In today’s digital age, social media has become an essential ingredient for most marketing plans. You know that social media is effective for reaching potential clients, plus it’s a great way to strengthen client relationships, but with so many options and all of the different platforms where to start can be confusing.
On this Elementality, Abby talks with Jeff Morgan, Head of Marketing at Elements, about how to integrate social media strategies as part of your marketing efforts. Discover which platform might be the best place for a small RIA to start—and why. Find out about the challenges that are part of building an organic social presence and the advantages of paid social. And learn why content creation plays a pivotal role for any social marketing game plan.
Podcast Transcript
Jeff Morgan:
Organic social requires you to build your own audience and so there’s a lot of like in the weeds relationship building and trying to leverage other influencers, other people with audiences to try to build your own audience so that when you post something someone actually sees it. That’s the real chore of organic social, where paid social you are paying for that audience so you can skip the hard long, build your own audience kind of like slow burn kind of activity and just jump straight to the results, but it comes obviously at a cost. You have to pay for that and you pay handsomely for it.
Jordan Haines:
Welcome to Elementality. Each episode, we will explore the challenges and the opportunities faced by financial advisors and how advisors can use Elements to grow their business and serve their clients better. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Abby Morton:
Welcome to Elementality, everyone. I’m your host today Abby Morton here with our head of marketing elements Jeff Morgan. Welcome Jeff.
Jeff Morgan:
Hi Abby how’s it going?
Abby Morton:
I’m so excited to have you on.
Jeff Morgan:
I’m excited to be here. I’m always behind the scenes, and I never get to be in front of the scenes. So this, big deal for me.
[laughter]
Abby Morton:
We’ve pulled Jeff out of the back room that we lock him in to come and talk about some very important marketing tactics today. So we’re excited to have you on the show.
Jeff Morgan:
Happy to be here.
Abby Morton:
So, Jeff not only does marketing for us at Elements but he also helps grow and scale dentist advisors and still is involved with them a little bit today. So Jeff is very knowledgeable. Even before that, he owned his own marketing agency, so anything marketing, Jeff’s our go-to, he’s very knowledgeable. And so I wanted to bring you in today, Jeff, to talk about a number of different marketing tactics but probably more specifically paid social. As we’ve talked to advisors and growing their marketing efforts and thinking about all the different marketing tactics they can use, I think paid social is this kind of mystery and this maybe type marketing type activity that’s a little hard to figure out. And so we thought we’d bring you in to kind of level the playing field and help people understand a little bit more about really what paid social is all about. How does that sound?
[chuckle]
Jeff Morgan:
Sounds good to me. I’ll do my best.
Abby Morton:
All right. So why don’t you start you know high-level, how would you describe paid social and how have you used it kind of in your different marketing activities? Give us kind of a high-level overview of what it even it really is.
Jeff Morgan:
Sure, yeah. Well, paid social is where you use the different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok and any of the other ones that are out there to get your ads in front of people. And instead of organically displaying those ads based on the algorithm like you do when you do normal social media posts, you’re actually paying that platform to get your ad in front of people. So that’s just like at a high level what it’s all about, and it’s a way to essentially use your money to get in front of the right audience.
Abby Morton:
Yeah, okay. And I think this is an important kind of distinction because when I joined the marketing team, I didn’t really understand the difference between organic and paid social, and they’re two very different things. Like you described, organic is just me going on my Twitter profile and posting every day. Whereas paid social is me paying the company to put ads in front of a very hopefully select group of people and I hope they click on that ad. How would you maybe build on that definition?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah that’s how I would define it. I think that the reason why they’re so different is because organic social requires you to build your own audience, and so there’s a lot of like in-the-weeds relationship building and trying to leverage other influencers, other people with audiences to try to build your own audience so that when you post something someone actually sees it. That’s the the real chore of organic social, where paid social you are paying for that audience. So you can skip the hard long you know build your own audience kind of like slow burn kind of activity and just jump straight to the results, but it comes obviously at a cost. You have to pay for that, and you pay handsomely for it.
[laughter]
Abby Morton:
Okay. Great, Jeff. So tell me how does paid social fit into your overall marketing strategy at a small RIA?
Jeff Morgan:
Well, I think it depends on your budget, first of all, because there is a cash outlay that you have to put out there to get started, and it depends on if you know your audience and how you can identify that audience on the paid platform. So I would start by looking at all of my marketing channel options. The organic ones for the smaller firms with low smaller budget are probably going to be where you want to start because you don’t have to spend cash to get results. Like I was mentioning before though the downside of doing organic free marketing is that it’s a long-term investment. And I would say it’s a very similar long-term investment to what you would counsel your clients to do with the stock market. So, marketing investments compound over time. So you may invest for a whole year into a specific marketing channel like organic social, or your email list, or building a podcast audience or a webinar audience without much result at all, but then as your audience slowly gets bigger and better, then you’ll start to see more and more results over time. And just like in financial investing, those results compound and you start to see a huge return on your investment. But you have to be consistent and you have to be in it for the long haul. So what I’d say is that paid social, if you have the budget for it, is a great way to jump to the front of the line. It’s a way to get immediate results as long as you’re prepared to pay for it. So, yeah.
Abby Morton:
So, tell me, you kind of say as long as you’re prepared for it and like you really got to put some skin in the game, if I go in and put $400 into a campaign, am I automatically going to be successful? Like talk to me about benchmarks and numbers and how do I know how much money has been enough to know if it worked or didn’t work.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, that’s probably one of the biggest misperceptions for especially small business owners as they go into a paid marketing or paid advertising scenario, is the amount of investment that it really requires to be successful, because number one, when you first start, it’s not going to be nearly as is as efficient in terms of the cost per lead or cost per meeting that you get on your calendar as it will be after you’ve optimized over a period of time. So when you first get started, what I’ve seen in the RIA, small RIA kind of advertising campaigns is that to get a consultation on your calendar, it could be… It’s usually around $800 per consultation when you first get started. And then from…
Abby Morton:
Yeah, I’d say that’s on the higher end. For those that don’t know, $800 per consultation, that seems like a lot.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, it is a lot but you also have to start thinking about what’s the return on that investment. So depending on what your close rate is on those consultations that come in, you may actually have ROI in the first year from that. So, let’s say that you spend $800 per consultation and you get 10 consults, and out of those ten consults, three of them close or four of them close, then you’re easily going to cover that $8000 in marketing expense in the first year with that client. But many small business owners don’t think of it in terms of ROI, they don’t think of it as like what’s the lifetime value of this client that I’m bringing in and how much am I willing to spend in order to get one client?
Abby Morton:
And I’m thinking with paid social it’s probably another way to target someone who maybe you weren’t in your other marketing activities, so not only did you bring in in closing a client but you probably brought in someone who maybe you couldn’t have done any other way.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, and paid social beyond just like scheduling consultations can be used to build your organic audiences. So, if you have a podcast or an email list or a webinar that series that you’re doing on a monthly basis, you can use paid social to build those audiences and then nurture relationships with people over time and then convert them later. Yeah, so going back to the the benchmarks though, $800 would be probably worst-case scenario but you have to think well. That means how much money do I need to really put into this thing in order to get traction to get enough like actual visitors to my website and everything to get one consultation. You’re gonna have to spend 800 bucks right like to get one, potentially. So if your budget is $400 a month, you can expect maybe in the first few months to get one consultation every two months. And for most people that are uninitiated, that would feel like this is not working.
Abby Morton:
Dropping money down the drain and like getting no traction from it, getting one every other month. Okay.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, and it might feel like it’s not successful because you’re not seeing any success immediately, but actually it’s just a numbers game, and you need to get your numbers up high enough in order for that channel to really start working. Now, as you start to get some experience and you start to narrow your messaging down and start to see like what… How are people engaging with my ads, like my… Maybe I have a set of five different ads that I’m running. And out of those five, number three is getting the most engagement and the most traffic to my website now I’m starting to see well that particular message is resonating better with my target audience so I’m gonna like cut out the other four and I’m gonna create three new ads that are similar to the one that was working. And so over time, you can start to narrow down like what works and what doesn’t.
Jeff Morgan:
And as you do that, your cost per consultation or cost per lead, depending on what what you’re trying to do, will go down because you’re getting better and better at identifying how to turn engagement and traffic into leads and consultations. So, what I would say, once you’ve got things optimized, a really good cost per consultation would be somewhere between 250 and $300. So at Dentist Advisors, we, in our best months, we’ve had it all the way down to like $150 per consultation. And so it’s always like kind of fluctuating somewhere between there and about $300. And we’ve been doing it religiously for the last like six or seven years. And so we kind of have it dialed in now and know how much it’s gonna cost and what our… We know our customer acquisition cost, we know what our ROI looks like, we know how much money we’re gonna make for every dollar we spend on social media. And so it makes a lot of sense. It’s a no-brainer kind of investment. But you’re gonna have to be really patient in the beginning if you’re new to this.
Abby Morton:
How long? I mean be patient like let’s say I put five grand into it over a span of… Like how long do you think I have five grand, I want to go spend to try this out, what time frame do you feel like and is that even a good kind of starting point? What would you say?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t even attempt to get in to paid social unless you can spend at least $1000 a month. I’d probably… Based off of how many consultations you’re gonna get for that though, you may want to bump that up to $2000 a month so you could expect to get three demos or three consultations or in a single month, and that’ll give you enough learning so that you can start to optimize at a fast enough pace that it makes sense. So, if you could swing $2000 a month, that’s probably where you want to start and then you can go up from there, but it’s gonna take that much to really get the data in quick enough.
Abby Morton:
And then would you say try it for a year and then you’ll have known if it’s gonna work or not or what time frame would you…
Jeff Morgan:
Well, I’d say if you’re spending $2000 in one month and you don’t get at least two to three consultations out of that, assuming consultations is what your objective is, then there’s something wrong. And I would stop and reevaluate and change maybe my ad creative, and then I’d try again the next month, like kind of starting from scratch and seeing if if you can dial it in. And if you go three months and don’t get by the end of those three months, you’re not getting at least three consultations after that, I would say that you probably need to ask an expert to evaluate what you’re doing to see if they can give you some advice. And honestly, you should do… You could and should probably do that from the get-go because even if you spent 30 minutes with somebody who had done this a lot in their career to review the way that your campaigns are set up, review the ad that you set up and review your landing pages, they would be able to give you a ton of advice and help you avoid spending money that you don’t need to.
Abby Morton:
Do you think then someone could do it on their own to be successful or you’re kind of like it would just be probably more beneficial for you to spend the money to hire someone to do it for you?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah. Well, I think when you’re at that budget, you can’t afford to hire somebody to do it for you, but you can afford to hire somebody to give you maybe a consultation once a month or you just review your campaign performance and give you some ideas of how to improve.
Abby Morton:
That’s a good idea, yeah. So, tell me in terms of, like you said, maybe initially start with five ads and you decide number three works the best so then go and take number three and do a couple iterations of that… Something I’ve learned is like there’s something called ad fatigue, and over time it’s not like, oh, that number three worked and that same number three ads gonna run in perpetuity forever and ever and ever. Does that work or do you feel like you’re then constantly needing to come up with new ads or new ways to say what you might want to be saying, like is that also kind of something to keep in mind of having to come up with content or new hooks or ways to grab people to have them actually click on that button?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, that’s definitely a big part of success. So, when you’re running ads at one to $2000 a month, you don’t get to ad fatigue nearly as quickly as we have at Elements or even at Dentist Advisors because our budgets are a lot bigger than that. So I wouldn’t worry a lot about it up front but it certainly is important to test a lot of different ads. And the more you can swap those out and learn, the quicker you’re gonna get to that cheaper cost per consultation. So, if you want to get it down to 300 bucks, you got to really test the market, see what works, see what messaging is really resonating with your audience.
Abby Morton:
Well, I think sometimes too it’s like, oh, this is gonna land and and you go and try it and it doesn’t work and it doesn’t work… And so don’t get discouraged. I’d say keep trying keep iterating. ChatGPT, it’s a great thing, a great tool to even use to say, I want to say are you stressed about your finances and give me 10 different ways to say something like that, and there’s maybe 10 different ads for you.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, and one thing that I think is important as you start to build your campaign is to really learn how each platform works because each one has it… They all have a lot of things in common but they all have a little flavor of their own. And some things work better than others on different platforms but let’s just… Facebook is probably where you want to start.
Abby Morton:
Why is that?
Jeff Morgan:
It’s got the very biggest audience. It’s skews to an older demographic. So, assuming that you want to skew to an older demographic… If you’re like I’m going for young Millennials or Gen Z type people, then you want to go to TikTok.
[laughter]
Jeff Morgan:
You’re gonna have a different strategy if that’s who your target audience is, but most financial advisors, smaller financial advisory shops are working with… They want to work with more affluent people, and that usually means that they’ve been in their career a little bit longer. And so Facebook seems to be a good place to find professionals. And you’d think it might be LinkedIn but LinkedIn is a good place, but it’s super expensive, way more expensive than Facebook to get get on and get started. So, I would always start with Facebook, biggest audience, most likely place for success. And then once you start building your campaign, something to keep in mind is that you can optimize your campaign for different types of activities. So, they have this algorithm that will say well do you want people to engage with your ad, meaning like hit the like button or comment or scroll through my carousel of images or watch my video.
Jeff Morgan:
And so you can optimize to that type of activity or you can optimize towards traffic, so when they click a link and go to your website, you can optimize to get more clicks or you can optimize for more form fills. And the key to that, you probably want to test all three of those. The closer you get to form fill the more expensive it is, so you may want to start with like engagement ads, to begin with, just to get your brand out there and to build awareness for your business, because it’ll be less expensive to do that. But the platform is going to be optimizing, just to keep people on the platform and to engage with your ad, not to get form fills. So, depending on which optimization metric you select, you want to build your ad content to match that. So, if it’s engagement, you want to like build a video that like gets people to watch it or you want to ask a question in the ad that gets them to like or comment.
Jeff Morgan:
If it’s traffic, you want to build… You like want to sell, clicking on the learn more link or the get more information link. And if it’s form fill, you want to say book a consultation now and you want to optimize the the ad around that particular optimization strategy. And in that way you’ll get them very most out of your ads.
Abby Morton:
Okay so each different one it kind of has a separate call to action. You want to be sure that you’re not confusing. You don’t want to tell people to do two or even three things because they’re gonna get confused and they’re gonna do nothing. So, if you’re going for engagement, focus on just engage, comment below, like this post, whatever it may be. But if it’s form fills, the call to action should be schedule a consultation here, book time with me here, that type of thing, and just be very clear and what you’re wanting.
Abby Morton:
Okay. Great. That was a helpful kind of breakdown of the different types of ads, I think, and knowing that there are those three different types, so thanks for that explanation. As we wrap up, like what final tips, thoughts, tricks do you want to leave our listeners with in regards to paid social? What have we not talked about today that people should know?
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, good question. Well, I think that what I would say is that just remember that this is a numbers game, and so you need to know to know your numbers. So when you’re wondering if this is working or not, you need to… A few of the key performance indicators you want to look at are how many people are seeing my ad and though that’s measured in the ad platform, like where you set up your ads as impressions. So it’ll tell you how many times has your ad been seen as people are scrolling through their newsfeed. The next thing that you want to look at is how much traffic am I getting. How many people are clicking on my ad and going to my website. And then you want to be able to track how many of those people that visit my website are filling out forms, so it’s a conversion rate from traffic to lead. And so knowing your numbers and understanding like is this getting better or worse over time is a key to getting the most out of what you’re doing.
Jeff Morgan:
And then I’d also say that when it comes to the actual content of your ads, you want to think about how do I provide value. So it’s not always about like tell people about what I do and hope that they’re interested. What you really want to do is say I’m gonna add free value to the world, and that value should be connected with my target audience. And as you do that, you’re gonna build trust and brand affinity and people are more likely to visit your website and fill out a form if they feel like you’re giving back essentially than if you’re just it’s all about me and I want you to do… Come, come and buy my service. So that leads you back into what is your content marketing strategy. You really should be trying to figure out how am I building an organic audience in one way or another. So pick a medium, so a podcast, a webinar, articles, newsletter, organic social media, that you feel most comfortable with. The one that you feel like you can be really consistent about every week every day, even if it’s… Some of those platforms are more frequent than others, like organic social.
Jeff Morgan:
And if you feel like I can engage in that particular type of content creation at minimum once a week, then that’s probably the one you should start with. So at Dentist Advisors, we learned over… We tried all those different things, and we found that creating podcast episodes on a weekly basis was the thing that was easiest for us to do the best way for us to like deliver value consistently every single week, because that consistency is what builds the audience. So, the way that that ties back to paid social is that you need to be able to provide value… When you’re trying to provide value, when you’re running these ads, the value comes from the content that you’re creating, the subject matter expertise that you’re generating through whatever organic audience that you’re building. And so for example, if you have a podcast, you can run ads that drive people to your podcast episodes or you can take clips of your podcast like audio or video clips of your podcast and you can run those to generate little bits of interest and then ask people to schedule a consultation if you want to know more. And so without that content engine, your ads are not going to work very well because you don’t have anything interesting to say.
Jeff Morgan:
Now, maybe if you have an organic social approach and you’re just doing small snippet of like tips and advice for your client or our prospective clients, then that could work too but you need to add value all the time. And if you’re not, it’s gonna be a waste of money.
Abby Morton:
Wow. That’s great. It’s just crazy how it all is connected, everything that you do in marketing, it’s all connected. You use it all intermingled together all the time. And really, it just seems like it always comes back to consistency. The more you do the more you are consistent, the more it build over time and it helps in paid social organic social. Everything you do. The more consistent you stay the better results that you’ll see.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, and I just add to that that if you do have that centerpiece of content or you can kind of think of it as a flywheel. So you’ve got the center, maybe that’s your podcast, that’s where you’re creating weekly content. Now, you can iterate off of that so the podcast turns into articles easily using ChatGPT now. Just take your transcript, put it into ChatGPT, ask it to write you an article, and then do some light edits on it, and now you’ve got both a weekly article and a weekly podcast. Now, take that and turn it into an email newsletter, and so you have an email newsletter, a blog, and a podcast now, and you’ve got content that you can take little snippets of that and put it in your organic social posts, you can put it in your paid social posts. So you really just need to pick that one thing that can feed the rest of your marketing efforts.
Abby Morton:
Perfect. I love it. Well, we could talk about this all day. There’s so many more things. We could go way deeper in paid social. Maybe we’ll have you back on on a future episode but Jeff thanks so much for your time today.
Jeff Morgan:
Yeah, thank you, Abby. It’s been fun.
Abby Morton:
Next time on Elementality.
Dale Shafer:
If as the advisor, if you say I’ve got a great tool, it’s gonna monitor all these things, here’s the link, download it, as a client, I’m gonna say okay I’ll get to that at some point. But if you start the conversation with, look, what’s most important to you? What do you feel like you’re missing in your financial life? Where are the opportunities? What is it that you want for yourself? What’s your financial purpose? And actually doing some work there, with helping them understand that, then you can say okay this is the tool that I’m gonna use but here’s how it’s gonna help us answer those questions. Here’s why it’s important that we decide exactly how much money needs to be in the bank and here’s why some of that money should be put to work and here’s why we need to reconsider your life insurance objectives and here’s why we need to have some better controls around spending and burn rate and all of those things.
Abby Morton:
To find out more about Elements, go to getelements.com/demo Elementality’s executive producers are Reese Harper and Carl Richards. Elementality is produced by Tad Henderson and directed by Abby Morton. Have a good one.