S2
Episode 5
The Greatest Assets for Financial Services Marketing
About This Episode
We look at how financial services marketing has shifted strategically during the pandemic to help build consumer trust and foster growth.
Cash Meyerhoffer | Media Director, thomasarts
Jennie Anderson | Media Buyer, thomasarts
Zach Van Kerrebroeck | Sales Director, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
I think just with COVID and everything, we saw a huge shift in how people are consuming their information and their entertainment. So I think just, you know, if budget allows shifting budget to those tactics, CTV, or, you know, streaming services like Pandora or Spotify, I think that’s what people should be looking to do. You know, we still want to stay relevant with our audience, and people are going to continue to use these subscriptions as they’ve now become more comfortable with using them. But yeah, definitely, including those tactics as part of the media plan.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:36)
Curious to know what industry-leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever-evolving digital landscape. The How Agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward-thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.
Matt (00:01:04)
Hey, everyone, welcome to today’s episode, my name is Matt Evered. I’m the host of the How Agencies Thrive podcast, and I’m also the Education and Development Manager at StackAdapt. This episode is all about how marketers in the financial services vertical can thrive in their upcoming campaigns. Today, we’re joined by none other than Jennie Anderson, and Cash Meyer Hoffer, from Thomas Arts, as well as StackAdapt’s very own Zach Van Kerrebroeck to share their expertise on this vertical. I’m excited for this episode, not just because I’ve had the opportunity to work with the Thomas Arts team in the past on a few case studies. But because their team has seen a ton of success in this vertical throughout the pandemic, especially when it comes to driving awareness for their clients. But don’t just take it from me. To get this episode started. I’d love to hear from each of our guests. So starting with you, Jennie, tell us a little bit about your experience and some areas of expertise that you have.
Jennie (00:01:55)
My name is Jennie Anderson, I have been a media planner for almost five, six years now. And I’m just my experience, I have a lot of experience in digital media, obviously social and then traditional as well. I’ve been at thomasarts for over almost three years now. And so what can I say about ta um, I mean, there’s a reason why I’ve been here for almost three years. It’s a great atmosphere, highly knowledgeable team, especially our media team. Sure Cash can speak to this, you know, we have a lot of people with there that can bring their expertise to the table. And it’s a very collaborative ad agency, we do have quite a diverse portfolio of clients, the ones we’re going to be talking about today. So our financial banks that we focus on, that are regional, to our area. And then we also work on some larger clients, but really focus on some senior senior consumers. So we’ll leave it at that.
Cash (00:02:56)
I’m Cash Meyerhoffer, I’m the media director here at thomasarts, I have been in the media space for for almost 10 years now. It’ll be 10 years in the next spring here of 2022. I’ve been a TA for just short of five years now as well. So half of my career I’ve been here at TA and Jennie did a really great job of of introducing the really great teams here at TA. We’re a full-service ad agency located just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. So we do creative strategy, media analytics, we have a full development team as well. So we have a really good plethora of different teams here that do really just a bang-up job. I talk about our media team as being the center of excellence within ta because we have so many great team members that have just a wealth of knowledge. That is really awesome. So it’s been a really great place to be part of.
Matt (00:03:58)
Thanks so much. And Zach, a little bit about you.
Zach (00:04:01)
Thanks, Matt. And Thanks, Jennie, and Cash both for joining today. My name is Zach Van Kerrebroeck, I’m a Sales Director at StackAdapt. I’ve been here for about four years. And I’ve held a few different roles on the sales team. But my current role is primarily focused on media strategy and execution. I’ve been lucky enough to work across a variety of advertisers. But I’ve spent quite a bit more time in a subset of verticals, and financial services is one of them. So I’m really excited to be a part of the conversation. And, as always, I’m looking forward to hearing from Jennie and Cash given their experience.
Matt (00:04:39)
Thanks so much. So, to start the episode off, I want to draw to the fact that in this industry in financial services, the last two years have been, for lack of a better term, disruptive for businesses that were offering financial products as well as you know the entire economy with people losing jobs, changes to income moving all kinds Two major decisions being made, as everything began to unfold, you know, thinking back to the beginning of the pandemic, what were thoughts that all of you had as marketers working in the space?
Jennie (00:05:13)
Kind of just to answer your question, and you know, how we supported our clients, I think it was just a major time of uncertainty, you know, not just for our clients, but for ourselves, you know, our office we sent us were sent home for about two weeks, with the plan to come back to the office after those two, that two week period, kind of similar plan with our clients, a lot of them just went and worked from home for two weeks with the plan of coming back into the office. And I’d say it was probably around week three or four that, hey, this is going to be a lot longer than what we thought, and this isn’t going away anytime soon. So quite a few clients ended up just kind of pausing their campaigns, you know, just kind of want to see how things played out with the news in COVID. But I would say probably most of our clients did, you know, just look at their messaging, just making sure that they were not being irrelevant or insensitive to the news and things that were happening in the world during that time. So I’d say a lot of them, it was just more of like, “Hey, what are we doing? Let’s pause and then plan for the future.”
Cash (00:06:22)
Yeah, I’ll jump on to Jay’s point there. We really were in like a wait-and-see approach early on in the early days, I think we were all thinking that it was going to be a couple-week period, the two weeks to slow the spread was really the big initiative here in the States. And so we were really in that holding pattern throughout that time. There was also really some talk amongst, you know, the administration at the time, as well as Congress, that they were going to push out more stimulus packages, you know, that would be able to help help people. I mean, it was it was kind of crazy, from just our own perspective, wondering whether we would have opportunities to work with our clients, because there was so much uncertainty. But then as we started to get a better feel for the financial impacts that were taking place, and maybe some of the things that were going to come out of the Cares Act, which is what was one of the first legislative pieces that came out, we started to really buckle down and be able to say, “Okay, well, we’re gonna have jobs.” Now we need to help and make sure that other people are going to be able to do that. And so with those early dollars, I think there was like a trillion dollars that were given to businesses, we stepped into action and really started putting together plans for our financial clients, that we’re allowing them to be able to push out and start talking to their clients and make sure that they had the peace of mind that we were starting to get as, you know, as members of TA.
Zach (00:07:45)
Yeah, I think my input would only add to what both Jennie and Cash had mentioned, I think everyone took a pause in March 2020. And regardless of the vertical, you know, businesses, but also consumers need to just take a step back and sort of assess the situation. I think, marketers were left with two key challenge challenges. So the first one being budgetary, you know, marketing budgets are often one of the first to get slashed. But I think the more interesting one is what actually what Jennie picked up on in terms of messaging. I just remember in 2020 Ad Age called the year, you know, the year of tone deafness. And I think we can all remember examples where that was the case, I think the funniest one I saw was, was KFC, prior to lockdowns had launched a campaign with their slogan, you know, finger-licking good. And obviously not something you want to be promoting at the time. So the timing was everything. And for financial services, I think marketers really had the goal of trying to inspire confidence in consumers. And, you know, that was a challenge, because both marketers and consumers had no idea what was going to happen day to day. So navigating that uncertainty was really my goal at the time. And I think to a certain degree, still continues to be a goal with the teams that I work with.
Matt (00:09:03)
Absolutely. Thanks so much. Jennie, you mentioned something that was kind of interesting. And you said that, you know, what ta wanted to do at the beginning of the pandemic was to act as a resource for the clients and sort of be that go-to for, you know, not only information on what was going on within the vertical, but how they could, you know, pause a campaign or make adjustments to a campaign. Were there any specific resources that the agency was providing to their clients at the time that sort of helped with that, you know, empathetic understanding approach that a lot of agencies were taking?
Jennie (00:09:40)
Yeah, I think just kind of, I want to say availability. So you know, just being right on the fly ready to go, especially with the financial, you know, as Cash mentioned, with the Cares Act, I’d have to say speed was definitely an important part of the campaigns that we ran Um, for the financial institutions that we represent, you know, our CEO was able to work with the other CEOs of these financial institutions, and was able to secure quite a substantial amount of budget. And, you know, the banks were excited, we were excited. And I think Cash can speak to this too, you know, these Finance, Financial institutions, they have to go through so many drafts of our campaigns, whether it’s through creative, the media plan, you know, just making sure that they’re compliant, that messaging is lining up. And I think having, you know, the development team on our side, the analytics, the creative, the media, all in-house, we were able to execute on these campaigns in as in a six week time, if it was even that I think it was even shorter than that. Right? Cash. Yeah. Just the urgency was there.
Cash (00:10:50)
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. It was it was, it was a six-week campaign that we ended up really launching with it. But the key pieces of the campaign came together within a weekend, we were able to really pull in a lot of agency resources to Jennie’s point, and a TA with us having everything in-house, it became really easy to start pulling in some subject matter experts from all the different teams within TA, even ones that maybe don’t even work on financial services, especially like from our creative teams, they were able to start talking to, you know, other teams and see if they had ideas, and start being able to push a lot of different ideas out there early on, so that we could, you know, push the campaigns live a lot quicker and a lot with a lot more opportunity. So I mean, I can think back to you know, that weekend, and I was I personally, I was on the phone with a lot of digital and traditional media partners, trying to see if we can get plans in place with those dollars, what we could have as far as a media plan. And through those weeks, it felt like I was probably doing a new media plan daily, just as we were trying to get that launched and out the door. So it was it was a real effort for us to try and bring so many of those teams together and give our resources 100%.
Matt (00:12:10)
Yeah, and Cash. That’s a perfect transition to the next question that I had. Because what I’m wondering is, you know, during this time as a media team, how often did you have to adjust the strategy for your campaigns, and you know, doing things in real time to adjust to the changing landscape during the beginning of the pandemic? Was it, you know, almost daily that you had to do this? Or were there some strategies that were a little bit long-term that played out?
Cash (00:12:39)
Yeah, so we really were on probably more of a daily basis looking at how can we change things because we had, so I’ll step back and say we initially started out with this paycheck Protection Program style campaign where we wanted to reach users or potential clients with information regarding the paycheck protection loan and the money that came out of the Cares Act. And then we started morphing additional campaigns out of that we did a restaurant campaign where the banks were giving, giving credit card additional credit card points to people that actually just went to local banks. So there was there was that so new initiatives came out of that. But then additionally, just within those campaigns, those longtail campaigns, we were in there daily, looking to see what the metrics, the KPIs that were performing best. So if we were, you know, trying to get more users to the landing page, we were trying to engage more click through rates, we were looking at conversion. So if people are actually signing up for loans and pushing budget, I think on a daily basis to, you know, different things, whether it was, you know, a TV or a lot of cases, it was really trying to leverage newer opportunities like CTV, in streaming audio, where we knew that there was more people spending more time on a daily basis there.
Matt (00:14:02)
Absolutely. And, Zach, I’m wondering for you from a more holistic sense, with all the campaigns you’ve observed through StackAdapt, over the last two years, what were some adjustments that you noticed happening, especially in the financial services vertical?
Zach (00:14:17)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, speaking to programmatic, you know, in my eyes, the biggest benefit is efficiency, both in terms of reach and performance, but also in terms of speed. So we saw people, you know, changing campaigns daily, very often, and I think, you know, DSPs are perfectly suited to that challenge. That sort of, you know, takes care of the how, but the question we always end up asking is sort of when and what, so what are we looking to change? Is it the messaging or the creative? Is it the channel? Is it the audience, I think all of those things changed in one shape or another across across the platform and across our clients. But it. You know, the other question would be like, how quickly do we need to action on that change? Have we really given our current tactics a chance to perform and what is it we’re looking to test against? So, obviously, it’s hard to set benchmarks when the world has been flipped on its head. So I really think it’s our job to just keep communication as open as possible and provide clients with all the tools that they need to make sound business decisions.
Matt (00:15:24)
Absolutely. Thanks, Zach. Now, I want to draw on something a little bit different here. When I was doing research for this episode, there was an ebook that had been published, it was on the state of financial services marketing. And there’s this interesting quote that said, to succeed in today’s hyper-competitive financial services environment, brand marketers need to adapt to big changes in consumer behaviour and how they find and choose businesses. So from that, I’m interested to know from the three of you how important you think it is for marketers in this vertical to not only develop, but understand these customer profiles and how that impacts the campaigns that they run.
Zach (00:16:07)
I think when you think about understanding the customer, this, first again, speaks to the importance of messaging. I think it’s important for marketers, especially brand marketers, to understand their audience, and what’s likely to resonate with that group. But secondly, from the lens of media strategy, I think it speaks to the importance of channel and where you’re looking to execute, sort of as Cash at alluded to, you know, media teams need to know where people are spending the bulk of their time and, you know, allocate efficiently. And probably the most prevalent example that comes to mind is sort of looking back at CTV, you know, three years ago, marketers were only dipping their toe into connected TV. And, you know, that might have been far and few and far between, despite, you know, momentum from consumers sort of shifting their attention and cutting the cord. But now, there are so many more ad-supported OTT providers, and consumers are getting to the point where it’s getting harder and harder to justify subscription-based services. So, you know, almost every team I speak with now lists CTV as their largest growth opportunity. And in my opinion, the biggest reason for this has to do with the industry catching up to consumer attention, which is really, you know, a product of understanding your customer. So I think the channel really fits into that puzzle.
Cash (00:17:28)
Well, I was just going to touch on what I think the really interesting thing to think about is that financial services is always really behind the eight ball as far as maybe innovative marketing tactics and techniques. It’s with compliance, we’ve already talked about it, there’s things that we have to make sure that we do we also need to protect individuals’ information. I mean, it’s not easy to say that, you know, a user came in and put a bunch of dollars into their bank account, and we need to push out a message to them, we need to be really thoughtful with that it’s completely different than maybe retail, which, you know, if somebody comes in and buys a shirt, we can say, Oh, well, they’re really interested in large shirts, we should be able to do that and put that customer into, into more narrow focus style campaign. So really, we have to think about really full channel opportunities to speak to people so that it doesn’t, of course, appear creepy or anything. But also, we need to leverage some of those digital tactics like CTV, live streaming audio, which saw some growth during the pandemic, and be able to reach people that we know, have interest in our products.
Jennie (00:18:43)
Yeah, I’ll add to Zach really quick, just kind of the CTV. So the two financial institutions that I worked with, they love traditional media, they love prints. And what was really interesting was that this was the very first campaign that working with these clients, they did not want to do print. And that was actually because there was some underlying concerns of how COVID was spread. And, you know, people who are receiving the newspaper or magazine in the mail, you know, there’s just some concerns there. So we actually didn’t do print for the very first time. And as the alternative as people, you know, people are still seeking the news, no matter what age native was actually. We tried out native for the very first time with these clients. And it’s been a staple in their campaigns ever since they’ve been very happy with those results, especially with that their target audiences, you know, high-consuming news users, we call them. So yeah, that’s definitely been kind of one of the changes that we’ve seen, and how our customers and consumers kind of adapted to the new digital space.
Matt (00:19:53)
This has all been great. On that note, I think we can take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll talk strategy and look at future trends that financial services marketers should be looking at as we head into 2022.
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Matt (00:20:45)
Welcome back, everyone. As mentioned, I’m joined by Jennie Anderson and Cash Meyerhoffer, from thomasarts and Zach Van Kerrebroeck from StackAdapt. In this half of the episode, we’re going to focus on strategy and future trends in the financial services vertical. So to our guests, compared to pre-COVID world, if we think about areas of campaigns such as audience targeting creatives, etc, what are some key strategies that marketers in the financial services vertical should be taking into consideration for future campaigns?
Jennie (00:21:18)
I think just with COVID and everything, we saw a huge shift in how people are consuming their information and their entertainment, especially with, like, online video, huge subscriptions, and, you know, Netflix, Hulu, and then just like how Cash had mentioned with, you know, Pandora, or Spotify. So I think just, you know, if budget allows shifting budget, shifting money budget, to those tactics, see TV, or, you know, streaming services like Pandora, or Spotify, I think that’s what people should be looking to do, you know, we still want to stay relevant with our audience, and people are going to continue to use these subscriptions as they’ve now become more comfortable with using them. But yeah, definitely including those tactics as part of the media plan.
Cash (00:22:05)
I’ll piggyback on Jennie’s thought here that, I mean, there’s the idea that the pandemic pushed us ahead about 10 years, and I’m sure we’re all experiencing it, you know, we’re still going to restaurants now where you’re, you’re scanning QR codes, you know, any type of option to use your devices and digital devices is being taken. So really leveraging digital as a channel, I think growing out of that, with the growth of some of those traditional pieces inside of digital, so whether that’s a, you know, connected TV or over the top, but one of the strategies that TA has been really trying to push in the last probably year just as we have been able to see this is we call it stalking impressions, which is the opportunity to use CCTV or audio streaming audio through StackAdapt. And take users who have either listened to that watched it or engaged and then having some type of follow up whether that’s you know, a retargeting banner, you know, pushing into somebody into a sequential message. That’s the type of benefits that we’ve had with our relationship there. And being able to leverage that. And that I really see as being the future of the mediums is we’re really wanting those to work together in an omni-channel opportunity. Now we actually get to be able to build those journeys out in a really constructive way.
Zach (00:23:29)
Yeah, and I completely agree with both of those points, I think that data is really the brand’s biggest asset now and regardless of how digital identifiers sort of present themselves over the coming years, I think marketers need to use the tools available to reach their ideal customer. So digital provides so much flexibility to tailor messaging to segment and target and to provide a fuller picture when it comes to attribution and reporting. And so I think moving forward, brands really need to work to organize and to action on their data in ways that are obviously safe and compliant.
Matt (00:24:07)
To close out the episode. If we look at the last 18 months, I think it’s it’s almost universally agreed that this is a time in our history, when everybody reevaluated certain aspects of their lives. So you know, where you choose to live, how much you’re saving, how much you’re spending and on what, and making these key decisions. What do you think the future of marketing looks like in the financial services industry? If we look at, you know, 2022 and beyond, you know, keeping in mind some of these trends that are up and coming and, you know, strategies that you just mentioned that marketers should be paying attention to?
Cash (00:24:48)
Well, I would say with financial institutions, they’ve always really, or in the last probably 20 to 30 years, have focused on those that that have money already, and I think there is a shift of saying, well we need there is a groundswell of talking to everybody and having more opportunities to, to reach out to a young student and get a student, you know, checking account and started so that you have that, that opportunity to start building that relationship and that the relationships really matter. That’s one thing that really came out of our paycheck protection loan campaign where so many people didn’t know where to turn, those business owners didn’t know where to turn our our banks really did a tremendous job of having really good relationships with with their clients. And so there is that relationship building. And so shifting some of those opportunities to speak to the younger generation and actually focus on them. And I think that that can be done through digital channels, as well as any, so maybe shirking some of the, you know, suit and tie kind of atmosphere and really leaning into like a younger demographic with that, I think, is a big deal. And then also, really speaking to more of a diverse and inclusive environment. And I know that our banks are very thoughtful in that and in that way, and wanting to, to really showcase that there are so many people that the bank can reach out to and be part of. And so I think that that’s just that, that type of being all-inclusive, and being, you know, thoughtful is going to be a big piece and how we do that, in addition to the channels that we’ve talked about.
Jennie (00:26:33)
Great. Yeah, and to kind of add to what Cash has said, I think just also putting out more products that are more online, you know, seeing how everything can almost be done through your phone through a car loan, and our Well, I wish to house loan, but that takes a lot more paperwork and probably needs a computer. But, you know, making sure that these services are available to you know, not just millennials and knowing about them. But you know, also the older generations, especially as they’ve turned more to their phones, so, you know, marketing tactics that are going to be more educational, so that, you know, we did change from going into the bank and depositing our checks. Well, now we’re doing it just through our phone by taking a picture. So I think the messaging should be very, very clear as well, as we shift to a more online online world.
Zach (00:27:26)
I completely agree with Jennie’s point, I think the future really relies on innovation. And, you know, as Cassatt caches had mentioned earlier, you know, timelines are going to be tough because it’s a regulated market, but you look to the growth of FinTech and digital payments. And you can really point to convenience and access is a huge deciding factor now and in the customer journey. So, you know, with that said, I think marketers need to echo that sentiment, and they need to push their organizations to not only provide but then demonstrate the convenience and accessibility as core tenants of their product offering.
Matt (00:28:04)
Well, Jennie, Cash, Zach this puts us at our time. On behalf of myself and our listeners, I want to say thank you again to three of you for sharing your expertise on this episode. And you know, I had the benefit of going through this live, but after the episode, I feel like I’ve learned a lot, and I’m definitely confident that our listeners who are operating this vertical will as well and apply some of these strategies to their upcoming campaigns. So until then, thank you to our guests for joining. And thanks for tuning in.
Episode Outro (00:28:32)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcast on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback, we’d love to learn how agencies or brands work with StackAdapt, find us at www.stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
