Financial Services Shouldn’t Fear Social

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

by Shauna Trainor, The Covenant Group

It’s no sur­prise that many inde­pen­dent finan­cial advi­sors have been hes­i­tant to join social media net­works — even many of the 50 most impor­tant pri­vate banks and wealth man­age­ment insti­tu­tions world­wide have lagged behind, accord­ing to a studyby Asset​inum​.com.

Mea­sur­ing the FIs’ use of Twit­ter, LinkedIn, Face­book and YouTube, as well as their website-social media inte­gra­tion, the researchers deter­mined that the banks aver­aged 43 out of a pos­si­ble 100 points. Assentinum​.com also observed that clients across the globe want greater trans­parency and edu­ca­tional con­tent from their banks. The demand is there, yet finan­cial pro­fes­sion­als and insti­tu­tions have con­tin­ued to ignore it.

Finan­cial ser­vices firms that fail to engage with exist­ing and prospec­tive clients on social net­works may be miss­ing out on vital oppor­tu­ni­ties to build client cap­i­tal and estab­lish deeper rela­tion­ships. These web­sites can also prove use­ful in the sales stage of the buy­ing cycle, when you are research­ing prospects’ busi­nesses, val­ues and goals in order to devise a solu­tion that will help them. Social media can make your sales, mar­ket­ing and client rela­tion­ship man­age­ment respon­si­bil­i­ties more effi­cient and bring your firm into the 21st century.

“Espe­cially for renowned banks with a demand­ing clien­tele, it is increas­ingly impor­tant to be present in the vir­tual social net­work,” the com­pany notes. A sur­vey from Cogent Research found that more than 5 mil­lion investors with more than $100,000 investable assets use social media plat­forms when research­ing and mak­ing finan­cial deci­sions.. Finan­cial Plan­ning reports that the study also deter­mined that 75 per­cent of the 5-million investors men­tioned in the research study turn to LinkedIn most fre­quently when con­duct­ing invest­ment research.

There is no rea­son to shy away from social media. Although it may seem com­plex in the­ory, the reg­u­la­tory issues asso­ci­ated with the chan­nel can be avoided if you care­fully plan your social mar­ket­ing strat­egy. Before set­ting up blogs and pro­files, take time to iden­tify the goals you have for mar­ket­ing and pro­mot­ing your prac­tice and yourself.

Are you join­ing these net­works sim­ply to spread aware­ness of your brand, or do you gen­uinely want to cre­ate more mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions with the pub­lic, prospects and clients? How do you cur­rently use social media for busi­ness pur­poses? What do you hope to gain by expand­ing your online presence?

Side­step­ping social media and keep­ing it out of your mar­ket­ing mix is no longer an option. Increas­ingly, high net worth indi­vid­u­als, as well as the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion, are join­ing the net­works and using dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools to stay in touch with their busi­ness associates.

Shauna Trainor is The Covenant Group’s Mar­ket­ing Man­ager. She focuses on The Covenant Group’s own mar­ket­ing strat­egy and also helps entre­pre­neurs through finan­cial advi­sor train­ing to lever­age social media and other tech­nol­ogy to spread the word about their ser­vices and prac­tices and build relationships.

Fol­low The Covenant Group

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