Financial Services

Market your financial services with these top five strategies

Introduction

From banking, brokerage, and insurance to investment, financial services firms have a lot to manage. At the same time, they also have the opportunity to shape the industry’s future.

And, in spite of the financial services marketing sector being shackled with regulatory and compliance constraints, the industry is expected to grow at an exceptional CAGR (compound annual growth rate). Service providers wishing to market their services and offerings need  to navigate a complex landscape, and if they choose to rely purely on traditional marketing strategies, they run the risk of being easily overthrown by competitors, or, worse, become obsolete.

The situation is made more complex with more fintech (finance technology) startups entering the industry. The steep inroads these companies are making in the financial sector have opened the eyes of existing players who are also ramping up their strategies to stay ahead in the race.

Top five strategies to stay ahead in the race

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation):

  Every business puts out its website on the internet. It is a given in the digital world. It is where people go to look for what they want. And a lot of competitors are vying for attention. So, invest in SEO. Here, going local can help become more visible in local google searching too.



• Multi-channel online marketing:

  Increase leads by promoting multiple online channels such as:

• Email marketing

  - The ROI (return on investment) on email marketing is exceptional, which means that for every dollar spent, there is profit to be made. Also, billions of people use email. With numbers like these, this is a marketing strategy worth investing in.

• Mobile marketing

  - The world’s smartphone user-base is growing, and so is the use of mobile to access the internet. Billions of smartphones are being sold every year; mobile-driven web traffic is also growing tremendously. These aspects are convincing enough to embrace mobile promotions.

• Social media marketing

  - The number of people on social media apps is growing steadily. TikTok led the list, followed by Reddit, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook. So, choose the social media platform(s) carefully for advertising your brand. A majority of consumers today expect this.

• PPC (pay-per-click) marketing

  - Ads that are rude interrupters are both annoying and undesirable, but the ones that appear when actively sought are effective. Three-fourth of the people find paid-ads an easy way to get information that they want. This model, popularly known as PPC, charges you only as and when your ad is clicked. It is worth investing in since it has a favourably high average conversion rate for the financial services sector.



• Content marketing through digital storytelling:

  Today’s consumers are fiercely information-driven. They also want to carry out their own research, which emphasises the need to put out content that is relevant, original, consistent, and succinct. Content in any form is a worthy investment - blogs, educational videos, infographics, ebooks, white paper etc. - as it generates more than thrice the number of leads as outbound marketing. Significantly, it is 62 per cent cheaper.



• Personalised messages:

    Personalisation is a buzzword that is becoming popular these days.  Seventy-two per cent of consumers engage with messages that are relevant to them, and 88 per cent of marketers believe that personalisation is a key driver of customer experience improvement.



• Big data analytics and automation:

  Financial sectors generate a lot of data, which big data analytics thrive on to create innovative solutions. The things that big data analytics can accomplish are exhilarating: listing customers that are likely to seek a loan pre-approval; targeting customers that may need digital financial education; offering real-time stock market insights; and, detecting and preventing fraud. Add to this, bots, and process-bettering automation tools; you have a winning technology combo.

Conclusion

Technology trends have augmented innovative fintech ideas, improving their hyper-productivity*, and new products and services offerings continue to emerge. This has made the financial services industry a crowded place for people to steer through and find what they want, which is why marketing is critical.

With the right marketing strategies and techniques, firms can now focus on increasing awareness about their financial products and service offerings and convert leads to customers. Emergence of digital marketing has culminated in the most desirable outcomes such as customer engagement, improved visibility and higher exposure.

*For organizations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organizational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organizations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organizations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.