6 Bank Marketing Strategies to Move You Past the Competition in 2022
In the future, banking will be more competitive than ever. You need to stay ahead of your competition with these 6 bank marketing strategies. These strategies work for traditional banks and neobanks too!
The key to success in any industry is a solid marketing strategy. In the banking sector, this means being creative and innovative without forgetting about security and trustworthiness. The following 6 strategies can help you move past the competition in 2021:
- Demographic Targeting
- Technology adoption
- Digital Apps with your financial services
- Customer Value with new bank services
- Customer Outreach and lead generation
- Hyper Personalization
1. Target Different Demographics for each financial institution
Most banks are trying to attract limited audiences. Money is in the niche right? Would you be a new neobank or a broker with an umbrella license, I am sure that you are targeting specific audiences such as Gen Z, Millennials or Baby Boomers.
On the contrary, we are telling our banking clients to target not only one segment with one specific marketing that would feel like a no-go for another segment. Marketing results are indeed limited if you restrict yourself to one segments. However, with a customizable client portal as developed by InvestGlass and powered with a Swiss CRM, you can customize for your current customers or new prospects a financial brand that will look different for each segment. Target audience is obviously key but you should not restrict yourself. It’s the same if you write a blog post. The blog post can be interesting for millennials and not for baby boomers. Yes, this is true, but in reality, family members can be happy to share the post with other members. Here segments are sharing content.
One size doesn’t fit all. Your bank’s marketing strategies may have more success if you target local, specific, and smaller demographics. For example, if you can identify that your bank offers services specifically valuable to Gen Z students graduating high school and moving into university and college, you could create a strong marketing campaign geared at them. Similarly, if your financial services are better for middle-income baby boomers looking to start a savings program for retirement, you could create a strong marketing campaign on one specfic financial product. Even targeting a local audience will help you create more specific offerings and marketing so that you can more easily differentiate yourself from competitors.
2. Financial institutions must Adopt New Technologies
New technologies are found everywhere in consumer engagement is part of your added value. New technology can start from making sure that all marketing channels are properly covered with a marketing strategy.
Your colleagues have a LinkedIn account. What are they posting on their LinkedIn accounts? Do they have a corporate picture? Do they have a corporate background?
Creating marketing brochures and guidelines is the basis of marketing efforts for any financial institution. The digital marketing agency can help you to set the basic color, wording but you have to make sure that your colleagues effectively use them.
New customers will look into their bankers’ profiles. Therefore you might also suggest and create contacts for your bankers to push on social media. This is what we call influencer marketing or micro-influencer marketing. Each colleague can be part of an effective marketing strategy.
As you can notice here, we are not talking about chatbots or artificial intelligence. Obviously, artificial intelligence and chatbot can be used for frequently asked questions or FAQ. But financial institutions are not only about putting a robot for any type of service… it is about creating human relationships.
3. Push Digital Apps and Financial Services
Today, an estimated 60% of the world population has an active social media account. New customers are less and less interested in going to physical banks and are looking for digital services. They are expecting to find all your financial products in a well-designed digital bank portal or BAAS portal.
On your digital bank portal, you can add third-party cookies to improve content targeting for each individual client. InvestGlass portal is not an IOS Android mobile app but a web portal running on a browser. There is nothing to download. We believe that this approach is the most affordable mobile banking approach. We will also suggest you use the portal for your prospective customers. Collecting their browsing data is a very important part of your digital marketing strategy improvements. Make sure your GDPR and data processing agreements are updated. GDPR is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation.
The digital marketing strategy will include text and video content. Younger generations will prefer video and engaging content. Wealthier or older customer bases will look for expert advice. Creating content is key nearly more important than buying google ads. Good content will position you at the top of search engines. SEO will encourage local businesses and local search so you should make sure your content presents a local flavor: ” Your bank accounts in your neighborhood…” SEO works by optimizing your site for the search engine that you want to rank for, whether it’s Google, Bing, Amazon or YouTube.
4. Return Value to Customers with special financial services
Many companies forget to return the favor to their customers. Through email marketing automation, you can share new service news but also offer specially developed products and target the right customers.
Happy customers should be presented on your social media ads and you should put them in the middle of marketing campaigns. Social media platforms have targeting tools so you will easily match your consumer’s testimonials with potential customers.
For financial institutions, dealing with mass retail customers, you should also watch for online reviews. Customers can share their opinion on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter so make sure your marketing team prowls financial services testimonials here too. Consumers are your marketing troopers. They will replace some digital ads budget.
5. Focus on Customer Outreach
Customer outreach is crucial as a digital marketing strategy for banks, simply because many banks are focusing on digital and social media marketing. You could create workshops for trading, tutorials to explain tax wrappers, reinvent local banks meeting. You should create content that your consumers will keep and re-use. It’s not sales here, it’s about building relationships with existing customers with quality content.
6. Integrate Marketing Strategy Personalization with Big Data
First, ask customers more questions. If you can not or don’t feel like asking the question – try the big data approach. With a simple automation algorithm, InvestGlass can recommend products to your existing customer base. All previous interactions are monitored. More data will give you more consumers’ preferences. Existing customer data is used to extrapolate potential customers’ expectations for financial services. Big data bundled to InvestGlass marketing reporting can teach you which marketing strategies work. You will not be guessing why a new account comes to your bank. It’s about target marketing. Customer loyalty is the last pillar of this strategy.
Use data to improve customer experience, focus on complaints and be more proactive about customer service. You will quickly see which channels are the preferred ones for communicating with your institution. The best thing you can do is focus on making digital interactions with customers as human as possible.
InvestGlass Artificial Intelligence and Signal Analysis
Recommendations to engage customers
- Get an automatic reminder for securities or portfolio to rebalance.
- Reveal sales pipeline with engagement level reminder.
- Create campaign with video marketing, content marketing for different customer segements
- Test diverse digital channels
- Test new ideas with new customers
- Send direct mail carefully
- Build a simple customer journey with new banking services presentation – like a video game… step by step. Give access to your online banking when customers are read!
Automate Sales Activities Trending Insights
- Surface key opportunity insights including customer sentiment, competitor involvement, and overall prospect engagement to understand whether or not a deal is likely to close.
- Provide advisors and bankers with the best next action to take based on positive and negative signals to increase the likelihood of closing an opportunity.
Control risk with Smart data discovery
- Find trends in unstructured data or trading – transaction logs.
- Calibrate flavour of the month – banking products
- Identify trading patterns to automatically qualify clients’ suitability.
- Explain the risk factor to foster a greater sense of connection with as many customers are possible
Marketing Campaign and monitoring
- Empower your sales with hyper-targeted financial products.
- Monitor churn and deals that don’t work to analyse blind spots in the sales/marketing process and correct inefficiencies.
A digital marketing agency will tell you – to put customer relationships first!
Effective marketing strategies will start with creating content. Most customers will be interested in your IDs. Customers are eager to learn more like anyone. New clients will be looking for micro-influencers. Those micro-influencers can just be anyone in your company.
Bank’s brand is built with the content you generate. Would you offer investment banks’ services, savings accounts, and interest rates comparison tools, it’s all about content and a capacity to target audiences however they are.
The financial services sector is like any other sector: modern marketing is all about the experience. You have to keep a local bank feeling within your digital tools to make sure that the customer experience will be different with you.
A good digital marketing strategy starts with the tools you use. InvestGlass is a complete Swiss software suite that can help you launch and manage your bank marketing online, from digital onboarding, email marketing to the client portal. The system does all the work for you so there’s no need to search through different platforms or spend hours trying to learn how something works. You get everything in one place and it’s easy to track what’s working and what isn’t – saving time, money, and frustration!
We look forward to helping you build brand awareness in the digital world and generate new leads for your bank.