It’s not easy to break away from the pack in the financial services industry; here’s our guide to creating a winning marketing strategy.
A detailed marketing plan is a helpful tool for businesses in any industry. For financial services companies in particular, codifying a marketing strategy can help your team navigate the ups and downs of a highly regulated industry. These are the five features to include in an effective financial services marketing plan that drives growth from day one.
Financial services marketing plans describe an actionable roadmap that financial companies can follow while aiming to find, convert, and retain customers. Developing a sound marketing plan that is both pragmatic and optimized to deliver a return on investment is particularly important as the world of performance marketing continues to mature.
Meanwhile, financial services is a highly competitive industry. Standard financial apps tend to deliver similar core functionality, making effective marketing strategies a critical step in standing out to consumers. It’s not any easier for disruptor apps in the financial services space, though; they face an uphill battle due to the challenge of establishing trust when it comes to consumers’ personal information and financial resources. In both cases, a sound financial services marketing plan can help pave the way for major business growth.
These are the five key elements you should include in your strategy in order to write a marketing plan for financial services that actually moves the needle.
Start out by determining where you’re headed. Establishing clear goals will help orient the rest of your marketing plan by giving you a benchmark you can use to constantly check your progress. For example, your primary marketing goals might be some combination of the following:
Marketing decisions aren’t always a choice between good and bad, they’re often either a question of degree or personal taste. With clear marketing goals in place, you’ll be able to gut check your choices at every turn to make sure they’re putting you on the right path toward your stated intentions.
It’s always a good idea to put your goals through the SMART filter, ensuring they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The SMART marketing strategy will take your financial services goals from vague ideas to clearly defined endpoints. It’s the difference between “acquire new customers” and “increase customer acquisition by 150% in Q3 of this year.”
In order to get SMART, you’ll need to set the right metrics to track your progress over time. The key performance indicators (KPIs) you choose will depend not only on your stated goals, but also on the channels you choose to implement as part of your financial services marketing strategy. Some common performance marketing metrics include:
Unlike brands focused on selling physical products, many financial service companies cater to multiple kinds of people with different sets of needs at the same time. That’s why defining audience personas is a crucial step of creating a financial services marketing plan; the more specific you can be about the kind of consumers you’re aiming to reach, the more effective you can be with your targeted campaigns.
Take into consideration factors like age, gender, education, employment, income, hobbies, goals, and challenges in order to paint a complete picture of your ideal customer. Then with those details in mind, you can design messaging, ad creative, and even specific service offerings to satisfy each individual persona on your list.
Studying the competition will help you gain an understanding of how your financial services company fits into the broader marketplace. You should take the time to get to know what your competitors do and what specific services they provide, and take a structured approach toward identifying their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, also known as a SWOT analysis. It’s also a good idea to answer subtler questions like:
When it comes time to implement your strategy, there is no such thing as a single channel powerful enough to support your big picture marketing success. The most effective marketing plans — for financial services brands and companies in other industries alike — are those that make the most of multiple channels integrated into a single strategy. In the past, traditional marketing channels like paid advertising, social media, content marketing, email marketing, and guerilla tactics have been effective for financial services brands. Here are a few real world examples:
Beyond the tried and true, new and emerging channels are also proving to be successful marketing tools for financial services companies. In order to qualify as “emerging,” marketing channels don’t need to be net new technologies. More often than not, they represent evolutions of existing channels for the modern era. Social media is considered a traditional performance channel, for example, but features like AR and platforms like TikTok are new applications within that category.
Similarly, linear TV advertising has been around for decades but CTV is an emerging channel perfectly suited for today’s performance marketers. With unparalleled targeting, attribution, and metrics, CTV is a viable channel for financial services brands large and small. It represents a blue-sky opportunity for marketers of all stripes looking to tap into new, cost-effective paid marketing opportunities.
To learn more about how incorporating CTV can help your financial services company achieve massive growth, download our free report, “How CTV Advertising Powers the Performance TV Revolution.”
Once you’ve created a financial services marketing plan complete with these five key elements, it’s time to execute your strategy. That’s where we can help; as the world’s first CTV advertising and attribution platform, tvScientific offers comprehensive testing so that financial services advertisers can make sure their marketing efforts return worthwhile results and drive sustainable growth where it really counts. Interested in learning more about how to make CTV advertising part of your financial services marketing plan? Get in touch today.