Financial institutions deal with a never-ending array of forms and documents. These ever increasing document piles mount up until the office is overrun with paper. Therefore financial institutions are investing heavily in document conversion services among other digital solutions to help with the digital transformation process for better customer focus, business agility and improved operational efficiency.
Digital marketing for financial services is not an easy task. According to IPG Mediabrands Magna, the year 2016 was marked the first year where digital ad spending overtook television ad spending in the US market and it is expected that 2017 will be the year when this will happen globally. Research by eMarketer also predicts that the digital ad spending is going to increase more than TV ad spending in the coming year.
The conventional method of advertising is rapidly changing to digital delivery. This in turn allows marketers to present diverse messages as well as collect more information regarding how and where viewers are viewing the ads, and reacting in real time. As a result, the broadcast model can also transform from a one-to-many to a conversational model. A conversational model refers to a brand leveraging everything they know about the context of the advertising and the consumers. It helps to communicate with the consumer and also listen to their responses. Measuring the consumer’s response is important and click-throughs and completions are the two primary metrics used to judge a video’s success. Now, all video is shown on a screen that allows the consumer to respond (desktop, mobile or connected TV). This enables more interactivity.
- As per eMarketer, video ad spending in the financial industry is projected to increase to 26 percent YOY in 2017; and Kantar Group found that 9 of the top 25 overall digital ad spenders are financial service companies.
- The banking sector has also adopted the data management platform that allows them to centralise all customer data. The data can be combined with third party data to identify demographic or psychographic groups of consumers.
What are the important data that can be leveraged? Traditional enterprise data from operational systems related to customer touch points such as
- Call centres
- ATMs
- Mortgage units
- Credit cards
- Web-based and mobile sources
- Volatility measures that impact the clients portfolios
- Branches/Brokerage units
Financial business forecasts from various sources
- News
- Industry data
- Regulatory data
- Analyst reports (internal and competing bank)
- Alerts about events (news, blogs, Twitter and other messaging feeds)
Other sources: Advertising response data, social media data
Financial brands can use the data mined for digital ad buys. With the help of technology, programmatic advertising can be used to select the desired viewers to see a specific brand’s ads in real time.
Earlier, online marketing was all about content marketing and social media marketing but today the buzz word is video marketing. Big companies use expensive advertising methods such as radio, magazines, newspaper, direct mail, TV etc. However, for small business owners video marketing is an affordable but highly effective marketing strategy. Small companies can utilize videos and video marketing in the following ways:
- Showcase products in action
- Answer customer FAQs
- Demonstrate product use
- Feature video testimonials
- Introduce staff and provide an intimate look around operations
- Ask for user generated contributions featuring real life customers.
Whatever marketing effort a company may choose to adopt, investing in reliable data is very important. The collected data can be digitized and organized with the help of data conversion services and the digitized data will help in easy data analysis. This in turn will help derive data insights that are valuable for any marketing effort.
