By Mia Wood, Senior Client Relationship Manager at Simplicity Lone Beacon
A financial advisor came to us looking to expand his firm’s brand awareness, aiming to connect personally with his target audience. With his firm, we assessed how traditional media outlets such as radio and television could help achieve this goal. However, these avenues were costly and time-consuming for the advisor. Today, we know that consumers respond to bite-sized pieces of information with just a few seconds to grab their attention, tell a story, and engage them. According to sproutsocial, people will retain 95% of a message watched on a video as opposed to only 10% read in text. That’s a world of difference! If your goal is to connect with consumers on a part of someone’s life that’s as important as financial stability, you’re going to need them to retain the information as much as possible. From that, we zeroed in on video as a key media format to execute a brand awareness campaign, even if television wasn’t our first channel to share it on. Instead of sticking to TV, video content can be repurposed across several digital platforms, and doing so is more cost-effective than signing on to a year-long TV or broadcast commitment. But although it’s easy to make videos these days, it takes effort and expertise to make good videos—they have to come across as professional and legitimate. With Simplicity Studio One as a resource, this would be more than doable for the client.
However, once we realized short-form videos were the best way to reach their prospects and clients, we then asked ourselves what we wanted to make the videos about… but there were infinite options – Social Security strategies, Federal Reserve news commentary, Roth IRA conversions, founder’s story videos, the list goes on! So, we started by narrowing down video topics that hit their marketing goal best; ones that established brand awareness. So, we focused on topics that communicated their company story, client processes, and educated their audience on key topics that their team has expertise in. Because their goal was brand building, it was important to make sure their videos showcased who they were and how they use their expertise to solve problems for clients without overwhelming them with details on how to sign up or complex product strategies. This can be a major roadblock for some firms, so if you’re struggling to choose topics for videos, make sure each piece has a clear purpose based on the goal you want to achieve or the problem you want to solve. Although the advisory firm was not expecting these videos to generate leads right away, they were enthusiastic about the opportunity to get their brand to reach consumers so that someday soon, viewers of their content may become qualified leads.
That said, it is not just about the videos. For the videos to have impact on brand awareness, we would need to devise and execute a plan to share and reshare these videos across different platforms with tracking in place. Having a well-rounded distribution plan is what was going to bring us back to the client’s end goal. After recording and editing the videos, our team stepped in to create a marketing plan. This included publishing these videos to the firm’s website, incorporating them in email marketing, and pushing them out on social media. Here’s an example of the results as it pertains to the social media portion: After posting five of the short videos on Facebook and LinkedIn with a small budget for boosting, we saw the following results:
- ~ 20,000 views total
- 69 page views and 28 unique viewers on LinkedIn
- 47 page views and 2 new followers on Facebook
This increased engagement and led to more marketing qualified leads (MQLs), which basically means it increased the pool of people interested in working with their firm and therefore can be remarketed to and nurtured along the sales and marketing funnel. Seeing these results, the advisor felt encouraged to continue producing short-form videos, so we didn’t stop there! Our video marketing strategy continues with this client even now, and we’re confident that with consistent effort on this over time, the results will start compounding.
When it comes to brand awareness, consistency is key. That’s why we point our advisors in the direction of our Social Media Content portal, where we share almost 200 turnkey video outlines that are designed to be easy to shape to your voice, recorded at a professional studio or in your office, and can be shared to any platform.
For more information on how we help firms like yours execute professional grade marketing strategies, look forward to more blogs from our team for invaluable advice!
Sources:
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-video-statistics/
About the Author: Mia is a graduate from The University of Alabama where she received her bachelor’s degree in Marketing with a concentration in Computing Technologies & Applications and her master’s degree in Marketing. She joins Simplicity Lone Beacon from a property management company where she managed the end-to-end leasing process for prospective residents, oversaw CRM data entry, and implemented a leading digital editing software for virtual floor plan staging.
In her free time, Mia is pursuing her Group Fitness Instructor license. A true adventurer and avid athlete, she likes to spend her free time exploring new places with her family and friends. Her favorite getaway is visiting Cape Cod with her family.
