Digital Navigation
Synopsis: Looking for a better way to make social media marketing work for you?
Takeaways: Focus on a target client, and don’t worry about alienating others who might need your help. Target-boost your Facebook messaging, and make sure somebody is tracking your results.
As some of you might know, I’m working on a detailed article about the various lead generation programs that are out there, what they offer and how to get the most out of them. But as I was gathering interviews and perspective from the Inside Information community, a question kept coming up over and over again.
The basic form of the question, asked various different ways, was: ‘I’m not really interested in having somebody else generate leads for my firm; I want to generate them on my own. But the lead generation people are way WAY more sophisticated about navigating the social media marketing options than I am, and getting the attention of prospective planning clients. How can I do what they do? Is there a marketing consultant who specializes in social media and financial planners, who will understand my business and also understands how all these social media options work?’
As it happens, while I was in the early stages of gathering information about lead generation, I also happened to be talking with Kalli Fedusenko. Fedusenko is a rarity: a digital marketing consultant who understands financial planning services.
Content plan
Fedusenko is the founder and CEO of something called the Kalli Collective, a prodigious provider of marketing advice through a blog, newsletter and YouTube videos. (There’s a lot of free material if you scroll down this page.) The advice, tips and ideas are all about building a digital marketing strategy for your firm that will drive leads to your landing page and website, rather than to the lead generation provider who then gives the lead to you and two other advisors to fight over.
“I would describe us as a digital marketing agency,” says Fedusenko. “We create customized websites for advisors, create a monthly content plan, provide the content and publish it on their behalf. It’s very much a personalized service for them and their specific goals.” And she tracks the results of each social media posting and the overall engagement that the advisor is receiving, so that the campaign can be modified in real time.
Fedusenko is a rarity: a digital marketing consultant who understands financial planning.
Bob Veres, Inside Information
BULLS-EYE MARKETING
There’s no shortage of ad agencies that provide digital marketing advice these days; indeed, the entire advertising agency world is pivoting from launching TV and radio campaigns on behalf of their corporate customers to courting influencers and building Facebook audiences. What’s different about Fedusenko is the fact that she understands the unique marketing challenges in the financial planning profession, and perhaps most importantly the value that financial planners offer their clients.
“I worked at a financial planning firm for seven years before going out on my own, doing marketing and client service,” she says. “And I became a real fan of the value of planning, and how planning can improve a life—both my own and with my mother, who didn’t think she would ever be able to retire, and after working with a planning professional, is now on track for retirement.”
Fedusenko adds that she grew up in a household where there was a great deal of financial anxiety. “My mother and father both worked, but there was always a sense that the bills weren’t going to get paid, and I grew up with that fear,” she says. Her response was to save aggressively in her early work years. “But it all went into a savings account, which is basically like cash in the mattress,” she says, “because I wasn’t taught any different. Getting a job at a financial planning firm, I was able to learn, hey, there are all these ways to invest in addition to save. I’ve been able to apply those principles in my life,” Fedusenko adds, “and now I’m in a much more confident place.”
Her service starts with an onboarding assessment, which is pretty comprehensive. “We want to get clarity on what your goals are, who your audience is, and what content topics you should be focusing on based on your audience,” says Fedusenko. “We do a pretty deep dive,” she adds, “because that’s the foundation for everything else that we or any marketing person is going to do.”
This will include advice where needed. “I describe the audience as being like a dart board,” Fedusenko explains. “We’re looking for the bulls eye, the very specific client that would be ideal for the firm.”
This bulls-eye advice may engender immediate pushback. “A lot of advisors have a hesitation of: if I focus on this one group, I am not going to be able to get the others who could become a client,” says Fedusenko. “But that’s really not the case. If you create your messaging and marketing for the bulls eye, you are still going to get rings around it. It is not an illogical fear, but they really aren’t going to miss out.”
Some advisors are reluctant to target their digital marketing to a specific client profile, for fear that they'll miss out on others who may need advice.
Inside Information - December 2023
What kind of bulls-eyes are we talking about? “That, of course, depends a lot on the advisor and what they like doing,” says Fedusenko. “We just had a new client come through, and one of their focuses is on employee benefit plans, essentially executives who get stock in their companies. But they weren’t marketing to that audience directly,” she adds. “So now, as we’re writing their marketing materials, we’re going to target executives. That doesn’t mean that someone who is about to retire, a non-executive, is not going to work with them,” says Fedusenko. “But we’re going to focus on the people who fit them best.”
Another firm specializes in families that are interested in generational wealth transfer. But Fedusenko discovered that a high percentage of the firm’s existing clients are widows. “That became a second target audience,” she says, “and the marketing to them is going to look very different from the marketing to the generational wealth prospects.”
The other content aspect is mixing in personal information. “Personal information always drives the most engagement,” says Fedusenko. “We recommend a 70/30 ratio, 70% education, data and showing how you’re an expert, and 30% being that personal content. Personal is going to attract engagement, while professional and educational represents you as an expert.”
Precision boosting
That initial onboarding process will often result in a more customized website, with very customized landing pages for one or two specific target market clients.
With that in place, Fedusenko turns to the content. “We meet with the advisor team every month, and the first thing I ask is: ‘what are you talking with your clients about in the office? Because that is what’s going to resonate with the people they’re trying to work with.”
But the real magic seems to come from the way the targeted, professionally-written content is posted.
“My best advice to people who want to dabble in advertising on social media,” says Fedusenko, “is: do not boost.”
Say what again? “On Facebook, if you put something on your business page, there is a little button that will pop up if you are the page owner, and it will say boost this post. And essentially, you say: yes, I will pay $10 (or whatever) to get more views.”
Does not boosting mean you don’t want more views? No; Fedusenko says that instead of clicking on that button, you want to go into the back end of Facebook, where there are many more options for targeting. There, you can pair your message or advertisement with a more specific audience, and specify what kind of results you’re looking for.
The options are somewhat complicated. They include ‘awareness’ (where the primary goal is to increase brand visibility or introduce planning services to a new target demographic), ‘traffic’ (to drive users to a specific website or landing page that explains the advisor’s services in more detail), ‘engagement,’ (to encourage user interaction, maximize likes, comments and shares), ‘leads’ (if the goal is to collect contact information for subsequent drip marketing and outreach) ‘app promotion’ (to increase app installs and engagement if the firm has developed a customized app as part of the user experience); and ‘sales’ (prompting users to schedule an appointment).
There’s a feature where you choose an ‘audience source.’ Are you trying to drive traffic to your video, or to a landing page where you will capture leads, or an instagram account or Facebook page. You can set a budget, and then turn the dial to highlight people in certain geographic locations, people of a certain age range (between, say, age 30-50), one or both genders, and something called ‘detailed targeting,” where you can be more specific about your bulls-eye. (Simple examples include income level, job titles, interests and hobbies, publications they read, and recent life events like marriage, divorce or retirement.)
Most advisors find it too complicated to track the engagement and clicks from their digital marketing.
Inside Information - December 2023
Mastering this greater specificity, says Fedusenko, can add a surprising amount of effectiveness and efficiency. “We had a client who was spending $200 a month boosting their video,” she says. “We came in and spent $50 and got way more results, just because we were able to turn on those options on the back end.”
Kalli Collective publishes the content it creates on behalf of advisors, and buys targeted advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, based on the advisory firm’s budget. Messages are also posted on the firm’s website and sent out via email to the firm’s prospect list.
This creates a lot of data, as people interact with the email messages, the social media posts and as they visit the landing page. As mentioned earlier, Fedusenko does something that most advisors find too complicated to bother with: she tracks the results and makes modifications to the settings and words that are highlighted in the searches, so that the effectiveness level, ideally, goes up over time: more reach and more engagement as the content and backend settings begin to focus closer and closer to the bulls-eye. You can see a sample of her monthly tracking reports on this page.
What does all this cost? The detailed onboarding is $5,000, and advisors can simply buy that and walk away. If the firm wants Fedusenko to create the content and navigate the various switches and settings and handle the reporting, then the ongoing cost is $2,800 per month.
Talking with Fedusenko, you realize that digital marketing requires a lot of things to come together just right; you can get the target market right but the content might not be engaging. Or the content can be engaging, but not focused on the bulls-eye. The social media settings might not be set to maximize the targeted reach of the postings and ad auction process.
Getting multiple aspects of any endeavor exactly right with pinpoint precision is not a trivial goal—which helps explain why so many advisors have come to believe that digital marketing is really just a waste of time and money. For many of them, says Fedusenko, it is.
“I have seen so many people spend money on digital and social media marketing, and not get any results,” she says. “You have to know what is effective and what isn’t, and that can mean modifying your approach over time.”