Marketing a financial services business can often be complex due to the nature of the products and services. Customer decision cycles tend to be longer than other retail products. Moreover, a customer needs a high degree of trust to engage with a brand or organization. With this being the case, personalization becomes key. If you have wondered how to market a financial services company, the answer lies in building long-term relationships.
If you have your own firm or are a high-level executive at your financial services company, keep reading to learn more.
As a leader in financial services, you may not be concerned about marketing on a granular level. You may have a team that implements financial services marketing for you. However, knowing the overarching strategy of how to market a financial services company could prove beneficial in two ways: Firstly, you will weave marketing into your overall business strategy. Second, you will be able to collaborate more closely with your CMO and marketing team.
The next step seems simple- find wealthy clients. To do this, however, you need to start with the right kind of data. Furthermore, you will need the right strategy to build trust and establish long-term relationships with these individuals. You’ll also need to stand out from your competition. Let’s examine what challenges might stand in your way.
Challenges in the Marketing of Financial Services
In a dynamic industry such as yours, trends are constantly shifting. Keeping up with them can pose several issues:
1. Digitization disrupts the industry, threatening customer lifetime value (LTV).
2. FinTech companies are set to outrun traditional companies in the sector.
3. The volume of data has grown exponentially, posing challenges for analysts.
4. Data is stored on unsecured platforms and there rise is a marked rise of cyberattacks.
5. The growth of AI/ML adds pressure to balance automation and the human touch.
If you’re interested in learning more about these financial services issues, read our article on the subject.
Marketing a Financial Services Business
Before you think about how to market financial products and services, it is important to understand how to market your financial services business as a whole.
This begins with having the right brand strategy. Let’s examine how you can build an effective brand for your financial services company. Follow these 5 steps:
1. Understand Your Audience:
In the financial services sector, your customers and their needs can be quite varied. When you analyze your database, you can understand who your customers are. For instance, WE Analyze can study your database and identify patterns among your customers. You could find out, for example, that you primarily have two types of customers- baby boomer men and millennial women. With this insight, you can create a brand that speaks strongly to both customers. You might even decide to create different product lines with different identities to serve these two diverse groups.
2. Talk to Your Customers:
Conduct a survey among major groups that you have identified. This survey should tell you more about your customers’ needs and preferences. This primary research, combined with other industry reports, can tell you how to position yourself best.
3. Build Awareness:
You have created a brand identity that best suits your story and your audience. Now, it is time to ensure that the right people become aware of your story. You need to curate imagery, typeface, language, and media channels that all reflect your identity. Use owned and paid media channels to promote your story to your audience. Ensure that your brand’s personality stands out from your competitors. You may, for instance, need to adopt a luxurious and business-like image to appeal to major corporate clients/executives. On the contrary, your tone and imagery may need to be more personal and relatable if you are appealing primarily to millennial women.
4. Refine Your Message:
As your awareness campaigns see results, you will learn more about which aspects worked well and what didn’t. As you analyze, you can continue to refine your messaging until you ensure that it resonates with your audience.
5. Find More Customers Like Your Best Ones:
When you know what kind of person engages with your brand and your story, it becomes easier for you to find more people like them. In fact, WE Analyze can generate a look-alike model. The model can help you go through your database and find your best customers.
Segmentation of the Financial Services Market
Building your brand is the first step. But it is not a one and done kind of activity. The process is ongoing. So, the next step in the how to market a financial services company guide is refined segmentation. This is especially important as your audience’s life stages change or your market segments shift. Here are 3 steps for effective segmentation:
1. Identify Your Company’s Strengths:
Your story is always unique to you. This is a strength that your brand can leverage. Ensure that your brand is authentic to your company’s story and its culture. Study the market to see where you best fit in. For example, maybe most advisory services are directed at older customers. Your niche could be offering a tech-savvy, relatable wealth management solution for millennial millionaires. Furthermore, this may be a great fit for you as your company has a lot of younger executives and wealth managers.
2. Segment Customers Based on Interests:
You will segment your audience based on demographics. This is definitely a great foundational step in how to market your financial services company. You can go further by segmenting them based on their interests. You may find needs that are similar across different demographic groups. This type of segmentation can help you expand your business into various financial services sectors such as retail banking, home loans, advisory, risk management, etc.
Wealth screening can help you gain great insights into your customers’ lifestyle and interests. Screening your database regularly helps you stay up to date as customer life stages change.
3. Address Gaps in the Financial Services Market
You cannot be everything to everyone. This is usually true of most businesses. But in the financial services products and services, you may find that you have more leeway. Because trust is a major factor when choosing a financial services company, you may find that customers are willing to stick with you for all their needs.
This may trickle down further into their sphere of influence or as we like to call it, their inner circle. You need to begin with a strong brand identity and an authentic story. With this as a solid foundation, you can then grow your business to offer a variety of financial services products and services. These can cater to generations of customers.
Your expansion strategy can rely on identifying gaps in the market. Find niches of services that are unavailable for certain groups or segments. This may be microloans in large metro areas for example.
How to Market Financial Services Products & Services
Segmentation and identifying gaps can serve as your guide for expanding your business.
When it comes to the marketing of financial services products and services, trust is key. Before you try to expand your business, you need to ensure that your brand has a solid foundation. When you offer a minimal range of products and services, but your customer experience is par excellence, you are working on building long-term relationships with your customers.
These customers who trust you and expect to be served well by you will rely on you for more services with time. By screening and analyzing your audience regularly, you keep up with changes in their needs and preferences. Doing so can help you offer personalized products and services to them.
Furthermore, you can use wealth data ratings and scores to identify the right customers for the right set of products. For instance, WealthEngine’s Propensity to Spend (P2S) score can help you understand a person’s likelihood to spend or save.
Additionally, you can also run wealth models to answer specific marketing questions. For instance, you could build a model to find out who among your customers is most likely to invest in a holiday home. The model can automatically scan your entire database and identify the top 10% of people who are most likely to do this.
Thus, when you are looking to expand into a new product or service, a model can indicate whether this would be a prudent path to growth.
How to Grow Your Book of Business
Finally, we’ll leave you with 3 tools that can help you grow your financial services company:
1. Use wealth signals to personalize your offerings:
2. Leverage Inner Circle:
Identify connections of your current or most influential clients to build a referral business. The tool identifies prospective clients with a connection already to your firm. Thus, you can increase the conversion rate of new clients. Relying on your referral pipeline with prospective clients already connected to your firm.
3. Integrate Through API:
API integration can not only bring you wealth insights right to your CRM, but also provide you with real-time insights.
Take advantage of all these tools within one convenient platform to market your financial services business.
