The 5 Most Effective Marketing Strategies for Financial Services

1. Customer Outreach Customer outreach is one of the oldest and simplest marketing strategies for banks and financial institutions to adopt. However, it’s also one of the most effective. Customer outreach is quite simply the concept of reaching out to customers to fill existing needs surrounding education, awareness, and help. 2. Self-Service and Digitization Where baby boomers and previous generations largely preferred to receive products through sales representatives who could advise them and set up personalized (or not) accounts for them, millennials and Generation Z often want to do everything themselves with as little contact with human representatives as possible. Setting up and promoting digitized financial products and customer service or experience portals that enable customers to sign up for services online, change products and services online, and view their information without going into a branch is an effective and increasingly necessary trend for financial organizations. However, it is not a marketing strategy that applies to every organization, as you may not sell products only services. 3. Social Media 81% of the United States population is on a social media account and many use social for up to 4-5 hours per day. Your smart and consistent use of one or more social media platforms is a valuable financial marketing strategy that you cannot afford to ignore. Millennials, Generation Z, and even Baby Boomers use social media platforms to connect with brands, learn from peers, and follow current events and news. Maintaining a steady presence on one or more sites with a strategy in place to offer value to followers will help you to build brand trust, create marketing opportunities, and grow your customer base. 4. Automation and Big Data Most financial organizations have more data than they know what to do with, but that is quickly changing. Today, customer experience platforms and automation tools make it easier than ever to utilize and apply data as part of your marketing strategy for financial services. For example, big data can tell you who is saving up for a big purchase and most likely to need pre-approval for a loan, big data can help you identify and offer services before or after they are needed, it can help you to target specific customers for additional customer service or digital financial education, and can help you to cut down on needed customer service. For example, JP Morgan uses bots to respond to internal IT access requests, cutting the need for 40 full-time employees, and speeding up the process. Other banks are using automation to tailor services, offer more specific or personalized solutions, and to create custom data and dashboards for customers in ways that would have been prohibitively expensive without automation. 5. Digital Storytelling Storytelling is still one of the most effective marketing mediums, whether on social media, video, ads, or cross-channel platforms extending into the real world. Here, your marketing strategy should encompass telling a story that captures interest and evokes emotion to interest, excite, and move the viewer. Here, your goal is to create relatable and shareable content which can educate, entertain, or help the reader in some way – and hopefully manage all three at once. For example, Allstate’s award-winning “Worth Telling” digital storytelling marketing campaign focuses on telling the story of 3-8 customers who are making a difference. Allstate not only promotes what their customers are doing, building trust by sharing real people and stories, but also dries interest across all marketing channels, builds customer relationships, and creates a human factor while promoting the products and services discussed in the videos. No matter what your financial organization does, digital media opens up a wide range of creative marketing ideas, tactics and strategies you can take. However, you shouldn’t focus on just one or try to incorporate everything. Instead, create a single, broader financial marketing strategy so that each element adds to and builds on the rest, adding value to your organization.