How can large finance brands attract and retain more customers this year?
As you know, marketing is always evolving. This year, companies are focusing on more customer-centric marketing initiatives including, smart content and social marketing. For many industries, adopting these kinds of marketing trends and tactics is a critical component of attracting new prospects, building stronger relationships with existing customers, and bolstering brand equity.
However, the financial environment comes with a few unique complexities. For large financials, executing customer-focused marketing activities requires localized compliance language and legal disclaimers, while still maintaining brand consistencies. Close collaboration between corporate and local teams, in additional to legal teams is essential.
In this article, we'll discuss the most popular marketing trends for finance brands and why brand managers should incorporate these tactics into their local marketing strategies. As a bonus, we'll even show you the distributed marketing tools needed to support these tactics across the distributed environment.
5 Marketing Trends for Finance Brands
To keep up with consumers and deliver experiences that provide value to both customers and brand, and remain compliant, your marketers need to routinely monitor the latest distributed marketing trends. As an industry-leading brand management software provider, we have a pulse on trending marketing strategies and tactics. Additionally, we offer the tools and expertise needed to make it all happen.
For many industry-leading finance brands, content is a great way to demonstrate value to prospects and customers. This year, the success of your content marketing activities depends on knowing where to promote your content, when to promote your content, and who to target.
Merrill Lynch uses content to promote its financial services and offerings. "Getting the right message to them, the right piece of content, at the time when it's on their mind is critical," says Hoe Corriero, head of digital marketing at Merrill Lynch.
Merrill Lynch tailors its content to answer prospects' exact questions. This kind of hyper-personalization attracts highly qualified clients that are ready to buy.
2. Digital Asset Management Adoption
The savviest financial brands will invest systems to store, reuse, and analyze the performance of creative collateral. A central repository for organizing and managing creative assets allows advisors to pull from previous campaigns, assess campaign effectiveness, and make ongoing creative optimizations.
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WebDAM
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MediaValet
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Percolate
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Workfront
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CampaignDrive
More than a DAM, CampaignDrive is a complete brand management solution purpose-built to help brands managers deliver unparalleled customer experiences and maintain brand compliance. To learn more, we recommend taking our product out for a test drive:
3. Compliance in Social Media Marketing
In a heavily regulated industry such as finance, source media use and social media marketing can influence a financial institution's risk profile. However, with so many customers engaging on social media, finance brands can't afford to skip out on these platforms. The strongest financial institutions will maintain a strong social media presence and comply with specific guidelines such as communication regarding deposits, payments, and lending.
This year, to better equip local and corporate advisors, align on regulations around social media usage. The most important thing financial advisors should know is that soliciting is strictly forbidden on social media.
"So what a marketing person would term a call-to-action (CTA) such as "sign up now" or "call to learn more" is forbidden. Instead, regulators prefer that consumers make their own determinations about whether they want to seek out the advisor for further information," says Rob Feinstein, vice president of product at OutboundEngine.
4. Refreshed Brand Identity
This year, financial brands will look for ways to differentiate from the competition. The most successful organizations will employ the following tactics:
Update Unique Value Proposition: A unique value proposition tells visitors why the business is the best choice for customers. This message needs to be prominently displayed on the website and incorporated into other messaging.
Conduct Competitive Analysis: A competitive analysis helps advisors identify weaknesses and friction that customers experience in the industry.
Overall, advisors should conduct a strategic brand refresh by tapping into the brand's core values and finding more ways to communicate those values to prospects and customers.
5. Increased Collaboration and Feedback
Many of the customer-facing representatives at financial institutions can shed light on the day-to-day frustrations that their customers face. Through increased collaboration, consulting with these internal team members – salespeople, agents, brokers – advisors can tap into the financial goals that customers are setting for themselves. This kind of feedback can help to inform stronger messaging and more targeted print and digital campaigns.
How Finance Brands Gain an Unfair Marketing Advantage
For those local and corporate advisors already in complete sync, adopting these and other finance marketing trends is key. However, if your distributed finance brand is currently experiencing challenges in creative asset distribution and management, we recommend investing in a distributed brand management tool.
CampaignDrive is a distributed marketing platform that facilitates self-service marketing to improve the way corporate and local marketing teams create, collaborate, and distribute creative assets. In many ways, this tool improves speed and responsiveness to local market forces with personalized collateral that maximizes your brand value while maintaining regulatory compliance. CampaignDrive helps distributed organizations deliver timely, relevant, and on-brand creative campaigns.
