The public’s expectations of the financial industry, which includes wealth, banking, and insurance, have dramatically changed over the past few years. Previously, these industries were merely tools for managing transactions or providing products such as a loan, 401(k), or a life insurance policy. Now, organizations must help their customers navigate the complexities of their financial lives using financial education before selling them products.
Marketing professionals are central to communicating the organization’s value to customers and prospects. Specifically, they must demonstrate how they and their advisors aim to improve a customer’s financial wellness. Financial wellness includes how finances may impact the customer physically and mentally and how investment strategies, such as climate-based ESG funds, align with their values and goals while ‘doing good.’ Furthermore, finance industry organizations must provide tools to help their customers become more educated and show them how to take proactive steps toward improving their circumstances.
“Customer expectations should determine how organizations market to their customers and prospects. But, when organizations are not set up to meet those expectations using digital tools, customer retention and acquisition can lag. Delivering financial education via marketing technology like Fresh Finance makes it easy to meet those expectations and show value,” says Teresa Leno, CEO and Founder of Fresh Finance.
Leno says that when talking about digital marketing technology (Martech), digital lead-gen ads are off the table because they often are trying to sell a product. Instead, a digital marketing strategy should consider MarTech, which provides web-based client newsletters full of helpful financial articles, website blogs, and social media articles that address their customers’ financial wellness problems. It’s essential to show how your organization and advisors help solve the complex problems people experience today.
A report by Adobe and Econsultancy identified the most significant challenges that financial services marketers face in 2023 when it comes to content and campaign development:
- 52%- Automation- being able to focus on high-value work by automating repetitive tasks
- 42%- Measurement- understanding the performance of our content
- 41%- Integration- creating process efficiencies from different solutions working together
- 38%- Process and approvals- enabling the timely launch of new campaigns
- 28%- Planning- determining annual/quarterly plans and resources required
- 27%- Content strategy- creating content aligned to key customer journeys
Source- 2023 Digital Trends Financial Services in Focus
“To take financial services marketing to the next level, organizations must direct their marketing budgets toward innovative marketing technologies, their employees’ experience- for marketing, compliance, and advisors, the process, and the people you’re delivering value to; the customers,” adds Leno.
Self-service platforms like Fresh Finance ensure the organization’s people and customers have access to an array of resources with them in mind:
For customers, customized newsletters with a selection of financial articles where the customer determines their relevance when they select an article that pertains to their situation.
For advisors, a secured portal to access finance content that automates posting to their website’s blog based on their business model and customer demographics. Or a selection of approved third-party articles to post to their social media profile.
For marketing professionals, a self-service content creation portal filled with finance articles that they can select, edit to make their own, draft an entirely new article, or select third-party articles from industry publishers.
Whatever the use case, the MarTech must consider all users across the entire value chain and the value it provides to each.
“Our software is designed with the people it touches in mind so that marketing professionals can help their advisors, who help their customers make better financial decisions. That’s the real ‘win-win’ that our MarTech can help organizations achieve,” says Leno.
