Look at Your Social Media Results with New Glasses

Written By : Clifford Blodgett

I remember around the time I turned 40 the “fine print” started looking smaller, my smartphone began getting a bit tougher to read, and I found myself straining my eyes to read a book or newspaper. At first, I resisted this tell-tale sign of aging and convinced myself that I was tired or that things “had always been this way” and I was just used to it. I spent nearly five years struggling to read or see things that were less than two feet from my face until I finally made an appointment with an optometrist. I had always had 20/20 vision so I half expected him to tell me that my eyes were fine and was somewhat shocked when he told me I needed glasses. Okay, fine, I acquiesced and got the glasses and I’ll never forget the first time I put them on my face. In an instant, all that was previously blurred became clear! I couldn’t believe the difference and was kicking myself for waiting so long to actually take this step.

If you’ve been investing time, effort, and money into your social media marketing for the past year or longer, then there’s a good chance that your vision has become somewhat blurred. I refer not to your eyes, but rather to your view of the social media results (or lack thereof) that you have been achieving with your campaigns. So allow me to provide an eyeglass through which you may be able to view your social media efforts more clearly and better evaluate your results.

Strategy: Social Media for Financial Advisors

Vision Tip #1: Stop Expecting Your Social Media Efforts to Result in New Clients
Social media really was never intended to sell a product or a service. If you’re expecting sales to directly improve via social media, then you may have a blurred picture of what social media is and what it isn’t. Social media can keep you in touch with your existing clients, expose you to new potential clients, build your credibility, and generate traffic to your website. But by itself, it is not likely to result in new clients walking through your door.

Vision Tip #2: Recognize the Importance of Blogging and Email Along with Other Platforms
Too often, when business owners hear the words “Social Media” they immediately think of Facebook and Twitter. While these can be important cogs in the social media machine, failing to see the importance of blogging and email is again blurring the horizon on your efforts. Understand that your blog is the place for you to show your expertise by posting valuable information and email is still the fastest, most effective, and most inexpensive way for you to get that information to your client base.

Vision Tip #3: Linking Everything Back to Your Website and Track Your Traffic
This is possibly the biggest disconnect I see with advisors and their social media efforts. Many fail to see that their website should be their online “hub” and various social media platforms (including email) should be used primarily to direct traffic to the site. This does not happen by chance, but is a result of strategic planning, calculated posting/linking, and targeting content writing. When done correctly, tools such as Google Analytics can be used to evaluate the traffic, where visitors originate, how long they stay, how many pages they view, and more. You can, without question, get a very clear picture of how well your efforts are working.

Vision Tip #4: Evaluate Your Website’s Lead Generation System
This picture and strategy may be extremely blurry for most advisors so I’ll try to clear it up in just a few sentences. Does your website clearly and conspicuously offer a visitor the opportunity to easily access valuable information by simply providing their name and email address? An example might be a whitepaper on estate planning or a video presentation on Social Security. The better and more pertinent the information is, the more leads it may generate for you so this aspect of your social media campaign should not be taken lightly. Spend the time (or money if you pay someone to do it for you) and develop unique and valuable content to be used for lead generation. When done correctly, you build your database and can start to convert web traffic into followers and then clients. Done incorrectly, you may be wasting all of your other social media efforts.

Let’s Make Sure We’re Crystal Clear
To recap, here’s the clear and simple formula for social media success…

• Post regular articles on your blog (which is integrated into your website).
• Email these articles to your database, directing readers back to the blog.
• Post links to the articles on your social media platforms.
• Monitor your web traffic with analytics to discover if your content is attracting people.
• Incorporate strategic lead generation into your website to expand your database.

Hopefully this un-muddies the waters and provides some clarity for your social media plan.

FOR INSURANCE PROFESSIONAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR USE WITH THE GENERAL PUBLIC 14202 – 2015/3/5

Filed under: Financial Advisor Marketing, Social Media for Financial Advisors