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!
After helping hundreds of financial advisors, financial planners, wealth managers, and insurance agents run successful lead generation campaigns with Facebook ads, here’s everything you need to know about using Facebook ads successfully.
Executive summary
Short on time? Here’s a quick overview of the main points:
- Use a sales funnel. Facebook ads work best when you send people to a sales funnel designed to get appointments rather than your website.
- Talk about the problem. Create ads that solve problems for retirees. The bigger the problem you solve, the better results you’ll get.
- Combine Facebook with other platforms. Facebook works best when combined with other marketing strategies, including content creation and email marketing.
- Get help. To get faster results and make fewer mistakes, learn from someone who has already done Facebook ads successfully for other advisors (see this video to see how we can help).
Should Financial Advisors use Facebook Ads?
Facebook is undoubtedly 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 just starting out, other free or low-cost financial advisor lead generation strategies may be more suitable.
Here are the pros and cons of running financial advisor Facebook ads:
Pros
Cons
Best tips for creating successful financial advisor Facebook ads
Here are our top tips for running successful Meta Facebook & Instagram ads as a financial advisor:
1. Use the right Facebook ads strategy
The biggest mistake we see financial advisors make is running Facebook ads without a proper strategy. They’ll throw a few hundred dollars at Facebook ads and 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 Facebook ads, you need to have a clear and well-defined strategy in place.
This means knowing things like:
- Who is your ideal client?
- 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 can you build an appointment funnel so that leads can automatically convert from strangers to clients.
Click here to watch a video explaining our strategy for financial advisors.
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.
For example, here’s a Facebook ad example from the wealth management firm Fisher Investments:
As you can see, the ad focuses on providing value to retirees (not selling to them).
Your ad copy should focus on the client, not on you or your firm. It should clearly state how you can help them achieve their goals.
So, what do you actually say?
For our financial advisor clients, we’ve found some of the biggest problems you can talk about in your ads are about how to:
- Avoid running out of money in retirement
- Increase your income in retirement
- Protect your wealth from inflation or stock market volatility
- Get a guaranteed income in retirement
- Enjoy a comfortable retirement
If you focus on solving those kinds of problems, you’ll be on the right track to creating a financial Facebook ad that converts.
Learn more about 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 for 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 promise 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.
It’s important not to give too much away in your ads. If you tell people everything about your solution before they click on the ad, this will hurt your conversions.
4: Run A / B split testing
If you’re new to running ads, you’ll have to do a lot of split testing to find the right combination of ad creatives, ad copy, and target audience to get results.
This is why it’s important to split-test the following:
- Audiences
- Ad text
- Headlines
- Images
- Videos
Facebook’s algorithm will find the best combination of ads that aligns with your Facebook ad goals.
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 to use a financial advisor CRM to track your leads and manage your leads.
By tracking your leads in your sales funnel software, you’ll be able to:
- Follow up with interested leads automatically
- See how many leads convert into appointments and clients
- Keep your pipeline full
- Make changes to improve your marketing campaign performance
What software works best to track financial advisor leads?
Most of my advisor clients use Kartra to track and manage leads because it’s an all-in-one marketing platform. As a bonus, if you’re a client, you can also access our 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.
6. Know your numbers
As a financial advisor, you must know how well your Facebook ads convert strangers into leads, appointments, and clients.
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)
For our financial advisor clients, here are the Facebook ad results they typically see:
- Cost per lead: $20
- Cost per appointment: $200
- Cost to acquire a new client: $1,000
Of course, these numbers can vary greatly depending on many factors. For example, if you’re targeting wealthier people, then your costs will likely be higher.
In our experience, we’ve also found the wider the geographic location of your ads, the lower your costs will be.
7. Target people searching for financial services
Another great way to run Facebook ads as a financial advisor is to target people searching Google for various financial or insurance products and 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 them 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 quickly.
8. Follow up with Facebook leads
To ensure that as many Facebook leads convert into appointments and clients as possible, it’s critical to 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 generating leads with Facebook ads, another great way to convert more of these leads into clients is to retarget them outside of Facebook and Instagram.
You can do this using Adroll.
This ad platform 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 repeatedly, 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.
The more ads you test, the greater the chances are you’ll find a high converting ad. Some of the best ads we’ve run for advisors have been a result of continuous split-testing.
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
One of the biggest mistakes I see when financial advisors run Facebook ads (or any other type of paid advertising) is not using 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 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. 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
It doesn’t hurt to post social media updates on your Facebook page, but it won’t make a big difference in results. So focus your time and money on marketing activities that will move the needle the most (like running Facebook ads).
There is a lot of social media 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.
13. Lower your cost per lead
Want to get more appointments and clients from Facebook ads? The easiest way to do this is to lower your cost per lead.
The less you pay for a high quality exclusive lead, the more appointments and clients you’ll be able to get.
The problem is that many advisors buy leads from other lead generation companies. When you buy leads from a third-party company, you often end up paying more for them.
Some advisors have told me they’ve bought leads for $150, $300, $500 or more. And this is only for a lead (not a qualified booked appointment).
In contrast, here’s an example of one of our financial advisor clients’ Facebook ad campaigns getting exclusive leads for only $8.44:
As I mentioned, some lead generation companies charge $150 to $500 for a shared lead. But this client can 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 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 kinds 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 got leads for less than $2 and some awesome quick wins along the way!
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.
14. Do more than just Facebook ads
If you want to get the best results from Facebook ads, then you need to do more than run ads.
Here’s the thing.
In the past, you could throw up a few Facebook ads and get leads to convert into appointments and clients immediately.
Although this can sometimes still happen, the reality is, results like this are decreasing. Now people want to research and learn more about you before they schedule a call.
That’s why we’ve found that clients who get above-average results combine Facebook ads with other marketing activities such as blogging, YouTube, Instagram and even TikTok ads.
In fact, for 80% of our clients, TikTok ads perform even better than Facebook ads (in terms of cost per lead, appointment, and acquisition) when targeting people over the age of 55.
15. Get help
To get faster results from Facebook ads, you must work with an expert who has experience working with financial advisors and helping them get results with Facebook ads.
By working with someone who has already done this, you’ll avoid countless hours of wasted time and save thousands of dollars on ads that are unlikely to work.
To learn how we can help you get results with Facebook ads, watch this video.
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.
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, Ash has been helping business owners get high-quality leads, appointments, and clients each month. He has extensive experience working with B2B & B2C industries in finance, insurance, marketing, sales and beyond. Learn more about the author here.
