Are you looking to promote your financial advisor business with Facebook ads? If so, Facebook can be a highly effective way to reach your target audience and generate more leads!
But… Before you start creating Facebook ads, it’s important you can answer these questions:
- What is the best Facebook ads strategy for financial advisors?
- How much do financial advisor Facebook ads cost
- Is Facebook ads really the best way to advertise financial services?
After helping hundreds of financial advisors, financial planners, wealth managers and insurance agents run successful lead generation campaigns, here’s everything you need to know about running Facebook ads to promote financial services.
Executive summary
It’s all about the strategy. Facebook ads work best when you have the right combination of ad messaging, target audience & strategy.
Get help. To get faster results and make less mistakes, learn from someone who has already done FB ads successfully for other advisors (see this video to see how we can help).
Explore all options. The are lots of other good (free) alternatives to Facebook ads if you’re just starting out and don’t yet have the budget to invest in paid ads (See xamples).
Should Financial Advisors use Facebook Ads?
There’s no doubt that Facebook is one of the most powerful advertising platforms available, with over 2.9 billion active users.
And when used correctly, Facebook ads can be an extremely effective way to generate leads and grow your book of business.
That being said, Facebook ads may not be the best option for every financial advisor.
For example, if you’re on a tight budget or if you’re just starting out, there are other financial advisor lead generation strategies that may be more suitable for you.
Here are the pros and cons of running financial advisor Facebook ads:
Pros
Cons
Need help with Facebook Marketing in your firm?
We can help you set up successful financial advisor ads.
Here’s why working with us is better than working with some of our competitors:
Working with us
Working with others
Note: We work with both financial advisors and other advertising agencies that work with financial advisors. Either way, if you need help with generating leads for financial services watch this video to learn more about working together.
After helping lots of financial advisors use digital marketing to grow their business, here are our top 11 tips for advertising on Facebook.
Best tips for creating successful financial advisor Facebook ads
1. Don’t run FB ads without a proper strategy first!
The biggest mistake that we see financial advisors make is running Facebook ads without a proper strategy in place. They’ll throw a few hundred dollars at FB ads and just hope that something sticks.
This is a recipe for disaster and will likely result in you wasting a lot of money with little to show for it.
Before you start running FB ads, you need to have a clear and well-defined strategy in place. This means knowing things like:
- Who your ideal target client is
- What type of message will resonate with them
- What kind of offer will get them to take action
Only once you have a clear understanding of these things should you start running FB ads.
Click here to watch a video that explains the strategy we use for our financial advisor clients with Facebook ads.
2. Advertise the problem / solution
In both your landing pages and ad copy, it’s important to focus on the problem that your target client is facing and how you can help solve it.
Your ad copy should be focused on the client, not on you or your firm. And it should clearly state how you can help them achieve their goals.
So, what do you actually say?
I don’t want to give too much away in terms of what to say to create high-converting Facebook ads for financial advisors (since that’s the kind of information our clients have paid us for). But one thing I will say is that for financial advisors, the two biggest problems you can solve for clients are:
- How to avoid running out of money in retirement
- How to increase your income in retirement
So if you focus on a solution to those two problems, you’ll be on the right track to creating a financial Facebook ad that converts.
Learn in more detail how to do this in ‘Step 1’ of my free training.
3: Create curiosity
Don’t give too much away in your Facebook ad. Why? Curiosity is one of the biggest motivating factors to getting people to take action.
So asking questions or making a big promise in your ad copy can be a great way to hook people into wanting to learn more.
For example, you could say something like:
“Find out how to retire with more money than you ever thought possible.”
This is a promise that will create curiosity and make people want to click on your ad to learn more.
You can also use questions to create curiosity.
For example:
“Are you worried about running out of money in retirement?”
This type of question speaks directly to the pain point that many people have and will make them want to click on your ad to learn more.
4: Run A / B split testing
If you’re new to running ads, you’re going to have to do a lot of split testing to find the right combination of ad creatives, ad copy and target audience to get results.
To save money and time, by working with us you can skip about 90% of the testing phase because we already know what works and what doesn’t. So we can give you a shortcut to getting results vs starting from scratch and doing it all on your own.
5: Track leads
It’s important you use a financial advisor CRM to track your leads. I recommend Kartra and if you’re a client, you can also get access to my done-for-you Kartra sales funnel.
See ‘step 5’ of this video to learn how.
By tracking your results in a CRM you can see how many of your leads have converted into sales appointments and clients.
Tracking your leads in a good financial advisor CRM can also give you useful insights on the behavior of your leads.
This data can help you make more informed sales decisions and help you improve results over time.
6. Know your numbers
As a financial advisor, it’s important you know your numbers when advertising on Facebook. The most important metrics to track in your Facebook ads campaign are:
Cost per client acquisition: How much does it cost to win a new client?
Cost per appointment: How much does it cost to get a qualified sales appointment?
Cost per lead: How much does it cost to get a lead? (someone to raise their hand and say they’re interested in learning more)
7. Target people searching for financial services
You might be surprised to learn that you can actually target people searching Google using Facebook ads interest targeting.
In other words, if people are researching the best universal indexed life insurance, 401K rollover options, wealth management services, investment strategies or anything else related to financial planning, you can target those people on Facebook ads for less money than it would cost to target those people through Google PPC.
Here is an example of targeting people interested in annuities or wealth management with Facebook ads:
By targeting people searching for various financial services, you’re more likely to get leads that convert into appointments and clients quicker.
8. Follow up with leads
To make sure you get more leads converting into appointments and clients it is critical you follow up with them using email marketing.
The best thing about email marketing is that you can use email marketing software to automate the whole follow-up process.
Seriously, if you’re following up with leads manually right now (through calls, leaving voicemails, sending text messages or emailing them), you need to STOP what you’re doing and automate this whole process instead.
By automating your follow-up, you can focus on what you do best (helping clients) while your marketing runs in the background nurturing your leads 24/7.
9. Run omnichannel retargeting ads
Once you’ve started to generate leads with Facebook ads, another great way to get more of these leads to convert into clients is to retarget them OUTSIDE of Facebook & Instagram.
You can do this using Adroll. Adroll allows you to retarget leads on thousands of different websites including Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Investopedia and many more financial websites.
Using Adroll to achieve omnipresence online is covered in ‘Week 4’ of our lead generation course. Or, if you prefer, we can set it all up for you as part of our done-for-you lead generation service.
10. Create different ad creatives
To prevent retirees from seeing the same ads over and over again, it’s a good idea to give Facebook a variety of ad creatives (images or videos) that they can rotate every so often to keep your ads fresh.
I recommend using between 3-5 ad images for each ad set inside Facebook.
Tip: In our tests with financial advisor ads, we found that images tend to convert better than videos is 90% of cases. But it doesn’t hurt to split test both, just in case!
11. Use a video lead magnet call to action
One of the biggest mistakes I see when financial advisors run Facebook ads (or any other type of paid advertising) is that they don’t use a lead magnet.
Instead, they send people from the ad straight to their website homepage or a page where they can schedule a call in their calendar.
This does not work very well.
Why?
Because people do not know, like or trust you yet.
It’s kind of like meeting someone for the first time and then asking them to marry you. It’s too soon! Instead, you need to build trust first. And one of the best ways to do this is with a video sales letter (VSL) or webinar-style lead magnet.
For our financial advisor clients, we use a video sales letter because it’s almost the same as a webinar, but shorter, easier to record, can be watched on-demand and therefore gets better results (in our split tests).
A video sales letter is an online presentation where people can learn more about your financial advisor firm, how you can help clients and why working with you is better than other alternative options.
To learn how to create a high converting financial advisor video sales letter, watch ‘Step 2’ of my free Masterclass training.
12. Ignore the social media noise
There is a lot of marketing advice online that says you need to:
- Post every day on social media
- Get more likes
- Grow your followers
- Increase your post engagement
… And so on to get results.
But the reality is… That couldn’t be further from the truth!
Most of my clients never post regularly on social media, don’t care about likes or followers and they still get amazing results.
In fact, we often launch financial advisor ads on brand new Facebook pages (with 0 likes) and they get better results than Facebook pages with thousands of likes.
Why?
It’s all because of the strategy.
The strategy is 100% focused on leads, appointments and clients. NOT vanity metrics like followers, likes and engagement.
To see how to stop wasting time on the ‘busywork’ marketing that gets slow (or no) results and focus on the 20% of marketing activities that produce the fastest and best results, watch ‘step 4’ of my free training.
Do Facebook Ads work for financial advisors?
The short answer is: YES! Facebook ads can work very well for financial advisors with the right strategy.
Here’s an example of one of our financial advisor clients Facebook ad campaigns getting leads for only $8.44:
There are some lead generation companies that charge $150 to $500 for a shared lead. But this client is able to get an exclusive financial advisor lead from Facebook ads for under $9 targeting a COLD audience (people who have never heard about them before).
Here’s another example of another one of our financial advisor clients getting leads for under $5 using Facebook ads:
That’s 152 leads in just a few weeks by spending only $711 targeting a COLD audience.
These kind of results are unprecedented in the financial services space.
Finally, here’s one more financial advisor client retargeting people who visit his website through Facebook ads:
By retargeting people on his website, he was able to get leads for less than $2 and some awesome quick wins along the way!
Needless to say, these are just a few examples of many clients we’ve been able to help get real tangible results using Facebook ads.
To learn more about working with us, watch this video that explains how it all works.
Is Facebook ads the best place to advertise financial services?
We’ve tested financial advisor ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google, YouTube and even TikTok!
In our experience, out of all the paid advertising channels, here are the best-performing paid advertising channels:
- TikTok Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads
- YouTube Ads
- Google Ads
Yes, you hear that right. To our surprise, TikTok ads actually performed the best (in terms of cost per lead, appointment and cost per acquisition) when targeting people over the age of 55 in the USA.
It’s likely in other countries, TikTok ads will get similar results.
If you’re interested in us running TikTok ads for you, check out our done-for-you services.
So, to get the best results from Facebook ads, it’s important you work with an expert who has experience working with financial advisors and helping them get results with Facebook ads. To learn how we can help you get results with Facebook ads, watch this video.
Next steps?
Facebook ads can be a great way to generate leads for your financial advisor business. But if you want your ad campaign to be successful, you need to take the time to plan and execute it properly. Use the tips in this article to create a strong Facebook ad campaign for your business.
If you’re looking for help generating more leads and converting them into clients, then watch this free training video for financial advisors. Although the training can work for ANY business that needs appointments to win clients, we’ve got a lot of experience doing this for financial advisors (with excellent results!).
FAQs
Ashley Davis (or ‘Ash’ for short) is the CEO & Founder of Skyline Social. For over 15 years, he has been helping business owners with lead generation. Ash specializes in helping businesses get high-quality leads, appointments and clients each month in an automated, scalable and profitable way. You can watch his free Masterclass training to learn more.
