Why financial institutions are using social media marketing to connect more

Is social media for financial services firm worth it?

Do the connections on it have any commercial value whatsoever?

Yes – but it takes work.

There is a time lag between when you start building a network on social media and when the decision makers who follow you convert into business.

For financial services firm, social media is a platform on which you can:

• showcase your commercial experience and knowledge and the value you deliver to your clients and
• become an influencer – a person to whom people turn for information and insight on specialist commercial finance and mortgage products.

To be successful on social media takes effort.

The two major reasons why not as many commercial finance specialists take full advantage of it as there should be are:

1. you need to spend a lot of time creating linguistic and visual material which your followers engage with and
2. you’re busy enough and the constant creation of linguistic and visual content is not something you have time for or want to do.

Let More Than Words’ commercial finance marketing team do the work for you.

Our social media marketing service for commercial finance and mortgage providers

We offer the following two services to commercial financial services clients:

1. Social media profile creation

We create striking, findable, and persuasive profiles for you personally, for your colleagues, and for your company.

We want your personal and company profiles to be as easily locatable as possible for decision makers searching for your commercial financial products and commercial mortgages.

When they do find you, we want them to clearly understand what you do and what you offer so that:

• they ask to connect with you on the platform so that they can see you posts and
• they get in touch with you to get a quote from you.

Both the copy and the imagery we use are important in making the profiles we create for you as visible as possible as are the privacy settings we’ll recommend you adopt for each account.

2. Social media marketing management

Our full social media management service includes the creation of you and your colleagues’ social media profiles and your company’s social media profile.

Our four targets for clients with our social media management service are to:

1. develop a recognisable and appreciated shared linguistic and visual branding for you and your firm online,
2. highlight your experience and the value you offer to clients by creating and distributing subject-specific, high-quality content to appeal to potential clients and other people of interest to you,
3. increase the number of relevant people you reach through a mixture of organic and paid-for social media marketing campaigns, and
4. manage followers’ interaction with the content we create with the goal of turning those interactions into enquiries of the highest quality.

For both your organic and social media campaigns, we’ll create additional content which followers can download and share with others to further extend the reach of your marketing beyond the platforms.

Find out more

Take full advantage of the opportunity social media offers to connect with business people, developers, investors, brokers, lenders, and introducers.

To find out more about our social media marketing campaigns for financial services companies, please call us on 0330 010 3495 or click here to email us.

Why social media is growing in importance in commercial lending marketing strategies

Social media for financial services companies offers a brand new and effective way to reach different target audiences.

The key to an overall successful social media marketing strategy is to be on as many relevant channels as possible – for example, someone wanting a business mortgage may choose to search LinkedIn first before they search Google.

It’s important to remember what social media is not

Social media is not a sales channel – it is a marketing and communications channel.

It’s where professionals go to share experiences and insights.

It’s an online space where mutually beneficial connections are made.

And, because it’s not a sales channel, you’ll be wasting your time if all you ever do is make promotional post after promotional post.

If you’re a social media user yourself, you know how quickly you’ll block or unfollow someone if all they ever do is pollute your newsfeed with sales pitch after sales pitch.

That’s not what we want for you.

Social media for financial services is more about “them” and not “you”

Social media is a platform on which you can build real commercial value into your personal and corporate brands.

You build value by sharing important and actionable information with fellow users which makes a difference to their lives and to their businesses.

The more important and actionable information you post, the more your followers will share your content exposing you to an ever wider audience.

For every five posts, make four of them “tell” and one of them “sell”.

For the post you choose to “sell” on, give your followers something of particular value like:

• a downloadable guide,
• a free audit, or
• a confidential conversation.

Make it clear that there’s no quid pro quo – you expect nothing in return.

Getting the best results with a planned and tailored strategy

To get the best results from social media, you should not only mix up the content of your messages but you should also mix up how you deliver that message.

More Than Words creates and distributes the following types of content for our clients:

• white papers for people who want to fully understand your commercial lending products,
• sector-specific reports (like the use of commercial finance in particular lines of industry),
• articles which establishthought leadership,
• invitations to events that your company is either hosting or attending,
• stunning infographics,
• links to the newest articles on your website,
• short pieces directing followers to items of interest on third-party websites, and
• simple and short messages conveying useful information.

Social media for financial services companies – helping prospective clients to overcome the fear of applying and the fear of rejection

There are 4.5m businesses in the UK, nearly one tenth of them limited, yet the number of businesses which apply for commercial lending or commercial mortgages is surprisingly low.

The same fear stalks business owners which stalks consumers when they apply for a mortgage or a loan – the fear of applying only to be rejected.

In today’s business climate, access to business finance for even the smallest of companies has never been so broad.

There are far more suppliers and far more products than there were ten years ago.

However, most directors, developers, landlords, and small business owners are completely unaware of the sheer diversity of choice which is available to them.

With social media messaging, you can share that knowledge with an interested audience – an audience which you have selected and one which has selected you.

Become the commercial lending and finance expert they private message for advice

The more you’re seen, the more your voice and experience is trusted.

There will be some followers who private message you immediately for advice.

Others will not be quite ready yet to make the decision but, as long as they continue to see interesting, actionable, and engaging content from you in their newsfeed, you’ll be the professional they contact when they are ready to make a decision to proceed.

Social media strategies for financial services firms – how to build up followers quickly

In addition to asking to connect with decision makers in your target markets, one of the quickest ways to build your and your company’s numbers of followers is to include links to your profiles on your website, in your emails, and on all your marketing material.

When you use our social media management service, one of the first tasks we carry out is to contact the users on each platform most likely to be of greatest value to you.

We’ll also try to broaden your exposure to:

• other people in your sector (new opportunities) and
• those in other sectors with a large number of followers (who may repost your content to their audience).

We’ll aim to contact 10-15 users a day on your behalf and, with your permission, manage the initial conversation before passing it over to you.

Take advantage of the opportunities which paid advertising on social media offers commercial lending firms

Each of the platforms offers opportunities to pay for advertising for a much wider yet focused reach.

Although costs vary per industry, you should expect to pay up to £80 per lead on Facebook, £50 on Facebook (lower quality leads) and £20 on Twitter (lowest quality leads).

We create and execute both organic and paid-for social media marketing campaigns to increase engagement with your target audience.

Our role is to use this engagement with a view to obtaining as many direct contact details from decision makers as possible to provide your sales and marketing teams with workable and quality sales leads they can close.

Social media analytics in financial services

Whether for mortgage social media posts or for LinkedIn posts on mezzanine finance, it’s always been difficult to produce reliable marketing analytics for financial services firms.

However, that’s true for all types of firms using social media – the platforms themselves do not give out a great deal of usable information about who interacts with your posts.

For example, you don’t get a list of contact names, telephone numbers, and email addresses of the people who have read your posts or who have clicked through to your website.

That said, we see the value in social media and what it delivers for us as a business and for our customers across different sectors including commercial finance.

The key to success is to use social media to:

• encourage as much private messaging contact with followers and
• capture followers’ details when they visit your site and download your free materials.

Social media is still evolving however, despite the lack of detailed analytics, it is too popular a marketing medium to ignore.

Social media for commercial finance – speak to our team

We’re open during office hours between Monday and Friday.

Please call us, email us, or fill out the contact form to work out how you can use social media to promote your commercial lending and mortgage products to the people most likely to need your services now and in the future.

We’re available on 0330 010 3495 or you can email our commercial financial marketing team by clicking here.

We’re based in North Shields town centre if you want to come and visit us. There’s lots of free parking outside and we’re only three minutes’ walk away from North Shields Metro station.