Social Media Strategy to Attract Ideal Clients

In this post, I'm going to talk about the social media strategies that are currently driving the most growth for advisors, and then how you can implement it so that it can work for you too. If you can do this in the way that I'm going to share with you, it should take you less than an hour a week to implement, but it should also drive the most traffic for you. It should make a big impact on your new business efforts, at least your marketing efforts to attract people to you.

The social media strategy that we're currently using is bringing one to five people per day into our email list, and an average of one person per day reaching out to us for an intro or a first meeting. This has worked so well that we've actually had to become pretty selective with who we're working with moving forward, because we're just four advisors here and we have a pretty lean ops team too, and we want to keep it that way.

First, I'll go over the medium of communication to use, then I'll talk about the platforms to focus on that are really getting the most results right now. I feel confident about this because we've tried really all of the platforms and all the mediums, and this has been the best so far. Everybody's different and I'll give you a couple of ways to try, but we're seeing 80 percent of the results coming from one place. And that's the one that we'll focus on today.

Then, I'll share what to do if you only have one hour per week, what I recommend to start getting more results from social media.

What medium of communication will get you the best results on social media?

The main forms are of communication on social media are:

• written content: short posts or long-form posts, such as blogs
• audio content: like podcasts or sometimes you see audio on LinkedIn or places like that
• video

In trying to figure out which form of communication is best for you, there are really two things to consider.

Number one is the content type that you enjoy the most consuming. When you're on social media, what kind of content are you most attracted to? What do you enjoy the most or spend the most time doing? Is it video? Is it YouTube or is it watching the videos on LinkedIn? Or is it reading the long-form blog posts or just the short posts? Do the one that's most attractive to you.

Then the second thing to consider is, what’s going to connect you to the most prospective clients?

We got to test all these different styles and content and really the one clear winner that we've seen, the one that's allowed us to connect the most with prospective clients that we've never met, is video.

But don't worry if video is out of question for you, later I'll give you the next best thing that we do.

Benefits of Video

Why do I say video is number one, at least in our list?

It's the next best thing to being face-to-face.

It allows viewers to connect with you in a way that written and audio can't really do. Also, once you build up that library of content, those videos, you're going to have an asset that's going to be able to continually work for you, connecting you to new people who come across your content. It's really valuable. That's what we're starting to see now after over a year of really focusing on video.

Very early on, though, in my efforts of recording video, I was amazed in just the first few months at the people reaching out and saying, it feels like I already know you and talked to you. These are people I'm meeting for the first time, and they're already saying that I feel like I know you. That's pretty powerful.

Another great thing about video is that people really get a good idea of your personality and who you are. People who don't gel with you or who might not be aligned with your personality, they tend to not want to talk to you. Or they won't watch the video. My personality and communication style might be attractive to some people. And it's also going to turn some people off. But the people who like it, they're going to watch the videos and then they're going to end up calling me. So it automatically pre-qualifies our ideal clients. And it can do the same for you.

Now, one problem I've seen is that the many of the advisors that I talked to who are using video and doing it consistently, they're not getting many results or they're not getting many people reaching out to them. And if you consider our Streamline Financial YouTube channel, 11 months ago, we had 70 subscribers in December of last year. And then 11 months later, we're now over 10,000. But I remember talking to advisors who are using YouTube and they had thousands of subscribers. At the time, we had less, a lot less, maybe 100 or 200. But we were getting more people reaching out to us and more prospective clients than they were. They didn't pay for fake subscribers or anything like that, and I thought maybe we were lucky. But I realized that we were doing something that other advisors were not. They were missing one vital piece that I'm going to share with you so that you don't waste your time putting in the effort for your marketing. If you're putting in effort, we want you to get results.

Turning Viewers Into Clients

At Streamline, we have a formula that we use to easily communicate and increase our value in the minds of our clients. In order to attract the ideal client, we actually plugged our ideal client into this value formula. And if you want more information, click here to access a free training on how to come up with your own ideal value formula.

One of the results from doing that was we found the main questions and the main concerns that our ideal clients had and how to communicate those concerns and solutions to them so that it was compelling and easy to understand. We created a solution that didn't require the viewer to talk to anybody and we gave it away for free. And then we had a series of helpful follow-up emails once they had opted in to our email list that really converted them from tire-kicker to ready-to-talk-to-someone.

Once someone gets on the email list, either they stay there and don't do anything, or they unsubscribe, or, eventually, they reach out. So, there's a lot that goes into this, but basically we created a free giveaway and continued the conversation with them in an automated way. So there's no extra time for us to do this, but it's still making connection a little bit deeper than just the first video on social media does.

There's so much to say on this topic and I’ll share more in future posts.

One Hour Per Week

If you only had one hour per week for marketing activities, what should you do first?

If you’re open to video, I recommend writing and recording videos. Start with 30-second to two-minute videos so that it doesn’t take too long to write a piece of content. Just get in the habit of practicing video. I would have the expectation that they aren’t going to be good to begin with, but the realization that video is going to be extremely important to you over the next five years or even longer, because of how many people are moving to video.

Pretend it took you an hour to write a one-minute script. (It shouldn’t, but let’s pretend that it did). That would be your time allocation for that week. That’s it. You spent and hour, that’s the max, cut it off. Then the following week, spend your 60 minutes recording on your iPhone and posting it to social.

When I first started, I made a commitment to myself that I needed to practice video and I started making short one- to two-minute videos and posting them on LinkedIn. When you start, it will be a time commitment even to make just one video. The hardest part, I think, is really just coming up with the content and the ideas and scripting out an engaging video. Because of this, I’m creating a shortcut for advisors to help save you time. If you’d like me to send you monthly content so that you can skip the creation process and already have something nearly ready to post, click here to check that out.

If You Don’t Want To Do Video

Some advisors say video is out of the question, I can’t do it, I don’t want to do it. If that’s you, here’s what I would do with my 60 minutes per week. Focus on just one platform. And that platform is LinkedIn because that gives you the greatest chance of having your written content in front of brand-new eyes. This is where I started putting out regular content in late 2019 and the following year, I had 500 subscribers. A year later, I had 6,000. It was bringing in people who were interested in working together based on the content that I was sharing–mainly it was around tax planning for business owners.

With LinkedIn, the chance of your content getting to people who you’ve never met or who aren’t even part of your network is very high and you can grow your following pretty fast and attract the right types of people.

On LinkedIn each week, I’d spent 30 minutes writing a post, or just writing to exercise that creative muscle, then 15 minutes of the week were spent on posting. With the last 15 minutes, I’d reply to comments that I might get.

And if you want to get even more specific, I’d split this time up over the week. On Monday, spend 30 minutes writing and see how many posts you can write in a half hour. Then Tuesday, spend seven minutes posting in the morning, before noon. Then on Thursday, spend seven minutes posting another one, if you were able to write two on Monday, and spend the remaining time, 15 minutes or so, on replying to any comments that you get. That’s one hour per week, a little bit each day. If you really wanted to chunk it, you could do it all on one day of the week, and just be diligent about that 60 minutes one day a week.

This is just an idea of how to allocate time. You could find a different rhythm that works for you. What I do though, is make sure to schedule it. Put it on the calendar and then stick with it. You already know that the winners in the social media game are the ones who are consistent. That’s it. Even if they start out with really bad, horrible content, or just not-good content because they’ve never done it before, if they stay consistent, improvements are going to be made. Your creative muscle gets stretched and you grow and get better. I’ve seen it with lots of people and I believe that you can do it too. If you need assistance warming up that creative muscle, check out the monthly content membership here that should save you at least 30 minutes per week with content that gets results.

 Multiplying Time

Recently I posted a video on multiplying time. If you saw it, you realize that 30 minutes of your time is probably equal to $500 or $1,000, just based on what you could be spending your time on. That’s why you might not want to do the content thing, because of the time factor. But once you get consistent posting, there’s a final piece to this puzzle that’s very important no matter what platform you’re on.

I’ve seen a lot of advisors not do this. And this is probably why the advisors with big subscription numbers aren’t getting a lot of results. The final piece for social media to be successful is having a micro-commitment that your prospective clients can make that does not involve having an introductory call with you and they don’t have to join your email list. I’m sure you know, joining an email list isn’t that compelling unless there’s a free giveaway associated with it. But if you had something they actually wanted, that was easy for them to get and it took just a small amount of effort, that’s what you want to offer. Look for more details on this in future posts.