Social Media Done Right: Using Facebook Ads For Financial Services

Social media is a GREAT place to reach out to new people and get your financial institution's products and services out to new markets. It is also a great place to retarget your current members/customers and cross-sell. 

If you're looking for the most effective way to use Facebook ads for financial services, you've come to the right place! Here are some of our top tips for successful social ad results.

1) Understand Basic Campaign Structure

This is one of the most important tips to ensure you're spending your budget wisely. You should only have a few campaigns going at once and they should have different objectives if they're aimed at the same audience. 

If you create too many campaigns with the objective of 'engagement' and they are aimed at the same (or similar) audiences, your campaigns will compete against each other and increase the cost overall. 

The ONLY website traffic campaign I recommend having is 'Landing Page View.' I use these kinds of ads and create one campaign with a very small budget aimed to drive traffic to the blog and one campaign with a much larger budget to drive traffic to product and service pages. 

2) Create Different Ads Sets and Use Manual Placements

Since we spend so much time creating ads for the landing page view campaigns, we recommend selecting manual placements in the ad set level of a campaign.

We do this because each placement has a very different look and so it works best if you are able to control how that ad is going to look, instead of letting Facebook try to fit the same ad details into different placements.

See an example below:

Facebook ad:

How the ad translates to IG story placement automatically by Facebook:

**Note: this ad is missing the headline that includes the rate.

The ad we created for Instagram Story Placement:

3) Use Engagement Campaigns

Engagement may not seem like a very valuable action, but this is how you can reach current customers or new potential customers at the lowest cost. These campaigns should have a budget of only a few dollars a day.

These should NOT be product or service-related. You want to be fun and entertaining so you can build your engagement audience to retarget later. Think of these as a first touchpoint, NOT as a way to sell anyone anything. 

4) Look at Fans as a Vanity Metric

Don't get hung up on your page's total fans. I repeat - DON'T GET HUNG UP! The average cost per result for these ads is VERY high. For most of our clients, the cost per new fan is MORE than the average cost of a landing page view! Think about that... 

You DO want to see slow and steady growth, so spend up to $5-$6 a day (TOPS) if you would like. But remember, you are able to do so much on ad platforms without ever having anyone actually hit that 'like' button, and your overall ad performance is not determined by your total fans.

5) Only Run 2-3 Different Product Ads at One Time

Less is more in terms of ad performance. If you have too many ads running at once, your campaigns will never generate enough results to get out of the learning phase. Facebook recently put limits on how many active ads your ad account can have based on your ad spent. 

Depending on your budget, you should have at least 4 different ads in each ad set, but no more than 10 total in each. If you notice after a couple of weeks your campaign is still in the learning phase, consider pausing a few ads and limiting the total number of ads moving forward.

Bonus: Ensure Your Pixel is Set Up

This is KEY for retargeting your website traffic! Once the pixel is installed in the header of your website, it will create an audience of Facebook users that you can retarget. You can even go as far as creating an audience of people based on specific pages they visited. This is a great option when you are driving traffic to a page from other sources as well.

Say for example you have PPC ads that are sending people to a mortgage landing page... you can create a custom audience of people that have visited that page and create an ad on Facebook to remind them to come back to your website. 

Let us help with your Financial Institution growth... Contact Us today and we will show you how it's done!