Digital authority is usually won in the niches, such as various segments of finance and yet banks and credit unions are not well known for leading the charge online. There are some very clear reasons as to why.
I came to this Financial marketing conference looking for something very specific. At McDougall Interactive, we’ve had national level success with bank and credit union marketing over the years, but at times I get very frustrated with the compliance issues.
Some of our local clients are painfully slow to accept and embrace the full process of content marketing. Some have even started with high expectations and then stopped because the compliance officer or the IT department slows things down to a crawl that makes a snail on Valium seem faster than a speeding bullet.
Others have even had award winning and national success and then backed off of full-fledged content marketing, and even conversion optimization, due to a regulatory burden or various other fears.
Is it the fate of financial services marketing to forever be slow and behind the rest of the marketing community? That’s what I wanted to explore more deeply, and what follows is my conclusion.
The overall tone of some of the top-level speakers
Brett King, author of banking 2.0, who is apparently known for shaking things up, said that there are far too many bankers and far too few technologists, behavioral psychologists, information designers and data experts.
Brett also quoted Bill Gates who said “if your culture doesn’t like geeks you are in real trouble.”
He said that over the last 250 years there has not been one industry that was immune to disruption, and the bankers and financial institutions that put their head in the sand and refuse to fully get on board with digital transformation will not make it, and some will even go out of business.
Another speaker cited that by 2020, 40% of the US population will be “digital natives” and will account for 39% of the nations income. This means that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace digital marketing will be missing out on nearly half of their potential audience.
Brett also mentioned that there are 18,000 financial technology companies receiving more than $20 billion in funding. That’s a lot more money pouring into them than to branches and traditional banking.
I asked Mark Ryan, the co-founder and chief analytics officer of Extractable, at the end of his talk (which was my favorite of the conference) if he felt that content marketing was working consistently for banks and picking up steam, or if the regulatory burden was diminishing their future of partaking in the space.
He said there is really good news for those that do embrace creating great content and getting people to engage with it, because many banks are struggling to grasp how it is a game changer for their bottom line. He shared results based on having analyzed client data from 10 million users over 10 years. It showed how content marketing used for search engine optimization, social media and increasing conversions has the overall largest effect on increasing the return on marketing investment for financial services companies.
So is content marketing too difficult for banks?
The answer is definitely yes for those that let it be too difficult. The answer is no for a small amount of pioneers that are going to eat the lunch of the bankers that fail to get on board quick enough.
Which digital marketing tactics are hot?
One of the first talks to go into great detail on tactics was by Matt Wilcox of Fiserve.
Here are his seven most effective digital marketing strategies in banking.
- Leveraging smart data and analytics
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Mobile marketing
- Retargeting
- Search engine marketing including SEO and paid search
- A/B testing and conversion optimization
A continual theme of the conference is that some financial institutions are doing a poor job of truly leveraging analytics and website data to improve their website experiences. Those that are doing a great job with it are having the biggest wins. Those that do things like put the Google Analytics code in their website and then don’t do anything with it are losing.
Where do we go from here?
Mark Ryan, the cofounder and chief analytics officer of Extractable, showed a funny picture of young kids coloring on large white paper on the floor. He said that is the perception of the web team by many of the c-suites. This perception has to change because website marketing teams are more like people at the command center of NASA. We are a combination of engineers and artists, and we leverage big data to generate tens of millions of dollars of revenue. That kind of activity cannot be solely left to IT departments and rogue graphic designers.
He reminded us of how financial institutions have historically been some of the top spenders in paid search and online content creation, and how some of the top tasks that people do online are finance related. The Internet continues to grow, and with it the opportunities for marketing, but the gap between the people doing it right and the people dipping their toe in the water has never been wider.
Mark Ryan simply blew my mind with his talk. I have been doing digital marketing for over 20 years now and can recognize greatness when I see it. The level of detail that he shared about projecting the lift on revenue from the various stages of Internet marketing, makes it clear why he has been chosen by companies like Chase and PayPal to do their marketing.
These are the kind of talks that inspire me to come to conferences. Clearly some people are doing financial services marketing properly, using search engine optimization, competitive analysis, paid search with landing pages / conversion optimization, leveraging analytics to inform website redesigns, getting conversions from social media and using email marketing to nurture prospects into becoming multi-product customers.
I suppose the best news of the conference is that there are a lot of people I will come across that won’t hire me and that won’t do deep content and digital marketing. That means that the financial institutions I work with that embrace it fully are even more likely to be amazing case studies.
