How financial advisors can leverage Instagram to find new clients

A few days ago Hearsay Social, a tool that helps financial services firms stay compliant when going social, announced that they now supported Instagram. The doubters came quickly…

For our marketing team, this meant we were able to tap into a whole new platform for our clients. For too long, Instagram has been a very popular social media platform with a lot of marketing power but virtually off limits to RIAs.

Don’t believe me, MVMT, the watch retailer, grew their sales from $0 to $80M in sales in five years primarily using Facebook and Instagram.

Even though the CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per impression) have skyrocketed given the success of brands like AllBirds, Hims, Casper, and many many more…more brands are flocking to the platform.

Financial services companies were left out in the cold until they had a way of staying compliant. Hearsay is hoping to break down that barrier of entry for advisors to thrive on Instagram.

If you’re still questioning the viability of using this platform for scaling your lead generation, look at the stats below…

Stats on Instagram marketing

• 500M ACTIVE accounts every day
• 64% of users are between 18–34
• 80% of users follow at least one business account (it’s not just for consumers)
• 60% of users first heard about a product on Instagram
• 66% of visits to business profiles are from users that don’t follow them
• 72% of users buy products after seeing them on Instagram

We could keep going, but you get the point. Instagram may be the selling strategy for financial advisors in the past five years.

Engagement is the name of the game

While hashtags will get you discovered and a great photo will get people to pay attention…it’s nothing like the amount of engagement you receive when you engage with others.

By using the search function to explore relevant hashtags, you are able to interact with your target market in a very real way. If you are focused on helping young professionals who are interested in CrossFit, guess what?

By engaging to your hearts content, you are able to imprint your brand onto users in your target market. The accounts you target may not be in the market for a financial advisor, but by occupying mindshare of your ideal customers, you won’t be an afterthought when their situation changes.

This is why the stat above, 72% of users buy products after seeing them on Instagram, is so powerful and should convince you to at least begin strategizing how your financial services organization could leverage Instagram.

Reach out proactively to people in your vicinity

One of the most powerful ways to engage is by looking at what people are posting in your community around you.

There are so many opportunities to provide value to people nearby that a savvy RIA could host a free workshop for local entrepreneurs, and then search the surrounding areas for all the entrepreneurs and send them a personal invitation via DM.

When you think about the access you now have to provide value and attract the exact clients that you want, this tool can be the ultimate lead gen tool, and all it takes is a little effort and some creativity.

Create relevant content

Always, always, always market for the year you are in and the platform you are on. You will no longer receive thousands of followers for posting pithy sayings, you must provide value in a visual way.

Either by using short videos to explain a concept or update potential followers on current news. An RIA can also hire a designer to create a steady diet of infographics that help explain some of the concepts that they see confuse a lot of their clients.

Think about Carl Richards and his drawings, in an Instagram-driven world financial advisors that can harness visual cues to educate clients on the complexities of personal finance will win on Instagram.

The platform has done a great job to prevent the practice of spamming links and completely removed them. If you are used to setting your social media on auto-pilot, cross-posting and re-posting links constantly without any value being provided…Instagram is not going to be your friend. The platform isn’t built for it and the users will see straight through it.

Diminishing brand equity by putting social media on autopilot

As an aside…we are not aware of any financial services company that has had meaningful success by putting their social media on autopilot.

Vestorly and other companies like them say they can provide revenue by automating your content curation, but I imagine no one has really received glowing results. That’s because social media is still social, you have to take the time to engage or you may as well refrain from using the platform in the first place.

The same goes for Instagram, if you don’t have the time or will to put in the consistent effort it takes to be successful, I would stop reading this post right now.

If you would like to learn how to get clients on Twitter, watch this video we produced just for you.

Sharing photos from behind the scenes

Having a feed full of quotes or financial services facts, will not engage the audience because of how consumers browse their Instagram feed.

Sharing photos of what goes into making a financial services company operate will give your brand a human touch.

By humanizing your brand, you are able to put a face with a name that isn’t necessarily on the team page of your website (where let’s face it…most team pages make their advisors look like cold robots). When you add a personal flair it comes through and translates in a positive light for consumers.

Public speaking opportunities

Hopefully, you are already consistently taking photos whenever someone on your team is speaking publicly. The unfortunate piece is that people aren’t likely to see them if you are posting them to Facebook and leaving them there.

With Instagram, you can build out a hashtag strategy that is just focused on when your team speaks publicly. This will allow people to view an archive of all the past events and even see the value you provide for the audience.

By giving them a look into the past, you are equipping them to understand how knowledgeable each member of your team is.

Do not forget to remind your team to ask audience members to tag you in their Instagram stories and posts at the beginning of your event.

Share pictures of happy clients

I see this all of the time with Realtors. A picture is shared where an extremely happy client is smiling as wide as possible about just purchasing their new home.

Very rarely do we see financial advisors take pictures with happy clients. As a matter of fact, this technique is so under-utilized that you may differentiate your brand by simply being one of the first to do it.

At first glance, you may be thinking that it violates the “testimonial” rule. However, as long as clients consent to their photos being shared, you are not giving away any personal information, and your captions do not convey any support of your services…you may be in the clear…depending on your state regulator.

When I ran my own RIA years ago, I had a conversation with a compliance expert that said a picture cannot be revealed as a testimonial as long as you do not add a caption that indicates your service.

In other words, posting a picture and saying, “We had a great time at client appreciation event’ is not a violation. Posting a picture and saying, “We’re glad Mr. Wright has trusted our firm to do his retirement planning strategy” is probably pushing it.

Share announcements and accomplishments of the team (like being featured in Forbes)

Instagram is a great PR tool for financial advisors. When you have a tool that gives you access to millions of engaged users (IG users are even more engaged than Facebook users), you should use it to praise your team.

If someone receives their CFP certificate…post it.

If you have a team member that was accepted into graduate school…post it.

Even marriages or proposals are fair game because it shows that you are not just a financial services company, you are a team of individuals who are passionate about the work they do for clients.

When you leverage IG as your press release tool, you are able to attach photos to your announcements and also to popular or trending hashtags. You can read here about the basics of creating a hashtag strategy for your RIA.

Using Instagram stories to create a relationship with your potential clients

Instagram stories is a feature that dives more into the “urgency” mentality of the users. Anything you post in Stories will be available for 24 hours before disappearing into your archive.

By leveraging FOMO (fear of missing out), your followers’ engagement of your content skyrocket because they want to know what you have to say next.

A great way for financial services companies to bring stories into your marketing plan is to create a “day in the life” series. In this series, different members of your team will be in charge of posting to the Instagram Stories account.

By building out this expectation amongst clients to interact with a different team member throughout the week, you are allowing them to get to know your team.

Imagine if your clients knew you well enough to ask how your dog is doing on your next visit, because you mentioned needing to take him/her to the vet later in the week.

This emotional connection matters when you are dealing in any services business, but especially when in financial services.

Advertising on Instagram

If you have ever advertised on Facebook, Instagram is fairly similar in function but not in form. Remember, you need to adapt your creative to the platform you are on and this will be no different.

With Instagram, you need to have a visually appealing brand and aesthetic. Brands that do the best are places that are built to be Instagram attractions (i.e. Museum of Ice Cream). By taking notes from those who make money by being visually stimulating and engaging, your advertising will be off to the right start.

Another rule of thumb when creating the creative for your Instagram page is to make it a “scroll stopper”, it needs to jump off the page and make you take notice.

This is why travel bloggers get their biggest increase in brand awareness from posting pictures from their trip. It makes people stop their mindless scrolling of the platform to really pay attention to what you have to say.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a great financial advisor brand on Instagram take a look at Britney Castro’s Instagram profile. She has almost 12,000 followers and averages a high amount of engagement (likes and comments) per post when compared to other advisors we’ve looked into.

Last, but not least, do not forget to give people the ability to easily schedule a consultation with you. If the goal of marketing for financial advisors is to stay top of mind so that you can be in the right place at the right time, reducing friction on social media is paramount to your success.

Don’t know where to start? Reach out to us at ARIA, we’ll work with you to create an Instagram strategy that resonates with your target market, and then implement and monitor the results of that strategy.

This article is also published on LinkedIn!