Small financial services companies face many of the same difficulties that other small businesses do, but they also face unique challenges regarding their marketing efforts. Besides operating in a highly regulated sector, financial service practices must build trust with consumers, and it can often be hard to convince people to switch financial service providers because of this—even when the services or promotions offered are better.
For these reasons, your firm needs marketing tactics and tools to 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.
1.) Reevaluate your marketing strategy
You probably have a strategy already, but as you work to elevate your overall marketing approach – revisiting your strategy is a good starting place and key for financial services firms that aim to grow their client base and revenue. Before diving into tactics, it's vital to have clear goals. Consider what you want to achieve, identify your target clients, and determine the best ways to reach them. Typically, the main goal in this industry is to improve lead generation and attract new clients, which requires defining your ideal client profile. With this profile in mind, you can customize your marketing efforts to effectively attract and engage your target audience.
2.) Consider your marketing mix
Digital marketing has transformed the way financial services firms interact with their clients. From personalized email campaigns to content-driven social media strategies, the digital world offers various ways to engage customers. Yet still, traditional tactics like seminars and direct mail still hold their weight, particularly for more mature market segments. An integrated approach where the strengths of each channel are harnessed is often the best path forward.
Pivotal tools for a hybrid marketing mix include call tracking and form tracking, which are geared toward the needs of the financial services industry and capable of tracking online and offline marketing tactics. Reporting on digital marketing strategies with robust tracking ensures that calls and conversions are appropriately sourced to specific campaigns, providing a clear picture of return on investment. Furthermore, with conversation analytics, marketers can analyze conversations for insight into caller intent, allowing for enhanced customer experience, streamlined marketing efforts, and improved conversion rates.
3.) Tap into AI to increase insights and efficiencies, decrease manual tasks
Conversational AI is a game-changer for the financial sector, where personalized and secure interactions are non-negotiable. Conversation intelligence can field conversations for common customer inquiries and concerns, providing immediate insights that enable your firm to provide a differentiating personal touch. Given the sensitive nature of the financial services industry, you should only use tools that provide the redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) while adhering to top security standards intended to protect your business, clients, and prospects.
Conversational AI not only increases the efficiency of your operations but also helps your firm promote customer satisfaction and loyalty. In the financial services industry, where the difference between your offerings and a competitor's may be minor or difficult to distinguish, the customer experience is often the deciding factor in making a selection.
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. Use keyword research tools, citation management sites, business listings, insights from your website analytics, and your Google Business Profile to publish helpful content and ensure information about your firm is current and complete.
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 that are 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 reach your ideal audience.
5.) Improve your email marketing
Email marketing for fin-serv prospects is one of the most cost-effective tools you can use for targeting. 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 messaging decisions and 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 performing.
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 the valuable information and insights acquired from analyzing the data collected through your website forms, you can further enhance your website performance by optimizing not only the site itself but also the keywords used. It is crucial to ensure that your website is both visually appealing and user-friendly, particularly on mobile devices. Incorporating clear and easily accessible contact information enhances the overall user experience.
Additionally, using dynamic call tracking numbers on your site can help determine which pages and content are driving the most calls, providing valuable insights for optimizing your website and marketing tactics overall.
7.) Level up your content marketing
Content marketing is the development and distribution of informational and educational material that is valuable to prospects. Content geared toward finserv prospects and customers 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 services 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.) Try out 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, such as 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 and paid content. Both have advantages and disadvantages. Organic efforts require less financial investment but do require time and usually don’t get as much reach, as it takes significant effort to grow an audience. Paid social media includes advertising, boosted or sponsored posts, and influencer marketing. These methods can cost a lot, but you can target your audience more effectively.
9.) Take your referral strategy to the next level
Referrals are essential for financial services businesses because they capitalize on the trust that prospects have in recommendations from their network, significantly reducing acquisition costs. To optimize the potential of your referral network, firms can incentivize clients with bonuses or exclusive services to encourage advocacy. By consistently delivering exceptional service, finserv businesses ensure clients have positive experiences to share, thus embedding referrals at the heart of their growth and marketing strategy.
You’re probably benefiting from referrals already, but other than providing exceptional service and hoping referrals roll in — how can you be sure you’re maximizing this tactic to drive business impact? Consider leveraging a solution like CallRail to add Call Tracking phone numbers to your business cards. That way, when referrals come in, those leads will be automatically classified as such in your analytics.
For referrals that seem to come in organically, self-reported attribution – a feature of Conversation Intelligence® – can help you uncover how prospective clients heard about your firm. If your lead tracking is set up properly, leads may appear to come in through sources like your Google Business Profile or Google Ads, but self-reported attribution would reveal incidentals such as when a client says they were referred by their neighbor who recommended the firm.
10.) Consider 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 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 the conversation post-event.
Bonus tip: Measure your marketing performance
Measuring all your efforts can be informative and satisfying because it provides information about how your marketing is performing, where it can improve, and where there are untapped opportunities.
Metrics
To determine what you should measure, decide on your key performance indicators (KPIs) based on your marketing goals.
Key marketing metrics often include:
- SEO rankings
- Website traffic
- Lead attribution
- Form submissions
- Customer lifetime value
- Website conversion rate
- Customer acquisition cost
You can easily track these with the unique call tracking phone numbers you create 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, making it more accurate and easier to manage. With Call Tracking and Form Tracking, you can sort and tag by the criteria that is important to you. Then, you can create reports illustrating outcomes like the best-converting PPC keywords and cost per lead.
CallRail delivers in-depth insights into financial service customer calls, clicks, and conversions and can automatically record and transcribe phone conversations. Conversation Intelligence uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze keywords and customer sentiment and produces complete transcripts, while Premium Conversation Intelligence™ provides call summaries and call sentiments to provide the context and tone of conversations in an instant.
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 drive your best leads.
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