By Ronan 
Developing impactful marketing strategies for a company dealing with financial services would involve taking into consideration a number of key elements. According to Scott Tominaga, these elements include the goals and objectives of the company, its strengths and weakness, its target markets and resource availability. New and emerging markets should also be factored in. No matter what are the goals of a company or the type of financial services are provided by it, creating and executing a well-planned marketing strategy can go a long way in helping them to focus on efforts to better reach targets and goals.
Unless a financial service provider has an effective marketing strategy, they will invariably be spending more money on acquiring leads instead of nurturing them and turning them into loyal customers. The path to marketing success lies in effectively evaluating internal financial services marketing resources and subsequently identifying the gaps to bridge to generate the expected ROI. Here are a few key elements of financial services marketing strategy that can help in this process:
- Customer outreach: This is among the oldest and simplest marketing strategies meant for financial institutions and banks, and is also among the most impactful ones even today. Customer outreach is a pretty simple process. It is basically the process of reaching out to the customers with the aim of filling existing needs linked with education, awareness, and help. This might scale to a small organization in the form of webinars and free consultations, and to larger ones in the form of financial education like debt management programs. Customer outreach can seem like a great philanthropic use of budget initially, but in reality, it actually goes a long way in igniting a genuine interest in the products and services of a company, building market awareness and ensuring customer loyalty. A smartly formulated financial marketing strategy shall take into consideration the various services and features the business wants to sell and promote.
- Self-service and digitization: While the previous generations and baby boomers majorly preferred to receive products through sales representatives who would provide them advice and set up personalized accounts on their behalf, the current generation is pretty different. Millennials and Generation Z commonly want to do everything by themselves, without having to deal with human representatives. Hence, choosing to set up and promote online financial products, as well as providing them with the ability to view information without going into a branch, has today emerged as an increasingly necessary and effective marketing means for financial organizations.
Scott Tominaga points out that most financial organizations today have more data than they know what to do with. Hence, it is smart to use customer experience platforms and automation tools to leverage and apply data as a part of the marketing strategy. For example, big data can help companies to identify and offer services before or after they are needed, target specific customers for additional customer service or digital financial education, and so on.