Poll: Which high-impact prospecting technique works best for you?

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Some marketing techniques work better than others for financial advisors.

The five most effective techniques for freelancers (who share key characteristics with financial advisors) include the following, as described in The Wealthy Freelancer:

 

  1. Tapping your network
  2. Getting more out of existing clients
  3. Investing in smart local networking
  4. Leveraging social media as a networking tool
  5. Employing direct mail

My network has always worked best for me, but the other four techniques help, too.

My referrals come mostly from current and past clients, many of whom subscribe to my monthly e-newsletter, another big contributor to my marketing successes. Although my clients typically work for large companies that aren’t big on social media, they seem impressed by my social media visibility. Social media has expanded my network to include some great professional colleagues, referral sources, and an occasional client.

Smart local networking inspired me to launch my business. Many Bostonians have been generous with their time, advice, and connections. The Boston Security Analysts Society became one of my first clients and its timely presentations have provided the topics for many of my blog posts.

Direct mail has been the least effective technique for me. But I probably haven’t given the U.S. mail a fair chance because I’ve been so lucky with referrals from my network.

Thank you, all of my colleagues and referral sources, who have encouraged me! Every little bit helps.

What works best for you? Please answer the poll in the right-hand column of this blog. Feel free to leave a comment, too. I’ll report on the results in my January 2011 e-newsletter.

Guest post: “Be Compliant When Using LinkedIn Messages”

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Social media compliance is a big worry for financial advisors, so I was delighted when Bill Winterberg offered to write a guest post on three easy steps to be compliant using LinkedIn messages. I’ve quoted Bill in numerous blog posts and tweets on technology, social media, and tweets because he’s a great resource.

Be Compliant When Using LinkedIn Messages

By Bill Winterberg, CFP®

An earlier post on InvestmentWriting.com highlighted a “whopping flaw” in LinkedIn’s messaging system that poses compliance issues for financial advisors. The concern is that no viable solution exists to archive and retain messages using settings on LinkedIn.

I believe that advisors can use LinkedIn messages without violating regulatory requirements, provided they follow the three steps below. The key in all three steps is to leverage an existing e-mail archiving service to capture and retain messages sent via LinkedIn.

Here are three steps advisors can follow to demonstrate proactive compliance when using LinkedIn messages.

1.      Use an e-mail archiving service and use the e-mail address being archived with all LinkedIn messages. If you’re not archiving e-mails today, you’re going to have a challenging time responding to audit requests by examiners. They almost always ask for e-mail communication in one form or another.

2.      Configure your LinkedIn E-mail Notification settings to control how you receive e-mails and notifications. All of your General options should be set to deliver Individual E-mail, as shown below. This will feed all LinkedIn messages sent to you into your e-mail system, so they will subsequently get archived by the service you established in Step 1.

3.      Here is the only part that requires you to do something manually. When you compose new LinkedIn messages−or reply to messages received−you must click the “Send me a copy” check box under your message window. Again, the copy of the message will be sent to your e-mail address that is subject to archiving through your archiving provider.

These three steps will leverage an e-mail archiving service to capture and retain message sent through the LinkedIn messaging system. Upon examination by a regulator, advisors will be able to quickly produce all messages sent using LinkedIn.

Bill Winterberg, CFP®, is a technology consultant to financial advisors in Dallas, Texas. His comments on technology and financial planning can be viewed on his blog at www.fppad.com.

LinkedIn’s fatal flaw for financial advisor compliance

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LinkedIn has a whopping flaw for advisors who’d like to keep their compliance officers 100% happy, and there’s no solution in sight. At least, not to my knowledge.

The problem is records retention, which is at the heart of conservative management of compliance risks from advisor communications. Much of what you post to LinkedIn can be automatically saved and archived using solutions provided by third-party vendors. But there’s no way to do this for messages sent via LinkedIn.

How to cope with LinkedIn’s weakness

If you’re a solo financial advisor who’s not subject to rigorous compliance controls, you may use one of the following approaches:

  1. Taking the risk of neither automatically nor manually archiving messages
  2. Manually copying your LinkedIn messages to your corporate email account, which I assume is automatically archived, by clicking on “Include others on this message” and then checking the “Send me a copy” box below the message.
  3. Avoiding the use of LinkedIn messages, although the LinkedIn message function cannot be disabled–at least not to my knowledge

If you work for a large, conservative organization, your compliance department may ban you from using LinkedIn. I know this happens.

What’s the problem?

The barrier to solving this LinkedIn message problem may lie with LinkedIn, according to a communication from the @Backupify Twitter account. But I’m not sure if this is a challenge specific to Backupify or to all vendors.Meanwhile, I must thank @BillWinterberg of FPPad for connecting me with Backupify.

To back up what you can on LinkedIn

In the meantime, if you’re looking for a partial solution, Arkovi backs up most of LinkedIn. I believe that some of the firms listed in my blog post on “FINRA/SEC compliance for bloggers,” such as Smarsh and Socialware, also tackle this problem.

Please tell me if I’ve overlooked a solution. I’d like to share it with my readers. Meanwhile, check with your compliance professional about how to keep them satisfied as you use LinkedIn. You CAN do it.

Guest post: “Investment analysts and social media”

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Pat Allen of RockTheBoatMarketing is one of my “go to” people when I’m looking for information on how asset managers use social media. If you’re interested in tracking this topic, follow Pat’s Twitter feed at RockTheBoatMKTG and check out her Twitter list of investment managers. If your interests focus more on financial advisors, then Pat’s AdvisorTweets Twitter account is for you.

In her guest post below, Pat suggests that investment analysts and portfolio managers need to learn how to do research using social media or risk missing–or being late to obtain–information that influences the prices of securities.

Investment analysts and social media

By Pat Allen

Institutional analysts and investors rely most on information that comes directly from companies.

This was a finding in a survey conducted last year by the Brunswick Group that I remember reading and finding unremarkable.  And yet it’s increasingly obvious that corporate information can be relied upon for a company’s plans and intentions—but how an organization moves forward will be influenced by a marketplace reacting in real-time.

To be sure, that complicates things and not just for corporations pursuing business agendas but also for analysts and investors trying to assess companies’ prospects.

Social media is messy. There are zillions of media and networking sites and blogs, lots of noise and plenty of false signals. Still, we think it’s a faulty investment decision that’s made today without consideration for what consumers and influencers are saying.

Gap’s October 4 introduction of a new logo is a recent case in point.

In an October 7 essay on the Huffington Post, Gap North America president Marka Hansen explained that the company’s product selection and retail presence was evolving.

“The natural step for us on this journey is to see how our logo–one that we’ve had for more than 20 years–should evolve. Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that,” wrote Hansen.

“The natural step for us on this journey is to see how our logo–one that we’ve had for more than 20 years–should evolve. Our brand and our clothes are changing and rethinking our logo is part of aligning with that,” wrote Hansen.

Not so long ago a company executive might have mentioned a new logo on a conference call. If the company’s marketing was believed to be stale and a growth inhibitor, a rebranding plan might have bolstered investor confidence–if only temporarily–prior to the market’s reaction to the change.

In thinking about this post, I flashed back to Peter Lynch’s One Up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market. I was pretty green when I read that book but even then I was skeptical about Lynch’s thesis. Listen to what shoppers said at one store in one mall and invest based on that? I had my doubts and there was something about it that I found condescending. Surely that’s not how professional investors did it?Institutional analysts and investors rely most on information that comes directly from companies.

But Lynch’s recommended approach foreshadowed what is today called online listening. The difference today is that the vast majority of social media sites are architected to serve as databases—easy for interested parties to query, filter and subscribe to for efficient listening and ongoing temperature-checking.
Company information, primary market research, real time subscription information services, analyst research, the business media—all are inputs that ranked higher than “new media” in the 2009 Brunswick research into what influences analysts’ decisions or recommendations. New media, defined as blogs, message boards and social networking sites, were consulted by just 4% of respondents.

The next time such research is conducted we’d expect the monitoring of new media to soar as professional investors learn more about social influence.

Pat Allen is a Chicago-based digital marketing strategy consultant whose Rock The Boat Marketing firm helps investment companies think through what they do on the Web. Pat also operates AdvisorTweets.com, a site that aggregates the tweets of U.S.‐based financial advisors.

Guest post: “What’s a tomato got to do with getting your fund discovered?”

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Mutual fund marketing is the focus of this week’s guest post by Dan Sondhelm. His post originally appeared on SunStar Strategic’s FundFactor blog.

What’s a tomato got to do with getting your fund discovered?

by Dan Sondhelm

Have you ever grown a tomato? If so, you know it’s not as simple as just putting a seed in the ground. In fact, passionate tomato farmers often start their seedlings indoors several weeks before planting season. Once outside, they need a good dose of sunshine and the right amount of water, not to mention great soil, shelter from chill winds and a strong trellis. You get the idea.
Growing a fund requires similar specialized knowledge and attention. According to Morningstar, in the open-end mutual fund industry of over $7 trillion assets, the top 10 fund firms hold 58%. That’s one big tomato! The next 40 hold 28%, while you and the remaining 600 plus firms compete for the remaining 14%. And, fund flows follow a similar pattern.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been privileged to speak on panels addressing distribution for smaller funds. I’ve met dozens of smaller fund managers there. Some are managers with unique investment processes. Others are experts in their asset classes, still others have amazing performance. Yet, they’re frustrated by lack of fund flows, anxious about mounting expenses and hungry for ideas about how to get the recognition they deserve in this crowded market place. So, how do you differentiate your fund from the others and get discovered?

Like growing tomatoes, gaining visibility – and resultant sales – requires commitment. As a small firm, you’re competing for attention with firms who spend significant dollars on their marketing activities, both in the advisor market and at the retail level. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for TV commercials, glossy magazine style annual reports and sponsorships with major distribution platforms and public venues.

Making the Commitment to Grow.
Distribution is at the heart of the potential for success. But just getting on platforms is the equivalent of tossing your tomato seed in the dirt and hoping for the best. Successful distribution lies in nurturing the effort. Like adding water and light, protecting from the frost and spraying for bugs, growing your fund requires consistent attention. You have to ensure you’re in the right channels, and that advisors and investors know you, know your people and know your products.

We understand smaller firms are often made up of a handful of people. Not all firms can afford a wholesaling staff or have resources to sustain a significant marketing presence. So, how do you make it work?

Design a Distribution Strategy.
Write it down. Make someone accountable for each step. We all know that what gets measured gets done. Traditional marketing wisdom says you must address the four P’s: Product, Price, Place (Platforms), Promotion. This applies to fund distribution, too. But what about a fifth P, Performance? It’s true, not many investors will flock to a poor performing fund, but relying solely on performance is risky business. While performance may get you your 15 minutes of fame, performance chasers will drop your fund for the next hot item if they don’t really understand your investment philosophy and process or know the fund manager well.

Cover all the bases
Product

• Build a story around your investment process that highlights the opportunities of your asset class and process and differentiates you from your competition.
• Add personality by discussing your current sector strategy and top investment selections. Let investors know about the good decisions you’ve made in the past and the fund’s current positioning.
• And of course, commit to excellent performance.
Price
• Set competitive pricing – You’ll notice I didn’t say lower than average. Many managers think this is important, but many funds with lower-than-average expenses don’t sell. What does matter is how your fund compares overall to other funds that are selling.
• Set your share classes so that you are priced appropriately for the advisor types you are targeting. The preponderance of flows are going to no-load and load-waived shares. For smaller firms without existing relationships or sales teams, no load may be the way to go.
Place (Platforms)
• Select the distribution channels and share classes that make sense for your fund.
• Get on Schwab, TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, and Pershing – these are the most appropriate for smaller firms with limited distribution. Then, establish a relationship with your account manager, who can guide you through the maze of opportunities available to reach platform advisors.
• Be realistic in your expectations. If you have no prior relationships with wirehouse firms, you are too small to meet their criteria and/or there is no demand from their representatives, it’s unlikely they will add you to their platform in the short term.
Promotion
• Establish relationships with advisor firm research teams to get and stay on their radar. Where applicable, find out and work toward meeting criteria to be placed on preferred/recommended lists.
• Take advantage of marketing opportunities offered by some platforms. Develop a strong relationship with your account manager so you are alerted to and aware of opportunities for proprietary mailings or sponsorship opportunities at local and national events.
• Consider Virtual Wholesaling – use third party endorsements and technology to communicate with advisors in a structured and timely way to attract and retain investors, while building your brand.
o Proactively engage the media. Let the financial press sell you; third-party endorsed news coverage in national and local business publications adds credibility.
o Leverage third-party endorsed reprints in your other sales and marketing efforts, in print, through social networks and on your website.
o Keep your website up to date with timely commentary and news coverage. Regularly post themes about your fund and the good decisions you made. If your site doesn’t allow you to add timely information, upgrade it. Advisors won’t come back if there is nothing new.
o Communicate. Regular communication with advisors is critical in order to keep your story top of mind. Consistently offering useful, meaningful information will position you in their minds as the expert on certain topics.
o Use monthly email newsletters to drive advisors to new content and fresh ideas on your website such as recent commentaries, Webinar promotions and media coverage.
o Host Webinars or conference calls for advisors on a quarterly basis.
o Take advantage of platform outreach programs to stay in front of their advisors; many of these are free.
o Develop a social media strategy to distribute timely information in the networks investors frequent. Social media allows you to listen to shareholder concerns and become part of the conversation.
Growth will happen if you take the right steps. Like a tomato, the more care and attention you provide, the greater the likelihood for success. Healthy growth depends a great deal on creating relationships. With today’s email, internet and social media opportunities, expanding your reach is easier than ever before. Make a commitment to building strong relationships where advisors and investors can learn to trust and respect your firm and its expertise.
Dan Sondhelm provides personalized services to money management firms and service providers, REITs, public companies and pre-IPO companies seeking to attract and retain investors. Dan is also the executive editor of the company’s online blog, Fund Factor.

Six tips for snaring reporters with your market commentary

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Chief investment officers, strategists, and portfolio managers sink a lot of energy and brain power into their quarterly market commentary. If you’re among them, your return on investment should include greater visibility in the media.

Here are six tips to help you achieve your publicity goal.

1. Publish your investment commentary – or at least some brief observations – prior to quarter-end.

Most newspapers publish their quarterly stock and bond market report the day after quarter-end. So they must conduct their interviews before asset management firms receive final benchmark returns and other analytical inputs. Journalists can’t wait for you to polish your commentary. Consider writing a first draft of your quarterly commentary two to three weeks prior to quarter-end, so you can send it to reporters on the timetable that works best for them, not you.

In calm markets, you may only need to drop in benchmark returns after quarter-end. This was often the case when I wrote economic as well as stock and bond market commentary with Columbia Management’s chief investment strategist. Even in volatile times, you’re unlikely to find yourself discarding all of your pre-quarter-end writing.

2. “Think different.”

Just as Apple successfully, although ungrammatically, markets itself as different from other computers, you should stress to reporters how your views differ from other investment commentators.

This is easiest when, for example, the crowd fears inflation, but you foresee deflation. But even when you agree with the consensus, you can distinguish yourself with a striking analogy, statistic, or sound bite.

3. Make it easy for reporters to grasp your market commentary’s main points.

Just like you, journalists are busy, so they may only skim your headline or first paragraph. Don’t title your piece “Fourth Quarter 2010 Commentary” or lead with “During the fourth quarter, the S&P 500 returned X.X%…” Instead, smack the reader with your most interesting point. For example, “Trading volume indicators suggest a less volatile 2011.”

Follow your provocative headline with a brief summary of your main points. A few bullet points may make your introduction easier to scan.

4. Connect electronically with reporters.

Your commentary will get stale if you wait to send a professionally printed copy via U.S. mail. This is why I recommend email and social media.

As for email, you’ll get better results if you ask reporters’ permission before adding them to your quarterly email. Plus, a phone call gives you the opportunity to start a personal relationship with the reporters by asking about their “beats” (the topics they cover) and what kinds of sources they need.

Social media are also a great way to circulate your commentary. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook can get broader exposure for your compliance-approved material with little additional effort or legal risk.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to post your commentary as your Linked In status update, as I explained in “How can I post my investment commentary on LinkedIn?”

5. Find reporters who are looking for you.

Your professional association may have a media relations manager who fields requests from reporters looking for sources. Wearing my reporter hat, I’ve often contacted the CFA Institute, Financial Planning Association, and National Association of Personal Financial Advisors for help finding sources. Some associations send email blasts to any members who sign up. Others hand-pick interviewees. Some handle PR locally; others work best at the national level. Contact your professional association to ask how its PR activities work.

6. Make it easy for reporters to work with you.

  • Reply promptly to journalists’ inquiries. They’re almost always in a hurry.
  • Give your full name, title, company name, city, state, and phone number in your emails to ensure any article gets your details right. This also makes it easy for the reporter to contact you with follow-up questions.
  • Listen carefully to reporters’ questions before answering them.
  • Offer to email related materials to the reporter. Sometimes a graph or table can earn you bigger play in an article.

What are you waiting for? You can start today by posting your firm’s third quarter commentary as your LinkedIn status.

Image courtesy of Sujin Jetkasettakorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Effective writing and blogging is faster with a plan

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Effective writing takes time. This is true even for short pieces such as blog posts. So don’t beat yourself up if you feel as if you’re rowing upstream instead of kicking up wake as you speed ahead.

It took me slightly less than an hour to type, input, and proofread “Poll: “Investable” or “investible”–which spelling is correct?” my Sept. 7 blog post. That’s fast. At least for me.

I was able to write this quickly because I had a plan, which included:

  1. Clearly defining my topic as “Which spelling is correct?”
  2. Knowing where I’d do my research–I would pull references off my bookcase and do Google searches
  3. Having a structure in mind: First, the case for one spelling, then the case for the other spelling, and finally asking for readers’ opinions–This structure would work no matter what my research showed

These tips also helped me to create 31 posts for my May 2010 Blogathon. I posted daily to my blog for an entire month, including a 10-day vacation.

What plan do YOU use to speed up your writing or blogging? If you lack a plan, then sign up for “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read.” You’ll learn a powerful process for writing blog posts.

Guest post: “How Seeking Alpha Can Build Your Professional Reputation”

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SeekingAlpha.com looks like a great way for investment professionals to share their opinions and market themselves. So when I met Geoff Considine and learned he’d done exactly that, I asked him to guest-blog about his experience.

How Seeking Alpha Can Build Your Professional Reputation

by Geoff Considine

Writing for SeekingAlpha.com has helped me develop my professional reputation and gain attention for my quantitative modeling software and consulting services. Financial professionals can build a substantial brand from SeekingAlpha.  Quite a few writers, advisors, consultants, and others have developed enormous reach on the basis of SeekingAlpha.  I am certainly not even among the most successful.

If I can do it, so can you, especially if you follow the six rules I give at the end of this article.

My experience publishing on SeekingAlpha.com

I have been writing for SeekingAlpha.com since January 2006.  At that time, I had fairly recently launched a software tool for financial advisors and individual investors and I was trying to drum up some attention.  All in, I have written 127 articles on SeekingAlpha.com, even though I have not written for them since September 2009.  I have written a lot over the last year, but I have developed a sufficiently deep audience that I have only been writing for advisor-focused publications such as Advisor Perspectives.  I am quite confident that I never would have been able to write for these professional publications without the experience and reputation gained from writing for SeekingAlpha.com.

Quantext, my small company, gets about 100,000 hits a month on its website in a good month.  I sell software and e-books, along with doing consulting on analytical models for portfolio management and asset allocation.  The only marketing that I have ever done for my business is writing—and SeekingAlpha.com was the only place that I published articles (aside from my own website) in the first couple of years of building out the software side of my business.

Once something is published on a site like SA, people will go back and look at what you have said in the past—it’s a fairly permanent record.  This can be great when your thinking is validated, but can pose reputational risk if you make some outlandish statement.  Back in 2007, for example, one of The Motley Fool’s best-known columnists came out and said that he risk measures such as Beta and volatility just didn’t matter at all, not matter what all the academics say.  His timing was very unfortunate.  Investors who ignored standard risk measures are likely to have suffered disproportionately large losses in the subsequent decline.  This type of reputational risk is quite easy to avoid if you stay away from making assertions in articles that strain common sense or that fly in the face of all standards of practice.

One of the ways to build credibility with articles is to identify thought leaders with whom your thinking is consistent.  One of my early articles looked at Berkshire Hathaway’s portfolio using my portfolio analysis software.  My software identified a number of ways that Berkshire’s portfolio looked very attractive.  If my analysis had suggested that Warren Buffett didn’t know what he was doing, I would have had something of a problem.  I have also analyzed portfolios and strategies proposed by David Swensen (head of Yale’s endowment), Mohammed El-Erian (co-head of PIMCO), and Jeremy Grantham.

The previous paragraph notwithstanding, I am not suggesting that writers steer away from controversy.  If you can make a really solid case for a contrarian theme and publish it in an open forum, you can really stake out territory for your thought leadership.  One of my major early themes that I wrote about in 2006-2007 was that there were a number of really robust reasons to believe that market volatility would skyrocket.  This theme in a number of my SA articles got the attention of an editor at Kiplinger’s and resulted in an interview that appeared in the magazine in early 2008.  As the market conditions have evolved, my writing on this theme has continued to get me very positive attention.

If SA is so great, why don’t I publish much there anymore?  The answer is that I have found that my audience is mainly professional advisors, there are better publications to reach this targeted audience, and I get paid to write these days.  There is a significant opportunity cost for me to write a piece for SA.  If I have more time on my hands in the future, I would certainly put more pieces in SA.

How YOU can thrive on SeekingAlpha.com

There are a few guidelines that I would offer for financial professionals who want to use Seeking Alpha to develop their professional brands:

1)     Make sure that you have something to say, and good arguments to support your ideas

2)     Craft your writing carefully

3)     Use feedback on your articles to develop your writing style

4)     Respond to comments—be an active member of the community

5)     Write regularly and consistently

6)     Learn your special niche

Seeking Alpha can be a powerful channel for reaching your audience, but you need a long-term strategy for how to tap this channel.  If you simply plan to write one article, SA won’t do much for you.  If you write a consistent series of articles that is well articulated and make sense, SA can be enormously powerful.  When I started writing there, I thought of SA as a somewhat narrow channel for getting my ideas out there.  Whether or not I was correct then I am not sure, but this is certainly not the case today.  SA has enormous reach.

Are YOU the one?

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Ever wondered if you could improve your financial or investment blog posts?

You can benefit from a FREE critique by a professional financial writer whose clients include leading investment and wealth management firms. That’s me.

Some of your colleagues have bravely volunteered their blog posts for my review. I’ve written about the strengths–and opportunities for improvement–in Nathan Gehring’s “And About That Financial Plan” and Jonathan Smith’s “Opportunity Arriving Daily” in the Discussion section of my Facebook business page.

When you read my recommendations, you’ll get ideas about how to tweak your own posts.

To volunteer for a critique

If you’re a financial advisor who’d like to volunteer for a gentle critique of a blog post you’ve already published, please email me at info@investmentwriting.com with
* Your name
* Contact information
* Link to your published post

My gentle critique of a financial advisor’s already-published post is intended to be a monthly feature in the Discussion section of this Facebook page. That means there are only 12 openings each year.

Feeling shy?

It’s no problem if you feel too shy to learn in public. You can sign up for “How to Write Blog Posts People Will Read: A 5-Week Teleclass for Financial Advisors.” If you sign up by 12 midnight on AUGUST 31, you’ll pay the Early Bird rate.

Guest post: “Generate Quality, Low Cost Leads with Facebook Ads”

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Kristin Harad’s video series on marketing for financial advisors caught my eye-especially because she talks about niche marketing. I’m a big believer in niche marketing.  So I was delighted when she offered to write a guest post for my blog.

By coincidence, Kristin’s guest post arrived not long after a wealth management firm executive suggested to me that Facebook ads could be a powerful tool for financial advisors.


Generate Quality, Low Cost Leads with Facebook Ads

by Kristin Harad, CFP®

Adding new prospects to your sales funnel can be a costly endeavor for financial advisors.  Workshops, mailings and other tactics can be effective, but the cost-per-lead from these channels is often quite high.  Recently, I’ve discovered how to effectively use a new marketing channel that’s been right under my nose to bring in a steady stream of quality leads at an incredibly low cost:  Facebook.

Now, you probably know that Facebook has become the second largest Web site in the world and last month it was all over the news for registering its 500 millionth user.  But what you perhaps didn’t know is that Facebook also offers an incredible self-service advertising platform that is an absolutely amazing tool for laser-targeting ads to your precise audience.  There are four reasons I really love Facebook Ads:

1)  It’s really easy to create and manage ads.  No technical nor design expertise required.
2)  You can target practically any niche.  Target your ads by location, demographics and interests. You can reach your EXACT audience.
3) It’s highly effective. Put together a well thought-through campaign and you can move people through your sales funnel to becoming paying clients!
4)  It’s really cheap! You don’t pay anything for impressions and some of our ads cost just six cents per click!  I’m adding targeted prospects to my marketing database at a cost of just 83 cents each.

It’s fast and easy to start testing your own Facebook Ads campaign.

Start by going to www.facebook.com/ads where you can sign up online in just a few minutes and instantly begin creating ads that appear on nearly every page of Facebook.  It’s very easy to create the ads — you can make one in just a couple minutes and you don’t need to have any technical or design expertise.

Be sure to design at least five different ads so that you can test different ideas to see which performs best.  The headline and the image you use in your ads have the most impact on click-through rates, so write a few very pithy headlines.  Images of people generally attract better click-through rates.  The more often people click on your ad, the more it will be shown and Facebook will actually reward you with a much lower price.

Next, and most importantly, think carefully about how to target your ad.

Start with location.  My firm mostly serves families within 25 miles of San Francisco, so in the Location section, I target by City, then type in San Francisco and select cities within 25 miles.  Under demographics, identify who your best potential clients are.

Next comes age, relationship status, likes and interests. Since I work with expectant parents and young families, most of my clients are between their late 20s and early 40s, so I put 28 – 44 as the age bracket.  I choose ALL for relationship status, especially since many people on Facebook don’t state theirs.  However, many advisors base their niche off of relationship status, so it can be a really power way to target.  (If you are focused on couples who are getting married, think of the precise messaging you can deliver when you target people who are engaged!)  Then, you’ll come to the small Likes & Interests section, which is where the real power targeting comes from.  This identifies users by what they have placed on their own Facebook page, and you can target them based on practically anything!

As an example, I put in ‘pregnant’ and ‘pregnancy’ as two keywords.  Based on what I picked for location, age, gender and these two keywords, Facebook estimates that my ad will reach 2,200 people.  That’s 2,200 pregnant women between 28 – 44 in the San Francisco Bay Area — my exact customer demographic!  You can’t find that kind of precision anywhere else.  More importantly, now that I know exactly who is going to see these ads, I can write messages that speak directly to them.  For instance, “Pregnant in San Francisco?” or “What New Bay Area Moms Must Know.”  It’s pretty easy to catch my audience’s attention when I know exactly who they are.  Plus, I can quickly create other ad campaigns that micro-target other groups, like expectant fathers or parents of a kindergartner.

These ads work incredibly well for me.  Dozens of people click on them each day, visiting special pages on my Web site that I’ve set up for them.  About 1-in-5 visitors take a further action on my Web site, like subscribing to my email newsletter or signing up for the monthly events that I hold.   It’s critical that you design a Web page with a specific action in mind for these visitors.  Send them to your company’s home page and they will bounce off without spending two minutes on your site.  But, if you offer an informative and relevant free report in exchange for their email address, they will opt-in to your marketing database by the dozens!

That’s what makes Facebook a great way to fill the top of the sales funnel.  Is anyone going to click on a small ad and instantly purchase complex financial products for thousands of dollars?  Of course not!  But by structuring a well-thought out campaign that is designed to pull targeted prospects into the start of my sales funnel, I can begin to form a relationship with them that will evolve over the months ahead and I absolutely convert a portion of these leads into paying clients over time!

Finally, Facebook ads are incredibly low cost.  You can set your own budget, and I’m only spending about $25 per day.  You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and the price is usually well under one dollar per click.  I think it’s a great marketing tool that is absolutely worth experimenting with, so give it a try today at www.facebook.com/ads.

About the Author:  Kristin Harad, CFP® is the President of VitaVie Financial Planning, a fee-only financial planning firm in San Francisco.  She offers a free video series on marketing strategies for financial advisors at http://www.next10clients.com.