Financial Services Marketing: Is Your Channel Marketing Strategy Missing *This*?
You’re held accountable for maintaining compliance in a highly-regulated industry.
You oversee dozens, even hundreds of individual marketing channels that exist under your brand, and you’re responsible for supporting their marketing campaigns and driving better results.
You need to stay on top of new marketing trends, ensuring branded marketing campaigns are relevant, modern, and meeting consumer demands.
You’re a financial services marketer.
Financial services marketers face unique challenges—there’s no doubt about it. While business development, revenue generation, and driving market share for your brand are at the top of your “must achieve” list, delivering compliant yet personalized, professional yet quickly-designed, and corporate-appearing yet local-sounding marketing campaigns seems to get more complex as your company undergoes phases of growth.
You’re excited about your company expanding and progressing—it’s the perfect opportunity to make your mark and prove that your marketing efforts are influencing corporate growth. At the same time, professional, modern marketing requires well-thought-out strategies and tactics, and with so many locations to manage (and limited resources), it gets difficult to standardize your marketing processes and ensure your local channel teams are delivering the most effective campaigns possible.
This post has a simple objective: to make sure you’re getting the absolute most out of your channel marketing strategy and that you’re reaping maximum results (and in turn, maximum ROI). If you’re a financial services marketer looking to make an impact on your company and deliver more local-level growth this year, make sure your channel marketing strategy incorporates the most essential component of any operations: effective, powerful technology.
Choosing the Right Tools to Activate Your Channel Marketing Strategy
First things first, you need a channel marketing plan. Formalizing a strategy and outlining how you’ll reach your overarching goals and granular objectives makes it much more likely that you’ll achieve what you set out to do. If you’re overseeing a multi-location financial services brand and you don’t have a channel marketing strategy yet, check out this post where we outline ways you can support your local-level teams with a solid plan.
Now that you’re preparing to develop a channel marketing strategy, you need to research and select the tools that will bring it to life. While technology alone isn’t a strategy in and of itself, having the right tools in place is absolutely critical to ideating potential tactics and conceiving how your strategy will be executed.
The shift to digital marketing and sales is prevalent across all industries, with 11% of companies now claiming to be “digital-first”. Financial services companies face unique barriers—one being the inability to capture a holistic view of customers—and are lagging behind with only 9% claiming to be optimized for digital. To capitalize on this opportunity and become a forward-thinking, modern financial services brand (and part of the 9%), you need technology that covers all of your bases. Your tool should enable you to deliver campaigns across all channels—from social to email, to direct mail and beyond—and capture real-time customer data, allowing you to monitor, analyze, and action insights.
So what capabilities does the ideal campaign delivery and multi-location marketing activation tool deliver? Your platform’s features should enable you to incorporate top financial services marketing trends—including data-driven decision making and personalization—into your strategy.
The Ability to Capture Customer Insights
Any proper channel marketing plan should be built to evolve—and that evolution should always be based on concrete data. The tools you choose to power your plan should include insight-capturing capabilities, empowering you to collect data about your customers and how they interact with your local-level marketing campaigns.
Unearthing information like the types of personalization that drive engagement, the media formats that local customers react to best, and local-level conversion rates enables you to lend your sophisticated corporate marketing skills to your local teams in the field, offering them ways to optimize their local campaigns and drive results.
The Ability to Measure (and Prove) ROI
An overwhelming 96% of financial services marketing execs feel measuring ROI is a challenge, with 46% identifying the challenge as a major barrier (The Financial Brand). Channel marketing tools with advanced analytics capabilities allow you to track closed-loop results, tying as many customers as possible back to your marketing efforts.
What’s more, centralizing campaign delivery into one comprehensive tool gives you a more holistic view of your customers and their behaviors. Instead of piecing together results from your social scheduling platform, your email marketing automation platform, your landing page tool, and more, choose an all-in-one tool that captures holistic data, saving you time and resources. Read more about the advantages of an all-in-one marketing tool compared to a stack of single-use platforms.
The Ability to Personalize Local-Level Campaigns
84% of financial services professionals consider it crucial to know and deeply understand their customers, yet 40% of the largest financial institutions still consider themselves “static”, meaning they offer no personalization in their applications (Evergage). Furthermore, two in five millennials complain they don’t receive personalized marketing from their financial institution. There’s a massive opportunity for small-to-medium sized financial brands to capitalize on this and gain a competitive edge by putting personalized communications at the fore.
Your campaign delivery solution should enable your local teams in the field to deliver the most professional branded campaigns, in line with both industry and corporate standards. At the same time, it should allow your teams to personalize messaging for their local audiences, speaking to them in ways that resonate. Make sure your solution allows users to customize templates and campaigns while also allowing corporate marketers to lock in critical branded components.
Trust a Distributed Marketing Platform to Power Your Channel Marketing Strategy
Distributed marketing is increasingly becoming a top strategy for financial services brands with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of individual teams or brokers spread across the country. With a Distributed Marketing Platform, you can provide your teams in the field with the most modern, professional branded templates that can be customized to suit their local audiences. Furthermore, the best Distributed Marketing Platforms capture valuable customer data, enabling you to efficiently identify trends and evolve your channel marketing strategy based on behaviors.
Think a Distributed Marketing Platform could be the key to growing your financial services brand on a local level? Get the Ultimate Guide to Distributed Marketing to learn more about how leading financial services companies save time and money, streamline their customer data into one easy-to-use platform, and are ultimately, gaining a competitive edge and driving market share with more powerful technology.
