Social Media Strategies for CPAs & Financial Advisors
- Tailor Content to Your Audience: Create relevant posts for different demographics, from Gen Z professionals to retirees, and use storytelling to make financial topics relatable.
- Balance Organic & Paid Campaigns: Analyze which platforms deliver ROI, separate content by channel, and invest in ads that reach the right audience.
- Build Authority & Trust: Engage with followers, share thought leadership insights, and track metrics to refine your approach and position your firm as a go-to expert.
CPAs and financial advisors have always had to balance their marketing depending on where their clients were in life and how the general economy either helped or hindered their lives and future goals. After all, a retiree will have very different expectations of their investments than somebody graduating from college.
If you’re looking for social media strategies for financial professionals, it may mean pivoting your content and approach so you can reach your target audience.
Rethink Your Content
Broad content can be appealing to financial professionals because it doesn’t discriminate against or alienate anyone. However, the danger with this approach is that your content becomes all too easy to ignore. If your content is tailored to your target audience, you’re likely to get more of a response.
For example, if a financial advisor prompts a Gen Zer to contribute to their 401k, they may want to humanize the success stories of past clients, rather than hammering in facts and figures. Or if you’re a CPA appealing to high earners, your content might cover how your firm is equipped to handle people with a high net worth and diverse portfolios.
Even (or perhaps especially) in the age of AI, content is still king. You want your content to reflect your brand, whether you portray your firm as practical or spicy, rule-followers or rule-challengers. Content needs to be your foundation, so it’s important to come up with a solid strategy that you can still adapt as time goes by, and your customers change with the seasons.
Analyze Your Advertising Opportunities
As a general rule, organic content has been the preferred option for nearly every business. Organic content doesn’t cost anything to post, and it gives you the freedom to shape your own marketing.
However, not every CPA or financial advisor has the time or the energy to keep up with organic posts. Plus, it can take years to establish your presence on different platforms, and if you’re a CPA who’s trying to attract clients during tax season in a competitive market, it’s that much easier for distracted scrollers to tune you out.
This is why advertising on certain platforms may make sense for some financial professionals. However, before you start spending a significant portion of your marketing budget, you first need to understand who’s on each platform.
In other words, if you’re going to run a pop-up ad, it needs to pop up in front of someone who could actively benefit from your services. This way, you promote positive feelings toward your services instead of annoyance at having to close out or scroll past yet another ad.
Separate Your Platforms
When different platforms attract different demographics (and those demographics can vary drastically from city to city), it’s important to untangle each platform from the other. This way, you’re not spending the same resources on the lowest performers as you are on your highest.
For example, let’s say that the majority of your clients are on Facebook, and they prefer straightforward content about highly relevant financial news, like the latest tax code changes or interest rate cuts. However, you also have a smaller group on TikTok that follows your content for more general financial tips.
You can still nurture your TikTok followers with helpful content while still allocating more resources based on the ROI of each effort. This way, you can stay on people’s minds, even if they don’t have an immediate need for your services, without stretching your budget too thin.
Go Deeper
Finances can be a difficult subject for anyone to talk about. Not only is it rife with numbers, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it can also be tied to feelings of shame about one’s net worth. CPAs and financial advisors have a tremendous opportunity to approach this complex topic from any number of angles on social media.
One way to help your clients — once you’ve settled on a content focus — is to go deeper into each category. For example, you might use your social media to promote blog posts that explain complex topics, such as how to accurately itemize deductions or break down the numbers in a portfolio. Or you might invest in professional infographics or videos that help your clients work through common financial obstacles.
Visual aids can keep your clients engaged with your content, so you get more engagement out of every post. No matter what type of customer you work with, going deeper with your content can give everyone context and insight into often opaque markets. Far from removing the need for your expertise, the goal is to empower them to take bolder steps (like trusting you with their future finances).
Engage with Your Customers
Deleting comments, ignoring likes, and failing to respond to questions are all good ways to alienate your base. Engaging with your clients, whether that means thoughtful answers or sharing your side of the story, shows both your current and prospective clients how you deal with conflict.
For example, if you have an unhappy client, you might detail how you tried to make the situation right. This way, even if you can’t please the client, you can show other clients that you go out of your way to do what you can in the event of a conflict or dispute.
Engagement is also a good way to boost your general reputation on any given platform. The more effort you put into your social media page, whether that’s updating your hours or posting a well-placed emoji, the more likely your page will be organically boosted when people search for your services in the area via social media or Google.
Become a Thought Leader
This tip is similar to going deeper in your content, but there’s an important distinction. Being a thought leader is less about explaining complex topics and more about calling the shots.
If you’re good at predicting the markets based on past performance and current events, you can use your forecasting abilities to share your thoughts about what you’re seeing and explain the logic behind your views.
For example, if you can speak to the odds of a recession after a big tax cut, you might create a video or blog post on this topic and explain how you came to your conclusions. This kind of timely, relevant content breaks the mold in many ways, straying from the banal or generic into uncharted territories.
Becoming a thought leader not only helps to define the brand of your financial firm, but it also establishes you as a trustworthy expert in your industry. (Just make sure that you have plenty of solid points to back up your posts!)
Use Metrics
Engagement rates, followers, reach, conversion: all these metrics can help you decide how your social media is performing. You can see who’s reading your content, what action they’re taking, and how it all relates to your revenue.
While it’s impossible to discern the true value of every marketing campaign, especially when clients may need a few months to really absorb your messaging, metrics can give you a sense of how people consume and digest each content piece.
If you’re not seeing a strong response, you may need to switch things up so you’re not wasting your efforts. The good news is that today’s analytics often go well beyond the obvious numbers (e.g., the number of reactions to a post, etc.), giving you additional insights into whether your content is having an impact.
For example, if you post a promotion on Facebook, and it gets reposted on another site like Reddit, you can perform a sentiment analysis to see how people talk about your brand across the board.
One easy way to boost your metrics is to get your clients involved. In addition to thoughtful, deep, and relevant content, you might ask people for their opinions, or challenging everyday assumptions can spark a strong response on social media.
How to Improve Your Social Media Strategy
Whether you need better financial advisor or CPA social media marketing strategies, or you just want to post more often, Surefire Local can help you leverage these popular platforms in a way that fits your client’s needs (and yours too).
What’s more, we can help you make the stickier decisions, such as how long to run a campaign and how much to spend on each individual platform. Social media may still be a popular way for people to find services of every kind, but it’s also exceptionally saturated with offers, promotions, and information. If you want to see how we help local CPAs and financial advisors stand out from the crowd and noise, schedule a demo today!