With digital channels and tactics evolving rapidly, as well as consumers’ desire for personalization, the financial services brands have had to dive headfirst into digital waters to stay relevant, cut through the clutter and competition, and grab attention (as well as wallets).
Effective Advertising Requires Financial Brands to Understand the Buyer’s Journey
Choosing a financial partner, product, or service is nothing like shopping at a supermarket. The stakes are higher, so the decision-making process is more complex. Consumers need carefully crafted messages served through the right channels at the right time.
The key to selling financial services is identifying where in the purchase journey the consumer is and keeping your message consistent and coherent, as different channels work collectively.
Tracking investment and performance across advertising touchpoints is important because moving your consumers toward conversion is a cumulative experience.
1. Leveraging Display and Video Ads
Consumers aren’t always actively looking for solutions to their financial problems and needs. Display advertising is an excellent way to gain visibility with specific audiences that might not be actively searching for your products or services.
The larger and more visible formats yield higher conversion rates—think floating ads, homepage takeovers, skins, and overlays. Financial brands can now choose from a variety of options. Some video and display advertising examples include:
Site-Specific—When display ads appear on sites that target consumers visit, content gains relevance and credibility. This is because your brand builds trust by leveraging site content and editorial reputation.
Contextual—Editorial content strongly influences on-site ads and displaying your ad alongside relevant content always drives engagement in your favor.
Imagine the impact on a potential customer who sees an ad from a bank promoting mortgage loans when reading a banking article in the online New York Times. Contextual ads carry the obvious benefit of timely, relevant messages delivered directly to engaged consumers.
Behavioral—Financial institutions focusing more on the person than on the web page can track online behavior to refine targeting efforts. Consumers who respond well to behavioral targeting tend to have higher incomes, shop online more often, and spend more.
Location/Geographical—90% of product searches result in offline purchases within 20 miles of where the consumer lives or works. It’s no wonder that more financial brands are localizing display to reach consumers in targeted areas with tailored offers and brand messaging.
2. Creating a Social Media Marketing Program That Converts
Social media gives brands a platform to share content and connect with individuals and organizations that support the brand.
By leveraging multiple platforms across organic and paid modes, a strategic effort in social media marketing for financial services can help brands gain visibility, drive leads, and reinforce their brand identities.
63% of affluent customers reported that they were motivated to take action after learning about financial products and services on social media.
21% of consumers reported using social media to look for product information when seeking a new credit card.
- Twitter is a great place to connect directly with content partners, industry leaders, account holders, and participants in financial-education programs.
- Facebook posts have a longer lifespan and can generate lengthy comment threads. Financial institutions looking to generate B2C connections will benefit from a branded Facebook page and a well-thought-out content strategy.
- LinkedIn works best for generating professional connections and sharing industry-specific content and thought leadership. Engage with other leaders and influencers in your industry, as well as in other industries that can support you.
- People use YouTube just like they do Google—to find information and answer their questions. It’s a great place to publish valuable content to earn awareness for your brand. Video is also extremely valuable for reaching affluent investors. According to Spectrem Group, 21% of millionaires use YouTube for videos on financial topics.
Investing in social media advertising increases the chances that your boosted posts will be seen by your target audience. Because social media feeds are subject to constant motion and algorithm changes, only a small percentage of your audience will see any given post.
Paid social takes the guesswork out of posting by letting you strategically choose your audience. Paid social’s targeted and timely nature results in a 25% higher conversion rate than organic social—making it an investment with significant returns.
3. Build Brand Awareness and Trust
According to Wikipedia, there are almost 5,000 banks in the United States alone as of late 2021. Customers always have options for who they’ll entrust their money. How do you get them to choose your financial institution over any other?
Digital marketing strategies are key.
By focusing on personalizing the customer experience and bettering your customer service, you’ll begin to generate trust in your existing audience.
Redesigning your website with the user experience in mind and focusing on areas of digital marketing such as content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing can pay back dividends for financial services companies.
You’ll generate brand awareness and then build on that brand awareness so that your name recognition grows. When leads feel like they recognize your brand even if they’ve never done business with you before, there’s an inherent sense of trust there.
You can continue to build trust throughout the customer journey to cinch a conversion.
4. Engage with Your Audience in Innovative Ways
The financial services industry is perhaps not the most engaging compared to retail sectors, but with an improved marketing strategy, you can find continually innovative ways to connect with your audience.
That could be through a highly personalized drip email campaign, gripping social media content, whitepapers and blog posts, email newsletter content, or your website.
Customer engagement is another major digital marketing trend that financial services companies cannot afford to ignore. Throughout this guide, we’ve detailed many methods for increasing customer engagement and tracking that engagement.
5. Track How Your Audience Progresses Through the Sales Funnel
How does your average customer go from an inquisitive lead to a loyal customer? As you begin to utilize digital marketing for financial organizations, you can better understand how a lead finds you and what their process is.
This allows you to in turn better accommodate your customers on their way through the sales funnel, so they have a greater likelihood of sticking around until they convert and then for a good deal of time afterward.
6. Email Marketing
The next digital marketing strategy for financial organizations is email marketing.
As you prioritize your website design and the creation of your blog, you’ll begin to collect the contact information of customers and leads who are interested in staying in touch.
Your email list is an excellent communication tool. You can send your customers monthly or quarterly newsletters that peel back the curtain of your financial services institution and grant them a behind-the-scenes look.
You can offer exclusive offers on mortgages or life insurance through your email as well as use it as a tool to inform your customers of any changes or additional services your firm now offers.
Email can lead to more conversions as well. You can use an automated drip email campaign to guide a lead through the funnel. While you can reply to leads in real-time, the bulk of the emails they receive would be time-based according to actions they take.
7. Personalizing the Customer Experience
A 2021 study published in Business Wire by bank company Capco surveyed 1,000 customers. While there were a lot of interesting takeaways for certain, the one that matters most to you is this.
Up to 72 percent of the respondents called personalization “highly important.”
Your financial organization can utilize machine-learning personalization, real-time personalization (that relies on historical and real-time data), or prescriptive personalization (that uses historical data) to personalize your emails, blog content, and social media content.
8. Corporate Storytelling and Personal Stories
Peeling back the curtain in your bank newsletter is a great start, but customers want more transparency from you still. That’s why corporate storytelling is the next trend on our list of digital marketing for financial services.
Every bank or financial institution has a unique story. How can you craft yours? Corporate storytelling creates a connection and engages with your audience while increasing trust through your transparency.
In some instances, as appropriate, you may even wish to divulge personal stories. Of course, keep the subject matter tied to your financial services firm and avoid topics like religion, sex, and politics.
9. Webinars and Educational Videos
In finance, some topics are simply too broad or in-depth to cover in one blog post. Even an eBook wouldn’t really do a topic justice. Your financial organization might produce webinars and educational videos instead.
These highly valuable forms of content will allow you to plumb the depths of a financial concept. In the case of a webinar, it can keep making money for your firm for a long time to come.
You can charge to access the webinar initially, charge for replays, sell a transcript, or take sections of the transcript and use them as a lead magnet to build your email list.
Video content has become increasingly valuable, and thus, your financial services company should produce videos too.
Rather than an entertaining YouTube-style skit, your videos could be question and answer sessions, video tutorials, and explainers on financial topics and concepts.
10. SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO is how your financial services company gets found. It’s another major marketing strategy to utilize. As we discussed in this post on our blog, the following are exemplary SEO strategies to boost your online standing:
· Use keyword optimization
· Update alt tags, meta descriptions, and title tags, incorporating keywords
· Build a sitemap so Google can index you
· Complete your Google Business Profile if you haven’t already
· Get on financial business listings
11. Chatbots
The last digital marketing strategy for financial institutions is chatbots.
You always go above and beyond to help your customers, but your company is not open 24/7. When you go close shop and go home, a chatbot bridges the gap.
The chatbot can answer questions, address complaints, and keep customers patient until a banker or accountant is back in the office to speak with them.
If you’re looking to expand your digital marketing services, you should hire a marketing firm that specializes in financial services such as Mediaboom.
With our extensive services, we can redesign your website, select ad campaigns to build brand awareness, help you create and maintain a social media presence, use email and content marketing to your benefit, and track the analytics that matter to you in real-time.
The Role of Content and Inbound Marketing in the Financial Services Industry
Many individuals are quite lost when it comes to choosing the right financial product, let alone the right banking partner. This is where content marketing comes into the picture.
Content marketing goes one step ahead of generating awareness. It informs consumers and empowers them with the knowledge that they need to make the right decision.
- Blog posts (and guest posts)—The purpose of this top-of-the-funnel content is to raise awareness and drive engagement from a web visitor. Blog posts can be used to write articles to educate an audience and put your experience and expertise on display and share resources or solutions to address your consumers’ pain points.
- Videos—Not everyone enjoys reading eBooks or blog posts, which is where videos come into play. Videos offer a more engaging option for certain audiences.
- JPMorgan Chase produces “Kneading Dough,” a YouTube series where pro-athletes discuss money-management lessons they’ve amassed through their careers. With 165 million views, the series has been successful in reaching people looking to improve their financial literacy.
- Infographics—Infographics present data visually, which makes them effective at displaying complicated information or numbers in a compelling way. Their visual nature makes infographics highly consumable and great for sharing on social channels.
- Whitepapers—This may translate into guides, worksheets, and calculators that you give away to your site visitors, in exchange for their email addresses. Whitepapers are valuable pieces of content that take a deeper dive into a particular subject and offer in-depth knowledge and resources to a reader.
Conclusion
Digital marketing for financial services is critical for building customer engagement, generating more leads, strengthening your brand, and increasing sales. With the strategies and trends we outlined today, you should have a blueprint to follow for your own digital marketing plan.
