x 500px
Be sure to center your content to give your followers an optimized experience on mobile.
Twitter post photo: 1600 x 900px
Allow your followers to see the entirety of the photo in their feed by adhering to this sizing guideline. The maximum file size is 5MB.
X video: 1280 x 720px (desktop, recommended), 720 x 720px (mobile)
The optimal video length for Twitter is 20-45 seconds and the maximum file size is 512MB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Underneath your profile photo, your company name and username will be displayed.
Write a short bio to tell people more about your business.
IMAGE SIZING
Profile photo: 110 x 110px
Your profile picture will be small, so be sure your image is sized correctly and centered. This is a great place for your company logo.
Profile thumbnail: Displays as 161 x 161px
This is a preview of your large image post, but looks best when the photo posted is square.
Highlight Cover: 1080 x 1920px
Your cover photos should have centered images to give your highlight reel a balanced look. You can also name your highlights, but be concise as they can only be 15 characters long.
Instagram Feed Photo: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The recommended width for all Instagram feed photos is 1080px, but the height can vary. To optimize for your feed display within your profile, we recommend using the sizing listed above to keep your image square.
Instagram Feed Video: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The optimal length for an Instagram video is 30-60 seconds and the max file size is 650MB.
Instagram Feed Ad Photo: 1080 x 1080px
Your ad photo will display the same as a normal feed photo, but with a link attached. When creating an ad in Ads Manager, you’ll be able to upload a separate photo for Instagram to keep your photos optimized for the user experience.
Instagram Story: 1080 x 1920px (portrait), 1080 x 601 (landscape)
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience. The maximum length of the story is 60 seconds.
Instagram Reels & Live: 1080 x 1920px
Reels can be used to offer tutorials, demos, or service features. These will be saved under your profile page for viewers to go back and watch at their leisure. The maximum length for Reels is 90 seconds. For Live, this can be used for announcements, events, or other Q&A sessions. These can also be saved for later viewing, and can last up to 4 hours.
As the end of the year looms, budget is on every leader’s and marketer’s mind. Now is the time for financial institutions to step back and assess performance and determine how to spend wisely next year. In the face of climbing interest rates, uncertain economic conditions and hesitant customers, financial marketers will need to be effective and efficient in 2024.
Luckily, there’s a way loan officers, insurance agents, and financial advisors can cost-effectively build new (and strengthen existing) relationships: social media. A strong social media strategy helps intermediaries meet customers where they are in a personalized way. This is important, as 72% of consumers rate personalization as highly important in finance.
In today’s digital world, being on social media is a non-negotiable for financial professionals looking to stay top of mind with customers. Consider this: employees have 10x the amount of reach as brand pages alone, and social media users that regularly share content are 57% likely to generate leads. For institutions on a budget , social media makes the most of resources and lays the foundation for long-term success.
Sound familiar? Many financial marketers deal with reduced budgets and fewer resources. The good news is that social media can be one of the best (and most cost-effective ways) to get the most out of overall marketing and generate real business ROI. No matter how large or small a budget, with the right approach, marketers and financial professionals can use social media to make new connections and drive results.
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 your audience: Identify the advocates for your mission and the people who you need to get buy-in from. 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 will 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 reputation and online presence when choosing 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 a powerful way to attract new customers. In addition to all the facts and figures about why brand is important, you should also be ready to support the idea that people buy from people. At the end of the day, it’s about relationships. 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. 54% of prospects 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— so 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.
No matter the size or scope of a bank, insurance agency, mortgage lender, or financial firm marketing budget, the end of the year is the best time to assess what’s going well and what needs to change in the coming year. There’s no doubt that social media has a place in every marketer’s budget, and knowing where and how to spend can support business goals and keep financial brands relevant and accessible.
Social media supercharges marketing budgets to reach more customers and prospects.. Marketers that build a smart strategy through personalized social selling will be well positioned to get the most out of any budget. See how Denim Social can help you do more with less by scheduling a demo here.
Connect & Convert on Social
The Complete Guide to Social Advertising for Financial Institutions
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.
The effects of economic disruption and uncertainty have many families facing tough financial questions they are not sure how to answer.
Unfortunately, financial literacy rates remain startlingly low. A recent study showed three quarters of Americans say they do not feel confident about their personal finances. When a another survey asked over 1,000 American adults who they turn to for trusted financial advice, almost 25 percent said they had no one to turn to. Providing financial education has always been a core purpose of banks, but the financial turmoil of recent years has made financial literacy even more important.
Financial professionals have an obligation to educate their customers, and today, social media is one of the most effective ways to do so. Luckily, social media-driven education already aligns with consumer preferences: Pew Research Center reports that more than half of U.S. adults get their news from social media, and 79% Millennials or Gen Zers have gotten financial advice from social media.
Many financial institutions are already capitalizing on this by using social media to connect with their customers and communities, but there’s still ample opportunity to provide financial education to current and prospective customers. Here are three tips:
1. CURATE RELEVANT AND TRUSTWORTHY NEWS
Social media is flooded with misinformation and misleading data, and your audience members know this. To become a trusted source, be highly selective in choosing accurate, useful and relevant news to post on your branded social media pages. You can take several steps to ensure that the information you share comes from trusted sources before distributing it to your followers.
Established news organizations, such as CNBC and ABC News, seem easy enough to identify, but be wary of illegitimate sites trying to mimic them. The source’s domain and URL will help you identify whether the reference is credible. For instance, sites with URLs that end in “.com.co” might be cause for concern. If you’re still unsure, investigate the site further for more information. The “About” page should provide plenty of verifiable information about the organization’s staff and leadership team. If you’re still unsure, choose another source.
It’s also important to be aware of news bias and how it impacts your ability to build a healthy news diet that protects your brand reputation. Seek out resources (like this one) that help visualize where certain media outlets fall on the political spectrum. Armed with this information, you can help your institution’s brand avoid bias. You can also be sure you’re not resharing information that’s deceiving, one-sided, or untrustworthy.
2. EMPHASIZE YOUR TEAM’S THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Credible news updates draw in social media users searching for financial news, but rather than simply sharing links, weave in original insights to make the information more digestible and jargon-free. Remember: Your employees are financial experts, so empower them to share their knowledge through a strong social selling strategy.
In doing so, you’ll not only educate your followers, but also humanize your brand and build trust with your audience. After all, people trust people more than brands, and research bears this out: Nearly three-fourths of social media users say they are more heavily persuaded by posts shared from employees rather than brand pages. Engage team members to share their knowledge in original content like blog posts, social media posts and short videos.
3. BE ENGAGED
Social media is a two-way communication channel. A survey by The Manifest revealed that 74 percent of consumers follow brands on social media, and of that group, 96 percent said they directly interact with those brands. To make the most of your social media presence, your team needs to be engaged and respond to questions, comments and concerns in a timely manner. Stay connected with your followers and you’ll build stronger, more meaningful relationships within your community in the long term.
Financial literacy is an acute need. By using social media to educate current and prospective customers, banks can improve financial literacy, be a good steward for their customers and serve as a trusted source of information.
Connecting with customers and prospects on social media is a natural extension of the financial services industry becoming more digital. Consumers expect the businesses they patronize to be on the same social platforms they use — and they expect those brands to be ready to interact with them. Case in point: A survey of over 500 social media users found that nearly three-quarters follow organizations on social platforms, and the vast majority of them interact with those brands on social.
Social media is the perfect tool for financial institutions to build brand awareness, meet the demand for greater digital engagement, recruit prospective customers, and drive referrals.
While social media is a great way to connect with customers and prospects, it’s not without its risk. It’s essential to use social media tools that will keep your team in compliance.
1. START WITH A SOCIAL SELLING STRATEGY.
There are few limits to how you can connect with customers and prospects on social media, but it needs to be about more than posts from a brand page. Direct messaging is always an option for private communication, but to reach more people at scale, social sellers (i.e., agents, loan officers, financial advisors, intermediaries, etc.) should also be posting original content, resharing educational articles, responding to comments and questions, and liking others’ posts. With so many options, it’s important for marketers to craft a social selling strategy that guides social sellers in their social interactions on behalf of the institution.
A well-thought-out strategy can ensure effective social selling. For instance, rather than posting on channels at random and hoping for the best, social sellers can determine which social media platforms suit them best based on audience engagement and follower counts; then they can focus their efforts there. Consider also equipping intermediaries with a library of branded content they can mix in with their personal posts. This strategy will inform your all-important social media policy moving forward.
2. TURN YOUR STRATEGY INTO A DETAILED POLICY.
In a heavily regulated industry, it’s essential for firms to have a comprehensive social media policy. This is a package of brand messaging in a detailed policy to help ensure consistency when social sellers post on your behalf.
Take the plan you mapped out in your strategy and turn it into a documented policy that intermediaries can access easily. Social media and the way people use it continues to evolve, which is why your social media policy should always be a work in progress. Make updates periodically to account for shifts in your approval workflow, changes in messaging, and general social media best practices. As social sellers become savvier, your policy will grow more detailed.
3. MAKE TRAINING AN ONGOING EFFORT.
Intermediaries who are new to social media will require initial training — but it shouldn’t be a one-and-done initiative. Hold regular social selling workshops to keep all social sellers up to date on your social media policy and messaging.
You can also use workshop time to walk your team through any tools you invest in to fuel social media efforts. Denim Social, for example, offers live product demos you can share to show them how to use the technology and get the most benefit.
Demonstrate how the software streamlines the approval process for posts and automatically archives them for future reference. The more they know, the more comfortable they’ll be using such tools to facilitate social selling efforts. The great news is, our customer success team is here to help get your team trained and ready.
Social media opens up a world of opportunity for financial institutions to reach and engage customers and prospects, but that doesn’t mean you should set your team free to do as they please. The right strategy and social media management software can make it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and create a successful social selling strategy. Want to see how Denim Social can help your team up their social media game? Schedule a demo today!
If you didn’t want to believe it before, digital banking is here to stay. While most were on the path toward digital, COVID vastly accelerated digital adoption. That behavior is unlikely to change: 84 percent of banking customers polled said they plan to maintain the same level of digital banking services post-pandemic. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for traditional banks.
The good news is that the key differentiating factor for traditional banks remains the same: human relationships with customers.
The challenge is that maintaining strong relationships in a digital environment can be difficult for traditional banks. And without strong anchoring relationships, banks miss out on valuable cross-selling opportunities and lose customers to competitors that offer better digital services. Customer defection can be costly, as it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire than retain customers—but increasing customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can boost profits by 25 to 95 percent.
Banks that turn their focus toward strengthening digital customer experience can solidify relationships for the long term, secure more business with new and existing customers, and thrive well into the future.
HOW TO CREATE AN EXCEPTIONAL DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Delivering high-quality digital experiences is two-fold challenge for banks. First, traditional banks tend to struggle to design meaningful and emotional experiences in digital ways. Second, they struggle to deliver those experiences impactfully due to internal and external digital transformation hurdles.
With these two challenges in mind, bank marketers can lead their organizations to success by first focusing on their teams’ willingness to evolve and openness to the larger concepts of digital transformation. Without widespread buy-in, even a million of the fanciest bells and whistles on the market won’t help a bank evolve to meet and exceed consumers’ digital expectations.
Marketers must ensure an overall understanding of these four digital transformation initiatives and how they can help improve digital customer experiences and strengthen human relationships:
1. Continual tool improvement and refinement. Most financial institutions likely accelerated the pace of their digital transformations in recent years and they need to keep up the momentum. In fact, the primary goal behind digital transformation for 79 percent of respondents in one survey was to improve customer experience. You can’t improve experiences without continuous transformation efforts.
Gather data to show how customers are using your digital tools and continually evaluate how to improve your tools to create better and better experiences. Seeking strong and strategic partnerships with fintech vendors is an excellent way to stay on top of the latest innovations in technology and continue providing the best digital services.
2. Optimal onboarding. Your team and fintech partners might put a lot of time, money, and effort into building new and impressive digital widgets—but if your customers don’t know how to use them, they won’t bring any value. That’s why part of any bank’s digital transformation strategy should involve onboarding customers to ensure the adoption and use of new digital services.If new account openers don’t engage within the first month of opening an account, they likely never will. Encourage frequent and continued engagement by clearly demonstrating the value customers can find in your digital services and tools. Provide convenient and accessible customer support to keep the value stream flowing without interruption.
3. Transferring relationships to digital. Preserving human connections in the virtual world can be a challenge for banks accustomed to old ways, but with the right approach, digitization can actually help banks build and maintain stronger relationships. That’s why 72 percent of business leaders who responded to Harvard Business Review Analytics Services researchers said they expected the digital shift to create closer relationships with customers.
Take social media as one example. With an active social media strategy, loan officers can keep up with past customers and even get new prospects’ attention. And with the right social media management tools, marketers can help loan officers pull off social selling campaigns at scale. Ensure that customers also have a direct line to access employees who can facilitate customer service so that they always have a resource to answer questions and guide them along the digital journey without a hitch.
4. Constant value with content and data. The more value a financial institution can offer, the less likely customer defection will be. Provide useful information to customers through frequent social media content, blog posts, landing pages and more. Use targeting strategies such as paid social media advertising and create personalized content based on data. The more relevant the information is to your customers’ specific needs, the more valuable it will be. Personalize landing pages and gate information behind contact submission forms. When visitors exchange their contact information for the content they need, you can reach out directly to primed leads to continue the conversation with human-to-human touchpoints.
No matter the state of digital transformation, strong customer sentiment around digital banking is unlikely to wane. In fact, consumers are likely to expect better and better digital experiences from financial institutions as technology becomes an even bigger part of everyday life. Traditional banks that focus on creating exceptional digital customer experience based on human connection will thrive.
This article was originally published on ABA Bank Marketing.
Instagram stands out as the shining star of social media platforms. While Facebook still reigns supreme and TikTok grows, Instagram is quickly catching up fast with more than 2 billion users worldwide.
With users under age 34 making up nearly 60 percent of this user population, financial services marketers looking to reach younger generations should take note. And with an estimated sum of $68 trillion in wealth expected to transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials in the next couple of decades, Millennials are a worthwhile target.
Studies predict that, after inheriting wealth, 80% or more young heirs will seek out a new financial advisor. Considering that 9 in 10 accounts follow at least one business on Instagram and 8 in 10 users find new products and services in the app, it’s a safe bet that Instagram will be a place to influence many Millennials. Wise financial services marketers will meet them where they are with strong Instagram marketing strategies, and the following tips can help:
1. Focus on paid ads
Instagram is a visual platform for sharing photos and videos, so it’s important for brand pages to populate their profiles with organic posts. While this presence is important, organic content isn’t what will move the needle on business goals. Financial services aren’t exactly visually interesting, and organic posts tend to have low reach as they only show up in the feeds of a brand’s current followers. Without the ability to include hyperlinks in captions, they also won’t drive any traffic back to your site. If you want to build the type of following needed to generate new business, including paid advertising in your Instagram marketing strategy is your ticket.
With Instagram advertising, institutions and advisors can target ads to land with exactly the right audience — even outside their follower base — and include links in posts to drive more traffic to the brand. With a specific call to action that directs consumers to learn more about a topic, Instagram ads offer a straight-line path to giving customers the valuable information they desire — in their own time and at their own place. What’s more, Instagram advertising is seamlessly integrated directly into Instagram feeds and stories, creating a smoother user experience all around.
2. Connect with consumers on a local level
Instagram marketing on the corporate brand level is a great starting point, but advertising on behalf of your individual advisors can take your strategy to the next level. Think of it this way: If a consumer sees a well-known brand on social media, they might recognize the name, but they won’t feel an intrinsic connection beyond initial familiarity. In contrast, they’ll feel familiarity and an immediate connection when they see a post from an advisor in their own community. Consumers want to build relationships with brands, and a shared community is a great starting point.
Of course, most advisors and other financial services employees are not experts on how to market the business on Instagram. And marketers know they must keep all social media marketing for their financial institutions compliant to avoid heavy regulatory reprimands. To keep posts compliant, save employees time, and help them build relationships with consumers in their physical communities, financial services marketers can set up and run ads on their behalf.
3. Micro-target content to your audience
As big-name brands like Amazon continue to elevate the digital customer experience with seamless customer service, purchasing, and delivery, customer expectations are higher than ever before. When customers evaluate a financial institution, they compare it not only to other organizations in the industry, but also to tech giants in any industry that give them exactly what they need when they need it.
They expect a high level of personalization and convenience, and Instagram marketing with paid advertising can help you give it to them. Match basic behavioral and geographic data to potential customers on Instagram to target ads, and then track clicks, engagements, and post-click actions. These data points don’t indicate much on their own, but together they offer a rich story about what consumers want. Continually refine your strategy with these data points in mind to deliver the kind of highly personalized experiences your audiences want on Instagram.
With a large Millennial user base that engages actively with brands online and the ability to target highly personalized ads to exactly the right audiences, Instagram is a must-have in any financial services marketing strategy. To learn more about how Instagram marketing can work to drive your business forward, download our guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram for free today.
“If you build it, they will come.”
While this advice may work in fictional baseball movies, it’s a bad strategy for building your Facebook business page following.
Successfully growing your page likes and follows requires ongoing attention, but it pays off.
More followers indicates greater popularity and trust in your brand and also means more eyeballs on your content.
Follow these tips to start growing your following today.
1. Share meaningful content. Before posting anything on your page, make sure it provides value to your audience. When you do this consistently, your existing followers will share it with their friends, attracting more followers. As you plan your content strategy, think about the topics you can speak to with authority. Then look for gaps in the content already being shared with your audience. Where these two intersect is a great place to focus your thought leadership efforts.
2. Be consistent. It goes without saying that consistency in voice, tone and style should be inherent in any marketing message. As you work to grow your Facebook page following, it’s also important to aim for consistency in when and how often you post content. When your content quality, quantity or schedule isn’t consistent, it can confuse your audience. Staying on a schedule will improve the experience you deliver and build your business’s credibility and reputation. Use a tool like Denim Social’s Analytics to test and monitor when engagement is at its highest, and design your content schedule accordingly.
3. Invite friends. One of the quickest, most efficient ways to start driving awareness and growing your audience is to invite your friends to follow your page. Remember, your friends have friends, and they might be interested in following your business and your new page.
4. Run ads. A surefire way to grow your following is to run Facebook ads. Ads are an effective tool for promoting your page, boosting your posts, getting more leads, increasing conversions and performing a number of other actions. Keep in mind, however, that it may not always be in your best interest to grow your following just for the sake of a bigger number. You want to attract people who are interested in your products and services (and, in turn, more likely to engage with your content). Using audience targeting strategies will help you reach the right consumer with the right message.
A Facebook business page is an easy and effective way to grow your brand awareness and credibility. Although it’s not as simple as set-it-and-forget-it, if you follow the tips outlined above, you will be well on your way to growing your Facebook fan base. If you need help engaging your audience on social media, get in touch with us today.
Known as the professional social networking platform, LinkedIn is a powerful tool for social selling, allowing your team to foster strategic customer relationships and build credibility. An important part of your online brand, your LinkedIn profile is a key source of information for people looking to learn more about you.
A strong LinkedIn profile creates opportunities for meaningful connections and interactions with other professionals. But how do you make LinkedIn a successful part of your marketing strategy? Well, for starters, you need to build trust. Use the following best practices to do just that.
1.) Add professional profile and cover photos. According to LinkedIn, a professional headshot makes your profile 21x more likely to be viewed, and profiles with photos get a 40% better message response rate. For best results, upload JPEG or PNG images sized as follows:
- Profile photo: 400x400 pixels
- Cover photo: 1584x396 pixels
Pro Tip: Bookmark our Up-to-Date Social Media Sizing & Resource Guide to optimize your images on every social media platform.
2. Write a compelling headline and summary. Your headline and summary should clearly and succinctly state who you are and why someone should connect with you.
- Headline: More than simply your job title, your headline should answer these two questions:
- Who do you help?
- How do you help?
- Summary: Use the following framework to write a compelling professional summary:
- Paragraph 1: In three sentences or less, what is your value prop to your prospective customers? Reiterate your purpose from your headline.
- Paragraph 2: In three sentences or less, how do you help customers achieve results?
- Paragraph 3: In three sentences or less, what is your call-to-action for the prospective customer?
Pro Tip: In your headline and summary, be sure to include keywords prospective customers might search for.
3. Engage frequently and consistently. Every week, apply consistent effort to LinkedIn to build credibility and keep content relevant and valuable for customers. Below is checklist of activities we recommend performing on a weekly basis:
- Post relevant content: Check your content library or search for trending topics in the LinkedIn search bar. You can find some great recent inspiration from others in your field.
- Post/schedule content at the right time: Generally, the best time to post on LinkedIn is Tuesday through Thursday between 10 and 11 a.m. Content posted in the evenings and on weekends tends to get less engagement. Check out this guide in our Help Center for more information on when to post on various social media channels.
- Seek recommendations from customers and share success stories: What’s better than telling your networks how great you are? Someone else saying it for you! Positive testimonials, endorsements and reviews go a long way in building your credibility.
- Check likes, follows, shares, hashtags and comments. Be sure to engage and respond as appropriate. Set weekly or monthly goals for growth and track progress.
- Grow your network: Join relevant groups in your industry to gain customer insights about needs and interests, follow influencers and connect with others.
Pro tip: Add a 30-minute weekly recurring event on your calendar to go through the above checklist.
LinkedIn should be an essential part of your team’s social selling strategy. Stay visible and build trust with consistency and an optimized profile.
Looking for a quick reference for all of this information? Check out this infographic.