Popular and Emerging Marketing Tactics Effective for Financial Services
Personalization
Personalization is essential to building strong relationships with customers in the financial and banking industry. Institutions must understand their customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors to provide personalized solutions that meet their unique needs. To achieve this, institutions can use data analytics to gain insights into their customers' behavior and preferences. By collecting and analyzing data, institutions can provide tailored solutions and services to their customers. Personalization also means creating content that is relevant and resonates with each customer. This can be achieved by segmenting customers based on their interests, demographics, and behavior.
- Pro: Able to truly meet consumers and investors in their moments with offerings relevant to their life stage and financial position. Working with data partners to help target messaging is an excellent way to build your own first-party data. This increase in personalization ties into consumer desires for personalization and connection with their banks, with some 74% of all consumers expecting brands to treat them like an individual.
- Cons: If the offering does not provide value, is perceived as disingenuous or, worse yet, invasive there is a real risk that the messaging will be reported as spam and blocked. Nobody wants this. To avoid this potential abyss, be sure to take time to learn about audience preferences and to adhere to privacy laws when serving messaging.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is becoming increasingly important in the financial and banking industry. With more people using their smartphones to access financial services, institutions must optimize their marketing strategies for mobile devices. This includes creating mobile-friendly websites, developing mobile apps, and using mobile advertising. One effective mobile marketing tactic is location-based marketing. This involves using geolocation technology to target customers with relevant offers based on their location. For example, a bank can send a push notification to a customer who is near a branch, offering them a discount on their next transaction.
- Pro: Banking at your fingertips to check balances, transfer money and monitor alerts is truly a digital imperative in the modern era.
- Con: Unsafe banking practices can lead to internet phishing scams and exposure. Despite the bank’s best efforts to keep its customers out of harm’s way, the system is not 100% reliable yet.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another critical trend in the financial and banking industry. It’s also the cornerstone of effective inbound marketing. Creating a content marketing strategy begins with a lot deliberate questions and research. Before any content is created it’s important to first identify goals and develop the personas you want to reach. With audiences properly defined and mapped to appropriate goals, content topics can then be identified and written to effectively guide readers through various stages to the solutions you’re offering.
Content marketing can take many forms, including blog posts, magazine ads and cover wraps, social media posts, videos, native advertising in carefully curated print and digital spaces, and more. One particularly effective content marketing tactic for financial institutions is creating educational content that helps customers make informed financial decisions. For example, a bank can create a blog post or video that explains how to create a budget or how to save for retirement and have this information stand alone or give customers access to it through QR codes. This type of content is not only informative but also establishes the institution as a trusted advisor.
- Pro: Institutions can use content marketing to educate customers about financial products and services, build trust, and establish thought leadership.
- Con: Content marketing is a commitment; it requires time to develop and can take longer to see the ROI but it’s there!
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a powerful tool for financial institutions to reach and engage with their target audience. Social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn provide a platform to share content, interact with customers, and build their brand.
To succeed in social media marketing, financial services companies must develop a social media strategy that aligns with their business objectives and is authentic with their brand positioning. This includes selecting the right platforms to connect with target audiences across life-stages, creating engaging content, and monitoring and analyzing social media metrics to measure success with data visualization platforms.
- Pro: Amongst other things, social media offers you the opportunity to hold conversations with potential and current clients and better yet for them to share your content and resources.
- Con: Like any marketing strategy, social media takes time, you must stick with it over an extended period of time to reap its rewards.
More Sophisticated Search
New types of searches are becoming more popular. Marketing content must now be optimized to appear in mobile search as well as through smart devices, such as Amazon Alexa. Tailoring content marketing and keywords to meet those needs, without altering the customer’s experience is critical. Banks should adjust content sharing strategies to offer succinct answers for mobile and voice queries.
- Pro: Expanding your online reach and, if you’re lucky, getting onto page 1 of Google when a keyword is searched is why Search is a great way to raise the profile of your institution.
- Con: Search is anything but plug and play it. Requires monitoring of keywords and continued finessing of their performance to get the results you want.
Banking & AI
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly integral to the world we live in, Banks are expanding their use of AI to improve customer experiences. Creating a superior experience can generate significant value. A McKinsey survey of US retail banking customers found that at the banks with the highest degree of reported customer satisfaction, deposits grew 84 percent faster than at the banks with the lowest satisfaction ratings
- Pro: One of the key benefits of AI to the finance industry is its ability to handle large amounts of data.
- Con: Implementing can be expensive on the business side and can seem impersonal on the personal side. It’s important to find the balance with the human touch and input to make it all come together.
The Future of Financial and Banking Marketing and FinTech
It’s up to financial institutions to continuously adapt their marketing strategies to meet the changing needs and preferences of their target audience. Personalization, mobile marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, and influencer marketing are just a few of the trends that institutions can use to reach and engage with their customers. More data must be your base, it’s how brands can build a database that connects with target audiences on the platforms then engage on most, it builds comprehensive individual profiles. Additionally, targeting marketing messages by life stage can help institutions provide tailored solutions and services that meet the unique needs of each customer. By understanding their customers' needs and preferences, financial institutions can develop effective marketing strategies that build trust, establish thought leadership, and drive business growth.
Reach out to MNI if you are interested in learning more about FinTech, what it means to Banking & Finance, and how adding it to your advertising strategy can help strengthen your audience awareness and targeting efforts.
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@Janine Pollack is the Executive Director, Growth & Content, and self-appointed Storyteller in Chief at MNI Targeted Media. She leads the brand’s commitment to generating content that informs and inspires. Her scope of work includes strategy and development for Fortune Knowledge Group’s thought leadership programs and launching Fortune’s The Most Powerful Woman podcast. She is proud to have partnered with The Hebrew University on the inaugural Nexus: Israel program, featuring worldwide luminaries. Janine has also written lifetime achievements for Sports Business Journal. She earned her masters from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and B.A. from The American University in Washington D.C. About the Author
@Janine Pollack is the Executive Director, Growth & Content, and self-appointed Storyteller in Chief at MNI Targeted Media. She leads the brand’s commitment to generating content that informs and inspires. Her scope of work includes strategy and development for Fortune Knowledge Group’s thought leadership programs and launching Fortune’s The Most Powerful Woman podcast. She is proud to have partnered with The Hebrew University on the inaugural Nexus: Israel program, featuring worldwide luminaries. Janine has also written lifetime achievements for Sports Business Journal. She earned her masters from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and B.A. from The American University in Washington D.C. About the Author
@Janine Pollack is the Executive Director, Growth & Content, and self-appointed Storyteller in Chief at MNI Targeted Media. She leads the brand’s commitment to generating content that informs and inspires. Her scope of work includes strategy and development for Fortune Knowledge Group’s thought leadership programs and launching Fortune’s The Most Powerful Woman podcast. She is proud to have partnered with The Hebrew University on the inaugural Nexus: Israel program, featuring worldwide luminaries. Janine has also written lifetime achievements for Sports Business Journal. She earned her masters from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and B.A. from The American University in Washington D.C.
@Janine Pollack is the Executive Director, Growth & Content, and self-appointed Storyteller in Chief at MNI Targeted Media. She leads the brand’s commitment to generating content that informs and inspires. Her scope of work includes strategy and development for Fortune Knowledge Group’s thought leadership programs and launching Fortune’s The Most Powerful Woman podcast. She is proud to have partnered with The Hebrew University on the inaugural Nexus: Israel program, featuring worldwide luminaries. Janine has also written lifetime achievements for Sports Business Journal. She earned her masters from the Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism and B.A. from The American University in Washington D.C.
