COVID-19 has brought digital marketing more to the fore of minds in the UK’s financial services sectors. The lockdown made it impossible for financial planners to meet clients in person, whilst other forms of offline marketing (e.g. billboard advertising) became effectively pointless in the early months of 2020.
Digital marketing, however, has the advantage of allowing you to always get your brand up in front of your audience. Yet digital marketing is difficult to do well. There are many moving parts which need to fit together effectively, and channels which need monitoring and constant refinement.
In this article, our financial services marketing specialists offer 10 tips to inspire your own strategy in 2020 and beyond. We hope you find value in these ideas. If you’d like to discuss your own digital marketing strategy with us, get in touch to arrange a free consultation with a member of our team.
#1 Review your customer journeys
Many financial firms want more leads from their digital marketing. Yet little thought can go into the process that gets prospects to this point. Here, it’s key to devise an effective “customer journey” to give your traffic the best chance of converting.
For instance, do you expect a first-time visitor to your website to make an enquiry? This might happen, but in all likelihood, you need to build some trust first and encourage the user to make multiple visits. So, try to think of ways to build their trust and confidence over time with your digital marketing.
#2 Refine your audience
Sometimes financial firms are vaguely aware of their ideal client – e..g their age and income. Yet have you really gone deep into their demographics and psychographics? What are their main worries and pain points, for instance? How can you speak to those more effectively with the text and imagery used in your digital marketing efforts?
#3 Set up a clear measurement system
Do you have access to a portal which gathers together all of the key data and performance metrics of your digital marketing campaigns? If not, then consider finding a way to put a clear, easy-to-access dashboard together which allows for live reporting. This will enable you to quickly survey the overall performance of your digital marketing at a glance.
#4 Do an SEO audit
Have you checked recently whether your financial services website is compliant with the latest Google search algorithm requirements? Conducting an audit can be a relatively quick task which highlights some of the key areas where improvements could be made to make your website more visible in search engine results.
#5 Check the geo-targeting of your ads
If you’re running Facebook Ads, Google Ads or another pay-per-click (PPC) campaign then it’s easy to set things up, let the ads run and neglect to check whether they are performing as they should. In particular, it’s important to check that your adverts are still showing in the right geographic locations. If you’re a financial planner in Oxford, for instance, then you probably don’t want them appearing to people in Switzerland!
#6 Review and re-purpose old content
Perhaps you’ve been blogging on your financial website for many years. If so, then there’s probably some great content on there from years ago which needs updating. To build the SEO authority of these existing pages and to avoid the unnecessary task of completely writing about the topic again, why not review some of these old articles and update them? You might even find some ideas for re-purposing certain blogs into animated videos, infographics or other content formats.
#7 Review design consistency
Are the readers of your newsletter seeing the same brand design and assets on your website blog, social media profiles and other digital channels? Perhaps your LinkedIn page has an old logo which looks disjointed with your new brand. These sorts of inconsistencies can unsettle audiences, so make sure your digital marketing conveys the same style across its channels.
#8 Check your backlink profile
Are other websites linking to your own? If so, what is the nature and quality of those websites? If there are scant backlinks or they largely emanate from low-quality sources, then this could be hurting the search engine performance of your website. Consider doing a thorough review of these and think about what strategy might help you improve your backlink profile.
#9 Be open to new ideas
One of the biggest defining features of digital marketing is that it does not stand still. It is based upon technology that is rapidly evolving, which then changes how people behave in relation to it. As such, it’s important to regularly ask yourself whether there are new angles, platforms and approaches which you have not yet tried with your digital marketing – but which could be effective. Don’t just assume that what’s working will always work or be best.
#10 Personalise where possible
Digital marketing is powerful for many reasons. Yet a key reason is that it opens up the opportunity to address each member of your audience as an individual. Email marketing is perhaps the most obvious example here. Rather than addressing each recipient as “Dear Valued Client”, for instance, consider calling each of them by their first name. This is usually quite straightforward to achieve using an email service provider such as MailChimp.
Yet email is not the only channel of your digital marketing that allows for personalisation. There are many creative ways to do this which can increase the potency of your digital communications. Take some time to consider how this might work in your own case.