The Latest List of Finance Marketing “Dos”
We’ve been publishing a lot of advice on finance marketing lately, and it’s possible you’re just looking for some quick tips of how to make your marketing efforts work better for your financial firm.
Here are some recommendations you may want to consider.
#1 Hit All Stages Of The Buyers Journey
Not everyone is ready to buy from you or become your client straight away. Nowadays, power has shifted considerably away from the seller towards the consumer. People like to educate themselves online now before committing to a purchase, or to a long term relationship with a financial firm.
Broadly, the “Buyer’s Journey” can be broken down into Awareness, Consideration and Decision. Your finance marketing needs to touch people effectively at each of these stages.
Think carefully. The marketing channels, messages and calls to action you use at one stage may not be appropriate for the other stages.
For instance, someone looking to educate themselves about business loans may come to your blog to get informed. They are at the “Awareness” stage, and so a good call to action here might be to download a new report on the latest research you’ve done into small business loans.
However, someone at the “Decision” stage will be more receptive to a call to action saying: “apply now” for a business loan on your website.
#2 Watch Your Competition
Anyone engaged in finance marketing should always be mindful of what rival firms are doing online.
Are they publishing on their blog more frequently than they used to? What sorts of keywords are they targeting for their SEO, and how might that affect your Google rankings – and ultimately, therefore, your bottom line?
What kinds of backlinks are your competitors building with other websites to grow their domain authority? How have their overall Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPS) changed over time? Have they risen or fallen?
What activity are your competitors engaged in on social media? What AdWords and Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are they running, and what results are they likely to be seeing?
Be mindful of these trends, but be careful not to just mirror what your competition is doing. Sometimes, the best finance marketing happens when everyone copies what everyone else is doing, and therefore leaves a gap for you to exploit with your marketing (maybe a different marketing channel, for instance).
#3 Take Care Of Your SEO
SEO should be a vital strand in your finance marketing strategy. It holds enormous power to generate revenue for finance companies, and most of them know it.
That’s why the competition is so fierce over the keywords targeted in this industry, and that’s why you need to constantly be on your guard.
If you are ranking on page 1 for a keywords like “business loans”, for instance, then you will be generating huge amounts of traffic. If you are doing your finance marketing right, moreover, this keyword will likely be generating a solid number of conversions for you too.
However, all it takes is for you to drop from page 1 of Google and onto page 2, and you will likely see a dramatic fall in traffic – and also conversions.
Keeping yourself in prime position will require an ongoing digital marketing campaign, where you put focus, time and money into maintaining and strengthening your position in the SERPS.
Make sure you’re tracking your SERPS regularly, as well as the traffic and conversion metrics for your target keywords. A tracking tool is really helpful here; something we offer to all of our clients here at MarketingAdviser.
#4 Leverage Google’s Online Tools
Google offers a range of amazing tools – free of charge (many of them, anyway) – which you can exploit to improve your finance marketing.
Google’s Keyword Planner, for instance, allows you to identify search volumes for specific keywords you’re looking to target. It will also tell you how much it costs to bid on these keywords in an AdWords campaign, as well as providing related keyword suggestions which you may also wish to target.
Google Analytics is a vital tool for measuring your online traffic, where it is coming from (e.g. email campaigns, or organic), and how your visitors are behaving on your website.
Google Search Console will give you an idea of which search queries people are using to find your website, as well as providing an idea of your SERPS for these keywords. You can also use the Search Console to identify problems on your website, such as broken links and crawl errors.
Google Alerts will help you identify occasions where your company, brand or its staff are mentioned in the digital news sphere. Very handy for finance marketing and for PR purposes.
Finally, Google Trends is really useful if your finance marketing is actively engaged in content creation and distribution. This will show you which topics are trending in your industry, and will even show you the interest trends over time during a defined window.
#5 Read Widely & Regularly About Finance Marketing
It’s possible to be caught off guard by a new development in digital marketing. There’s just so much change going on all the time, and it can be hard to keep up with it all.
There’s also a lot of fluff going around out there – myths that are easily disseminated and believed, even by experienced marketers.
However, one advantage of working with a professional in finance marketing is that they have their finger on the pulse all the tine. They will know about imminent, significant changed to Google’s algorithm that have been announced, for instance.
It always helps if you try and read the industry news when it comes to finance marketing, as you never know when the marketing channel that’s currently so profitable for you might suddenly change, and dramatically impact your bottom line.
Some good places to start for SEO news are Search Engine Land and Moz. If you’re looking for finance marketing advice and insights in particular, then you’re in the right place!
Phil Teale is the Sales & Marketing Manager at MarketingAdviser, an agency specialising in marketing for financial services – and especially for financial advisers. Along with our sister company, CreativeAdviser, we also provide bespoke website design, branding, graphic design and video production services to financial clients.
Contact us on 01923 232840 or email me: phil@creativeadviser.co.uk