Financial services organizations face many of the same difficulties that other small businesses do, but they also face some unique challenges when it comes to their marketing efforts. Besides having to operate in a highly regulated sector, financial service practices must work harder to build trust with consumers, and it can often be hard to get people to switch financial service providers because of this–even when the deals or services are better.
Given these challenges, it’s imperative that your firm use a number of marketing tactics and tools that can help you reach more prospects, build stronger relationships, and develop trustworthiness with your ideal customers. Here are 10 ways you can elevate your marketing efforts for your firm.
1. Start with a marketing strategy
Before you can generate, track, and nurture leads, you need a strategy for how you’re going to do that. But even before that, you need to set clear goals to determine what you want to achieve, what kind of clients you want, and where to find them.
A common objective in financial services marketing is to generate more revenue through lead generation and booking new customers. Once you determine who your ideal client is, you can start narrowing down your tactics on how to capture more of them.
2. Choose your marketing tactics
While you may choose some offline marketing tactics, digital efforts are essential for today’s financial services organizations. A digital marketing plan typically includes both inbound and outbound techniques.
Inbound marketing brings prospects and customers to you via methods like social media, content marketing, and organic search. Outbound marketing is actively reaching out to people who may or may not be your ideal customer through advertising, billboards, direct mail, and cold calling.
When clients do reach out via phone, text, chat or form submission, tools like CallRail’s Call and Form Tracking let you see how customers found you and which campaigns generated the best leads. Call Tracking also lets you review calls to examine how to better communicate with customers and understand their needs. Combine that with a unified communication center and you can improve lead management for all the ways you communicate with customers.
No matter what tactics you use, it’s important to continuously test them, as well as your offers and your messaging. You’ll learn what’s working, where your customers are online, and what resonates with them. Then you can continue to optimize your efforts.
PCI Compliance Support Call Tracking’s PCI (personal credit information) Redaction feature helps build customer trust by protecting sensitive customer information. It removes information like credit card numbers and CVV digits from call recordings and transcriptions to maintain compliance and add another layer of protection for their customers.
3. Pick your channels
Historically, one of the big differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing channels is your ability to track where leads come from. Digital marketing channels–your website, online ads, social media, search engine optimization, etc.–are trackable by nature. Traditional channels like radio, TV, billboards, direct mail, and print publications are offline so you don’t automatically have a way of seeing whether a customer found you via one of those methods.
However, with the right tools you can create call tracking phone numbers for your traditional marketing campaigns. Then you can see all the paths visitors use to find and contact your company. You can even find out how they heard about you before you ever talk to them by using “whisper messages.” These are messages that tell the agent answering the phone information about the lead or lead source before you answer the call.
altLINE of the Southern Bank Company is a specialty commercial lender that used CallRail’s whisper messages to see which landing pages were driving calls to their office. They were able to optimize those pages and campaigns to see an online conversion increase of 108%.
Financial services institutions usually use a mix of offline and digital channels, and they use both paid and organic efforts. These are some of the most popular marketing channels for financial service organizations:
- Chat
- SMS/text
- Radio
- Phone
- Website
- Billboard
- Paid search
- Google Business
- Social media (organic and ads)
When choosing the right channels for your organization, take these steps:
- Outline your marketing goals.
- Determine which channels your ideal clients are most likely to use.
- Test different channels and compare results to see which deliver the highest return on investment (ROI).
Multi-channel marketing is when you use a mix of channels, giving businesses multiple touchpoints and increasing the chances of reaching potential customers. Valuable multi-channel marketing tools include a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, an email marketing platform, and a call tracking and analytics platform.
4. Use search engine marketing and optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to get your website to rank higher in search results based on relevant keywords. Start by using helpful tools like keyword research sites, citation management, business listings, website analytics, and your Google Business Profile.
Similarly, search engine marketing (SEM) is a strategy to help your ads appear in the top paid search results for relevant keywords. Using artificial intelligence (AI) to review your customer call transcripts can help you identify the words and phrases important to your customers. Using your customers’ language in your ads and landing pages will help them find and relate to your content and messaging.
Pay per click (PPC) is another SEM tactic that can help generate leads. The keys to seeing results are writing quality ad copy that resonates with your target audience and using the right ad network to ensure your ads are reaching your ideal audience.
5. Improve your email marketing
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective tools you can use to target prospects. You can send offers, nurture leads, share content, and build relationships through email.
It’s important to regularly evaluate your email analytics so you can make better decisions around messaging and to help with audience targeting on more expensive channels. Look at unsubscribes, open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more to determine how well your email campaigns are working.
You can also do A/B testing and segment your audiences to better target your email messages. Building and growing a compliant list is one of the biggest challenges, but it’s often worthwhile. You can improve results by testing and refining your messages and their timing.
6. Optimize your website to generate leads
With information and insights you’ve learned from your website forms, you can continue to optimize your site and keywords. Also make sure your site is intuitive and mobile-friendly, with easy-to-find contact information. Website forms used with form tracking software helps you capture inbound leads and improve your conversion rates.
7. Improve your content marketing
Content marketing is the development and distribution of informational and educational material of value to your prospects. Content can help build relationships, increase trust, raise brand awareness, and generate and nurture leads. In fact, the right content can be a powerful tool for building trust with financial service customers. You can demonstrate an understanding of their financial concerns and show that you have knowledge and experience handling financial matters.
Create content for the different stages of the buyer’s funnel—awareness, consideration, decision, and delight—to acknowledge a prospect’s pain points, provide answers, offer specific solutions, and build a relationship they’ll deem worthwhile to continue.
Effective content types include:
- Blogs
- Videos
- Ebooks
- Podcasts
- Webinars
- Infographics
- Case studies
- White papers
- Email marketing
- Social media posts
8. Social media marketing
Social media can be used to build brand awareness, introduce your company to new customers, and keep in touch with current customers. It’s also an opportunity for prospects to find social proof like ratings and reviews that build trust for financial service organizations.
However, not every social media platform is right for a financial services organization. It is important to identify and maintain a presence on the sites where your potential clients are. It’s also critical to have a strategy in place so that you don’t waste time creating posts that the right people won’t see.
Many financial services companies use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, but some have also found success on Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. You can always try out a channel to see whether it’s worth the effort.
Once you decide which platforms to focus on, you can try a mix of organic versus paid content. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Organic efforts cost less but usually don’t get as much reach, meaning it takes longer to grow an audience. Paid social includes advertising, boosted or sponsored posts, and influencer marketing. These methods can cost a lot, but you get to target your audience more effectively.
9. Event marketing
Event marketing–from webinars to multi-day conferences–is a great way to build relationships. Both in-person and virtual events can be valuable ways to meet prospects, create connections, and establish greater trust. Events can even be a hybrid of in-person networking and online content.
Whether virtual or in-person, what’s important is the value you provide to your prospects and the level of engagement you have with them. Be sure to find ways to collect information and continue conversations.
10. Measure your marketing performance
Measuring all your efforts can be informative and satisfying because you can get a lot of information about how your marketing is doing, where it can improve, and where there are untapped opportunities.
Metrics
To determine what you should be measuring, decide your key performance indicators (KPIs) based on your marketing goals.
These often include:
- SEO rankings
- Website traffic
- Lead attribution
- Customer lifetime value
- Website conversion rate
- Customer acquisition costs
You can easily track these with the unique phone numbers you created for your different campaigns, as well as form tracking and web and social media analytics.
Reporting
Create reports to see how your marketing efforts are going. Ideally, your reporting will compile data from one place so that it’s more accurate and easier to manage. With Call Tracking and Form Tracking, you can sort and tag by the criteria that’s important to you. Then you can create reports that illustrate outcomes like the best-converting PPC keywords and cost per lead.
CallRail delivers in-depth insights into financial service customer calls, clicks, and conversions. The platform can automatically record and transcribe phone conversations. The Conversation Intelligence tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze keywords and customer sentiment.
Streamline marketing for your financial services company
Marketing is essential to building a financial services business. The tips outlined in this guide can help you strategize and execute a marketing and advertising plan to generate more leads and grow your revenue.
Try Call Tracking for free to get insights into your best customers and discover which channels are driving your best leads.
