Digital marketing is one of the central ways financial institutions, such as private banks and investment companies, can reach new High-Net-Worth and Ultra-High-Net-Worth customers and engage with their current ones.
Indeed, digital marketing for financial services in its various forms is the first step in establishing a relationship with a new prospect and is one of the best ways of maintaining that relationship after an introduction and even a successful agreement.
However, digital marketing isn’t a one-size fits all. Financial service providers need a highly tuned digital marketing strategy that meets the needs of this unique sector.
Trust is a central pillar to the financial services sector – after all financial institutions are trusted to manage significant amounts of an individual or company’s wealth – and this should be at the heart of any digital marketing strategy.
An effective digital marketing strategy should seamlessly take potential investors through the sales funnel, establishing a relationship and nurturing it with both awareness and data-led trustworthy content in a digestible format for increasingly time-strapped individuals. Podcasts, webinars, trend reports, industry updates and newsletters can all be powerful ways to build confidence by providing relevant information that is useful and informative, tailored to your target audience.
With a multi-pronged digital marketing strategy approach across various touchpoints, financial institutions have a unique opportunity to build meaningful relationships with their audience.
Relevance has worked with several financial institutions, providing tailored digital marketing strategies that build trust with existing customers and potential new clients through effective and hyper-targeted data-led content, brand and influencer partnerships, and marketing campaigns underpinned by in-depth audience insights.
Here are just a few of the digital marketing strategies we have used to help our financial services clients cut through the noise, raise awareness, and engage in a meaningful way with their target audience.
Digital marketing strategies for financial services
Brand building with partners
Working with trusted media brands from a PR and advertising perspective is a great way to enhance your brand’s credibility and the content you produce.
For example, for one of our financial sector clients, as part of a robust digital marketing strategy, we partnered with some of the most respected global media brands, including The Financial Times, The Economist, and several other national and niche publications.
As part of a campaign with the FT and several other media outlets, we sent custom multi-question surveys to financial professionals, HNWIs, and those in the C-suite on reader panels in the UK and US. The questionnaires enabled us to better understand the impact of our campaigns, how our client was perceived in the market and the needs of their target audience.
As part of our digital marketing strategy, we did several of these surveys throughout the year, and these became some of our most important pieces of reporting for the client and their management team. The results of these surveys enabled us to drill down on the most effective messaging for each audience segment we wished to target so we could produce better creatives and answer the right questions with the research content we promoted to them.
The results of these customised campaigns were good uplifts in key awareness and trust metrics for our client, their products, and the content they produced.
Influencer marketing is another powerful digital marketing strategy for financial services, which can help drive uplifts across reputation and brand awareness campaigns. While working with well-known personalities or influencers can be challenging from a legal and compliance perspective, having someone speak about your brand, service, or product can drive significant uplifts in brand sentiment and demand when done correctly and amplified with coordinated PR and owned content to receive these visitors.
Narrowing your targeting with data to speak directly to your audience
With almost all clients online, financial institutions have a tremendous opportunity to understand existing clients better and reach and engage new audiences. While privacy rules are changing how granular digital campaigns can be, there are still significant insights to be gained at present.
For example, data from Google Analytics can help brands better understand how Google “sees” their market by offering behavioural data on who their audience is, and how they can better target them effectively online via new audiences and also with retargeting campaigns. Audiences you can create for retargeting can also be used to build “look-a-like” audiences of people similar to your website’s site visitors based on their browsing data.
Third-party data about buying habits or actual purchase history are accessible via programmatic demand-side platforms, like Trade Desk and Google’s DV360. This data can further assist in the creation and layering of audiences to create very finely tuned personas targetable via online ads as part of a digital marketing strategy.
If the budget is available to work directly with media vendors like the FT, Bloomberg, Morningstar and others, their first-party data can also be leveraged to ensure your messages are seen by the exact audience or persona segment you wish to target via digital display, content, and direct email marketing.
There are many useful data sources and together they can allow brands to craft online personas for their target customers; who they are, their wants, their needs, and the ways in which they can be reached and engaged online.
While some pushback to finely targeted campaigns does exist, creating audiences and campaigns in an intelligent way can help add value to users. As Francesco Brachhi, deputy chief operating officer at Banca Profilo, Italy, notes in the 2020 World Wealth Report hyper-personalised marketing communications “…aren’t perceived as aggressive marketing practices, since they are so intelligent and close to our needs.”
Artificial Intelligence combined with CRM and analytics systems can also help financial institutions engage more personally with clients and in line with their unique investment needs and objectives. For example, Morgan Stanley’s Artificial Intelligence “next-best-action” tool enables wealth managers to identify opportunities to connect with potential clients and then recommend appropriate financial solutions.
Digital marketing should be a core part of any financial services brand’s strategy for growth. However, with so many opportunities to engage existing audiences as well as to capture the interest of new audiences, it can be challenging to assess which digital marketing strategies will yield the best results. This is where a digital marketing agency like Relevance can support, offering advice and strategic guidance, either by working as your brand’s stand alone digital marketing team, or working within your current ecosystem to add further value and expertise to your marketing efforts.
If you would like to learn more about how Relevance can help amplify your financial services brand with a full suite of digital marketing strategies for the financial services sector, then contact our team today. For more digital marketing strategies for the financial services sector, check out our article, “Here’s how financial services brand reach and engage high net worth audiences” on The Drum.
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