TikTok is a “great platform” for engagement and could help encourage young people to the advice profession, LifeSearch head of performance marketing, Danielle Moore, has argued.
Discussing how social media could be used to encourage younger people into financial services, Moore underlined the importance of utilising TikTok specifically as a social media platform, saying: “Millennials and Gen Z predominantly use TikTok".
She said using this platform to its fullest extent could be used to advertise the industry and, therefore, encourage younger generations to consider a career in financial advice.
However, she cautioned that, for the use of social media to be most effective, firms should “think about how they use it”.
“I see a lot of people in the industry putting up posts on TikTok advertising themselves, saying ‘come and work for us, we’re great’ and, while that’s a fine idea to share, the problem is in visibility,” she explained.
“No one is searching for financial advisers on TikTok because it’s not really interesting.”
Moore suggested including more creative, performative, and humorous elements into TikTok posts.
She said this is important as TikTok is an algorithm-based platform and so if your post is not something that is exciting or something that does not play on a recent trend, the content will not be shown.
“It’s really kind of a waste of time if you’re putting a lot of effort into creating a post only for no one to be able to find it,” she advised.
“Creating a post on TikTok can actually be more time consuming than people realise as, especially in our industry because we are regulated, we have to write scripts and get things signed off, so there’s a whole process behind it.”
Social media importance
Moore also underlined the importance of reaching out on social media platforms to curate a more diverse customer base and expand the idea of financial advice to younger people who will benefit from it.
“Everyone in the market can capture the current customer, it's quite easy because our current customer is generally a 35 year-old male, so it's really easy to keep pushing the same thing that we've always done,” she explained.
“However, there's a massive gap in the understanding of products, if you say income protection, people will look at you and have no idea what you’re on about.
“As a result, we started thinking about, how can we start bringing that into the conversation a little bit earlier on, and what segments are massively underrepresented within the protection industry?"
This included examining which market segments were not getting exposure to these products.
Moore said, in her role, she and her team conducted research and ended up looking at TikTok as an opportunity.
“We found that 70 per cent of Gen Zs and Millennials will look to TikTok to search for something over Google,” she reported.
