What We Learned Buying $10,000+ A Month of Facebook Ads For A Financial Services Business

Facebook Advertising - Financial Services Lead Generation

One of our clients is a full service Financial Advisory business that services both Financial Advisors as well as individual clients. One part of their practice areas is running workshops and awareness campaigns on behalf of advisors, spanning 20+ advisors and over $10,000 a month in ad spend.

Through close collaboration with the clients and creative teams, we buy ads on Facebook, geo-targeted to the advisor’s home region.

The end goal of these campaigns is to drive qualified meetings with attendees of the workshops, resulting in Net Positive AUM (assets under management).

One of the 15+ accounts we manage for this client. The cost per result is for RSVPs to a workshop of high net worth individuals as well as Thurplays of video ads.

One of the 15+ accounts we manage for this client. The cost per result is for RSVPs to a workshop of high net worth individuals as well as Thurplays of video ads.

Campaign Types and Objectives:

  • Awareness: video ads to drive thruplays to then retarget for other campaigns

  • Conversion: Lead magnets and RSVPs to Workshops

  • Traffic: to get our ads in front of more people (vs conversion goal).

  • Retargeting: video ads and page visitors

Facebook Pixel:

  • We set up Facebook Pixels for each campaign on Unbounce landing pages.

Creative:

  • Video focused on thought leadership and education

  • Images focused on pattern interrupt and grabbing attention on mobile devices

Audiences:

  • Saved Audiences: Based on interests, behaviors, and demographics of retirees and high net worth individuals, targeted to specific geographies.

  • Custom Audiences: Awareness audiences based on web page visits, Thruplay of videos.

  • Lookalike Audiences: based on customer lists, past RSVP’s, etc.

Ad Spend:

  • $1,000 - $3,500 per campaign, per month.

  • We’ve run daily budgets and lifetime budgets. Lifetime budgets allow for daysharding (choosing what days and time of day to show your ads). We found Lifetime budgets weren’t spending the full budgets and we reverted back to daily.

Results:

  • These campaigns are focused on converting cold and warm traffic at the top and middle of the funnel. Sales (attracting AUM) can happen within 1 meeting with a client or after months of interactions. Clients have reported millions of dollars of AUM pipeline.

What We Learned:

  • The Facebook ad platform is changing constantly. Targeting options have been significantly changed over the past few months, making it harder to curate target audiences. We decided to go broader in an effort to drive down conversion costs and get more reach, especially as we are targeting local areas.

  • Beautiful, custom images sometimes underperform location images (office buildings, where many workshops are held), which surprised everybody.

  • Facebook is running out of places to show ads and encourages every advertiser to use different placement types. We found that the News Feed was the only place worth advertising for our goals.

  • Video is still CHEAP. We are seeing 3 cents per Thruplay. Imagine that kind of cost for a commercial! We will be doubling down on video in 2020.

  • Don’t keep turning knobs. Businesses ask to fine tune campaigns every day, but the Facebook algorithm (learning process) resets every time you do, further delaying meaningful results and insights.

  • Sales is just as important as marketing. Great sales people can close mediocre leads and poor sales people can’t close great leads, which has a direct result on ROI of each campaign.

    Do you need help with lead generation? We can help! Book time on our calendar for a free Strategy Session using the calendar below.

Jason Singer