Facebook allows advertisers to filter addressable markets by a variety of factors, including location, education, relationship, age, financial information, and life events like anniversaries, marriages and birth of children. Using these filters, advisors can refine their targets—i.e., married professionals with advanced degrees over the age of 30 and living in the zip code of the RIA. For a pipeline of warmer leads, advisors can choose to target individuals who share a mutual friend.

Facebook gives its advertisers a host of results analytics, along with diagnostic and prescriptive analytics to help refine their target markets. Click-through rates show advisors which ads perform better, the demographics most likely to interact with their ad, and average cost-per-click. These analytics help advisors hone their campaigns to be more targeted, better designed and more profitable.

Creating An Analytical Culture

Creating an analytical culture is a process, and it takes time. Advisors who want to bring an analytical approach to how their firm does business can take the following first steps:

• Don’t boil the ocean. Start by identifying one area of interest, pain point or key metric to improve. Potential topics might include business development, client experience, marketing or operating efficiencies.
 

• Tap readily available resources. Some custodians, broker dealers and financial technology tools already have built-in reporting capabilities, benchmarking tools or resources to get started. Expect the first report or analysis to generate more questions than it answers.
 

• Identify and collect the data points required to obtain deeper insights. Advisors should initally cast a broad net to collect data. Storage is cheap and there will be plenty of opportunities to fine-tune the approach.
 

• Engage others in these efforts. It is important to involve others, especially those who are interested in the chosen topic. Their support will be invaluable when it is time to take action.
 

• Assign accountability for analysis or report creation. If the expertise does not exist in-house, consider external resources. An application provider, such as the CRM tool, may also be able to facilitate this.
 

• Elevate data internally. Demonstrate the importance of using data to drive business decisions by discussing reports in internal meetings and ultimately, by tying results to compensation.