Mixing the worlds of social media and financial advice remains somewhat of a controversial topic among practitioners, however, one adviser who sees the combination as beneficial is Pivot Wealth founder Ben Nash.
Having amassed 130,000 followers on both Instagram and TikTok, Nash views social media as a tool for education to better prepare clients for the advising process.
“I love it when people come from our content and particularly when they come from following the content for a long time because you’ve already gotten across the key messages and philosophies in a lot of cases,” Nash said on The ifa Show.
For Nash, this has allowed for any potential clients to understand his philosophy and ideas as an adviser, highlighting that social media is an effective connecting tool for firms.
“I think for consumers to connect with an adviser, it’s important that they find someone that has a set of philosophies that they connect with,” the adviser said.
He added: “Because reality is when it comes to money, there’s a lot of different ways to be right. And I don’t think it’s for me or for any other adviser to say what is right and what is wrong. And ultimately, you want to help your clients to understand that.”
Even if the content you are making is not reaching a massive audience, it can still help provide a steady stream of clients that is educated on your philosophies, as well as some of the technical aspects of the financial advice profession.
Onboarding clients can be a time-consuming task, which can become further complicated with the addition of having to familiarise them with industry jargon and technical details. The result can be these introductory tasks eating into valuable advising time.
However, Nash explained that if some of these concepts are familiar to clients before the process begins, it can be a massive time saver.
“They’re often going to be already had that message [delivered through social media] ingrained in them,” he said.
“It’s a lot smoother. Less [onboarding] time puts them in a position to take more action faster, which means they can get better results faster. Then they’re happy clients. Then you’ve got long-term clients.”
He did acknowledge, however, that there is the possibility the client comes into the first meeting and state goals based on what they have already gleaned through the adviser’s content.
The key to drilling down into what they actually want – not just regurgitating what the adviser has covered online – is to spend the time necessary to cover “the why and what sits behind the goals”.
“Property is something that we’ve seen work really well for our clients. We’re big believers in that when used the right way. We don’t recommend direct properties or anything like that but just having quality blue chip properties using leverage and you getting some tax efficiencies,” Nash said.
“We often find that when clients come to us [we’ll ask], ‘What do you want to do? Or what’s success?’ And they’ll mention something around property. But we’re always making sure we’re asking the follow-up question: ‘Why is that important to you? What is the purpose?’
“Really understanding that so we can see if it’s an investment thing, is it a lifestyle thing, is it a family-based decision and ensuring that then we’re tackling their advice in a way that aligns with what is actually important to them.”
To hear more from Ben Nash, tune in here.
