With growing pressures on advisers to accommodate more clients in a smaller amount of time, educating new clients about what the advice process looks like can be a frustrating process.
“We used to have more time to be able to commit to educating people and taking them on the start of their financial journey. But we don’t have that luxury anymore. It just costs too much and so we need them to come to us with that education already,” Mazi Wealth founder Deline Jacovides told The ifa Show earlier this month.
One group of potential clients who could stand to benefit from social media outreach are pre-retirees in their 50s and 60s.
Speaking through the Financial Advice Association Australia (FAAA), senior financial adviser at Financial Foundations Kieran Menzie highlighted that many pre-retirees are starting the advice process lacking foundational knowledge, such as whether they have enough money to retire and how much will they need.
“Research backs this up. These are the questions that keep people up at night,” Menzie said.
For Menzie, a solution to this issue was posting content on social media aimed at educating people and answering some of their questions.
“When I first started posting on Instagram and TikTok, I didn’t do it initially to get new clients. I just wanted to add value, answer the common questions, and be someone people could come to for general guidance,” he said.
However, as he kept posting, Menzie found it also grew his client base, reaching an audience that may have otherwise been unaware of his services.
“That shift from content to conversations to clients showed me that social media can be more than just adding value. It can be a genuine way to grow your client base while still staying true to your purpose.”
Beyond pre-retirees, Pivot Wealth’s Ben Nash has also found that clients who approach a practice after learning about them through social media often come with stronger knowledge of the advice process.
“They tend to already be trained in your method and that makes it a lot easier for onboarding them and often means that people can get more out of the advice process as well because they’re not hearing about all of these concepts for the first time,” he told The ifa Show in August.
Menzie echoed this sentiment, highlighting that he sees social media content as an “extension” of what he already does as an adviser, helping those at key junctures in their lives feel less stressed.
“For me, it started as a way to add value to the community and has turned into a way to help individuals and families find a financial adviser they trust.”
