More isn't better: How advisors' videos can draw attention in a crowded market

Advisors and other financial professionals are heeding the call of online video, increasing their online postings by nearly threefold over the past four years.

But these online snippets dispensing advice or discussing recent news are still failing to connect as well as they might, according to findings from compliance consultant Hearsay Systems in its recent Social Selling Content Study. Hearsay Systems reported earlier this month that the firms it works with upped their video postings by a whopping 287% from 2019 to 2023. The results were culled from 13 million posts Hearsay Systems helped track for compliance purposes for its clients in the wealth and asset management, insurance and banking industries.

Those messages elicited more than 21 million "engagements," which are typically defined as instances when a viewer felt compelled to click on them, comment on them, share them, like them or respond in some other way. But, despite financial professionals' newfound fondness for talking into a camera, it wasn't videos that performed the best. That distinction was reserved for old-fashioned text-only posts.

Leslie Leach, Hearsay chief marketing and strategy officer, said the results suggest advisors and other financial professionals are still struggling with what they should say when they hit record and stare into a camera. For many, the biggest need is to come up with their own scripts and messages rather than rely on something handed to them by a corporate marketing department.

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Original posts elicited viewer responses 5.2% of the time on average last year, according to Hearsay. Canned content, meanwhile, had an engagement rate of 0.5%. 

"One of the findings is that you get 10 times the engagement when you're writing something original, which tends to be more personal," Leach said. "I think that's really the driver."

Original beats canned everytime

Marketing consultants have long admonished advisors and other financial professionals about the risks of relying too heavily on mass-produced "canned" messages for social media. Yet, despite these warnings, Hearsay Systems found only 4.4% of the postings in its study consisted of original material.

Leach said advisors certainly deserve praise for recognizing the potential of online video. At the same time, they could probably stand a few more nudges in the direction of better content.

"Would you expect your financial advisor to be a great video marketer?" Leach said. "Well, not necessarily. But those that are have been incredibly successful at it. It's such a good medium for showing what it's like to work with you. And if you're strong at that, you can present your personal value proposition well over video."

Marketing consultants say that advisors and other financial professionals who eschew online videos risk losing a direct means of reaching large numbers of potential clients. The young, many note, are particularly habituated to taking in content through short segments posted to sites like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and even TikTok. 

Yet, Hearsay System's study found that videos it tracked saw only 0.64% engagement rates, meaning users responded to the posts less than 1% of the time. Text-only messages, by contrast, had 4.3% engagement rates. Meanwhile, the most common type of post — consisting mainly of links to other content — elicited only a 0.42% engagement rate.

Put it in an email

Robert Sofia, the CEO of the marketing company Snappy Kraken, said the results of Hearsay System's study took him by surprise. The findings about poor performance for video run contrary, he said, to his own firm's findings about digital marketing.

Examining data extracted from Google Analytics and similar sources, Snappy Kraken found in its 2024 State of Digital report that videos — at least when sent by email — tend to do far better than text-only messages distributed by the same means. Snappy Kraken reported that promotional emails containing videos were opened 59.4% of the time and the videos  clicked on 36.7%. For emails containing only text, the comparable figures were 27.4% and 16.7%.

Sofia said the results suggest advisors aren't merely struggling with what they should be saying on camera; they also could improve their distribution methods.

"So if I was an advisor trying to take away some knowledge and some action items from this, I would say, OK, posting video by itself is not enough," Sofia said. "You have to leverage that video and drive traffic to it if you want better results."

Sofia said too many advisors are happy to post videos on social media and leave it at that. A far better practice, he said, is to promote the content by linking to it in emails and on their homepages.

Sofia said advisors can also encourage engagement by allowing viewers to submit questions in response to their posting and then providing answers as quickly as possible.

"If I make a video, I'm going to post it natively on Twitter or natively on LinkedIn, and I'm going to put it on my landing page and I'm going to send it out in an email to my entire base saying, 'Hey, check out this video about A, B and C,' and then I'll link back to it," Sofia said. "So my point is that really the best thing to do with content is not think about it as a one-off."

Sofia agreed that advisors most likely also need to take more care with what they're saying in videos. He, too, urged financial professionals to avoid canned content and to always put a little bit of themselves into whatever they're posting.

More than one way

That doesn't mean, Sofia said, advisors have to be constantly lifting the veil on their private lives. Wealth managers can stand out just as easily by offering their own takes on common financial advice or the news of the day.

He also said advisors should pay close attention to the expectations of the users of whatever social media sites they're posting on. Sites like LinkedIn, with its emphasis on professional marketing and networking, are best reserved for serious discussions of financial matters. Advisors who are trying to reach a younger audience on sites like Instagram and TikTok have a little more freedom, he said.

Financial professionals should also do an honest appraisal of their strengths and talents and find ways to emphasize those. Sofia said most people come to social media for entertainment and information.

He said he doesn't see his strengths lying in devising humorous sketches that he can use to tell a viewer something useful while also eliciting a chuckle. So his posts tend to take a different tack.

"I have a lot of things that relate to my son and my gardening and my home improvement projects, and I get a lot of engagement off that," Sofia said. "But I also have a good balance of advisor education and marketing strategy tips and business leadership tips. And then I pepper in some promotional stuff for my business."

Sofia said advisors can learn a lot from others in the industry. He pointed to Michael Kitces, an industry guru and the founder of the XY Planning Network support organization for financial advisors, as someone who has successfully used video to dispense advice to large swaths of the industry. He also likes Douglas Boneparth, the president of the New York-based RIA Bona Fide Wealth, for his use of videos and social media for much the same purpose but with a bit more humor.

"Half of his posts will make you laugh, and they relate back to the industry and finance, but they're much more tailored probably to the individual investor," Sofia said. "But also advisors just get a kick out of the guy."

Where the money's going

Amid all this, advisors and their marketing partners are showing signs of growing only more eager for online video and social media posts. The advertising software company Mediaocean, in its Financial Services Advertising Outlook Report released in April, found that three-quarters of the respondents to its survey plan to increase their spending on digital displays and videos this year. The results, compiled from polls of 95 leading financial services advertising firms, found nearly the same extent of enthusiasm for expenditures on social media.

Aaron Goldman, the chief marketing officer at Mediaocean, said advisors posting on LinkedIn and similar sites should take care to use the well-known hashtag system to tie their articles to key words viewers might be searching for. He also recommended "tagging" people mentioned in videos or comments; this can usually be done by affixing an "@" before their name in a post and then clicking on their photo when it pops up.

"The third thing is you've got to share it after you post it," Goldman said. "Put it in your email newsletter and have people look at it. And maybe say, 'If you liked this, please share it,' and have that explicit call to action at the end of your video. You might see this on YouTube. People there are always saying, 'Like and subscribe.' That type of thing is cheesy, but it works."

The place for AI

As in all industries, advertisers are looking to artificial intelligence for ways to make their clients' lives a bit easier. AI, for instance, can now be used to modify an advisor's video to make a message for an individual client. 

In the past, sending these types of personally directed communications could have entailed filming hundreds of separate snippets. AI allows the individualized element to be added on later to a single source.

"One of the beautiful things about generative AI right now is you can create thousands of different versions of a video without having to film them all separately," Goldman said.

The crowded market

Marketing consultants are quick to say that not all the blame for decreased engagement can be laid at financial professionals' feet. With social media postings coming with ever greater frequency, many advisors are simply struggling with the old question of how to command attention in a crowded market, Hearsay Systems said.

The difficulty of sending a clear signal amid all the noise is likely the biggest reason why engagements were down last year for financial professionals on almost all social media sites. The one notable exception was LinkedIn, which actually saw an 18% increase in engagements.

"It just shows they weren't doing promotional, spammy posts but actually doing quality content,"  Leach said.

But LinkedIn may not be where the biggest opportunities lie. Leach noted that another one of the surprising findings of Hearsay System's Social Selling Content Study is how little advisors are making use of Instagram.

Instagram, which claims more than 2 billion monthly active users, saw three times the engagement rate of Facebook last year and 14 times that of X (formerly Twitter.) Even so, only 2.2% of the social media posts tracked by Hearsay last year were to Instagram, which is owned by Facebook's parent company Meta.

Meanwhile, 51% went to LinkedIn and 40% to Facebook, garnering engagement rates of less than 1% on both sites. Leach said she could only speculate why Instagram does so well. One guess, she said: Its site lends itself to videos and images.

Partly to combat concerns about oversaturation, Hearsay systems separately recommends financial professionals adopt a schedule of posting consistently but not necessarily frequently. Usually one video or blog a week is enough, and more than three is too much.

Cause for celebration

Above all, though, Leach is happy to see so many advisors and other financial professionals embracing video. For many years, the industry — likely out of fear of attracting regulatory scrutiny — had been hesitant to employ this means of reaching out to current and potential clients.

The fact that so many are doing it now is something to praise, she said, even if some still have  a ways to go.

"Sometimes this industry gets a bad rap for being not good at certain things — self-marketing being one of them," Leach said. "But in this case, some of them really are amazing, and they're overall just really getting better at it."