This is a transcript from the Marketing for Advisors Podcast. To listen, please visit mfapodcast.com and every episode is easily available and free to listen.
Don Anders: Hello and welcome to Marketing for Advisors. My name is Don Anders, here with Donovan Stull. And we are going over, in this episode, branding on Facebook. Now I think most financial advisors agree that Facebook, at this point, is powerful. I'm glad that, when I first started talking about Facebook, people would laugh at me and say, "No, none of our clients have that thing." And I'm like, "But they will." And the answer is usually, "But I don't, and I don't think they will." And now everybody's on it. So Facebook is-
Donovan Stull: And that conversation's only been, what, three years old?
Don Anders: Yeah, three years.
Donovan Stull: That was, when we first really started getting into all of this three years ago of kind of hitting our real strides on it, early on, people are like, "Yeah, there's no way that my client's going to be on there. There's no way that my prospects are going to be on there." And so forth. And here we are.
Don Anders: I mean, it was an obvious trend. What happens is, as financial advisors, most of us deal with retirees or pre-retirees, so they're usually the last ones to adopt something new. But it was obvious that it was going to go that way. So, and what a lot of people don't realize is Facebook, while there's a lot of people on there, the fastest growing segment of Facebook is 55+ in the United States.
Donovan Stull: And for most advisors, that's probably-
Don Anders: That's our ideal client.
Donovan Stull: That’s the demographic that they're going at. I look at my parents who are in that demographic and they're on Facebook all day long. They're looking at every last image, every last post that's up there. And they're, for the most part, just like a lot of them, they're slow-scrollers so they're going to consume every piece of content that's in their feed.
Don Anders: Yeah. Next time that you're out with younger people, notice how fast they scroll. Someone under the age of 18, I can't believe how fast they are. I equate it to back when I was 13, 14, 15, how fast I would scroll through the channel guide and my grandmother would always say, "How do you even see anything you're going so quick." I feel the same way about kids today on Instagram and Facebook. They're scrolling so quickly, but older people they are, they scroll at a much slower pace statistically so which is good because you want them to be able to see your brand. You want them to be able to absorb some of your content and they will actually interact a lot more. And so what we want to talk about today was kind of the branding of it.
So we'll get into another conversation about getting people actually to events and doing calls to action for through Facebook, which is how we get almost all of our leads or majority of our leads. But branding is important too because like we talked about in the past episodes, it is a really high barrier of entry or cost to hire a financial advisor, not even from really the financial perspective, but the risk.
Donovan Stull: Sure. Well, kind of going as far as the branding actually goes and let me ask you this, what are your thoughts on doing branding in a way where you're always trying to offer them something or a call to action?
Don Anders: Would you like that?
Donovan Stull: Absolutely not.
Don Anders: Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of times people do that because that's what they want for their business, but they don't employ any empathy when they brand. So for us, our whole thing is reverse engineering, what I would want to see as a client and what I respond to.
Donovan Stull: We dive in more to this, but I think the association, when people think of an ad, an ad is to sell something, right? It's usually not just here we are, and that's it. It's, hey, call this number, do this, take this action.
Don Anders: That is what a terrible advertiser does. Someone that doesn't know what they're doing. But is that what Nike does?
Donovan Stull: No.
Don Anders: Is that what Coca Cola does?
Donovan Stull: Yeah. You'll never see a Nike commercial where they ask you to go buy something. And we talked about this the other day, talking about Coca Cola and all of their ads are always feel good. People are associating Coke with eating good food or we talked about the polar bears.
Don Anders: Or the Superbowl.
Donovan Stull: Superbowl commercials, right.
Don Anders: They always want to be one of the, after the Superbowl win, the number that's the most expensive commercials right after the victory because people are on the euphoric high and they want to be associated with that good brand. With Facebook, you kind of get that same thing. The reason that people go onto Facebook is because they're looking for a little dopamine hit, just like a slot machine. And ironically enough, well not ironically enough, it's not a coincidence that the people who invented the Facebook algorithm and the way you see things, they are the same people who invent the algorithms and the way you see things on slot machines. So they know based on how you scroll, how fast you scroll, what you stop on, what you click on, what you interact with, they know what you like to see.
And so their whole thing, Facebook makes money while you are on Facebook. So, they are trying to make you feel good because if you don't feel good, you're going to get off of Facebook. They want you to kind of get sucked in and feel good while you're there. And so the nice thing about doing just general branding is you can be that polar bear after the Superbowl, right? We can do it, instead of after the Superbowl and paying $20 million, and now you're doing it for a couple cents per view and you're doing it when they're looking at pictures of their grand babies and they're looking at pictures of their high school sweethearts-
Donovan Stull: Vacations, whatever.
Don Anders: Bacations, their brother's birthday, all these things that make them feel good, you can be associated with that, not consciously, but subconsciously. Now your brand is, "Oh yeah, I like these people." And they don't even really know why. But that's because they like Facebook and they like what they're seeing and if they see you consistently, then you get associated with that. Now you are going to have some people that just don't want to see any kind of ads or anything besides what they want to see. But that's every type of marketing. And so like we talked about with the dinner seminars, when you see people scarfing down stakes and you know that they don't want to meet with you, you're going to get bad feedback on Facebook.
But most digital marketers, professional digital marketers, they'll tell you, if you don't piss somebody off by noon, you're not doing something right. You're not marketing hard enough. And so my recommendation is if you say, yeah, I've been running some ads and I haven't had one bad comment, well you're not doing a very good job because there are people that are going to be ticked off no matter what you do, no matter how sweet you are, no matter how nice you are, you could just do nothing but puppy dogs and there is going to be someone who's upset with that. Right? So my recommendation is get out there, put some branding together. So for our clients, we do just very basic feel good memes so that we can boost out to other clients, prospects, we can-
Donovan Stull: And this is for them to associate our brand is just something nice, lighthearted, nothing over the top. We're not asking them for anything in these ads. We're literally just paying a few dollars to show up in a couple hundred, couple thousand people's news feed just to see something that already looks happy or-
Don Anders: Also having it there when somebody researches you is important too.
Donovan Stull: Absolutely.
Don Anders: So because they are going to look you up on Facebook, they're going to look you up everywhere. So-
Donovan Stull: It's something to keep in mind is what you like or what you think is good to put out, might not be what the prospects or the leads will think is a good thing as well. So just have to know your audience in that aspect.
Don Anders: Yeah we had one financial advisor, he was like, I think it was a picture of a puppy dog or a cat or something with a retirement quote. He was like, "Well why would anyone want to have this associated with their financial advisor? It needs to be all data and all." And I was like, he goes, "That's what I would want to see." And I go, "Do you really want people like you as a client? Probably not. I don't think you are your ideal client." So I just put myself into the mind of, I'm in my 60s, I'm retired, I have some grandkids, I'm really worried about whether or not I'm going to run out of money and I really don't want to be beaten over the head with a bunch of financial ads. What am I going to want to see if something pops up? What would make me feel good? What would draw me into a brand? And the cutesy feel good memes and videos and posts that we create for our clients and you can too, are really good.
So if you need help creating those, you can feel free to reach out to us. You can go to our website, mfapodcast.com. We're also going to have at the end of the show and there's a contact us button. If you need some help creating or some guidance, we'd be more than happy to do that. But definitely do some branding even if it's just taking some pictures of your office, your office staff or what you're doing or any of that. My recommendation is use Facebook for branding and don't be scared to pay a little bit of money to get in front of people. I always can tell people are thinking, "Well I just want it to go viral." Okay, well that doesn't exist anywhere on Facebook. Why would they?
Donovan Stull: Yeah. And when you see these videos that pop up in your news feed that have 6.1 million views, at some point, they paid for that to get out. That didn't just happen because they posted it and that was it.
Don Anders: And they're also usually not businesses.
Donovan Stull: Correct. Yeah. You’ll see like those Dodo videos, of a pit bull that saved a duckling. It's adorable but-
Don Anders: Yeah. But that's just a community video. That's not a business. Well it is a business, but Facebook doesn't view that as a business. Or you'll see the purple mattress commercial that is real funny or something or these different commercials that are really funny that you're like, "Oh well they got a bunch of views." But they had to pay to get that content out first. Then people liked it and then it went viral. So, but the way I look at it is you wouldn't expect a radio show or radio station or TV station to give you free advertising. So why would you expect the same from Facebook? They're a platform the same way a TV station or a radio station is so why are you expecting free distribution from them when you wouldn't expect it from something else? So just something to think about. Yeah. And if you're not using Facebook, listen, if you're planning on retiring in the next two or three years, then don't use it. But if you want to be in business for 5 to 10 to 15 to 20 years, my recommendation is you better establish your page and start posting some things because it's everyday getting more and more valuable.
Donovan Stull: And something I think before wrapping this all up, let's talk about the CTAs that people are always trying to put out. So in one of our earlier episodes, we talked about mailers and pros and cons of it. Well, anytime that people send out a mailer, it's always a CTA. It's always a call to action.
Don Anders: Well it has to be.
Donovan Stull: You're right, it has to be. But it's not a branding purpose. So with Facebook, you have this opportunity to brand yourself in a great light. You don't always have to be asking for something in return. It doesn't need to be come to this seminar, download this, click on this to go set an appointment. It doesn't need to be something of that nature.
Don Anders: Well if you were paying $8,000 per Facebook post, it should be a CTA.
Donovan Stull: That aspect of it, sure-
Don Anders: But you're not. That's why a mailer, you have to do a CTA because you have to try to recoup that cost. The beautiful thing about Facebook is it's so cheap right now. You don't have to try to recoup every cost.
Donovan Stull: A dollar a day minimum.
Don Anders: Yeah. I mean you don't have to always recoup. Just, you can get that branding and just, it's almost like having a really nice billboard or banner. Billboards don't always have calls to action. Sometimes they just want to associate, I always use the example of McDonald's billboards. The point of a McDonald's billboard is not to sell a $1 cheeseburger. You'd have to sell so many cheeseburgers to make up. The purpose of that billboard is that when you're hungry, you think of McDonald's and you go there. So same thing with your brand, right? You shouldn't always be trying to sell something. You just want, when an issue occurs and it pops up, you want to be one of the brands that they associate with help. So you want them to say, "Oh yeah, I really need some help. Oh yeah, there's those, ABC financial company I always see. Great." And then you can do it.
All right, let's wrap up. Wrap this up. Thanks so much for listening and have a good day.
Donovan Stull: See you next time.