Financial Advisors Should Not Ignore the Power of Instagram
With over 500 million daily users, it’s no secret that Instagram is a valuable tool for any business. But using the platform is more than just creating a profile, throwing together some images with clever captions, and following a handful of people you think might be interested in your services. In order to reap the full benefits of Instagram and drive brand awareness, it’s crucial for financial advisors to use the social media platform properly.
As a financial advisor, you may be questioning the value of Instagram. After all, your main focus is to provide valuable advice to your clients and prospects — do you really need an aesthetic feed and an engaged online community to achieve this? While your financial knowledge is ultimately the foundation of your business, without a strategic marketing plan to drive more traffic and business to your firm, you’re not likely to reach your full potential.
Incorporating an Instagram strategy into your financial advisory firm’s social media and marketing plan is a sure-fire way to increase brand awareness, nurture relationships with both clients and potential clients, and gain trust across the board. With just over 1 billion active users on Instagram, this gives you plenty of space to carve out where your unique value proposition aligns with your target audience.
Top 5 Benefits of Instagram for Financial Advisors:
Instagram holds five key potential benefits for independent financial advisors and financial advisory firms that want to reach more prospective clients and add value to their existing client base.
Benefit #1. Opportunity to Increase Engagement with Visual Content
Visual content, such as photos and videos, has the highest engagement on social media, with photos receiving 650% increased engagement from text-only posts. People are visual creatures, and therefore are more attracted to content that features eye-catching visual accompaniments, whether in video or picture form. Increased engagement on the content you are posting affects how the Instagram algorithms interacts with your profile and increases the likelihood that the app will show your photos and videos to a wider audience.
Pro tip: As a financial advisor, you can offer bits of free advice or share statistics with your clients in an easy-to-understand photo or video.
Benefit #2. Instagram is All About Telling Captivating Stories
Instagram focuses on storytelling in visual form, providing an excellent opportunity for your financial advisory firm to showcase its expertise and wisdom. You can focus on telling client success stories, showcase a prospect’s financial journey, introduce your advisory team and tell their stories, and ultimately, create a vivid account of how your financial advisory service can help your audience.
Sharing stories helps to increase trust, build relationships with prospects, and nurture existing client relationships. The more people know about your firm, the more likely they will be to trust your abilities to help them along their financial journey.
Pro tip: You can utilize Instagram Stories daily to showcase the personality and behind-the-scenes of your financial advisory firm.
Benefit #3. Unlimited Prospect Reach
With a solid Instagram marketing strategy, the opportunities to reach prospects are unlimited. With over 500 million daily users, the sky truly is the limit.
To reach potential prospects, consider implementing a hashtag strategy into your Instagram plan designed to utilize hashtags related to your firm, target demographic, and the services you provide. From just a quick glance, it’s clear that both #financialadvisor and #moneytips are excellent, relevant, and popular hashtags, likely to successfully target prospects and forge connections within the financial services industry.
Creating Reels (short video clips) is another smart tactic to incorporate into your strategy. As Instagram has recently shows favoritism towards video content, any videos you share are more likely to be bumped to the top of the algorithm.
Ultimately, the goal should be to focus on creating engaging, relevant, and visually appealing content targeted towards your ideal client.
Benefit #4. Perfect Place to Engage With Your Community & Receive Feedback
Instagram has the highest brand engagement rate of all popular social media channels, making it the perfect place to engage with your audience and make real authentic connections.
To increase client engagement and get your Instagram page noticed by other users, you might begin by following existing or past clients and other accounts in your COI. Start conversations by commenting on other user’s photos or videos to nurture existing or desired relationships along.
Additionally, you can start conversations on posts that have targeted the same hashtags that you use. Their audience then has a chance to be inspired by your thought-provoking, insightful comments and might even click to your page and follow it.
Instagram is also a valuable place to gain feedback from your audience. Try asking questions or soliciting feedback in your content captions. Feedback on Instagram is precious for your financial advisory firm because you can gain a deeper insight into what your prospects need from you and help you stay up to date with the desires of your clients.
Pro tip: In addition, you can network with other financial advisors or financial advisory firms to help each other promote your respective services.
Benefit #5. You Can Peek at What Your Competitors are Saying & Doing
Although you may not be tapped into the Instagram world yet, some of your competitors in the financial space probably are. You can use their Instagram pages to figure out what is working well for them and what is not, and use that information to build your strategy. Pay attention to how often they post content, at what time, how frequently, and what form of content garners the highest engagement.
The Takeaway
After looking at the five key benefits of Instagram for financial advisory firms, you should have a solid base understanding of how Instagram can help nurture relationships, grow your business, and solidify your reputation. However, you could still be questioning how to promote your account properly to reach as many prospects as possible. After all, it’s not enough to have good ideas, you must know how to market them too.
Stay tuned for part two.