The rise of digital marketing has presented brands – including financial brands – with the opportunity to produce more effective marketing campaigns. A primary reason for this is that online marketing enables financial services companies to precisely tailor their marketing efforts to a well-defined audience.
The goal of emphasizing digital marketing over traditional approaches is straightforward: increased lead generation.
While traditional advertising methods still have their place, financial brands that fail to incorporate at least some form of digital marketing into their consumer outreach efforts miss out on the significant benefits this form of marketing can provide in today’s market.
Pull vs. Push Marketing
One reason digital marketing is so successful in the modern business world is that it represents “pull” marketing, in which consumers react to messages that appeal to them. This differs from “push” marketing, which blankets a particular channel with marketing messaging, hoping that some of those who get the message will find it to be of interest.
Pull marketing is a powerful method of finding new customers because it attracts people who self-select as being interested in the services a company offers.
Pull marketing typically results from content that is viewed by those who have indicated their interest in the products being offered by previous actions, such as searching for information on checking accounts or online banking via Google search.
Digital marketing can handle this type of search in a way that traditional advertising – whether on TV, in newspapers, or on the radio – cannot.
“Banks.com enables financial brands to leverage pull marketing by providing a market-leading platform that consumers visit to seek financial information, products, and services.“
Chris Snyder, CEO and Founder
The Benefits of Digital Marketing for Financial Brands
The key benefits of digital marketing vs. traditional marketing are:
- More Precisely Defined Audience
- Plentiful Data to Build Customer Personas
- Most Effective Way to Reach the Younger Generation
- Improved Marketing Cost Efficiency
- Greater Budget Flexibility
- Easier A/B Testing
More Precisely Defined Audience
Given the flexibility of digital marketing, it’s easy to make changes to improve your campaign’s performance because it gives you the ability to precisely define and target your audience. By contrast, traditional marketing campaigns generally force you to work within broad target audience parameters.
For instance, a TV advertising campaign might target viewers of a TV show that appeals to a younger audience. Conversely, a digital content campaign could be aimed at a more clearly defined demographic: younger individuals who have previously expressed interest in or searched for information about opening an online banking account.
The ability to target your audience more accurately helps keep costs lower and conversion rates higher.
Plentiful Data to Build Customer Personas
Traditional advertising campaigns often involve taking aim at a broad audience and hoping for the best. Digital campaigns, on the other hand, enable you to use precisely targeted data from sources such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
The analytics these companies provide can be extensive, enabling you to improve the lead generation rate of your marketing efforts by utilizing relevant demographic and interest-oriented factors. This data can help you create consumer personas detailing the various features you are looking for in a potential customer segment.
Developing a persona calls for detailing the factors that drive conversion or buying activity for that customer type. The objective is to find the main issue that your product or service addresses for that persona so that you can tailor your ads to maximize your brand’s appeal to them. A persona serves as a powerful tool for drawing up a template for content that powerfully speaks to a potential customer type.
The data analytics these companies can provide enable you to:
- View combined data from various marketing channels to gain an overall perspective of campaign performance.
- Halt a campaign to make adjustments before restarting the campaign to test the changes you have made. This approach helps improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns from a spending perspective.
- Identify factors that work for campaigns, such as the most productive channels or types of devices used, improving spending precision.
Most Effective Way to Reach the Younger Generation
The next generation of banking customers uses mobile as their go-to source for content generation and interaction. If you exclusively reach out to this generation via traditional advertising methods, your chances of generating leads from this cohort are not great.
Radio or TV ads are unlikely to grab the attention of Generation Z, and the same holds true for billboards or print advertising. Conversely, digital channels are the prime location for reaching this group.
Improved Marketing Cost Efficiency
It’s not cheap to advertise via traditional methods such as TV or radio, in spite of the fact that it’s much harder to get a feel for the audience you are reaching. However, with online marketing, you can get a much better picture of who your campaign is reaching while typically paying less than you would for a traditional marketing campaign.
Greater Budget Flexibility
Digital marketing offers tremendous flexibility when it comes to budgeting. Digital campaigns can be canceled at a moment’s notice if they aren’t producing the desired results. This level of flexibility is typically not available in traditional TV, radio or billboard ads, which often require a fixed time commitment when making a purchase. At the same time, if a digital campaign is working, its running time can be extended for as long as it is producing good results.
Easier A/B Testing
Another benefit of flexible budgets for digital marketing is the ease of A/B testing. Given the typically lower costs of running a digital campaign, you can try different approaches without running up a huge bill. Because digital campaigns are easier to prepare and run, you can easily switch to the most productive campaign once you have performed A/B testing.
Using traditional advertising methods, on the other hand, it takes a lengthy period of time to figure out what approach is working best and to alter your approach if necessary. This applies to print ads as well as TV and radio ads, where efficacy data is not typically available immediately.
With digital marketing, you can continuously monitor the effectiveness of a campaign and make adjustments as necessary to maximize efficacy.
Grow Your Brand Awareness with Banks.com
Banks.com helps financial brands to reach, engage, and educate a larger audience of potential customers.
To learn more about how Banks.com can help you increase brand awareness, click here.
