3 Ways To Improve Digital Marketing For Financial Services

January 9, 2014 - 5 minutes read - Blog, Marketing Your Business Online, Social Media Marketing

Digital marketing for financial services represents the most affordable and effective way to reach out to new and existing clients. Naturally, you want to reach people where they like to hang out. These days, email, social networks and video sharing platforms are capturing more and more of your prospect’s free time.

The banking industry’s presence on social media networks increased 31 percent last year, according to a recent Marketo blog post. Even so, the NY Times reported that banks have been slow to embrace social technologies and that the 50 largest banks had strategies that were “amateurish” at best. These “social media wallflowers” often create profiles, but let them sit idly. They miss friend requests, fail to post regularly to engage users, and fail to communicate directly with users who contact them via social media. Research conducted by Scorpio Partnership found that 40% of high-net-worth clients under age 50 viewed social media as “an important channel for communicating with their banks.” Clearly, something must change! Financial service providers must improve their social media strategies or suffer countless missed opportunities.

A 170-page report from the McKinsey Global Institute titled The Social Economy: Unlocking and Productivity Through Social Technologies found that social media technology boosts marketing productivity, boosts a financial company’s perceived value, and adds 5.2% to the companies’ revenues. Based on this report, we can glean three salient points on how a company can improve its digital marketing for financial services.

1. Use big data to customize your marketing approach.

Social  media can be a gold mine for consumer data. Who is getting married or having a child? Who is buying a new car or starting a new job? Who is interested in starting a retirement savings or refinancing a mortgage? Clues are embedded in status posts. If you have a good analytics program associated with your social media pages, you can send out the right message at the right time to entice consumers with your financial services.

2. Interact with social media users to increase customer loyalty.

Research indicates that consumers who interact with companies via social media buy up to 40% more products and services from these companies. An infographic by Investment News revealed that 66% of financial advisers over age 55 DO NOT use social media to connect with clients. By contrast, 47% of financial advisers under age 45 are engaging customers this way. A 2012 survey of 400 Facebook users found that 24% were willing to connect with their banks on a social site — double the number of users willing to befriend their banks in 2008.

So what we can glean from this data is that older financial advisers in particular are missing a huge opportunity and have much room to grow their businesses using platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Integrating social features into a bank website not only improves value for consumers, but also increases the amount of time spent on your site and improves loyalty over time. Even if you don’t know the first thing about these sites, a good digital marketing consulting firm can build and manage a presence for your business.

3. Remain active on social networking sites to acquire new customers.

Customer acquisition is a big investment for financial firms. The McKinsey report found that financial companies spend $70 to $300 to acquire each new customer. However, this cost can be reduced by up to 30% by using social technologies, they say. An illuminating HubSpot report found that the banking/insurance/financial services industry has the highest cost per customer at $303. Not surprisingly, they are also the industry that struggles the most with acquiring customers through Facebook, with only 33% actively pursuing new clients that way. By contrast, 73% of companies in the retail/consumer goods sector acquire clients through Facebook, with the lowest cost-per-customer at just $22. This is no accident! Social media is truly the way to gain more prospects, while reducing your overall marketing expenditures.

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Tags: banks, digital marketing, digital marketing for financial service, finance companies, finance firms, financial services, insurance, lenders, mortgage, Social Media, Social Networking