Facebook for Financial Professionals: A Guide to Growing Your Practice Pt. 2
The power and influence of Facebook is substantial. If you’re not leveraging it to build your online brand, connect with potential clients, share your expertise, and generate leads, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities. In part 1 of our Guide to Growing Your Practice with Facebook, we reviewed how to optimize your page for the best user experience and why you should post regularly and with intent to increase your visibility and attract new clients. In our second installment, we dive deeper into Facebook’s marketing tools.
Leverage Boosting and Facebook Ads
While organic content can do wonders for your practice, reaching new prospects may require an offensive approach. That’s where boosting posts and Facebook’s Ads Manager come in:
Whether you’re new to paid social media or a pro, boosting posts is an effective way to get your message to an even larger audience. Get started by boosting posts that perform well with your current audience. Click boost on the post and follow these steps:
Set your goal to “Get More Engagement”.
Add a button if your post includes a link.
Set the audience to your defined location/service area.
Add additional targeting details, like demographics, interests, and behaviors to narrow your audience as needed.
Set your duration and budget. We recommend starting with a total budget that allows you to reach at least 0.5% of your maximum estimated audience daily for up to five days. So, if your maximum estimated audience is 100,000 people, your total budget (roughly $35-$45) should reflect a reach of 500 people per day.
The next step in our paid approach to social media is to leverage Facebook’s Ads Manager, which offers an impactful and cost-efficient way to acquire new clients. This strategy is much different than boosting a post and often requires a bit more work to build out. Here’s how to get started:
Set up an account for your practice in Facebook’s Ads Manager platform.
From there, create a new campaign and choose an objective. Our team often sees the most success using the “Awareness” and “Traffic” objectives. Some trial and error may be necessary here to determine what objective works best for your practice and location.
Complete your campaign’s Ad Set by setting a daily budget, scheduling your ads, and defining your target audience. Be sure to save your audience for future use!
Finalize your Ad Set and Campaign by uploading your creative (photos, videos, gifs) to the Ad section, writing some engaging “Primary Text” to go along with the creative (keep your copy short and to the point), and adding a button/link to your website. Be sure to upload multiple aspect ratios for your creative for the various placements.
Experiment with adding more than one ad to each ad group. This can help you better position your products by allowing your audience to choose which ad they like best. After a week or so, turn off the ad creative that is receiving fewer clicks so that your additional budget is funneled into your top-performing ad for the remainder of the campaign.
We recommend starting a new ad set with new creative assets and Primary Text every 4 weeks or so to help keep your ads fresh and relevant with your audience.
When it comes to building ad creative for Facebook’s Ads Manager, there are a few things to remember – be authentic, keep your audience in mind, and define your theme. Your ad creative should be consistent with your brand, while also standing apart from the content you post to your news feed.
Evaluate Your Performance
As with any marketing campaign, it’s essential to monitor what’s working and what isn’t for your practice. On Facebook, the Insights tab on your business’ page offers valuable information about your page’s health and post performance. In Ads Manager, you can conveniently compare the results of your campaigns, ad sets, and ads right from the platform. Use the Columns dropdown to compare different results.
Remember, with more than 2.9 billion monthly users, Facebook remains one of the best platforms to reach your target audience – despite competition from new platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. With the above recommendations, as well as those from Part 1, you can generate more visibility for your practice and attract new clients. Let’s start growing your digital presence today!
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