Increasingly, financial services firms are coming round to the power of Facebook marketing. Not only is the scale of opportunity immense (with over 1.4 billion daily users), the platform offers financial firms immense opportunities to target specific audiences with their marketing.
Small financial planning firms, for instance, can target potential clients in their local area based on criteria such as their age and profession, whilst larger international firms could target specific expat communities in particular countries.
Yet with all of the opportunity has also come immense, rapid change. Facebook works differently for advertisers and businesses in 2019, compared to just a few years ago. In particular, companies need to rely more on Facebook’s advertising platform these days in order to get content in front of their audience. In other words, you now need to pay to play.
Despite all of this, Facebook is still a powerful marketing platform. The question is, how can financial firms best leverage it for their marketing purposes?
In this short guide, we’ll be sharing 6 simple tips to get you started. For more information about our financial marketing services, please visit our main page here.
#1 Invest in a Professional Page
Most people are familiar with personal profiles on Facebook. Your mother, brother or spouse is likely to have an account like this. Yet these types of profiles are not usually suitable for financial firms.
Rather, you should consider setting up a Facebook business page. At the time of writing, this is free and relatively straightforward to do. Just follow the steps on the Facebook guidance page to get started.
Make sure you go through the set-up process carefully, including all the relevant information your customers will want to see (e.g. opening hours, location). Be careful to ensure that these details are consistent with your Google My Business and other publicly-available business information.
#2 Claim Your URL
Once your Facebook business page is set up, you’ll notice a little URL underneath your main profile image. It is likely to look quite strange and jumbled at this stage since Facebook will have assigned a URL to you automatically.
Make sure you take the time to customise your URL to reflect the character and quality of your financial services brand. If possible, try to keep it short so that it doesn’t look cumbersome when you share the URL with other people via email, social media etc.
To really pack a nice punch, see if you can claim the same URL as your Twitter and other social media handles (e.g. @IFAreading).
#3 Get Great Images
So you have a business page and a custom URL; yet your Facebook page is still likely to look quite bland. To give it character and integrate it with your brand, consider adding a high-quality profile picture and cover photo to bring it more to life.
This will be easier if you already have a powerful financial services brand and visual identity, where you can leverage strong, pre-existing design assets.
#4 Call to Action
What do you want your target audience to do when your marketing brings them to your Facebook page? It’s easy to forget about this step, but it is crucial. Do you want them to click the Like button and follow your daily Facebook posts? Do you want them to drop you a private message?
Whatever action you want them to take, consider integrating this into your main call to action button on your Facebook page. In the Suttons IFA example above, for instance, their primary objective is to encourage people to visit their main website after landing upon their Facebook page. This is represented by the “Learn More” button on the right-hand side.
#5 Post Quality Content
If you spend time looking at other companies’ Facebook pages, you’ll notice that the most popular ones will feature regular, high-quality content on their news feeds. This principle of offering continuous value to your audience also applies within financial services.
Admittedly, this can be hard to achieve for financial firms. The subject matter is inherently technical and quite abstract. This makes it hard to produce the tangible, visually-striking imagery and video content prevalent in other industries such as food, fitness and travel. With a bit of creativity, however, it is certainly possible to make your Facebook page a hub of irresistible content, which your audience will want to keep coming back to.
The key question to ask yourself is: “What would I want to see from my firm on Facebook if I was a member of my target audience. What kind of content would I take the time and trouble to subscribe to, and consume on a regular basis?”
#6 Schedule & Time Posts
It’s important to publish content at the points in time when your audience is most likely to see it. There’s probably little sense in posting your articles on Facebook when everyone’s asleep, for instance!
The great news is that financial firms do not have to leave all of this to guesswork. Facebook provides a set of valuable analytical tools (free of charge), which allows you to see which days, and times of day, your audience is most likely to visit your page or see your content.
It’s a good idea to leverage these kinds of analytical tools to your advantage. After all, the more people who see your content, then more brand engagement and conversion action you are likely to get.
Final Thoughts
There are many other aspects of Facebook marketing for financial firms which we could also talk about. We hope this gets you started and inspires your thinking. If you are interested in discussing your digital marketing strategy with our team here at MarketingAdviser, then we would love to offer you a free, no-commitment marketing consultation. Do get in touch today via:
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01923 232840
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