Marketing Your Financial Advisory Services with Paid Advertising

One of the best ways to get clients as a financial advisor is to use online paid advertising programs. These paid advertising programs allow you to hone in on your target prospects and control your budget.

That’s why these channels are very cost effective and known for producing a high return on investment for many professionals.

To get started, let's learn about the paid advertising options that are available.

These are the top programs to review:

Option #1: Google Adwords for Financial Advisors

Google Adwords is one of the most well-known advertising programs online. With the AdWords platform, your ads are placed on the top of the Google search results.

AdWords popularized the pay per click (PPC) model, where you simply bid a price you’re willing to pay every time a visitor clicks on your Adwords ad. What makes these ads so effective is that you are targeting specific keywords searches that are related to your services.

Another way to use Adwords is leveraging the Google Content network where publishers place Google Ads on their sites to get a share of the ad revenue earnings.

You can use Google’s platform to look for sites that target your audience or manually look for sites related to your financial services niche.

This allows you to place advertising on niche sites where your target demographic congregates. These clicks from Google’s content network are often more cost effective than their search network counterparts.

Option #2: Facebook Ads for Financial Advisors

Facebook is the largest social media site online with over 1.94 billion active users.

It’s is a great paid advertising platform because of its demographic targeting options. You can target users based on age, location, income, industry, behaviors, groups, and more.

Facebook offers a CPM (cost per impression) or CPC (cost per click) payment model which allows you to figure out which one is the most economical to you.

How Financial Advisors Can Use Facebook Ads to Build their Prospect Pipeline

They can start with the basic ads that appear on the right hand column.

You want to make sure that you use a great attention grabbing image and targeted message to attract clicks. It’s a great idea to use ad creatives (images or videos) that feature a model of your client avatar and speaks to their needs and concerns. Also, include a call to action that asks the viewer to click through to your site or landing page to learn more.

The other option is to use newsfeed ads (ads placed in users' live feeds) to promote your content.

As an example, your content can be based around financial advice for small business owners. This content can be used to generate leads and the leads can be nurtured and closed later in the acquisition process.

Option #3: LinkedIn Advertising for Financial Advisors

LinkedIn is another great option for your financial advisory firm’s paid advertising campaign.

What makes LinkedIn special?

It’s a site made up of businesses owners, freelancers, investors, and professionals, making it the perfect paid advertising platform targeting people with financial assets to manage.

Like the other paid advertising programs mentioned, LinkedIn uses a PPC model where you pay for ads that appear on the right hand column of the page.

There is also a newsfeed option:

LinkedIn also has a sponsored content and a sponsored InMail option.

The sponsored content option is similar to Facebook's newsfeed ads in that the ad appears as content in users' feeds.

InMail allows you to send ads through LinkedIn's messages. This can be very effective since LinkedIn users regularly use the messages to communicate with each other.

Other Paid Advertising Options for Financial Advisors

Some other paid advertising platforms that you should look into include Twitter Ads, Instagram advertising, YouTube, Reddit, or Pinterest.

Obviously, some of these platforms will be less targeted to your service but there are many marketers finding creative ways to make these platforms work regardless of the market and industry.

For instance, if you target single mom, Pinterest may be a good option since the site has a large female user base.

Some Closing Tips to Help Financial Advisors with their Paid Advertising Campaigns

Here are some closing tips you can use for paid placements online:

1. Focus on one paid advertising program at a time. Master the one paid advertising platform and scale it up before moving on to another one

1. Don't always try to get top placement for ads. It can be expensive to bid for the top positions. Sometimes the second and third spots may provide a better ROI.

1. Track everything and keep working to improve conversions. You want to track everything to see what's working and what's not. You also want to experiment with your ads and landing pages to optimize for the highest conversion rate and lowest cost per conversion possible.

1. Start your paid advertising campaign with a small advertising spend. You want to start with small samples and scale once you find a way to make it profitable.

Rotate ads on a regular basis. Social media users will get tired of seeing the same ad. Change up your content and ads when you notice the performance falling over time.

I hope these tips have been helpful. Stay tuned for future articles that go more into detail on each of the ad platforms listed here.

In the meantime, if you are interested in testing paid advertising for your online marketing campaign and not sure where to start, contact us today and we can help you start on the right track!