5 Lessons Learned In Marketing From The Financial Industry

by Steve Olenski

Whatever your business or service is, a successful marketing campaign involves driving traffic to your website, and then on-site conversion. Without those two actions, your company is dead in the water.

The financial industry is among the most dedicated service industries in managing their marketing. Here are five valuable lessons to learn from their successful strategies:

1. Use recognized influencers to drive traffic to your brand.
   It can be a celebrity, like Mike Ditka, who is associated with equity index products. Or anyone else who is a recognized talent or authority. Don Orban is the Executive Director of Retire Iowa, and he recommends tailoring the influencer to the product or service as closely as possible:
   “When you’re dealing with people’s money and especially with their retirement accounts, you want them to know they’re dealing with someone who shares their goals and orientation. Hollywood glamor or a Super Bowl ring may not be what reassures your clients; instead you may want a spokesperson who is trusted and shares senior’s values.”
2. Use compelling content (images, videos) to drive consumers from Pinterest and Instagram to your direct website.
   Both of these platforms are fantastic in getting customers who are browsing the web to land on your website. Pinterest is full of headlines meant to tantalize those interested in financial planning, such as “The 30 Day Money Cleanse” or takeaways like “Free Printable Financial Planner.”
3. Incentivize your customers.
   Customers who have purchased an item from your website need an incentive to spread the word, e.g. a discount on their next purchase when they spread the good word on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other social media. How about a free e-book for repeat customers? This kind of customer retention strategy pays hefty dividends.
4. Simplify every step of the sales funnel.
   Remove steps, minimize forms, add confidence builders and ensure progress is clearly signposted for the prospective customer to minimize drop-out. And, if your website has a remarketing pixel placed on all of its product pages throughout the site, when someone drops off without making a purchase you can serve an advertisement to them for that specific product over a 30-day timespan.
   Joey Muller, an expert in online direct marketing at Sum Digital, says “Don’t only ‘prospect’ for customers; with the right platform you can re-engage users who have already shown an interest in your products or services. Use remarketing techniques to close more customers.”
5. Find a strategic position in the industry.
   The CEO of BenefitGuard, Matt Bradley, is an advocate of this principle: “When we examined the competitive landscape, we found several large areas of opportunity. We then designed our services in such a way to solve the problems that we saw in the industry. Then we started to broadcast our message in ways that the rest of the industry had not yet considered.” Financial institutions, both great and small, use a host of tracking sites to follow their rivals. Can you afford to do anything less?

*This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Steve Olenski was named one of the Top 100 Influencers In Social Media (#41) by Social Technology Review and a Top 50 Social Media Blogger by Kred. Steve is a senior creative content strategist at Responsys, a leading marketing cloud software and services company. He is a also a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing and co-author of the book “StumbleUpon For Dummies.” He can be reached via LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter @steveolenski or at the nearest coffee shop.