Social Media: Adventures in Life-stage Marketing for Financial Advisors

Consider the typewriter. The clunky, mechanical device — and the White-Out and retyping inevitably needed to draft anything on one — harkens back to another era in technology. Now, think of all the hours of time (and frustration) saved by the invention of the PC and word-processing software.

The evolution from the typewriter to word-processing program provides an excellent illustration of the effect that social media has had on prospecting and marketing in financial services.

Life, Online

For decades, successful agents and advisors have capitalized on the impact that life events have on a person’s financial needs and ability to address them, as well as the fact that certain life events often trigger a greater awareness and openness to addressing them. For example, having a baby increases the need for income protection. Getting a promotion increases the ability to finance a need.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to know what was going on in the life of a client (change in marital status, promotion, employment, and so on), you either had to contact the client and ask, or cultivate a friendship with the local gossip. Now with the proliferation of social media, you can have access to that information (and more) with the click of a mouse or swipe of a finger.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Clients, And You

Many people share personal life events on Facebook — getting engaged, having a baby, death in the family, and so on. Meanwhile, LinkedIn offers insights into a person’s employment situation — a new job, a promotion, philanthropic interests, professional networks, and sometimes, personal interests and hobbies. There are tried-and-true best practices for accessing this this type of information in the digital age.

LinkedIn has made the process for obtaining personal introductions much more effective in at least three ways. First, LinkedIn gives you access to the networks of everyone to whom you are connected (assuming they give access). If you have 300 connections and each of your connections have 100 connections, that’s thousands of potential prospects. Second, it provides information that can facilitate the task of qualifying prospects. You can see a prospect’s job title, employer, education, work history, hobbies, volunteering, and interests—all of which can help you determine if the prospect needs your services and can afford them. Third, LinkedIn provides a mechanism for obtaining the personal introduction in a very natural way. In situations in which the prospect is in the network of someone you are connected to, you can simply send a message to the connection and politely ask for an introduction to the prospect.

Finally, social media enables you to demonstrate your expertise beyond simply the credentials listed in your profile. Both Facebook and LinkedIn enable you to post comments, articles, and so on, that may be useful to your contacts and/or demonstrate your knowledge in a particular area. For example, you can share an article on Social Security claiming strategies along with a quick insightful comment with your network on both Facebook and LinkedIn. With zero cost, you are able to expose your network to your expertise. Accomplishing the same objective before social media would have involved much more time and expense.

Using Social Media To Prospect And Market To Clients

These examples are but three of the many ways to use social media to market and prospect. It follows quite naturally that social media has also made it easier to build deeper and stronger relationships with clients. In addition, it has made the process for identifying and approaching centers of influence easier.

To learn more about the adoption trends of social media in the financial services profession, check out "The Advisor of the Future: How To Stay Relevant In The Digital Age," an exclusive whitepaper provided to The College courtesy of Hearsay Systems (formerly Hearsay Social).