6 Digital Marketing for Finance Tips
In recent years, the finance industry has gone through a digital transformation, with customers increasingly embracing digital products and services, like online banking. Customers today are also turning to digital sources to conduct research before making their financial decisions.
This means that digital marketing for finance is more important than ever before. To reach customers where they are, which is online, finance marketers should understand the finance industry funnel. They should build buyer personas, map their customer’s buying journey, and choose the right digital channels and tactics.
Read on to learn 6 digital marketing for finance tips that you can take to the bank.
Digital Marketing Finance Tips
1. Understand the Finance Industry Funnel
The finance industry has a unique sales funnel. Understanding it will help you better plan for and manage your digital marketing for finance. Finance products and services often require research on the buyer’s side. When it comes to money and finance, customers know that their purchase decisions should be well-thought-out and informed.
This means that your customers are reading—a lot. People take a long time to make decisions involving their finances, and are looking for articles and information from knowledgeable sources.
The length of time a prospect spends researching financial services will need to be considered when building your campaign, not only for the length of your campaign, but also for which tactics you use and how to begin selecting your audience.
2. Build Your Buyer Personas
There are a variety of finance products and services within the finance industry, ranging from insurance or tax services, to mortgages or loans. This diversity in offerings means that your ideal audience is also diverse.
Advertising a credit card to a new university student or promoting a new mortgage opportunity to a prospective homeowner will require different targeting tactics, audience segments, as well as consideration cycles.
The best way to tackle this diversity is by building buyer personas for your various finance services and products. Building a buyer persona is essentially creating a profile of a person who represents the exact centre of your target market.
This ideal (but fictional) customer is given a name, age, even a profile picture, and made into a “real” person by leveraging data that you collect. Having a data-informed view of your target audience makes it easier for finance marketers to identify and create ads for these users.
To build your personas, you’ll first want to leverage your 1st-party data. This primary data reveals important information on existing audience behaviours, traits, preferences, buying habits, and interests that can inform your personas. This data may also tell you something you didn’t know about your current customers.
For example, if you find that customers in the finance industry are typically buying multiple products together at once, you may consider this when targeting lookalike audiences in your media strategy.
Personas should be built using data, not hunches. If you try to answer these questions without using reliable data and sources, you might be overlooking some integral points of view that you hadn’t thought of previously.
Need some help getting started? Here are some questions to help guide your audience research efforts.
- What websites do users frequently visit?
- What publications do users read regularly?
- How do users learn new skills?
- Do users typically conduct research before making a purchase? If so, how many sources do they use?
- Who do users trust for product recommendations?
- What content format do users prefer (text, photos, video, etc.)?
- Are users loyal to certain brands or technologies?
- What key events and/or conferences do users attend?
- Do users consider themselves tech-savvy?
3. Map Your Customer’s Buying Journey
Now that you have buyer personas, you can map their individual paths to purchase to determine where your ads will be most effective. In digital marketing for finance, it’s important to consider the entire research process for a potential customer, along with the purchasing stages and all of the ways they might be using channels and devices throughout. This is called “journey mapping.”
Journey mapping is about reaching the right audience on the right channel or device at the right moment and with the right message. A strong journey map will help personalize your digital marketing strategy so that the journey, and ultimately messaging, resonates with your ideal audience.
For example, don’t assume that a couple shopping for a mortgage will only use a desktop computer to research products. You might end up overlooking their mobile activity, which could be integral to the buying process.
Once you have mapped out the customer’s buying journey, you can identify the best time to capture their attention with an ad, ultimately increasing the probability that your digital marketing for finance strategy will result in conversions.
4. Choose the Right Programmatic Channels
To effectively reach intended finance audiences, tap into programmatic channels that you can leverage to tell a story, and educate.
Programmatic video advertising is the perfect channel for this. With video, you can create an emotional connection between your finance brand and your audience. This medium will capture the undivided attention of your target audience, provide an opportunity to educate them, build brand awareness, and develop trust.
Programmatic audio ads are another channel well-suited to digital marketing for finance. Audio is an immersive and intimate medium that leverages storytelling to create a connection between the content and listeners. With audio ads, you can target niche audiences, convey brand personality, and educate your target audience.
5. Leverage Cookieless Targeting for Your Finance Marketing
Cookieless targeting delivers ads based on the environment in which an ad appears. It uses algorithms to target ad placements based on keywords, website content, and other metadata.
This way, ads are shown to users based on the content they are consuming at that moment in time. Modern cookieless targeting leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), which has made this targeting method more effective than ever before.
With cookieless advertising, when a person is browsing content about a specific topic, it signals their intent at that moment. This is what makes it so powerful for finance campaigns. If a user is reading a blog about how to get their first mortgage, they are in a receptive frame of mind when it comes to content and ads related to mortgage offerings.
6. Leverage Retargeting for Your Finance Campaigns
Retargeting captures users who have previously shown interest in your financial products or services. With retargeting, you can deliver online ads to a user based on their previous intent-based actions on the web. It’s an important tactic for moving users down the funnel to conversion, or another desired action.
If you’re looking to set your finance campaigns apart from your competitors, leverage dynamic retargeting to provide a personalized experience. Dynamically retarget a customer visiting your website and who is browsing through your financial offerings, with ads that personalize the content of the ad, whether native or display, based on the nature of their prior website activity.
Example of Digital Marketing for Finance
Let’s explore an example of a strong digital marketing campaign for finance. In this example, we’re targeting millennials who are looking for investment opportunities.
This audience is very savvy, and is interested in services that are customizable, and allow them to save on cost. If we were discussing television trends, these would be the cord cutters—they’re cutting fees and cutting out the middle man. They don’t depend on television providers to dictate programming, and they definitely don’t rely on a big bank to dictate the way they invest their money either.
As a result, this generation is looking for a finance brand they can align with and investing options that are simple to understand, navigate, and sign up for. Unlike older generations, millennials are not as likely to walk into a bank to speak with a financial adviser. They are online—and more importantly, mobile—and are going to find digital resources to educate themselves on what products work best for their needs.
To capture interest, you will need to provide lots of content and video, to remove the clutter of how people traditionally buy stocks. This will help you target millennials who are less familiar with trading and investing.
Leverage connected TV (CTV) and audio ads to educate this audience, and point them to the relevant information they need. When choosing your audience segments, look for 3rd-party audience segments related to investing. And as the consideration cycle will be longer, retargeting and dynamic retargeting will play a large role in ensuring your brand remains top of mind.
Digital Marketing for Finance: Take Your Leads to the Bank!
Success in the finance industry banks on the ability to build long-term relationships with clients. As customers go online to research financial products, banks, and financial institutions need to strengthen their online presence to build brand awareness and trust with them.
If you keep each of these digital marketing tips for finance in mind when building your campaigns, you should have no problem capturing a relevant and interested audience that you can count on for success.
Want to run exceptional finance campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
Content Marketing Manager
StackAdapt
