Some Major Digital Trends That Will Have an Effect on Financial Services Marketing
Financial service marketing is the use of marketing tactics to market financial services for attracting new customers, building a strong relationship with them, and generate sales from new and existing customers. Financial services include banking services, insurance, mutual fund investments, share brokerage, and the list goes on. With the digitalization of all such services, there is a need to market them across the digital platform through some effective strategic marketing efforts.
It is the marketing of financial services across various platforms like digital media, print media, TV, radio, and other channels of communication and interaction. Traditionally financial services marketing relied on print media, brochures, and TV & radio ads which are highly expensive. But in the modern digital world, digital trends are going viral, you can have PPC ads, email marketing campaigns, social media marketing, mobile marketing campaigns, artificial intelligence, and many other digital ways which are cost-effective.
In traditional marketing the strategies focus on overall marketing, no one-to-one communication, even can’t analyze the insights generated through marketing tactics you have used. Digital trends made it possible for you to get insights like
How many clicks you are getting,
How much time people are spending on your particular product or content,
How many conversions,
And ultimately ROI.
Trust is the main factor for a finance company to attract new customers, since, it’s a matter of the money earned from hard work. You need to gain trust first then you can easily get new customers; you need to build trust across the audience. It may take more effort while you are starting up, but people always choose a well-known company for getting any financial services. Digital trends made it possible through one-to-one communication and transparent operations.
Now the question is how one finance company can build trust.
In the following article, you will learn effective digital trends that will change the way of marketing financial services and how these trends can help you in building trust among the audience for increasing sale.
Machine learning (ML) & Artificial intelligence (AI)
ML and AI offer investors data analysis based on Social media activities, transactions, and behavior to make it more personalized. Being a finance firm, there may be a lot of investors’ details and data you may have, use these in automated marketing to generate great ROI. You can analyze some important insights through ML and AI like
The product or services investors are most interested in,
Which ad they are most likely to click,
And what type of content can convert them from visitors to valuable customers?
After getting this complete analysis financial marketers can strategize the content according to the customer demand and can automate it through ML and AI. Curate the content according to the investor’s behavior to offer them services that they can enjoy and get benefited.
With AI you can optimize the time spent by the audience on a particular service, conversion with the ad type, high click on the link, what there need, and what they are searching for. You can define the age group or category for the people more intent to make a purchase with you and according to it, can plan a better marketing strategy.
With the use of AI, transparency came from the use of data that you are collecting from the customers. Investors know how their data going to be used and thus the probability of providing their personal information gets increased. That will help you more in understanding them better and giving customer-centric recommendations to increase customer experiences.
Personalization
Personalization is nothing but one-to-one marketing or targeted marketing. Personalized marketing is to market products individually, and offer content based on data collection, analysis, and automation techniques. The aim is to engage people with the brand and build a relationship by communicating personally.
Generalized communication can’t make investors satisfied so make use of good quality, focused personalized marketing to increase the user experience as well as to help your brand stand out. Personalize the content, product, and email according to the purchase history, the data collected, customer behavior, and link clicked.
Customer will get more trust in a brand that understands the customer need, provide services based on customer online activity, learn and understand customer behavior, and who create a genuine relationship by offering a great experience. Specialized treatment let people become good and reliable customer.
Through ML and AI, collecting the data and the data analysis becomes easy you can tailor specific content to a certain audience.
The customer provides their information many times thus they expect, they should be treated independently. With the right automation technology used in the right way, you can personalize the content for a customer. It can be done by tracking users’ behavior towards your product and recommending them services beneficial for them.
For any financial company, there is a need to know who its customers are and what their needs are. It is not just to offer them relevant services but to make them feel valued too. Offering relevant recommendations to existing customers and announcing new services or products offered at affordable prices that are specially discounted for an individual is what is called personalization
Google AdWords
Google AdWords or Google PPC ads are the most trusted way of advertising for financial services for a long time and are bringing a steady increase in the customer base of financial services. Google’s new re-design, increased importance of quality scores, rise in the importance of negative keywords, and a high up in AdWords spending driving up bids are some of the trends to look out for this year.
Optimize the customer behavior for every campaign that will help you in the next marketing strategy or campaign. You will get more insights into the user’s choice.
Chatbots
A chatbot is the best marketing trend for 2019 to provide an instant solution for investors’ queries. AI-based instant messaging app chatbot is designed to chat 24*7 in real-time with customers to solve their queries related to finance, insurance, investment, loan, or credit cards and to offer a better service experience.
Chatbots are more responsive to any query, able to easily recall the history, and offer great customer service. It doesn’t get frustrating when customers take too much time or ask for repetitive tasks. No need for humans to go through every time with queries and get engaged with them. It’s time savvy and cost-effective and may cost less than hiring a customer service agent, in this saved time you can perform other important tasks.
It creates customer interaction with brands and makes the business reliable in front of them. The details collected from various sources get analyzed and directed to a chatbot to make it more personalized. The ultimate goal is the client should feel satisfied whether a human or a Chatbot provides customers services.
It can be incorporated with a website or mobile application and can be used for answering common questions asked by investors and document requests made by them.
Mobile Apps
The number of people using smartphones is increasing continuously, people are looking for all the financial conveniences at the tip of their fingers. If you are a finance marketer, loan provider, or bank, you need to put your business online with a mobile app to reach a number of the active smartphone user. To make your brand visible in front of this increasing audience your business should have an online presence. Need to make the website mobile friendly, create content that looks good on the small screen, great visualization for the mobile screen, and a great resolution to increase user experience.
Having a mobile app is a better option; Investors can easily get transaction details, and investment plan details, can easily transact, secure payment methods, and account details. Financial services marketing can be much more efficient with mobile banking apps, mutual fund management apps, insurance purchase apps, and the list will go on. Payment wallets, EMI calculator Apps, Loan Apps, and other financial marketing tools have brought a revolution in financial services marketing digitally. Mobile banking is fast replacing traditional banking at branches and banking through desktops.
Social Media Marketing
Financial services marketing can be effectively implemented across digital platforms through social media marketing efforts. The social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others have to be effectively utilized for financial services marketing. Financial institutions like banks, insurance companies, money investment houses, loan lending organizations, and others should have a strong presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Advertising campaigns can be run across these social media channels for these financial institutions at nominal costs.
Social media messaging apps are incorporated with social media platforms and these are getting more attention now a day. Millions of people are active on social media, as well as millions, are involved in messaging their friends and network using messaging apps like Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
To approach this wide audience social messaging apps are a great place. While sending personal entertainment messages you can also send business detail, details about products, and events information can solve the customer query and can offer updates about orders and deliveries. It increases the chance to reach a wide audience as well as generate more sales.
Social stories are there, you can share products, reviews, offers, and discounts. One great benefit of the story posting is, the story will get live for a fixed span of time which will let people click it and make a purchase instantly because there is a chance to miss it out if they are late.
Email Marketing (drip marketing)
Gone are the days of sending postal business letters, today is the era of emails. You can send bulk email messages by retrieving a prospective customer list from the trusted database. You can diligently form the content of these emails to have all the necessary information regarding the services of your financial institutions whether it is a bank, insurance company, investment house, or any other finance company. Successful email campaigns will result in a steady increase in your customer base.
Content marketing
Email marketing mostly helps in creating a strong relationship with existing clients and keeping them updated with new services or upcoming events.
Content marketing is all about putting the right content in the right place at right time. Each and every piece of content should be strategized to serve a specific purpose or to achieve a specific goal. Without great content creation, you can’t attract a number of people to your website and you will not be able to convince them for purchasing your product or services.
A content marketer can write great content. There is definitely an extra investment in hiring a content writer but surely it will give you a great return. Write content to educate people it may be in the form of Blogs, how-to guides, product-related information, investment advice, or anything related to your brand or product. It will create trust towards the brand and as a result, people will get a strong desire to make a purchase with you.
Video Marketing
Through videos, you can promote the product, brand, or procedure to avail of the services. Video is a more interactive way to convert since it can create reliability for the brand. People will trust your brand after getting a clear image of the brand and the services you are offering. It’s not only youtube, you can also make use of Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to reach more audiences.
A live video option is there on a social media platform that creates transparency for the brand and services to customers. Through video, you can explain more in less time so it’s good to watch a video rather than read lengthy content also chances are high to understand it easily.
Voice search
Voice search is increasing day by day, it is getting more advanced in providing relevant information according to your voice search. The error probability becomes less and the result you will get more accurate results for any query.
With the increased use of smartphones, the voice searches increasing, people like to search for speech rather than typing text. Voice search is easier than text search. Just need to include voice search in your digital trend and make better use of keywords that people will speak rather than type. You need to optimize content for voice search as well. Strategize your content to increase appearance in voice search results.
Omni channel and multichannel marketing
The platforms where your brand is present, all should be interconnected and synchronized. If a person is active on a platform and performing some activity there, it should be continued with other platforms. If a person enters a query on your brand website by filling out the form, you and that person will receive a mail that should be visible in the app also when that person logs in to the brand app. Some people use mobile and some use a desktop to operate your brand, Omnichannel marketing will offer a consistent experience to your customers.
Presence on the multi-platform is also a great chance to make a great user experience and to generate a wide audience. The reach will increase as your business will appear on each platform.
Influencer marketing
Approach some influencers to put a word in front of the audience about your product through their social channels. An influencer can be anyone who is trending and can reach a great audience whether it is a celebrity, YouTube influencer, Instagram influencer, or famous blogger.
An influencer can help you reach millions of people as they have millions of followers, different for different channels. Some people may don’t believe in any financial product. Celebrity voices will energize and encourage them by saying the benefits they will get.
Some people don’t search for the best finance company rather they will just follow their most loved personality, what they are talking about simply believes in that.
UX & Product Design
The user experience & product design have taken the center stage in financial services marketing. This digital trend makes financial services viable and reaches millions. The financial applications and products developed across multiple platforms like desktop, mobile, tablets, ATM kiosks; Passbook vending machines, and others should be effectively designed and should live up to the user’s expectations. Financial institutions should invest heavily in in-house designing and deployment of financial applications and products if they want to excel in their business. The UX & product design initiative must be infused at an early stage of product development to prevent missing out on a user-based perspective.
Conclusion
We have discussed some major digital trends that can affect financial services marketing. As the world is going digital, every finance marketer should get their business updated according to the latest trends to get benefited from technological advancement.
You may have tried many tactics to improve sales last year, but as the technology is getting updated daily so you should know what can work for you in present as well as in the future. Finance companies must implement the above-stated digital trends in financial services marketing to achieve ultimate customer satisfaction and the best ROI (return on investment).
Some business people who are in the finance industry, not aware of the latest digital trends so they are lacking. If you are also a financial service provider and want to improve your business using digital trends, go through this article and understand it well to implement it effectively for your business. Sometimes hiring a content marketer, digital marketer, creative designer, and expert data analyst is also a good option for many finance companies.
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