The highly complex and competitive world of financial services faces some unique challenges when it comes to marketing. But marketing strategies for financial services have evolved over time, taking advantage of new advances in digital marketing in a bid to overcome these challenges.
In many instances digital marketing strategies from other industries have now been successfully adapted and applied for use in the financial services industry.
Implementing marketing strategies for financial services
The specific implementation of digital marketing strategies will vary depending on the outcome that you are looking to achieve, for example:
- Grow your funnel – To increase the inflow of customers to your site, paid advertising can be a very quick and cost effective method. Google AdWords campaigns, or paid ads on social media allow you to target specific customers and only pay when they click on your ad. An alternative method is to use technical SEO to optimise the content on your site and increase your ranking in the popular search engines like Google and Bing. Increasing your visibility in these platforms ensures you will get a much higher volume of traffic to your site and improves your sales funnel.
- Educate your audience – Digital marketing provides a unique opportunity to educate customers in a way that simply wasn’t possible in the past. Content marketing, through articles or blog posts allows you to provide detailed information to your audience that will help them make a more informed decision about which products are right for them. This could also include tools such as savings or mortgage overpayment calculators which remove much of the complicated maths from the decision making process. These types of tools are often popular with customers and could keep them coming back to your site in the future. Marketing strategies for financial services that can help to secure repeat business are invaluable.
- Engage your customers – Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are excellent channels to provide great service to your customers. This can be both proactive and reactive; pre-empting concerns that customers might have and sharing your thoughts, or responding to specific customer questions.
- Cross sell / upsell – Once you have customers on board, you can build on your relationship and increase your revenue by offering them other relevant products. Email marketing is particularly good for this, as you can email details of offers and promotions specifically to customers that you think will be most interested. Analysis of your customer base allows you to send out highly relevant offers, preventing customers from feeling like they are being spammed.
Using a combination of these strategies will help you to grow your pipeline and keep potential new customers engaged through the sales process. By providing genuinely useful content and tools you can also build strong relationships that lead to repeat custom over time.
Build and refine your strategy
As with other industries, marketing strategies for financial services should not be static, but constantly evolving and improving over time.
By using data and analytics you can also quickly understand which channels are getting the best traction, and where you need to refine your approach further. This data can also be used to provide far more personalisation to customers, delivering content that is most relevant to them based on things such as their location, demographic or browsing history.
At AsOne we have experience of employing these techniques across a wide range of industries and have expert knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. We work with our customers over the long term to implement forward thinking strategies, then continue to support them through the optimisation process.
If you’d like more information on marketing strategies for financial services, don’t hesitate to get in touch and speak to one of our experts.
Alternatively, you can find us at the North East Expo on May 2nd 2019, at Kingston Park, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
