Marketing for banks and credit unions is constantly evolving — the tactics that were successful yesterday are not going to achieve the same results tomorrow. And the change comes rapidly, even in the financial services industry. Marketing teams need to be on their toes to continue meeting the needs of their audience and maintaining relevance.
Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for marketing teams to get swept away in this sea of constant change. In fact, the inability to adapt is often one of the top reasons marketing initiatives fail. Adapting to change doesn’t mean constantly scrambling to keep up. The more efficient approach is to future-proof your financial institution’s marketing efforts and initiatives.
What does it mean to future-proof your marketing — and why is it important?
Future-proofing your marketing means putting structures and processes in place to stay agile as the industry evolves. In some cases, this may mean identifying emerging technologies, like Connected TV (CTV), to adopt. In others, it may mean keeping tabs on changing trends in your industry. In others, future-proofing your marketing may mean improving your understanding of people’s evolving needs.
A future-proof approach to marketing will allow you to stay competitive within the finance industry and continuously deliver value to your customers as time marches on. Here, we’ll review the most common areas to focus on to future-proof your financial services marketing efforts and initiatives.
Four important steps toward future-proofing your marketing
Future-proofing your finance marketing efforts will likely require you to rethink, revisit or even revamp parts of your current approach.
1. Focus less on what works, and more on why it works
To future-proof your marketing, stop worrying about the “thing” you’re delivering — and stay focused on the value the “thing” brings to their lives. By understanding why a specific marketing strategy or tactic is so effective, you can replicate and continue to build on this success over time.
One example is the evolution of FAQ pages into knowledge bases and concierge-like support via chatbot. While FAQ pages typically provide basic answers to quick questions, your marketing team can use the latter two to deliver in-depth, highly relevant information to prospects and customers as needed. These findings can also be used to perfect your contact center training. It’s not that “people want chatbots instead of FAQ pages nowadays.” The lesson is that they want instant and user-friendly access to comprehensive information from the brands they use.
2. Stay driven by data and context
To be blunt, taking your “best guess” as to what will work for your marketing efforts in the future won’t get you anywhere. Instead, in the interest of future-proofing your marketing efforts, you need to become wholly driven by data.
By staying data-driven, the info you collect on your customers and within the industry will allow you to paint a clear path for your marketing team’s future efforts.
More than just looking at this data on paper, being data-driven means understanding the context in which this data exists. This will provide further insight into why a campaign or initiative was or wasn’t effectively able to engage your audience and allow you to make laser-focused improvements moving forward.
3. Diversify your marketing efforts
By today’s standards, multichannel (and, ideally, omnichannel) marketing is vital to the success of your financial institution. So, for starters, future-proofing your marketing efforts means actively looking to branch out to new and emerging channels as time goes on.
But this doesn’t mean you need to be active on every digital channel under the sun. Nor does it mean jumping onto a newly emerging channel because it’s the newest platform on the block.
Instead, it would be best to look for channels that will allow you to engage with and deliver value to your audience most effectively.
4. Invest in the right technology
Whether you’re looking to improve internal communications, supercharge audience research, or enhance your customer experience somehow, technology is the key to making it happen. Chances are good that you already have a decent martech stack. If not, you will have a tough time keeping up with your current and future competition without this technology in hand, because you can be sure they will have it — it’s no longer optional, it’s a must have.
This doesn’t mean splurging on every tool available. Your goal is to identify your team’s needs and your customers’ expectations — and figure out which available tools will allow you to continue meeting them both now and in the future.
How to make your marketing future-proof
Vericast offers marketing tools to help teams stay up to date with the latest info, news and events in the financial services industry — and allows them to use this data to serve their customers better daily.
Vericast’s 2022 Financial Services TrendWatch report shares key industry trends that empower you to thrive in a turbulent financial market.
Take a closer look at the tools we offer, then get in touch with our team to learn more!
