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The financial sector has always been difficult to navigate due to its strict regulations, robust data protection laws, and amount of sensitive information. In order to appeal to a customer, financial institutions have to appear safe, reliable, and impenetrable. However, modern digital marketing also requires a personable and relatable content that speaks to people’s problems and concerns.
In this article, we’ll discuss the importance of digital marketing for financial services, explore the main types of digital marketing, and cover the most relevant strategies.
Digital marketing is the practice of utilizing online tools and platforms to promote and sell products. Digital marketing in financial services relies on traditional marketing strategies and principles but introduces them into the online space. By harvesting customer data and extracting meaningful insights, companies can leverage their marketing metrics to better understand user behavior.
Nowadays, more than two-thirds of people use some version of mobile payments, with services like PayPal, Apple Pay, Venmo, and Google Pay leading the trend. From neobanks, investment apps, and budgeting tools to insurance, lending, and corporate finance, the financial sector is vast. More and more organizations make use of digital marketing services to achieve their goals.
First of all, digital marketing for finance allows businesses to engage with customers directly and effectively. Using social media platforms, marketers can bridge the gap and offer personalized recommendations, interactive content, and educational materials. This facilitates a more open and transparent relationship with the customer and allows you to position yourself as an expert.
Additionally, building an online marketing campaign enables a more targeted approach to content creation. Instead of guessing what the customer might want to see, you can leverage metrics and generate insightful and helpful content for specific demographics. Using data-driven digital marketing strategy, you can segment your audience and deliver personalized products, materials, and other content that speaks to them.
Finally, digital marketing benefits include gaining access to the latest data analytics capabilities. Working in the online space offers more room for data collection and analysis. By relying on digital marketing tracking tools, you can measure your campaign performance in real time and make adjustments on the go. You can monitor vital KPIs like click-through, conversion, user retention, and other essential rates.
There are several strategies for digital marketing in financial services, from traditional ones like email to modern ones like influencer marketing. In this part, we’ll investigate the different types of digital marketing and highlight their benefits for financial institutions.
Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective and powerful tools in financial services marketing. According to the the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), marketers make roughly $35 for every dollar spent on email marketing activities. Such return on investment is unprecedented compared to other strategies making email marketing one of the most reliable tools.
Using emails, you can nurture leads, offer personalized communication, provide tailored financial advice, and drive conversions. However, be mindful that people grow tired of receiving an exorbitant amount of emails every day. Make sure your content is not invasive, sticks to the point, and delivers informative and tailored messages to the recipient.
Social media platforms have long become the perfect place for product promotion and brand awareness for numerous businesses. Online tools like Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin allow marketers to directly reach their potential customers and engage with them fostering consumer trust and loyalty. Especially for financial institutions, B2B platforms like LinkedIn provide a simple way to connect with the audience through informative and thoughtful content.
Another integral part of digital marketing in financial services is search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC). They are techniques that cater to building and maintaining visibility on search engines. SEO is the practice of utilizing keywords and creating high-quality content to rank high on search engines like Google. PPC advertising allows organizations to drive traffic to their brands by temporarily ranking above the search results. By carefully crafting ad campaigns and choosing the right demographics, you can maximize the conversion rates and attract new customers to your services.
Similarly to PPC, display advertising is a way to reach new audiences through ads. However, display advertising is placed on websites, mobile apps, and social media sites and comes in the form of banners, videos, and interactive ads. Here, you can also target your specific demographic and attract users with an interest in the financial services sector. It’s important to ensure your ads are engaging, attention grabbing, informative, and not overwhelming to the customer experience to avoid ad fatigue.
Content digital marketing strategy is usually implemented across channels and platforms to maintain a consistent tone and messaging. For financial institutions, content creation includes generating whilepapers, infographics, video explainers and tutorials, and other educating materials. Financial organizations usually strive to become a reliable thought leader in the community to build trust and show up as a secure service provider.
Finally, the influencer marketing strategy has become integral to numerous brands, including financial institutions. Influencers who have positioned themselves as finance savvy often collaborate with various financial companies. However, make sure you’re working with someone who has a good reputation and aligns with your vision and values.
Online marketing provides general strategies that can be applicable across industries as well as a few specific tips for financial companies. In this section, we’ll dive into the most essential and useful actions and practices that will help you enhance your marketing efforts.
In this part, we’ll focus on general strategies for digital marketing for financial institutions that will aid you in improving customer acquisition.
Omnichannel Marketing: One of the main digital marketing strategies is to create and maintain an omnichannel presence across platforms. Launch an omnichannel marketing strategy to deliver a consistent and holistic customer experience on your website, social media, applications, and brick-and-mortar if relevant. Moreover, consumers expect an intuitive design and UI that provides functionality and seamless navigation.
High-quality Content: In order to extend your marketing reach to local and global level, you have to prioritize high-quality content. Beneath a sound digital marketing strategy, solid SEO, high-resolution graphics, and other marketing efforts there needs to be informative, well-researched, and relevant content. Techniques like SEO and ads only help you be searchable and accessible to the user while the quality of content is what persuades a reader to become a customer.
Personalization: Another aspect of digital marketing in financial services, personalization is a broad term that involves tailored recommendations and suggestions, personalized content and messaging, as well as custom financial services. At every stage of the customer journey it’s vital to provide personalized experiences by studying customer base, market trends, and other relevant historical data. In the saturated market of financial institutions, companies that invest in personalization gain a competitive edge and benefit from brand loyalty and trust.
Customer Engagement: Fostering customer engagement is not an easy task yet it’s absolutely essential for online success. Users nowadays prefer brands that create engaging and valuable content. Financial marketing campaigns should pivot from building simply transactional relationships to developing more personal and transparent communication. Additionally, make sure you’re taking into account negative reviews, answering customer inquiries, and resolving their issues quickly and effectively.
Video Content: In recent years, video content has become the must for many businesses. From informative videos that educate viewers on personal finances and trends to funny and quirky clips, financial organizations can largely benefit from investing into video content. Nowadays, videos don’t require high budgets and high-quality of production—on the contrary, TikTok and YouTube are full of influencers generating low-cost content that speaks to the viewer.
Digital Marketing Metrics: To measure the performance of your financial services marketing campaigns, pay close attention to engagement metrics. These can include pageviews, number of downloads, comments, and other signs of users interacting with your brand. Marketers monitor various important KPIs, compare them to industry standards, and enhance their strategies to achieve the best results.
Mobile Experience: Since more people have a smartphone compared to a laptop or personal computer, focusing on delivering a great mobile experience is imperative. Customers want to oversee and control their finances from their phones via banking apps, investment solutions, and other tools. Moreover, having a webpage that isn’t optimized for mobile use can substantially impact your Google ranking damaging your visibility and discoverability.
Let’s get into some industry-specific best practices that will help you build a strong and reliable brand name.
Security and Compliance: Financial marketers also have to highlight how secure and compliant their services are. Financial institutions deal with countless government regulations and laws to ensure the utmost protection of user data such as GDPR and FINRA. Additionally, make sure your assets are protected from cyberattacks by adhering to cybersecurity standards like multi-factor authentication and data encryption. As data breaches are more common within the financial sector, strengthening your security measures is the number one priority to win over clients.
Financial Product Explainers: Another industry-specific strategy for digital marketing in financial services is to release digestible financial explainers and tutorials. Finances are hard for an average person without a degree in economics. Creating easy-to-understand tips and hacks to enable consumers to make data-driven decisions can be tremendously helpful for your marketing efforts. Make sure your content isn’t only informative but also light, fun, and engaging.
Market Analysis: Providing timely and relevant market updates and forecasts is another key aspect that generates business growth. Depending on what kind of financial service you offer, you can create videos and blog posts that offer expert insights into the trends and economic indicators that will affect people in the near future.
Sustainable Finance: With the growing awareness of environmental issues, your financial brand would benefit from focusing on sustainable finance. Publish studies and whitepapers that explore the current market and highlight your commitment to responsible investment. You can also pivot your content to covering topics like green bonds and impact investing to showcase your efforts to make the industry more sustainable.
Finally, let’s take a look at some emerging digital marketing trends that will reshape the financial landscape in the near future.
Financial organizations collect and store massive amounts of data that can be used to study customers, identify market trends, and make accurate predictions. Data-driven digital marketing offers you access to industry insights that enable you to improve customer experience, develop competitive financial products, and become a trusted source of financial information.
Using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies, you can harvest customer data that allows you to enhance targeting and offer tailored content. By relying on data-driven insights, you can recognize what stage of the buying journey your customers find themselves in and act accordingly to turn a lead into a recurring and loyal buyer.
Micro-moments occur when people impulsively use their mobile devices to look something up or purchase an item. Nowadays, most of us are used to quickly getting our phones out to search up some information or check on something important or not that much. Financial companies can leverage these moments to offer their own answers and invite people into their funnel. This involves digestible content that concisely explains an issue or offers a solution.
For instance, you can help your customers by providing locations to the nearest ATMs in their area. Alternatively, you can generate glossaries or FAQs to deliver bite-sized explanations to complex or confusing concepts. This process requires a great understanding of your customer base and their interests and needs as well as the ability to anticipate these micro-moments and react to them.
Customer-centric approach continues to prevail on the global financial market. Hyper-personalization is among the most critical digital marketing trends in 2024 and beyond. Based on customer data, you can tailor content to ensure the best possible engagement. Furthermore, you can leverage historical user data to offer pre-approvals for loans and mortgages to make your financial service more appealing.
Voice-activated applications and devices are becoming more prevalent on the market, including in the financial sector. Not only is it more inclusive and allows users with visual impairments to take control over their finances but also more convenient. The majority of voice searches take the form of question making it the perfect addition to the micro-moments financial services marketing strategy.
However, make sure the voice commands are also optimized for local and global SEO to ensure the high ranking of your content. Furthermore, voice searches should also be secure and protected through authentication and other techniques.
Hyper-local marketing for financial services allows businesses to leverage geolocation data to notify customers with highly targeted prompts and offers. These can be updates about currency exchange rates, special offers, current events, and more. For example, when a customer lands at an airport, banks can send them a notification about the best exchange rates in the area or city.
Digital marketing for financial services is an integral part of any financial agency or organization. Although it follows similar steps as any other type of marketing, it does have some industry-specific caveats. If you would like to implement main digital marketing tips, avoiding common pitfalls and get started on building a strong brand name, get in touch with our experts at NIX. We’re a software development company offering end-to-end services, from ideation and coding to maintenance and marketing and everything in between. Our decades-long experience and a diverse portfolio makes us a knowledgeable and reliable partner for financial institutions and beyond. Reach out to NIX specialists to strengthen your financial marketing and build trust with your prospects and clients.
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