If you, like me, still receive a stream of letters each month from your bank informing you about the latest accounts and offers, then you, like me, know it simply doesn’t work anymore. They just sit unopened in the bin, waiting for the next bunch to join them.
This, in essence, is what needs to change across financial services marketing. Broad campaigns just don’t connect anymore, and can even put people off your brand. To get the right messages to the right people, you need to think digital, you need to think mobile, and you need to think Inbound!
So,
What’s changed?
So many new kids have turned up to the financial block, leveraging the best technology to offer services that are revolutionising the ways we think about finance.
They offer tailored customer service, hyper-convenience and an easy-to-understand process. As a financial service, this is what you need to compete with.
Importantly, what large financial services have going for them is trust.
Many of the new players may offer high-tech services, but their brand-new-ness is definitely a factor on people’s minds when it comes to decision-making about their own financial future and security.
With this on their side, financial services marketing has so much potential for growth in the digital age. Building on this trust with an inbound marketing approach to content.
By tapping into the inbound marketing techniques that are working so successfully for FinTechs, financial corporates can build on the established name they already have in place to create a more symbiotic relationship with customers – something the modern customer truly values.
So, the question is…
How should financial services market themselves?
The aim is to establish a deeper connection with customers. This means more effective brand awareness campaigns are necessary, employing more helpful, and relevant content to reach prospective clients and current customers where they are searching online, with the specific insight they’re looking for.
This is where inbound marketing techniques are so effective.
Starting with…
Aligning marketing and sales teams
For modern banks and financial services, aligning marketing and sales teams is key to success. With the space so saturated, having uncoordinated divisions means wasted opportunities and inefficiency across the board.
To allow these teams to work well together, they need to be united around shared goals, with joint access to the same actionable information.
Enter…
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation software is designed to offer exactly this, a shared source of truth that everyone has access to, and can work from. This means lead generation procedures can be more precise, with each lead being categorised and dealt with correctly by the right people.
Integrating marketing automation to your CRM will make both teams more efficient by connecting sales directly to nurturing and follow-up procedures, drastically reducing wasted opportunities and resources throughout all stages of your marketing approach.
With inbound marketing, you can discern which leads are ready for which information based on their levels of engagement, then market to them appropriately with relevant and helpful content.
Otherwise known as,
Rich content
This is content that actually works for you. Adding value to the lives of your audience, and to your business.
This is a direct move away from ineffective and broad product-driven campaigns. It’s content built around your audience; their needs, their life, their challenges, their buyer persona.
Understanding them is half of the battle. The rest is a mixture of strategy and creative to reach them in the best ways!
If you get this right and distribute your value-adding content in-line with a detailed strategy, you can have a huge impact on lead generation for your financial service.
It’s a way of attracting people to your brand, and – by giving them something they actually need and can use – delighting them!
Luckily, the information and insight that financial services can offer is vast. This isn’t the problem they face. The problem is understanding the best formats to put it in, and the best channels to distribute it through to reach the audiences you are targeting at the right times.
Get aboard the inbound train…
With inbound marketing and marketing automation, this potentially complicated process is made easy.
Getting on board now will mean your financial brand can modernise, putting an end to wasting valuable resources on customers who simply don’t appreciate it, and start seeing a genuine return on marketing efforts in the digital age.