Financial Services Marketing Tips That Leverage Current Industry Trends

Financial services trends have all veered towards digitization in recent years. While these trends are indicative of progress, they can also present certain issues for marketers. Marketers at financial firms need to leverage technology and data to make their offerings resonate. With this in mind, let’s review financial services marketing techniques that will modernize your approach.

Omnichannel Marketing for Financial Services

One of the major issues in financial services stems from digitization. This means that more customers prefer to interact with FinServ professionals via digital channels. As a result, marketers are tasked with the ability to maintain a human touch in new ways.

The primary way to achieve this is by taking an omnichannel approach to your financial services marketing. This means that your customers must have a consistent experience no matter what channel they choose to interact with you through.

For instance, let’s consider the case of a retail bank. More customers bank online these days. Whether they use your website for a money transfer, your mobile app, or they come into a branch, they should have the same kind of experience. If your brand’s tone is more personable when local residents interact with their teller, the same warm interaction should come through, as if they were communicating with a chatbot.

Let’s consider different channels and how you can make marketing effective in each medium.

Digital Marketing for Financial Services

Financial Services Marketing is now more reliant on digital techniques. It is possible and necessary to take an omnichannel approach even in your digital strategy. Your email marketing, content, social media marketing, among other strategies, should all reflect your core brand.

For instance, a customer care query could come in through email or via Twitter. Your response time and tone must be consistent across channels.

When it comes to digital marketing for financial services, one thing is crucial: maintaining a personal touch with your customers. Financial services marketing needs to build a high degree of trust. This can be enhanced through the human touch.

As a marketer, you need to find the right balance between leveraging technology and making your customers feel like they are receiving personal attention. Artificial Intelligence is becoming more adept at this over time.

Personalization comes from refined segmentation. Begin with understanding what makes your customers unique. Then, segment them on the basis of preferred channels, life stages, wealth indicators, etc. When you understand what each segment values, you can communicate in a way that truly resonates and makes an impact.

 

Let’s review different digital media and how you can increase engagement across them.

Content Marketing for Financial Services

Thought Leadership is a dominant theme under content marketing for financial services. This stems from the fact that financial products not only require educating customers, but they also require building trust.

However, for your thought leadership strategy to be effective, you need to offer real value to your readers. Clickbait or misleading titles guiding readers to pieces that don’t offer any insight will have an adverse effect on your brand.

To differentiate your content strategy, don’t just discuss trending topics in your industry. You need to weigh in on these topics by contributing your own point of view. This offers your customers insight into where you stand, plus it helps you stand out with your unique perspective.

Furthermore, content marketing needs to help solve problems and provide pertinent information. Your customers search for certain keywords, read your blog posts, emails,  or your how-to manuals in the interest of learning about something. When your content is written to help provide clarity or new information around a particular subject, it will automatically draw your customers in.

Email Marketing for Financial Services

Email marketing is all about personalization. This does not end by addressing your customers by name in your mass emails.

For email marketing to be effective in the financial sector, you need to understand customer preferences beyond the surface level. This means that you should know what product or service best fits their life stage. Further, it is important to know what kind of messaging would resonate with a specific customer. This extends to the tone of voice, images, and even the frequency of your email communication.

Automation tools for financial services marketing can help you understand what topics a customer is interested in. Knowing this means that you can tailor your communication to offer them the right solution at the right time. This, in turn, also helps build long-term relationships with customers.

Marketing Automation for Financial Services: Find Wealthy Clients

Many wealth managers and marketing teams fall into the trap of using the same old techniques for financial services marketing. Marketing automation for financial services is only possible when you know your customers well.

Personal networking, social media, sponsoring events, and other methods to meet wealthy prospects, are all useful techniques. However, you may end up spending your valuable time pursuing leads that are not qualified.

By using automated data analysis and prospect modeling, you can quickly screen and qualify prospects. Better yet, you can reduce sales cycle time and find new clients that are very much like your best ones.

How do you begin?

The answer lies in big data. You may already have large volumes of data. But, do you have the right kind of data? Furthermore, are you leveraging this data in the right way?

In other words, you can find wealthy clients that most financial firms overlook. When you tap into these methods for marketing financial services, you can shorten your sales cycle dramatically. Here are 5 strategies that will help you understand if you are using the right kind of data, the right way:

1. On-the-Fly Wealth Screening from Your Phone

You meet people everywhere: professional events, networking breakfasts, the gym, maybe even at your daughter’s soccer tournament.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could enter your new-found acquaintance’s name into your phone and instantly learn whether they could be a good prospect for you?

You can.

WealthEngine’s instant wealth search feature lets you scan over 250 million U.S. contacts and see their wealth profiles. You will learn details on their interests, donation history, real estate, and other luxury property holdings and many other data points. The data is gathered from numerous publicly available databases and compiled into an easily accessible system. This information can completely change the game in your company’s financial services marketing efforts.

It also provides ratings and scores. These can indicate a person’s propensity to spend, to save, and to give (known as P2G).  Propensity-to-Spend (known as P2S) can indicate a person’s likelihood of purchasing luxury goods. You can then use these personalized marketing insights to guide your dialog appropriately.

2. Batch Prospect Research Before You Attend an Event

Let’s say your company sponsored an event, maybe a golf tournament, an art expo, or a dinner for charity. You’re going to attend these events to meet new people. You want to focus on the individuals who have the highest potential to do business with you.

Traditionally, you would mingle and look for introductions from those you know. You would spend time talking to many people to determine whether they are a qualified prospect.

There is a much better – and significantly more efficient – way to do prospect research. More importantly, this form of financial services marketing will help you find who you should talk to at these events.

Wealth screening can pinpoint exactly who you should look for so you spend your precious time effectively.

Prior to the event, ask the host for a list of people who have RSVP’d. Then, you can upload the list into WealthEngine as a batch to do a wealth screen on everyone before you attend.

Within minutes, you will get back a list of the most wealthy attendees who will be at the event.

These are the people you should spend the most time with.

This method of marketing financial services allows you to do prospect research quickly. It will save you hours of wasted time pursuing unqualified leads.

You can also connect WealthEngine’s data directly to your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as SalesForce. When you use APIs in the financial services marketing, you can discover wealth insights on everyone as you add them to your CRM. There’s no need to login to WealthEngine or change your workflow.

3. Create a Model of Your Best Wealth Management Clients

Your financial institution’s research department produces financial models all the time. You can use the same concept of modeling to create a detailed profile of your best wealth management clients.

To illustrate, these models identify the characteristics of your top clients. You will learn your prospects’ demographics, assets, real estate and luxury property ownership like boats and planes, luxury goods spending habits, favorite charities, and interests.

This level of detail in financial services marketing is significantly more useful than simply knowing someone’s name and address. In fact, the more data you provide, the more information our data scientists can model.

Many of our clients learn that they are spending their time pursuing prospects who have a very low likelihood of turning into wealth management clients. Financial services marketing becomes a lot easier when you use machine learning to get deeper clarity on who your best prospects really are.

4. Finding New Prospects Who Match Your Model

Once you have a well-defined model of your ideal client, you can use it to find others who have similar characteristics. There are several ways to do this efficiently.

API Connected to SalesForce

If your wealth management firm uses SalesForce, you can use WealthEngine’s SalesForce Connector to instantly get a score of every new prospect you add. This way, you don’t have to change anything in your workflow to accelerate the marketing of financial services.

Just add names to SalesForce and we’ll instantly send you a match rate based on the model of your best clients. You’ll know right away whether this prospect is someone you want to spend your valuable time on.

Match Your Model to 250 Million Records

WealthEngine can also run your model against our massive database to find people you don’t know but who match your ideal client profile. This is one of the fastest ways to leverage financial services marketing to find wealthy clients who could become some of your best clients.

You can then reach out, invite them to breakfast, or a round of golf, knowing that they fit the profile you want to pursue.

5. Identify Money In Motion

Creating a model and prospecting for clients based on that model will help you identify people to pursue. Next, you’ll want to monitor their money in motion.

Money in motion refers to knowing when an individual you are tracking has a financial event. Real estate purchases and public company stock sales are examples of publicly available data, all of which WealthEngine tracks.

When you know that a prospect has a liquidity event, you know they are likely going to do something with that money. WealthEngine’s tools can email you a report as soon as someone on your watch list sells public company stock.

These wealth indicators give you more clarity on what’s happening in the lives of your prospects, giving you the ability to hyper personalize your marketing.

Financial Services Marketing Using WealthEngine

WealthEngine can help you create very detailed segmentation and analyses to focus on the exact audience you want to reach.