A 2017 report found that digital marketing for financial services companies continues to lag compared to other sectors, with only 9% of financial services and insurance organizations claiming to be digital-first versus 11% across all industries combined. While making sure that people who look for the term “financial services” find you doesn’t sound like traditional marketing, Google searches are critical—it means potential leads are looking for you online.
Any one of these five digital marketing ideas can help rejuvenate your online strategy and find new sources for leads, whether you’ve already dipped your toe in the water, never tried digital marketing, or are just looking for a way to revamp a current or underperforming strategy.
Email marketing offers you an entryway into a non-social media online channel that many people check every day. While email is a great marketing tool for any business, avoiding the spam filter has become more difficult over time as the market has become saturated with unwanted emails. Users have begun utilizing spam reports, and email servers like Microsoft Exchange have implemented spam filters to unsubscribe offers and block marketing emails en masse.
Spam emails also continue to confuse platform algorithms, often sending valuable emails to a users’ spam folder without them ever knowing. Marketers have developed various strategies to distinguish their business’s content from spam accounts, such as more targeted behavioral email marketing based on recipient analytics.
But this only means that your email marketing campaigns must contain valuable content—for your readers and the ever-wary spam bots. Here are some email marketing tips for financial services professionals:
Content marketing can range from shorter-form content like social media to blogging and guest posts. If you prefer to offer longer, more in-depth content, whitepapers and ebooks help your audience dig deep. Content marketing could also be more visual than text-based, such as posts featuring images or photos on Instagram or videos on YouTube or Vimeo.
Whichever format you choose—and whichever your audience responds to the most—content marketing is your opportunity to flex your muscles as a financial services professional. Ideas for content are potentially unending: the answers to every question your target customers have had and your own knowledge, expertise, and personal experiences, for example. Content marketing is quickly becoming an expectation of all businesses, and thus is a business idea financial services professionals can’t ignore much longer.
Advertising in local print publications is still an option, but in the digital age, Facebook ads are excellent for marketing financial services to your community. Facebook Ads enable you to drill down to specific demographics, such as gender, age, and location, and finer details like specific interests and income level.
Facebook Ads also tend to be more affordable and offer better campaign metrics to help you tweak and improve your marketing strategy as you go.
You likely have many business ideas for financial services in related, nearby niches that you could offer your customers. For example, credit repair services offer a way for your clients to improve their credit score and overall financial situation by resolving and paying down debt and learning better credit habits. As a credit repair consultant, you assist clients with inquiry removal, loan approval, negotiations with creditors, and so forth, which can also help them with your usual and less-niche financial service offerings. On top of offering a niche financial service to better help clients, you will boost your income.
See how much money you can make with credit repair services.
The term “digital” in digital marketing connotes that many aspects of these marketing strategies are clearly measurable, such as clicks in pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, website visitors, social media engagement metrics, and email open and click-through rates.
No matter which strategy you try while marketing financial services, you should have specific, measurable goals you can back up with trusted, verifiable metrics to track your progress toward these goals. These metrics and measurable goals enable you to adjust your strategies as needed over time. Learn how to set business goals with the SMART strategy in this article.
Read more about how to expand your money management talents to clients online and offline with credit repair services on our Financial Services page.