I wanted to post this as it is something I recently tried as our direct mail response rates continued to go further and further down (below 0.5% on some campaigns). We were continually having to spend more and send out more pieces simply to get a decent number of people in our seats for our dinner seminars.

Eventually I stumbled upon someone who specifically did Facebook advertising for filling seminars for financial advisors and I can attest that this change alone basically will double my production I will do this year, and he will have done so for less than half the cost of what I was paying for direct mail. Prior to using this person I was spending almost $6,000 a month on direct mail advertising for my seminars and continuing to see a declining response rate from the direct mail. Once I got setup with The Facebook ads on average I spend around $1,000-2000 in order to fill two nights of seminars with around 30 people each.

Even greater than this massive reduction in cost though in my mind is the flexibility that it has given me. With direct mail you have to plan out very far ahead of time which can be difficult and often times one night would get a much heavier response rate than the other night. This would lead to frustration as we would try to roll people from the slow night into the busy night or have to cancel days all together etc. With the online ads if this scenario ever begins to arise I can simply ask my marketing person to shut down the ad for the night that we are full and instead push the ad for the night we are light a bit harder to equal them out. That along with the fact that we generally only have to plan and advertise events around 2-3 weeks out has made all the difference in the world to my practice. Once the ads are setup and you have a couple of locations you like to use it has been pretty much as easy as authorizing a spend budget on my card and having the registrants flow in over the weekend for my assistant to follow up with the next week. I almost never would post about things like this but I have been so happy with the service and have found that so many other advisors have had questions around Facebook ads and how I’ve used them that I would try and help out some others. As long as you are not in my territory I am happy to provide the name and contact info of the person I use for the ads.