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Meet Anthony Svirkis—lateral thinker, lover of all things digital and all round smart when it comes to digital and the online world. Anthony is CEO of The Tribe Group, a platform that connects brands with social influencers to harness the power of old-school word-of-mouth marketing combined with the new world of social media.
Imagine if we as an industry could find influencers and help spread the great word about financial advice? Anthony explains how the Tribe Group could help us do that!
A modern twist on a traditional marketing concept
When I talk to financial advisers about where their clients come from, 80% of the time they say it’s through others. Whether that’s existing clients, strategic alliances or referral partners, the whole concept of influencers is fairly common in the industry. However, that is almost always exclusively offline word-of-mouth marketing.
Tribe is a tech company and marketing platform that take the very old concept of word-of-mouth marketing and adds scale to it through the use of social media influencers. So, instead of one person talking about a brand or company they like, through the Tribe platform, a brand can tap into the voices of 10 or 100 influencers and talk to thousands or hundreds of thousands of people at once.
How it works
The way Tribe works is that a brand will put a brief on the platform about a product they want to launch or run a campaign on. That brief gets pushed out to about 15,000 influencers around Australia who can respond with their content. Tribe and the brand they have the choice to buy that content, and it goes out on social media to the audiences of those influencers. The influencers are really content creators—content being image-based and video-based, including stop-motion graphics—and they will create content in response to briefs using their own creativity and voice. Tribe has done a lot of case studies with consumer-focused brands, and the sales data suggests the increase in sales can be 10-30% with the right social influencer campaign.
Tribe defines a social media influencer as someone who has over 3000 followers predominantly on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, but it can apply to any social media platform. Having at least 3000 followers means that influencer has a degree of importance with their audience and usually a high degree of trust. Often those smaller influencers with under 100,000 followers have a very engaged audience that shares the same passions and interests. We all know people do business with people they know, like and trust, and these influencers cover all three descriptors for their audience.
In the world of financial advice, unfortunately, there is still a challenge in terms of the trust factor. That’s why traditional word-of-mouth marketing works so well because clients come in trusting that the advisor they’ve been referred to will have their best interests at heart. Taking this concept online, influencer marketing could potentially lift the reputation of the financial industry. After all, the first and biggest strength of influencer marketing is the trust between the influencer and their audience. That trust does wield power, and when an influencer recommends a product or brand, it will therefore have more impact than a plain display ad.
Tell a story as well as sell a product
A lot of financial advisors practice goals-based advising, and everyone’s got different goals. Social media can really help advisors through telling the story visually of those goals. A picture paints a thousand words after all, and messages can be easily conveyed through the mix of visual and text-based content. This is where influencer marketing is a perfect fit because it can help create the inspiration and aspiration around particular goals and dreams. It does require some lateral thinking but it matches up very well with social media when the campaigns are about displaying what a good financial advisor will allow you to do or be or have.
Social media is weaving itself more and more into the fabric of everyday life, as are mobile devices. For digital natives like millennials, who have grown up with it, it’s just part of life, but even for older generations, it’s not going anywhere. That’s why it’s important that advisors embrace social media as part of the new world of marketing. Even in a very compliance-driven industry like finance, there are ways to engage with social media and integrate it into the business (and the wider profession) so we can broaden and target more people.
Ultimately, marketing is about sharing the wonderful message about the world of financial advice. Although the concept of social influencer marketing is very new, it’s based on the traditional ideas of using word-of-mouth and building reputations based on great work. That is something all financial advisors are familiar with so it’s not a huge leap to harness the powers of social media to reach more Australians, through platforms like The Tribe Group.
