This article was first featured in Financial Advisor Magazine on Dec 1st, 2021.
If you’re targeting a professional audience, LinkedIn, with its 750 million users, is the place to be for marketers wanting to get the best bang for their buck.
For advisors seeking clients among business owners and corporate executives, as well as firms looking to grow through mergers and acquisitions or seeking new recruits, LinkedIn offers several ad options at different costs.
Advertising budget needs vary by business, but putting aside about $500 to $750 per month should yield significant returns on investment for independent financial advisors in particular.
In fact, LinkedIn’s menu of ad options also allows marketers to choose the right combination of paid content that’s more effective across the four main types of paid advertising a financial advisor can offer on the platform: text ads, single image ads, carousel image ads and video ads.
Starting With The Basics: Text Ads
Easy to create and only requiring a minimal amount of copy and no image, text ads are LinkedIn’s pay-per-click (PPC) advertising option. These snippets appear on the sidebar and are designed to create minimal distraction as users navigate the site.
Text ads work best for an advisor wanting to generally promote their firm or promote a specific service that can be described in less than 100 characters (with a limit of 25 characters for headlines and 75 characters for descriptions).
Caveat emptor: You shouldn’t use text ads if you want to promote some sort of free content or build leads—these are typically difficult to describe in such a small space.
Up Your Game with Image Ads
A picture is worth 1,000 words. Unlike text ads, these promotional pieces appear as part of the page’s main content feed. Ads such as these tend to blend in well since they look like a LinkedIn post rather than promotional content.
Single-image ads work best when advertising an ebook, a specific service, or promoting site traffic for a general awareness campaign.
Carousel Image Ads
These ads work like the single image ad but invite user interaction with multiple images that can be swiped through.
Promotional items, such as a retirement planning ebook, could be accompanied by images showing people at different stages of their life, driving home the message that retirement should be on the radar of people of all ages.
Video Advertisements
If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is worth 1,000 pictures!
Across all social media platforms, videos are emerging as the medium of choice. The number of digital video viewers in the United States reached 239 million in 2020, and according to a 2021 Biteable survey, 74% of marketers said video has a better return on investment than static imagery.
People love sharing videos, especially if the information is easily interpreted in a short amount of time, is of reasonable to high quality and invites conversation. Visual media are also easier to consume than text.
Towards The Future
The pandemic has upended the way advisors conduct their businesses, and many in the industry feel that they’re not up to speed on social media best practices. The reality is these platforms are constantly evolving, with new product offerings always being introduced, for both B2B and B2C marketers.
LinkedIn, for example, recently introduced Articles for Pages, an in-app feature that allows you to publish articles from your LinkedIn page. According to LinkedIn, the platform plans to allow qualifying companies to publish in-app newsletters in the near future.
The tech landscape is still rapidly expanding, as are social media platforms. Moving on a nimble basis is essential, and LinkedIn ads can provide a way to get your business noticed, quickly, easily and cost effectively.
