There is one major thing that marketing departments in the financial sector are doing wrong. Not talking about marketing in financial terms!
It’s unfortunate to see in other industries, as we do regularly, but it’s suicide in the world of finance where cash is king. Engagement is fine, leads are good, but the key focus for finance is, finance; revenue, profitability, ROI and EBITDAR.
In this modern world, emerging technology has brought about ways of tracking your digital marketing from clicks to sale to repeat. This is Full-Funnel Tracking; following a user’s behaviour online to see if your marketing campaigns actually are producing sales. It’s facts-based, data to prove your profitability.
To make sure that you’re keeping up-to-date with the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing, here are key strategies for optimising your marketing campaigns towards the financial sector…
Automation
Without a doubt, software automation is the biggest influencer in the way that people interact with financial institutions. Within the space of a decade, the physical presence of banks has gone from a high street staple to a rarity, with customers now offered the ability to move money, apply for loans, and even cash cheques from the comfort of their sofas.
Digital marketing has undergone a similar transformation. Where ads place on a search engine like Google, is determined by a bidding system and you have to set the cap. However, what if everyone starts bidding more? What if you’re bidding on hundreds, even thousands of search terms? It’s impossible to stay on top of what you should be bidding. Automated Bid Strategies allow you to let machines find the best bids based on the goal that you command it to follow.
You want a better ROI? Automated Bid Strategies. You need higher value sales? Automated Bid Strategies.You want more sales and don’t care how much you pay for them? I don’t need to finish. There’s hundreds of platforms that do this, but the best place to start is the ad platforms themselves, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn and Facebook to name a few. They have billions of points of data on users to identify who are the best users to bid on for your service.
What this does is maximise your goal-reaching potential, whilst also freeing up your time to focus on new strategies, software and channels. You get better returns and more time.
Artificial Intelligence
Not to be confused with automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) uses the foundations that automation builds, to grow and improve in your campaign performance.
The rise of AI will, more likely than not, already be having an influence on your business. Perhaps you’re using Chatbots to streamline customer communication on-site, that can send automated responses based on user replies?
Such learnings can also be applied to existing messaging services like Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp. Again, this frees up your staff’s time, whilst maximising your goal-achieving potential, by learning from interactions. An example would be bots learning that by asking certain questions they get more engagement from users. Data can then determine out of all these interaction chains, which ones are more likely to lead to sales, so you can prioritise these interactions. So, using this data, your sales team becomes more effective and doesn’t need to grow itself to grow sales figures.
Not only this, but AI’s potential also allows for 24/7 contact with customers. It’s widely known that the shorter the time it takes for a company to interact with customer queries, the more likely they are to convert into a customer. Whilst humans can’t stay awake at a phone for 24 hours a day, AI can, to make sure that users are getting an instant reply, even if it is simply: “someone will get back to you within 12 hours”. Some delivery services allow you to even order via Facebook messenger.
Like automation, the effectiveness of AI increases your sales at no large cost to increasing sales team members, whilst also freeing up their time to improve their servicing of clients.
Personalisation & Trust
Are you more likely to read a letter that opens: “Dear Sir/Madame,” or the one that opens: “Dear John Smith” (assuming John Smith is your name)? People react positively to personalisation, even something as simple as having their name on a letter.
With ads now reaching broad audiences of all ages, genders, cultures and backgrounds, it can be difficult to find something to suit all. The answer: don’t. Many ad platforms, again Google Ads is a great example of this, allow you to use what is called Dynamic Insertion. This allows you to have a piece of ad text that alters to suit the audience it is trying to appeal to. When a user types in certain keywords, Dynamic Insertion can add their exact search term into the ad. This builds trust that your brand is going to offer them exactly what they want and increases their engagement rate with your brand.
Wealthify has taken personalisation and trust to a new level for the financial sector. What many people who have no knowledge of finance see as the ‘daunting prospect’ of investing, into an easily relatable and almost fun game-style activity. They’ve tapped into a whole new market of small-time investors that combined have a phenomenal financial potential.
Their offering makes investing simple and easy and allows people to personalise their portfolio by choosing the type of investing they want to make in layman’s terms. Wealthify then does the investing all for them. And by appearing trustworthy and personal, Wealthify have broken into a whole new market of investors, previously unobtainable by the competition.
Put simply, the goal of any marketing strategy is to increase your revenue, profitability, ROI and EBITDAR. If it isn’t, it’s not working.
By tracking every single activity you do, you can identify its outcomes and whether it’s achieving your goals; Full-Funnel Tracking will give you the data to easily identify this. And make sure to keep updated with marketing software to keep ahead of the market, so that you can evolve and break through to new audiences before your competitors do.