Financial Advisor Advertising – The Digital Way

Financial advisor advertising can be a highly regulated and competitive domain, meaning there is a lot you will have to bear in mind. You must strive to get noticed, stand-out to your target audience, and stay relevant to your consumers. 

If you are a financial advisor without a digital advertisement campaign, you are definitely ignoring an effective communication channel. According to Smart Insight statistics 2020, 81 percent of users search online for a product or a service provider. 

“Online advertising is crucial for financial service providers to attract more clients. It is an effective channel to project who you are to the online customers. You can capture your target audience’s attention and influence their decisions by educating them about your services. Digital advertising can help your company penetrate new markets and increase your conversion rate and ROI.”

According to Google, online advertising has numerous benefits; it is broad, fast, flexible, and trackable. It means you can deploy a digital advertising campaign on a large scale, customize it to fit your business needs, and track its performance in real-time and adapt accordingly. 

3 Major Benefits of Online Financial Advisor Advertising

Although there are numerous advantages of implementing a digital advertisement campaign, three of them make the most significant impact. 

1. Targeting New Audience

Online advertising will enable your company to cover a wider spectrum of the existing market. Additionally, it will open doors to new marketplaces such as social media platforms and online financial services portals. 

Some of the most common ways to target your audience include:

• Using pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement to reach new clients who are searching for financial advisors online 
• Targeting consumers based on their interests, locations, needs, profession, and age, etc. 
• Remarketing to existing clients and those who did not respond to your call-to-action (CTA) the first time

If you are not sure where to start, you can always seek experts’ advice to design an effective online financial advisor advertising campaign. 

All you need to do is target the right set of customers who are more likely to show interest in your products and services. There are various tools at your disposal, such as social ads, video ads, and display ads (we will discuss them in detail later). 

By implementing online advertising into your business’s existing strategy, you will be able to do much more than targeting new customers – you will also be able to do the following:

• Analyze the customers from your competitor about their needs. More importantly, you will be able to observe what your competitor is doing differently to get more business. You can use these real-time insights to improve your services and advertisement campaign.
• Create customer’s persona based on their demographic information, location, gender, age, profession, preferences, beliefs, cultural and personal values, and behavior, etc. It will help you drive more traffic, both online and offline, and increase your conversion rate. 
• Increase your engagement with your audience as online ads are more enticing. For example, using a video ad allows your customer to watch a short and simple video to get full information about your financial advisor services. 

2. Increase Conversions

Online ads play a vital role in increasing traffic to your website and online service portal.

A lead is your first contact with the consumer. It happens when a visitor shows interest in your service by submitting a contact request. This request may come as an email, a message with a phone number to call back, or through your social media business page, etc. 

You can use promotional services to entice a visitor into providing this contact information by offering a service such as a,

• Discount
• Demo
• Free training video
• Free download
• Complimentary services such as an audit report or a quote
• Newsletter, etc. 

In short, lead generation initiates the official relationship between your company and the prospect. By providing their contact information, they give you consent to contact them. Hence, the more leads you generate, the higher are your chances of conversion to increase sales and ROI. 

So remember, it is a simple formula, the more traffic you drive to your website, the more leads you are likely to generate. It will translate into more opportunities to pitch your financial services to potential clients, increasing the probability of potential sales, and return on investment. 

3. Brand Awareness 

Having a strong financial advisor advertising campaign will build your company’s trust amongst the audience. The reason is the ability of online advertising to showcase the details of your services that may be beneficial to the consumer.

It will also enhance your brand awareness amongst your existing audience as consistent online advertising will keep your company on top of their minds. Their familiarity with your business name will pursue them to contact you next time they are looking for financial services. 

While contacting new clients is important, contacting your existing clients is equally significant. You can also remarket your services to people, who did not respond to your first or previous attempts. 

In order to improve your brand awareness, you will have to do the following:

• Use an omnichannel digital advertising approach, i.e., using search ads, social media Ads, Video Ads, etc. 
• Step up your game when it comes to your social media presence. Research to find out where your target audience dwells, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. You will have to be proactive in your approach. 
• Do not underestimate the power of search engine optimization (SEO). There are numerous ways of how SEO can significantly increase your brand awareness. 

Now that you are aware of how important online financial advisor advertising is, let us look into the most effective types of digital advertising that can help you design your strategy. 

Types of Online Advertising

Knowing where to invest your time, energy, and money is critical for any business sector, and the stakes are even higher when you are offering financial solutions. So let us dive right into different types of digital advertisements at your disposal. 

Google Ads

Using Google Ads will enable your ads to appear on both mobile and desktop devices. You can use services such as Google Display Ads, which also allows you to target specific devices. For example, you can choose to target only tablet users or smartphone users, etc. 

Google Ads is a platform that allows you to publish ads within browsers, apps, and Google search results. Here are the types of advertisements you can use on tablets and smartphones. 

• Image and text ads
• Videos and image app promotion ads
• True view ads for in-app promotion campaigns.

The key differentiator that gives Google Ads the edge is Google’s position as the world’s most popular search engine. It allows your company to showcase your financial services to the whole world. 

Google Display Network allows you to design visually appealing financial advisor advertising and place them simultaneously on more than two million websites and mobile apps. It also has the capability to display your ad to the right audience at the right time and place. 

With Google display network, you get more control of your advertising campaign and choose where you want to place your ads. Some of the main targeting capabilities and features of this ad network are:

• Google is the world’s leading search engine; it also owns other world’s leading platforms such as YouTube and Gmail. It grants you simultaneous access to multiple marketplaces, with millions of users logging in daily. 
• Not only can you contact a new target audience, but you will also be able to remarket your products and services to previous website visitors by importing your contact list. 
• In case you do not have experience or time to build an ideal audience, Google Ads will do it for you. It has automated targeting features to identify the highest-converting potential audience for the best ROI. 
• Google Display Ads can be very effective in making your company appear legit and trustworthy. It is a huge advantage when remarketing to an existing audience that is familiar with your financial services.

Paid Search Advertising

Online users conduct a Google search for almost every product and service they are looking for. According to Forbes, 71 percent of users will click on the search results displayed on the first page on Google. Therefore, you must invest to ensure you appear in those top search results to reap the benefits.

Why? – There are three main reasons

• Advertisers make $8 on average for every dollar spent on Google Ads
• Google Ads protect you from competitors using your branded terms for their promotions
• Google Ads takes priority over organic search results and always appears first in all search engine result pages known as SERPs. It will also bring credibility to your company’s name and services. 

Video Ads

If you are stuck in the conundrum to use video ads, you are losing on a big opportunity here. Avoid incorporating a video as a part of your financial advisor campaign, and you will be left behind. 

Here are seven reasons why. 

• Customer prefers watching a video –According to the statistics, 92 percent of prospect audience consume online videos. Plus, people watch 4 billion videos on YouTube daily. 
• Video ads convert sales – One-third of online customers will buy after viewing a video ad. 
• People share videos – This is the digital equivalent to word-of-mouth promotion or customer’s referral. 
• Video ads perform well with mobile users – A short video message around 30 second makes your digital ad digestible and accessible to mobile users.
• Video can be an educating tool – You can create short and interactive financial services tutorials or how-to-guides to engage and entice your audience.
• Search Engines are obsessed with videos – When displaying search results, the biggest search engines such as Google or Bing will always prioritize companies and services with video content. 
• Videos allow you to tell your story – You can create a storytelling experience for the prospects and connect by striking a chord on a deeper level. 

Most importantly, analytics never lie. The primary video platforms, such as YouTube and Facebook, have features that help gauge your video ad’s performance in real-time. Knowing the number of shares, views, likes, and reading consumers’ feedback will help you do better in the future. 

Social Media Advertising for Financial Advisors

Financial advisor advertising on social media comes with several benefits. The most significant one is the exponential number of users. 

• You can target audiences by specifying their gender, age, profession, education, interest, location, and much more.
• Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have several ad formats that may align with your company’s goals. 
• Investing in targeted advertising drives solid leads and sales conversions.

Here are some of the statistics to demonstrate how big of an audience we are talking about that you can target using various social networking platforms.

• Facebook – there are almost 2.5 billion active users that log in regularly
• Instagram – this one has over 1 billion active users
• Twitter – has a following of over 330 million users. 
• LinkedIn – if you are looking for corporate clients, LinkedIn is a network for companies and professionals with over 660 million active users. 

You can use various ways to design your financial advisor advertising campaign on social media. You can use it as 

• Content in the form of posts and stories.
• Photo ads
• Lead ads
• Video ads etc. 

In short, establishing your presence on social media will open a new world of opportunity for your finance company. Therefore, it is imperative that you get started on developing a sound and customized social media ad campaign that fits your business model and fulfills your needs. 

Let the Experts Do it for You

Whether you are an independent financial advisor or a wealth management company wishing to deploy a financial advisor advertising campaign but do not know where to begin, let the Mediaboom help you. 

We’re a digital marketing agency with the expertise to help boost brand awareness and increase website traffic to generate quality leads, which will ultimately increase your sales.