Over the past several years, it’s been abundantly evident that banks and other firms in the financial services industry benefit most when they shift their attention away from a singular emphasis on their products. Key players in various fields are starting to understand that the quality of the customer’s experience is as significant as the products and services the company provides. This is especially true now, in the digital age, when people have less faith in the financial sector’s ability to protect their money.

For this reason, many chief marketing officers and chief financial officers have begun to focus their marketing efforts on satisfying their customers rather than on expanding their product lines. Financial institutions can gain a substantial competitive advantage by focusing on the needs of their customers and using cutting-edge technology to better serve them.

What Does Financial Services Marketing Mean?

Marketers in the banking and financial sector engage in financial services marketing when they employ methods and techniques to increase customer engagement with their brands or encourage them to make a purchase. Search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising are just two of the many marketing strategies that can bring in qualified leads for your business at a reasonable cost. Due to the increasing popularity of digital marketing strategies, banks can no longer ignore them.

Why Is Financial Services Marketing Beneficial?

In the financial services sector, increasing your marketing efforts can pay off in several ways. Increasing your company’s internet presence will increase brand awareness and brand equity by giving customers easier access to you. Using innovative marketing strategies can also help you strengthen bonds with your target audience and win their trust. One more perk is being able to manage how you come across to the world wide web. The brand may counteract negative headlines and get first-hand feedback from customers by being present in advertising and on social media.

We’ve compiled 5 of the most cutting-edge marketing trends and practices in the financial services industry to get your creative juices flowing:

1. Big Data And Automation

The financial industry is rapidly becoming awash in data, with most firms struggling to make sense of it. Automated tools and customer experience platforms make it less of a hassle to use data in financial services marketing. Big data can reveal which customers are putting money aside for a sizable purchase and thus are most likely to require pre-approval for a loan; it can also help you identify and offer services as they are needed; it can help you target particular customers for further customer service or digital education, and it can help you reduce the need for customer service.

For instance, JP Morgan utilises bots for its internal IT access requests, eliminating the requirement for 40 full-time staff while also increasing efficiency. For other financial firms, automation has allowed them to provide individualised services, solutions, and data and dashboards that would have been cost-prohibitive without it.

2. Analysing The Return On Investment In Marketing Efforts

Since digital marketing initiatives generate so much data relating to performance, chief marketing officers and chief financial officers have come to hold marketing departments to a higher standard of transparency and accountability. So, it’s up to the marketing executives to draw connections between campaigns’ worth of data and define which messages are effective and which aren’t. This is typically completed through the use of unified marketing measurement or another technique for linking sales data with campaign data.

When choosing a marketing analytics platform, it’s important for marketers to search for one that has the following features to guarantee reliable performance metrics:

Analysis and Reporting of Return on Investment (ROI): You may get a precise measure of your marketing’s ROI by connecting your analytics platform with your current financial reporting tools. This will be useful in convincing the finance department of the true worth of your marketing efforts.

Online or offline methods: Marketers should always aim for maximum impact from every media placement and message. While there are many marketing analytics tools available for keeping tabs on the success of digital campaigns, it’s important to make sure that the tool you choose also allows you to optimise traditional types of advertising.

Monitoring Your Brand’s Reputation: By monitoring your brand’s reputation in important areas like brand awareness, purchase intent, and customer interaction, you can see how your brand is developing over time. Brand tracking via continuous surveys is an integral part of the best marketing analytics software, allowing for increased long-term ROI.

Connecting Brand Expenditures to Sales Data: The best marketing analytics software will be able to draw connections between brand spending and sales data, revealing the successful and unsuccessful branding strategies.

3. Using Technology for Independent Service Provision and Digitalization

In contrast to the preferences of their parents and grandparents, many members of Generation Z and millennials would rather handle all aspects of product acquisition on their own, with as little interaction as possible with human agents.

Digital financial products and customer service or experience portals, which allow customers to sign up for services online, modify products, and display their information without visiting a branch, are becoming increasingly effective and necessary for financial institutions to set up and promote. Nonetheless, not every business may benefit from this tactic, as you could not be selling physical goods but rather services.

4. Customer Relations

Reaching out to customers is a tried-and-true method of advertising that financial institutions have been using for a long time. It’s not only very efficient, though. The term “customer outreach” refers to the practice of proactively seeking out and addressing consumer needs in the areas of information, assistance, and education. Free consultations and webinars are a good example of this, and debt management programmes and financial education in schools are examples of how this may be applied on a broader scale.

5. Inter-departmental Collaboration

Due to the prevalence of data silos, financial services companies often struggle to gain a comprehensive overview of their data. This is due to several causes, such as an increase in mergers and acquisitions, a lack of uniform data authority, and a decentralised approach to data collection. This makes it tough for financial organisations to conduct thorough analyses of their data. However, data-driven, streamlined marketing efforts that benefit the customer experience require accurate, centralised data analysis.

In order to consolidate data, CMOs need to foster communication between teams and departments across the company. Each group can have its own secure repository for crucial marketing data, thanks to a centralised data analytics platform. This will connect information from all departments, eliminating data silos and paving the way for more informed business decisions.

Conclusion

As the focus of banks and other financial firms shifts from products to customers, it’s crucial that they keep up with the latest developments in the customer-centric practices of their peers. For marketing departments to stay up with the dynamic nature of their field, they must evaluate and invest in the most suitable marketing technologies to back up their freshly developed marketing strategies.