Focusing on a niche audience is a best practice emphasized in the Financial Services space. But once you've identified a niche, how do you effectively engage with them? Social media provides an excellent platform. However, advisors, agents, and brokers need to understand how to best identify the preferred social channel, leverage useful content, and engage in conversation with each niche audience. For example, while LinkedIn is a great channel for engaging existing employees and stepping up recruitment efforts, it may not be the best way to engage with your niche client base. Financial Services clients tend to engage primarily on Facebook, while centers of influence and thought leaders engage on LinkedIn and Twitter. It’s also important to note that as Gen Y and Millennials become a target client, Twitter and Google+ will become the channels more commonly used.
Below are 7 tactics for engaging with your niche on social media.
1. Set Yourself Apart: Setting yourself apart by establishing your brand with thought leadership content and expert advice can be the key to building influence. Utilize data and experience. Understand that personal brand development requires commitment, as well as ongoing conversations, with your niche audience.
2. Choose Your Target Audience: Decide where you want to focus your business. Today’s advisors, agents, and brokers are focusing their attentions on niches that have different investment needs and priorities. By segmenting your business this way, you’re also able to focus your marketing message by touching on key events and issues that affect that target market. You can anticipate your client needs before they even arise.
3. Define Engagement: Depending on your niche audience, engagement may need to be redefined. Not all audience "like" or "share" content, but that doesn't mean they're not engaged.
4. Customize and Personalize Your Message: The right tools can help you personalize your message and offerings to deliver real value to each individual client. This will build your client’s sense of worth and create a high-quality customer experience
5. Test Social Channel Responsiveness With Your Niche: Responsiveness to social communications will depend on the audience as well as the content (image vs text vs video) and the time of day and week. Develop a matrix with "audience", "content type", "client stage", "date and time", and "social channel". Develop baseline metrics to measure results against. Using the matrix, develop a plan to test engagement levels.
6. Recognize the Power of Social Media: Social media sites can help you become a thought leader in the sector, offering the opportunity to reach out and keep audiences informed. More importantly these channels allow you to listen and learn more about your clients. It’s also a way of getting to know your clients’ connections, which could represent new opportunities for potential business.
7. But Don't Rely on Social Media Alone: There are a variety of creative online avenues that can help get your message across. Videos can put your face in front of customers and potential clients. And with the right tools in place you can track the engagement of those viewers to find out who exactly is watching the content you’re creating, offering insight into new potential clients. Webinars, e-books and written blogs are all effective at getting content across in creative ways. And if you leverage the power of your internal and external subscription centers, you can find out how people prefer to interact with content. Understanding these preferences allows you to personalize each communication for that individual.
Building a trusted brand and finding a way to stand out in the crowd means focusing and personalizing your message for a targeted group of clients. It also means reaching that audience where they’re most likely to listen, at proven stages of engagement, when life events occur, and using all of the technology you need to get your message across. Traditionally, doing all of that would require more resources and time than you have available. Technology can now help maximize your time, personalize your message, and put you in front of your clients and potential clients in an effective and efficient way. All of that can help you establish yourself as a thought leader in the sector, create a personal brand that gets you noticed, and keeps you front and center once eyes turn your way.