How Financial Advisors Can Use Generative AI in Marketing

Marketing may not be every advisor’s favorite part of their role, but it’s key to growing a business.

That’s why marketing efforts are a prime area for generative AI: They’re a core need for any business, but they can be time consuming. Generative AI is able to help advisors save time and effort here, and investors seem to be receptive to the technology’s use in this domain.

Our research showed that investors largely believe that marketing is an acceptable use of generative AI and that it did not negatively affect their reactions in terms of comfort and perception of their advisor-client relationship. They largely felt this was how technology should be used: to create generic content.

However, one lingering investor concern centered on lack of personalization or a true understanding of an advisor’s desired client base. In fact, concerns over generative AI interfering with personalization and human connection were reoccurring themes in our research.

Although investors are onboard with generative AI helping advisors become more efficient in menial tasks, they also believe that advisors should be careful that the technology doesn’t affect the advisor’s ability to give personalized advice.

How to Use Gen AI for Social-Media Marketing

One marketing tactic that our research suggests may be a good fit for advisors’ use of generative AI: social media.

Social media can be a powerful component of any business’ marketing strategy, whether it’s used to reach out directly to potential clients or stay top of mind for existing clients. And generative AI can help advisors save time and increase productivity when engaging in this area.

For example, say you just read this great post by Danny Noonan and want to share it on LinkedIn for your clients to see.

At this point, you can fire up your generative AI tool of choice and start refining your prompt. There are plenty of resources available on prompt engineering, which all agree on the importance of including as much detail as possible into your prompt.

Here are a few items to incorporate:

1. Define the AI’s role. Explain the role you would like the AI to take on—that is, the point of view you’d like the content to be written from. In this instance, the role would most likely be a financial advisor.
2. State your audience. Tell the generative AI tool whom you want to reach with this post. Are you speaking to your current clients? Are you trying to reach out to new clients? You can even try incorporating some demographic details here—say, if the post is intended to speak to Generation X prospective clients. However, be careful not to get too in the weeds of demographic details and not to include any actual client data. Our research shows that privacy is a chief concern of investors when it comes to generative AI.
3. Define your goal for this content. What is the purpose of this content? Do you want investors to see you as a trusted expert? Grow your following and reach new investors? Build your online brand and voice? Explain that in your prompt.
4. Explain the action you would like the AI to complete. Try to incorporate exact instructions for the post, like word count and structure. Also, don’t forget to specify to include a Call to Action for your audience, whether that be to reach out to you directly or engage with the post (for example, Like, Comment, or Share).
5. Run the task multiple times. We all know generative AI can produce some lackluster results, so ask the AI to provide multiple iterations. Generative AI can incorporate feedback such as, “Make this a little more casual” or “Make this a little more urgent.”

Here’s an example prompt to get you started:

## Instruction ###

Act as a financial advisor speaking to an audience of individual investors. Your goal is to establish yourself as a trusted expert in financial planning and share pertinent information with investors regarding financial decisions. With this goal in mind, generate a LinkedIn post on the following text. The post should be less than a 100 words long. Be thoughtful, detail oriented, but approachable. Have a clear CTA at the end to message me directly. Generate 3 LinkedIn posts in total. Here is the text:

## Text ##

[Copy and paste text here]

With this draft in hand, an advisor can check the content for accuracy, revise the draft to incorporate their own voice, and make any other edits as needed. In this instance, generative AI has given the advisor the bare-bones content that they can then build off for their own content, essentially giving them a head start.

After trying a prompt for a few posts, feel free to change things up and see what works better for your goals.

For example, maybe ask the AI to write longer posts. That will help you see whether longer or shorter posts seem to connect with your audience better. Or try out different calls to action to see if getting more engagement on a post is more impactful than asking for a direct message.

Developing and testing out different prompts can help an advisor see what messaging and content is most effective while cutting down on the time it takes to develop each post.

The Value of Generative AI for Financial Advisors’ Marketing

Will generative AI solve all our problems and bring about world peace in 10 years? Who knows. Some people seem to think so.

But, for financial advisors looking to use generative AI now to better serve their clients, our research gives a few suggestions. For starters, our results point to the opportunity of using generative AI in creating marketing content. Not only are investors comfortable with this use case, but it’s a key area where advisors can save time and effort. Even so, advisors must be careful of how they use and incorporate generative AI output in their practice.