Marie, the floor is yours. Okay. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome to November. Can you believe it? It's already November 2020. So today's date is November 10th, and we're going to be hearing from Johnny Swift, but this is a part of our NAPFA Playbook Series for 2020, brought to you by NAPFA and TD Ameritrade, of course. So those of you who have been following along know that we've had some great presentations so far this year. This is number nine in our 10 series for 2020. And next month, if you'll go to the next slide, Johnny, will be me talking about year-end, all of the things that we've learned over the course of the year. Today Johnny's going to be covering social media best practices as it pertains to advertising, not just organic. But if you want to flip back to the next slide, Johnny, I had them reversed a little bit there. This is what Johnny's going to be covering today. So it is going to be focused on advertising and using social media and all the targeting that you can do there. And then we will be talking about the best of when I come back in December. And I'll be going through all of the webinars again and bringing back some of the things that I've learned and that I think are noteworthy. So Johnny, I know you have a big presentation today. So let's flip ahead and let's get you started. I know everybody knows where to find these webinars and how to sign up for the next one on the Virtual Learning Center. So Johnny Swift, Impact Communications, our resident social media guru, take it away. Great. Thanks, Marie. So having a strong social media presence is more important than ever these days. And many advisors are jumping on the social media bandwagon with strong social media marketing efforts. However, some advisors are having a difficult time growing their audience and getting engagement on their posts, even though they're producing and posting the right kind of content on a regular basis. So this is where social media advertising can come in and where even a small budget can go a long way. Advertising on social media and boosting your posts is a cost-effective way to reach a larger targeted audience and get more engagement on your posts and activity and even gain more followers and prospects. So today I'm going to show you what kind of content you should be boosting and how to do so on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. And last year for the NAPFA Marketing Playbook Series, I did an in-depth presentation on social media tips and best practices, also known as SHARED or the S in the PESO model. So if you haven't seen that or you need help getting your social media pages set up, enhanced and optimized, make sure to go watch that archive presentation from last year. And so before we get into advertising and boosting, I just wanted to cover some of the main benefits of organic social media. So organic social media, the main reason you want to be active on social media is because it enhances your reach and allows you to connect with more people and prospects by giving those people more places to find you online, but it also enhances your SEO because social media profiles show up really high in search results. So it's always great to have profiles that you control completely show up high in your search results. And there's a lot of other reasons you want to be active on social media though. So those are to build your networks and to make contacts, to find new prospects, to engage peers, prospects, clients, and centers of influences, amplify your voice, share information, messaging, media mentions, articles, blog posts, videos, and other educational content to show the character and personality of you and your firm, as well as your unique perspective. Position your firm and build share of mind, enhance your reach and SEO like we just discussed, and more points of contact for people to find you and lead back to your website. So how about the benefits of advertising on social media? Some are the same and some are a little bit different. So you can reach a larger targeted audience made up of people similar to your clients. You can gain more followers and prospects, get more engagement on your posts and activities like likes, comments, shares, and follows, get more prospects into the top of your marketing funnel, get more views, clicks, and downloads on your lead magnet, grow your email list, amplify your voice, enhance your reach and SEO. So a lot of the same benefits for organic social media, but just allows you to boost out and reach a larger targeted audience. So let's talk about what type of content you should be advertising on social media. So I often recommend posting content that shows behind the scenes into the culture and personality of your firm and your organic social media strategy. You know, like employee announcements of a new baby or grandbaby or pets, virtual tours inside your office, posts about recent travels or community involvement, volunteer work. And while posts like these tend to perform really well and get lots of engagement, especially on Facebook, these aren't the type of posts you should be paying to boost on social media. And while you could spend a bit to boost your regular blog posts or media mentions or market commentary, most of your social media advertising budget should be reserved for your lead magnet. So that's a special offer with a lead capture form in order to capture the prospect's information, specifically their email address, and get them into your funnel in order to drip market to them over time and build trust and share of mind. So here are some great types of lead magnets that are perfect for capturing prospect information and for boosting on social media. The first thing we recommend is a special report or a white paper. So here's an example of one from Tech Girl Financial on a white paper of what to look for in a financial advisor, and that's evergreen content. And here's an example of a special report from Intercontinental Wealth Advisors on investing in a low interest rate environment. And so you can go with something more evergreen, like the one on the left, or with something that's more timely and current, like the one on the right. You could also boost your educational video series if you are big into videos. You could do a free chapter of your book. If you've written a book, right next to your Buy Now link, you could put a link to download the free chapter where they have to give you their information in order to access that free chapter. Some additional things you could advertise, a special form or a quiz, like a retirement readiness or ideal aging quiz, an estate planning checklist, something along those lines. An online webinar or in-person seminar. So here's an example of a retirement planning today online course from Fidato Wealth, and an example of an in-person seminar retirement planning workshop from Oak Wealth. And both of those are great things that are worth putting some advertising dollars behind. And then you could even do educational blog posts or media mentions or articles and industry publications. Well, I think that white papers and webinars and free book chapters and those kind of lead magnets that have a capture form are best in order to get new prospects into your funnel. You could also put a small budget behind blog posts and or media mentions to boost those out to a larger audience and build awareness, especially if it's a really important and timely blog post or a really prominent media mention that can help to build authority. So how about the social media platforms that you should be advertising on? So my personal favorite is Facebook, just in terms of ease of use and also in terms of the reach and the performance there. They tend to perform well, and you can build lookalike audiences, and you can also build your reputation as a friendly expert and show a personal side of your business. And for each of these, I'll have a link underneath them where you can go and learn more about advertising on these platforms. LinkedIn is great for connecting with businesses, industry niches, professionals, and COIs, and also to establish thought leadership. Twitter allows you to establish thought leadership, address current events, and build industry connections. Instagram is great for connecting on a personal level with photos and videos. Google is great for boosting your listings in Google Search and Google Maps. And Outbrain, while it's not really social media advertising, it's a native advertising in relevant articles and pages across the web. So, you know, it's just another form of digital advertising that can be really effective for certain types of content and getting content placed on articles across the web. And people are really high on Instagram ads, Google ads can yield some really good results for boosting SEO. But today we're going to focus on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. So before we get into actually building those ads and audiences in real time, I wanted to cover some best practices for advertising on social media. And on the right-hand side here, you will see an example ad on Facebook from Fedada Wealth advertising their online retirement course. So make sure to consult the social media platform support links on the previous slide. Those will help you get started in getting your ads up and running and give you more details on each platform. Make sure to use detailed, descriptive, clear, and inviting language with a clear call to action in the text of your post. And make sure to say who, what, when, where, and why in your post and lay out all of the info clearly. Use the learn more button rather than sign up or register. Studies show that the learn more button performs better than any other button since it's more inviting and non-committal compared to sign up or register. Use a specific link in the post and make sure that your link preview loads and use a visually appealing image or video thumbnail in your link preview. So make sure that you use a clickable link where you upload a link preview as the image rather than a native image that just opens the image in the platform. If you can, use a special and unique landing page link as well as a pixel. So if you can create a unique landing page for your campaign, it will be easier to tell how much traffic comes to your landing page specifically from that certain platform. However, it's not essential as long as you're linking directly to the content that you're trying to promote. And a pixel, a pixel is a line of code from Facebook that you can add to your landing page in the back office of your website that will track when someone visits that page. And this code allows the pixel to receive information about the actions taken on your site and better track conversions when someone actually signs up or fills out your form. So if the next step is to determine your ideal audience based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, and use a lookalike audience if possible. Lookalike audiences are created by uploading a list of your contacts, and then the social media platform will find the profiles of the people you uploaded, and it won't advertise directly to them, but it goes out and finds other profiles that are similar to those of the people in the list that you uploaded. So if you upload a list of clients, the lookalike audience will be made up of people who are similar to your clients and fit similar demographics with similar interests and behaviors. So you can even combine additional demographics with the lookalike audience for best results. And the people on the list that you upload aren't notified that their email address was used, nor are they advertised to unless you specifically choose to advertise them. But it simply uses their email addresses and contact information in order to go and find people that are similar to them. So that's a great way to go in building your audience. So make sure to set your budget and your time frame. I say set your time frame for at least a week, but the longer you let the ad run, the better, as it takes a few days for the platform to get out of the learning phase and get a good feel for the type of audience that your ad is performing best with. So the longer the ad runs, the more time the ad can be optimized and learn which type of people are more likely to click on it. And your amount of clicks will go up and your cost per click will go down over time. So if you're unhappy with your results after the first couple of days, be patient and give the ad some more time to learn and improve, which can sometimes take up to a week. So I recommend experimenting with $100 to $200 for two weeks. And that will give you a full idea of the effectiveness of your ad. And you can spend up to $500 for a big campaign around a specific report, white paper webinar seminar. So even $10 to $20 can have a great effect and get a lot more views and clicks on your content than a simple organic post would. You could even spend something just like $10 on every blog post, and that will help you boost each and every one of those out to a larger audience and continue to grow your audience and build share of mind. But I would recommend saving your budget for these larger lead magnets and things like that. So for Facebook and Twitter, your average cost per click should be around $1 to $5 per click. And on LinkedIn, it should be around $5 to $10 per click. LinkedIn tends to be a bit more expensive per click because they're a bit more strict on their targeting and focus more on quality clicks over quantity. But anything under $10 per click on LinkedIn is really good. And anything under $5 per click on Facebook and Twitter is really good. And then finally, examine your results, tweak, and try again. After a couple of weeks, examine your results and try to improve your ad. You can do some A-B testing by changing up the image or the language or the call to action or the audience and see which criteria performs better. So now I'd like to do some show and tell and go ahead and show you in real time how to set up these ads and these audiences on these platforms. So I'm going to pop over to my browser. And before we go into building the ads, I wanted to show you some of these lead magnets on these websites so you can see what they look like. So here's Tech Girl Financial where they have a pop-up on the homepage of their website for their white paper. And this is evergreen content that's been up for a while, clear way to fill out the form and download the white paper. Intercontinental Wealth Advisors for their special report on investing in a low interest rate environment. They have a pop-up on the homepage of their website. If you click, it takes you to a landing page where you can learn more about the report and you can also watch a short video on the report with a clear place to capture that lead information. Market Life Planning offers the Ideal Aging Quiz. So some kind of quiz like this is always great as well. And that takes you to the quiz page where it obviously captures the person's information and they have to give their email address to receive their results. Heller Wealth Management has a book and they offer the free chapters. Their lead magnet and a tab right on their homepage here and that captures their information. FedAuto Wealth offers those online Retirement Planning Today classes and you can visit their website to learn more about those and obviously they have a sign-up form here at the bottom to capture information. Oak Wealth Partners does these in-person Retirement Planning workshops that are COVID compliant. They're still going on right now. This one is actually tonight and so they have a link on their website to register on their Eventbrite page which obviously captures the leads information and in most cases it gets them in person to come to this seminar. So these are warm leads obviously. So let's hop on over to Facebook first and see how Oak Wealth has been boosting or advertising this seminar on their Facebook page. So here is their page here and it is the first post on their page. They have a very descriptive text about where it's located, what they'll learn, a little bit more about Oak Wealth and the CEO of Oak Wealth. They have a nice image with all of the pertinent information on the right-hand side here and a nice inviting image of where the event takes place and we can see they've already boosted this post and they've already gotten a lot of good results. So when you're boosting a post on Facebook you want to just create a post per usual and have it show up on your page and then if you, let's scroll down to a different post here, but there will be a boost post button underneath the post and you can click that to set up your ad. So if we take a look at the results of the boost they've already done on this post we can see that they have reached over 19,000 people and gotten 286 clicks over to their landing page which was the sign-up form on Eventbrite. They actually have a really high budget. They spend $1,000 to boost each and every one of these seminars because they have found it to be worth it and really valuable. So like I was saying on Facebook anything under $5 per click is a really good result so they're spending about $3.50 per click and have gotten 286 clicks over to their landing page and this has resulted in over 30 people signing up to come to their in-person webinar even in times like these. So we can see that Facebook's ads have been really effective for them and they use this as their main way to get new butts in the door into the seats for the events. So let's also take a look at the Fidato Wealth advertisements or boosted posts for their online Retirement Planning Today course and here's the one that they ran a couple months ago. They have very descriptive text about who, what, when, where, and why, what the attendees are going to learn about as well as some hashtags which helps this post show up high in these topics. They have a nice image with all of the pertinent information and the dates easily readable and they have split up. They actually only did $150 budget for this online retirement class so a lot different than Oak Wealth, a lot less but still very effective for $150. They split it up between two different audiences here. So for this first one had a $75 budget and they reached over 3,000 people and had 29 link clicks for a cost per link click of $2.59. So really solid cost per click there and they got 29 clicks from this one and from their other audience here they got 34 link clicks and so that cost $2.21 per link click. So really good cost per click out of the 63 link clicks to the registration they got over 30 registrants for their online retirement class. So really good results, $150 to get 30 warm leads into their class where they can demonstrate their expertise. So let me show you how to go about setting up one of these boosted posts. So like I said first things first you want to just create a post normally on your page like you normally would and then scroll down to the bottom of your post and click that boost post button. And if you've already done it you can do it again by clicking boost again. So first things first you set your goal and you can certainly leave it on automatic but I usually recommend changing that to get more website visitors. In most cases you know we're promoting one of our lead magnets or trying to drop people back to a registration page or your website. So that is going to be the most effective for targeting people who are likely to click on a URL. So we'll change that to website visitors. There's no special ad category and when you set your audience initially when you come in it's going to be set to people you choose through targeting. And so this is just a way to target people based on demographics interests and behaviors. So since this was a retirement planning course obviously you can set by gender but since it's retirement planning we wanted to set it ages 47 and up. Locations set to United States but you can add in additional more targeted locations based on towns or cities based on zip code and you can even drop a pin. So let's zoom in a little bit and let's say we were trying to target this area of Parma You can drop a pin right on that and then you can also change the radius to be larger or smaller based on miles and really target down the type of area that you are looking for. So once you have your location set up that will be saved up here and then you can scroll on down and you can add in detailed targeting around interests and demographics and behaviors. So I'm going to scroll down to some of the demographics that we set up here. So they were targeting people with professional degrees doctorate degrees college grads or master degrees. You can also target by household income based on zip codes in the US and then you can target based on types of jobs or industries. So they were targeting people that offer or offer legal services or medical services small business owners lawyers CEOs doctors senior engineers they have a lot of clients who are engineers so all types of this stuff is available to you via this search within the detailed targeting or you can click on browse and you can scroll down here look at the demographics you can choose based on education level specific schools or field of study. You can choose based on income level by house code and our household income and percentage of U.S. zip codes, so for most of you you'd probably want to select top 5%, top 10%, top 10 to 25% maybe. You can even search by life events like anniversary or birthday or a new job or recently moved, recently retired, stuff like that. You can choose by work, so certain industries, specific employers, specific job titles you can search by and select those to target, and then also interests. There's all kinds of categories here, so Fidado Wealth, their clients, a lot of them are interested in traveling and organic food and good wine and golfing, so you know we chose some of those interests to target here on Facebook because if their clients are interested in those things then the type of people they want to target are most likely interested in a lot of those things as well. So there's a lot of demographics, interests, and behaviors you can come and browse around in or search for and really make out a detailed targeting, and the people that fall, that are targeted here, they don't have to fall into every one of these categories, they just have to fall into at least one of these categories, and if they fall into multiple then they get boosted up as a better candidate and they are displayed the ad more prominently in first, so the more the better, which allows Facebook to really drill down and target the exact type of people that you're looking for. So let's get back out of here, so once you have your audience set up with all of your detailed targeting, you can really go deep into that as you can see here, then you scroll on down, you set your duration and your total budget, so I've set it for 10 days, $100 total budget, so that's about $10 per day, and it will show you your estimated daily results over here on the right hand side, you can also see your ad preview over here on the right hand side, and then once you're happy with your audience and your duration and your budget, you can go down here, double check your goal, it's set for link clicks, placements, you can certainly unselect these and leave it as just for placement on Facebook, but I recommend leaving Instagram and Facebook Messenger selected, just because that will allow Facebook to display your ads there and to places that they're more likely to get clicked, and then here you can turn on the Facebook pixel, which allows you to place that code in your website and it will track the conversions, and then you can also update your payment method here, and once you've done all that, you can click boost post, so this is how the way I would recommend doing it if you want to just set up your audience based on demographics, interests and behaviors, so now I'm going to show you how to set up a lookalike audience on Facebook, where you can use just the lookalike audience that will be made up of people similar to your clients or contact list, and you could also combine that lookalike audience with these demographics, interests and behaviors, so let's go over to this tab here, if you go to business.facebook.com, that will take you to your business manager for your Facebook page, and then if you click on ads in the left-hand column here, you can see ads that you have run previously, you can even create an ad from here, and here's another way to go about doing your boosted post, here we go, so you can do the boosted post from here as well, or if you wanted to simply get more leads or promote your page, then you could do that from here as well, and so if you were to promote your page, and you want to just do a generic post about your page or about your business to the type of audience you're trying to reach, you can make it so these advertisements only show up in people's news feeds and don't show up on your page, so if you want to, you know, like I said, I recommend boosting lead magnets, and obviously you want to post that on your social media regardless, so in that case you want to do a boosted post, but if you don't want it to show up on your page, you can come in here and do it this way, but to get to your audiences, on the left-hand toolbar you go to more tools, and then click on audiences, and this will open up my saved audiences or my custom audiences, as they're also called sometimes, sorry this is taking a minute, and here we can see saved audiences in a list, audiences that I've created before that are saved within the account, and we can continue to use time and time again, so the first thing you need to do is you want to set up a custom audience based off of your customer list or your spreadsheet of contacts, so you click create audience here in the left, and then click on custom audience, and then you're going to want to use a source, you can use your website if you want, but in most cases you want to upload your customer list, and this needs to be in a CSV or a text format, so if you have an Excel spreadsheet, go ahead and save that as a CSV, and this shows you the type of identifiers that you can use to prepare your list, at the very least you want to have email, but I also recommend having the first name and the last name in columns, if you have address or gender or age or phone number, those can help Facebook identify the profiles as well, but at the very least you need email and first name and last name, so once you are clear there, does your list include a column for customer value, no it does not, in most cases we will not have a customer value, and then we are going to upload our file, there's my CSV contact list, we can name this, and I always recommend naming it something descriptive, and it also doesn't hurt to put the date as well, just to be clear on when this audience was created. Next you need to map your columns, so it looks like it was able to map the email column just fine, but it says action needed on my two other columns, so first name, I can select that from the drop-down list, last name, select that from the drop-down list, and now we can see all three columns are mapped properly, and we're ready to upload and create that audience. All right, customer list has been successfully hashed and updated, uploaded 378 rows, so then we can go back out to our main audience view, and we can see right here the audience that I just named, and under the type it's a custom audience based on a customer list, so this is just the customer list of my 378 contacts that I uploaded, so now we want to create a look-alike audience based on this client list, so we'll go back to create audience, and now click on look-alike audience, and if you click into your look-alike source, we will see if you click on other sources, here's the custom audience list that I just set up, so we'll select that, and then you select your audience location, this is only by region or country, so in nearly all cases for everyone on this call that would just be the United States, we'll be targeting people in the US, and then you select your size, so it automatically sets it for 1%, and I recommend leaving it at that, if the larger you make this, it'll expand your audience, but the higher percentage you go up, the less likely those look-alikes are likely to fit the list that you uploaded in the demographics you're trying to reach, so if you leave it at 1% they're going to be stricter about who they target and add to your demographics, and if you make it 2% the people between 1 and 2% will still be a match, but they won't match quite as well, they won't use quite as strict as matching demographics, so even at 1% it's already at 2.4 million, so that's plenty large, and we are good to go with 1%, so we'll click create audience, and here we can see that our look-alike audience has been set up properly, and whenever you have a look-alike audience it'll start with look-alike, it'll show the region and the percentage that you chose, and then it will be named after the customer list that you had previously set up, so that is still populating, but you can go ahead and already use it, and you can also set up your saved audience based off of this, so you can certainly just use the look-alike audience and use that as your saved audience to target to with no additional demographics, interests, or behaviors, but if you want to add some of those things on top of the look-alike audience, then now we're going to create one more audience, and we're going to go down to saved audience, and do it here, we'll name this one second, here we go, and that's a test saved audience, and within our custom audiences, if you click in here, you'll see the ones that you've created previously, here's the look-alike audience that we just created, so we'll select that, and now we can add in these additional locations, age, gender, and detailed targeting based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, so if you were to create that saved audience, then it will show up in this list as well with whatever you name it, I'm going to show you one that I had previously created, which this is a FedAutoWealth custom Lorraine audience, Lorraine is an area in Cleveland that they like to target for their online retirement classes, so if you hover over it, you can see that is the custom audience based on the look-alike audience, and it also incorporates these additional locations, ages, and our demographics, interests, and behaviors, so now we've incorporated and combined our look-alike audience with all of these additional demographics, which I think is the best way to set up your audience in order to have the best results, so again just to cover that process really quick, when you come into your audience view in business manager, create audience, create your custom audience, which is the client list, then set up your look-alike audience based off of your custom audience client list, and then set up your saved audience, and that will be based off your look-alike audience with those additional demographics, and you can tell over here what type of audience it is based on the type, so custom audience, customer list, then we created that look-alike audience based off of that, and then you create your saved audience based off the look-alike audience, so once you're happy with your audience here, it will be saved for you to use at any time, so let's navigate back to the Facebook page, and you might need to refresh the page, but then you would go in to boost the post the same way that you would normally, set your goal to website clicks, and now in your audience section, if you click see all, you'll see your custom saved audiences here as well, and if you select one, you can see that it's the look-alike audience with these additional locations, ages, and demographics added in, and this will be saved here in your audience section, so whenever you come in to boost a post, you can select this one, and use it time and time again, and then same thing, you just have to set your duration, and your budget, and double-check everything, and then click to boost your post, and then once it is up and running at the bottom of your post, where it currently says completed, you will see it says running or in progress, and then you can click on view results to view your results as it runs, so that is my way for recommending Facebook advertisements, and now I'd like to hop on over to LinkedIn, I recommend Facebook first, and then LinkedIn second, but it does depend on the type of audience that you're trying to reach, if you're looking for more professional, and more business contacts, then LinkedIn might be the place for you, but you know there's a lot of the demographics, and type of people that personal advisors are looking for on Facebook too, but if you have both a Facebook, and a LinkedIn company page, I often recommend to split your budget between the two, Twitter can be good as well, but it doesn't perform as well in my experience, and you can't set up a lookalike audience on Twitter, so I recommend in most cases, splitting your budget between Facebook and LinkedIn, so same thing on LinkedIn, you come and make a post on your company page, like you normally would, and so here is Intercontinental Wealth Advisors company page, and here is the post that they made about their special report on investing in a low interest rate environment, so once you're happy with the way the post looks, and everything looks good to you, just make that post and have it show up on your page, and then you can click on the advertise button here in the top right, for some LinkedIn accounts that this is also located under the work tab, which would be right here under LinkedIn products, but either way, navigate to your advertising campaign manager, you can also just go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign manager, and if you haven't been in here before, you'll have to set up an account, but I've already set up an Intercontinental Wealth ad account, and then you will have to set up a campaign group, which is just automatically called a default campaign group, and then you can create a campaign, so let's click into this campaign that we currently have running for them, and we can see that it's active on this LinkedIn post on their special report, currently we've spent $149 of our $200 budget, and we've gotten 24 key results, website visits, or link clicks, which has cost us $6.21 per click, so just as a reminder, LinkedIn costs a little bit more per link click than Facebook or Twitter, anything under $10 on LinkedIn is really good, because they tend to focus more on quality clicks than quantity of clicks, so $6.21 is pretty good, for the first five days of this campaign, actually the cost per click was around $9, and we had only gotten eight or ten clicks, but in the past two days, the amount of clicks has gone up by quite a bit, and our cost per click has gone down, and that's just a factor of, like I discussed before, the ad having more time to optimize, and learn, and find the type of people that are gonna be more likely to click on this ad, so if you don't like the results in the first couple days, just give it some more time for it to do its thing and to optimize itself, so if you want to set up a new ad or a new campaign, you can do so with this button right here in the top right of your account of your campaign manager, and you'll have to choose your campaign group, the default one is fine, and then your objective, so in most cases that would be website visits, we're trying to draw people to our landing page or our website, and then you can set up your audience, so if you come down here to who is your target audience, first you can set your locations, and then who is your target audience, if you click on audience attributes, you can search by company, category, industries, specific names of companies, if you can target by people that follow certain companies, you can also do age or gender, you can do education levels, degrees, field of studies, specific schools, you can do job experience, so functions or certain seniorities, specific job titles or years of experience, and then there's also tons of different interests and other traits within all different types of categories, so you can really drill down on demographics, interests, and behaviors as well on LinkedIn and target exactly for who you're looking for, but let me show you first before we move on, how to set up a lookalike audience on LinkedIn, which is a fairly new feature that LinkedIn has added, so I'm going to go back out to the campaign manager, and then in the top toolbar here, you'll click on account assets and matched audiences, and I've already set a few up in here, but if you haven't yet, this will be blank, and you click right here on create audience, and first we need to upload a list, company or contact, and you can name it and then select your same CSV spreadsheet that we used on Facebook, the one thing about LinkedIn is they need at least to match at least 300 LinkedIn profiles in order to create your lookalike audience, so if your contact list is under 300, then this might not be the best way for you, but I still recommend advertising on LinkedIn with the basic demographics, however you probably need more closer to like 500 contacts on LinkedIn, because it won't be able to match everyone if they, you know, some people don't have a LinkedIn profile, or some people have their profile housed under a different email address than the one you might have in your contact list, so you, if you have three to five hundred contacts, you'll need that at least to do this lookalike process on LinkedIn, but once you have uploaded your list, this can take up to 24 hours to populate and for LinkedIn to match these profiles, and once it does, you'll see audience is ready, it'll show you your audience count, so I set up two contact list audiences here, one for their entire contact list, and it matched 1600 people, and one's for just their client list, and this matched 860 people, so once those are ready and good to go, now you can come back up here, create audience, and go to lookalike, and name that, and then you will see the contact lists that you can choose to create the lookalike audience off of, so if I wanted to create a lookalike audience based off of their clients, I'd select that list, click create, and then this can also take up to 48 hours, but once that is ready, it'll be here in your matched audiences list, you'll see ready, you'll see the audience count, they'll be clearly labeled by the type of audience underneath here, and also clearly labeled based on what you name them, so we can see the clients list started with 860 members, and the lookalike audience is now 6,800 members, so that is a great pool of people to advertise to, so now once they're in your matched audiences list, and they're ready, when you go to set a campaign, they will be ready for use, and you can use them time and time again, so let's go back to create a campaign, our default campaign group, our objective is website visits, excuse me, and set your location, and then under who is your target audience, under audiences you can select some of the lists you uploaded, and target exactly those people on your list, or you can select your lookalike audiences, so let's say for this ad, we wanted to do the lookalike of their clients, so we'll select that, and now we can also add in additional audience attributes, so let's say this was for a retirement planning course, and we wanted to target by age, so we'll do the higher age brackets, and let's say we also wanted to do target by job experience, and do by seniority, and we wanted to target senior level, more executive type, so you can select what fits, and then you can come up here to review, it automatically sets it as or, and so that would be your lookalike audience, or people that fit into this age group, or people of these job seniorities, so in most cases we're going to want to change this to and, rather than or, by just clicking on that, selecting and, let's change this one as well to and, and so now we have it set to our lookalike audience, and they also are in this age group, and they also have these job seniorities, so you can really target down, and set set these up the way that you like, so once you have your audience set, you can also save this as a template and save this audience with your lookalike and your additional demographics, and the next time you come in to set an ad, it will be right here under your saved audiences, and you can select to use that again without having to reset all the demographics. But once you're happy with your audience, then you want to choose your ad format. So you can do a single image ad in most cases, that's going to be what you want to do. You can also do multiple images or a video, but in this case we're just doing a single image. You can enable the LinkedIn audience network. This will allow LinkedIn to use partner apps and other websites where people are likely to click on your your advertisement. So I suggest leaving that turned on. You can set your daily budget or your lifetime budget. So let's, you know, you can set it for a $10 daily budget and set a start and end date to have it run through, let's say, 10 days on $10 a day, so about $100 budget. You will spend up to $110 total since that's actually 11 days. For bidding, I recommend just leaving it on automated or whatever is recommended. Maximum delivery will get the most results possible with your full budget. And then after you're set up with your audience and your budget and your schedule, you're ready to move on and select your post or your creative is what they call it. So here we are to select the creative. You can create a new ad or you can browse the existing content that's already been posted to your page. So here's that post that I showed before that's already on the LinkedIn page, so you can select that. You can select multiple posts if you like, but I recommend just doing one at a time for specific campaigns. So we select the sponsor that, we're ready to move forward, and then you are ready to review everything and launch your campaign. So just make sure to review your audience, your budget, and your schedule. You can always click back over here to go back to those pages and update those things, and then you're ready to launch your campaign. And then once it's launched, you can come back to your campaign manager to view your results as they get updated and see the status of your ad. It'll either say pending while it's getting off the ground or active or completed. So really quickly, I know this is a lot and we're coming up to the top of the hour. I want to have a time for a few questions, but I am going to cover Twitter ads really quickly as well, even though I do recommend spending most of your budget on Facebook and LinkedIn for ease of use and also for performance. But if you are interested in advertising on Twitter and a lot of your audience is on Twitter, you simply go to your Twitter page, click on more on the left-hand side, and then Twitter ads. Then create an ad right here on this page, and this will take you to the campaign manager. You can also go to ads.twitter.com. So our objective is website clicks. Obviously if you're posting a video or anything like that, or if you just want engagement and awareness for all of these different platforms, you can choose engagements or you can choose video views. But like I said, in most cases it's going to be website clicks. So you set up your campaign name, choose your funding source. You can set a daily budget or a total budget. So we'll set a daily budget of 10, a total budget of 100. We will set the start and the end date, and then we can move on to the next step. You can set your ad group name, and you can also set a start and end time and ad group budget for this specific ad group, or else it will just use your total campaign criteria that we just set on the last page. Leave your bid type as automatic or whatever is recommended, and then you can set up your demographics. So you can't do a lookalike audience on Twitter, but there are quite a few of the same demographics and interests and behaviors you can do. You can even choose certain devices, and down here in the targeting features you can search by specific keywords. You can also, even though you can't upload lookalike audiences, you can do follower lookalikes. So let's say that you wanted to target people that are similar to the type of people that follow the Twitter profile. You can search for whatever Twitter account you like and select that. Or how about the FBA? There we go. So this is a great way to choose a bunch of accounts that have followers similar to the type of people that you are looking to target, and you can choose follower lookalikes in addition to your demographics, your keywords, your interests, and other specific demographics and behaviors. And placements, I recommend leaving this on everything that's selected because that will just help your ad be more efficient and get more clicks. You can set your ad category to financial planning or whatever fits. You want to put in your website, and then down here at the bottom in creatives, you will select the tweet or whatever creative you want to use for your advertisement. So let's see here. Under tweets here, it should be showing my previous tweets. I don't know why they're not showing up here. Normally if you have this selected and organic tweets, they will show up here. Stuff that you've already tweeted. Oh, I did run into this problem recently. I had to turn off my ad blocker, and right now I'm using my wife's computer to present, so I'd have to go turn off her ad blocker. But so make sure to turn that off, and you will see a list of your tweets on your profile here. And then you can select one or multiple tweets, or you can go to display creatives. You can add your destination URL and upload your media and create that advertisement or that tweet or post right here and there. But in most cases, when you come here, it'll show your tweets here. You can select those, and if you're not seeing them here, make sure to turn off your ad blocker. And then after that, you simply go to next, and that gives you a review page to review your audience and the criteria for the budget and the schedule we set up. And then you're ready to launch your campaign. So you know, not quite as much capability here on Twitter, and the ads seem to perform not quite as well, especially for the type of people that most of you are going to be targeting. But if you do find that a large portion of your audience is here on Twitter, then it's worth giving it a shot as well. But for the most case, if you have Facebook and LinkedIn, I'd recommend splitting your budget up between those two platforms. So I know that was a lot, and I'm sure we have some questions. We have a lot of questions, Johnny. I've been triaging them, so I'm gonna blitz through as many as I don't think you've already addressed. People are asking questions about the return on investment. Somebody's got a case study. So let's tackle this easy one. Which is better if you're going to post a picture or a video? What do the studies show about images versus video online? They both can be effective. However, if we're truly trying to get someone to, you know, sign up for something and capture them as a lead, it's better to do a link with an image. So when they click on that image, it takes them to the website where they have to fill out your lead magnet or fill out your signup form. If you have a video there, then they can simply click and view that video right on the page, and they might be less likely to click over to the page you're trying to drive them to. So unless it's specifically a video that you're trying to advertise and you're just trying to get more views on the video, I would do an image that leads to the page with your video. Agreed. So that's different from getting engagement. We might say, if you want engagement, show the video link. So let's go to the next question. So when you boost a post, can the person see, the person viewing it, the prospect that it's sponsored or boosted? Yep. When it shows up on their newsfeed, right underneath the company name, there will be a little sign that says sponsored. So they will be able to see that, and that's totally okay. That doesn't reduce the effectiveness of the ads. Okay. The next question is still on LinkedIn. I'm going to try and batch these on LinkedIn for a little bit. So do you have to use a LinkedIn company page to advertise, or can you use your personal profile page? You have to use a LinkedIn company page. So if you don't have, I recommend having that company page set up anyway, and so if you don't have that set up, go ahead and go set that up and start populating that. Put some posts out there and use that to boost your posts. LinkedIn also recently introduced the ability to invite your friends and your connections to follow your company page. So you can do that to grow your audience on your company page first, and then go and boost your posts from the company page. Okay. Still on LinkedIn, do you need a paid or a premium account in order to run a campaign? No, you do not. You can run a campaign from any regular LinkedIn account, and that's it. Yeah. You don't need a premium account at all. Okay. So if somebody has a blog subscriber list that's about 300, but they have about 500 connections on LinkedIn, does it make sense to use those contacts from the blog for LinkedIn lookalike lists because it's going to improve the ratio? Yeah. I think that if you have a client list or a client in prospect or just a contact list that you use for your mailing list, your email list, that is usually best. But I think a blog readership list would also work as well because those are people that are interested in your content that know your company and fit your demographics. So if you use that to create a lookalike audience, that would also be sufficient for finding people that are going to show that similar demographics and probably show interest in your content. Now if you've got 500 connections on LinkedIn, can you create a campaign that targets your 500 connections for somebody who looks like them? You can't choose just to target or advertise to your connections, and I don't believe you can set a lookalike audience. Well, let's take a look really quick if we can set a lookalike audience on LinkedIn. One second. Let's go back to the matched audiences. And folks, we're going to go five minutes over so we can get to all these questions. I don't believe you can, you have to upload a list to create the lookalike audience. So what you could do would be to harvest your LinkedIn connections email addresses and put those in a spreadsheet and then use that to create your lookalike audience. Obviously if you have 500 connections that could take a while, but if you have an administrative person in your firm or you want to hire someone to do that for you, then they can harvest your email addresses, put them in a spreadsheet, and then you can upload that here and effectively use your LinkedIn connections to create your lookalike audience. Okay, so this is important. So one of our viewers had a LinkedIn ad. They were driving for engagement for, you know, to fill out the the lead magnet form, but they got zero names and emails. So they got 12,000 impressions and 30 clicks, but not one person completed the form. So the person is asking, how bad is this and should I keep trying to perfect the formula? I do think it's worth trying again, especially if it's your first or second time trying a LinkedIn ad. 30 clicks is pretty good, but obviously you would hope for more with that many impressions, so you might want to up your budget a little bit. You might want to change around the image or the language or the call to action and that might help get more clicks. 30 clicks should be enough to get, you know, at least a handful of people signing up for your form, but obviously the more clicks you get, the more likely you're going to be to have some people start filling out your form. So double-check your audience, I would say, and make sure the ad is being displayed to the right type of people that are really the type of people that are going to be likely to fill out your form and access your lead magnet. But other than that, I think just do some some testing and some tweaking and go from there. Make sure you've got a good call to action when they land on that special offer, too. So it's a numbers game. Okay, so as a new solo advisor, should I focus on my personal LinkedIn page or my company page and which one should I link on my website? So if it's a company website, I would recommend linking to with your LinkedIn icon to the company page, although you want to make sure both your personal and your company page are optimized and looking good, and I covered the best tips and practices in my NAPFA webinar last year on social media best practices, so make sure to watch that archived recording for more tips on how to really enhance and optimize both your personal profile and your company page. And when you go to make a post on the company page, go ahead and do that, but then come to your page and like it, and then also share it. So you can like it from your personal account here, and then we're going to share it to our personal account as well. So now we are sharing the company post to Howard's personal profile in all of Howard's personal connections, and he has over 500 connections, whereas the Intercontinental company page has 206 followers. So we're going to boost out this company post to the larger connection list and draw people back to the company page at the same time. Okay, so now we're going to shift over to some questions about Facebook, and this question is about how Facebook uses their artificial intelligence to create that lookalike. Is Facebook just gathering data based on the person's likes, comments, etc., or are they actually, are people selecting, like this is my interest, Marie loves grandbabies? So both. So, you know, when we upload the list of clients or contacts, it will go out and find as many of those profiles as possible, and it will look at what they have liked on Facebook. Obviously you can like all kinds of interests, movies, music, travel, certain, you know, pages on wine or food or whatever it may be. It'll look at what they like, what kind of posts they interact with, and it'll create a whole kind of demographic, and then we'll go out and find other profiles that fit those similar demographics, that have liked similar pages, that have similar interests or similar behaviors on Facebook. So it's both of those things, and it's a really complicated algorithm that I don't try to understand, but all I know is that it is, you know, Facebook obviously has a lot of data on its users on what their interests are and what kind of stuff they like, and it uses that to find other profiles out there that are very similar in terms of interests. Okay, so when you have a list and you feed that information up into Facebook, what does Facebook do with that information? It stores it in your ad account, but other than that, it doesn't do anything with it. The people in the list that you upload aren't notified in any way, and they don't sell the information, they don't use it to advertise, except for within your personal ad account where it's stored, and if you just save it in there, it'll just be saved in your ad account, and they won't use that information in any way, and you're not really giving Facebook any information they don't already have. You know, if it goes out and finds a profile based on the email address that you uploaded, Facebook already has that email address because that's the email address they use to sign up for their account, so no harm there. So there's a related question about privacy concerns and feeding up names and emails into these lists. Should clients be concerned, or does the advisor feel unethical in some way? I wouldn't, just because, like I said, the client isn't notified in any way, and there's really no harm, no foul in uploading the list. You're not giving Facebook a ton of data, especially if you're just doing first name, last name, and email address. They don't use the email address to send them any emails, they don't sell the email addresses, and so I don't think you need to feel unethical. It's completely safe. Okay, so this is related. When you put a Facebook pixel on your website, do you need to disclose to the website visitors that you've got cookies and pixels on your website? I am not sure about that. If you want to be safe, I would say yes. I don't know if you need to, so that might be something you want to check with your compliance team, but it doesn't hurt to add that in the footer of your website. Yeah, exactly, and I looked it up because I knew you were busy presenting because, you know, the first thing is check with compliance and legal, but there are some companies that will be extra safe, and they'll have a banner or a little bar or something in the footer that says, we have cookies on our website. You may see, you know, receiving some additional communications. It's in the disclosure area. It doesn't, like, pop up like the big ta-da on your website, but if you want to be safe and disclose, that's how I would do that. So, this is around return on metric, return on investment in metrics. So, repeat the metrics for clicks for each platform. I don't know if you can quickly state the difference again on that, and then just touch on the return on investment for fee-only advisors in particular because this advisor is seeing very little results anecdotally and with other, you know, peer group and benchmarking studies, so you can just address the cost per click and the return. So, if your ad is set up and your audience is set up correctly, then your average click on cost per click on Facebook or Twitter should be under $5, but anything up to $5 is still pretty good, and on LinkedIn up to $10, and if you can get it around $5 on LinkedIn, that's really good. And so, obviously, the more you spend, the more clicks you're going to get, and you don't want to spend too little or do it for too short of a time period as the platformers won't have time to optimize the ad or won't have time to have it perform a little bit and see what type of people it's performing better with and then start showing the ad to more of those types of people. So, you know, if you can get your Facebook click down to $2 or $3, your LinkedIn click down to $5 to $7 or something like that, that's really good, and obviously, the more you spend, the more clicks you'll get, and as for return on investment, you know, that's kind of hard to say, but, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these social media advertisements have a relatively low cost per click, and then we're, the point is to try and get people into your funnel, and so you might not, you're not going to get a lot of people that see your Facebook ad and click over to your website and then reach out and say, I want to hire you, but if you can offer a really good lead magnet or a white paper, a special report or webinar or something along those lines, and you can get them to give you your email address, and then you can add them to your email list, then you can continue to drip market to them and send them your newsletters or your blog posts or your videos and continue to stay top of mind with them, build trust, build share of mind, build authority, and eventually, after you've drip marketed them for a while and you've built that trust and that authority is when you often see people reaching out for a consultation or to learn more. So this is all about the long game and getting more people into your marketing funnel and building that trust and share of mind. Well said. This is the last question and then we'll say goodbye and we'll see you guys back here in December for the year-end recap. So this is regarding Facebook and look-alike audiences. What's the minimum size of a custom list in order to create a high-quality look-alike audience on Facebook? So really there's no minimum size to create a look-alike audience, but obviously the more people in that list you upload, the better. So if you want to get a really quality look-alike audience, I would say you want at least 100 names in your list, but obviously the more names you have in there, the more accurate the platform can be in creating that look-alike audience. I only wish I was as fast as you are on doing all that live show and tell. That's amazing. So thank you everybody for all your great enthusiasm today. Thank you, Johnny. I learned a lot. Yep, sorry we packed everything in, but obviously this recording will be available to you all if you need to touch up on anything and make sure to download the slides. And as always, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn and send me a message if you have any follow-up questions. And thank you all for joining us today. I enjoyed it. Thank you everybody. See you next month. Bye-bye.

social media advertising

Facebook ads

LinkedIn advertising

Twitter advertising

custom audiences

lookalike audiences

ad format

budget and scheduling

cost per click

privacy and ethical considerations