Written by: Tom Murray | Managing Director, Agency
Financial Services firms are the third highest spending category for digital ads according to eMarketer. This accounts for 12% of ALL marketing spend in the entire industry, only beat by Automotive and Retail. There are billions of dollars getting spent trying to generate leads, sell insurance packages, promoting advice and tips for stocks and investing, credit card offers and hundreds more.
With this much spend, financial service marketers need to ensure they are spending their money wisely and efficiently. It is a misnomer that these types of companies can just keep spending or “print money” and not worry about efficiency, but financial service firms are looking to profit just like any other industry, which means using effective marketing tactics.
Here are three things that all financial service marketers should keep in mind when trying to acquire new customers or achieve their main KPI goals.
Tip #1: You have to spend money to make money (eventually).
Often times, financial service ads are not for one-time products, but instead are looking for more long-term deals. They hope to sell you a credit card for years, or annual insurance that you re-up each year. This means that measurement should not be looked at as a straight CPA but instead on a longer-term look such as lifetime value. Financial firms have some of the richest datasets there are, which means heavy analysis should be done in order to understand the value of the new customers that they drive. Without an understanding on your LTV, it will be difficult to acquire new customers at scale and efficiently.
Tip #2: Remember who your target is.
While everyone rushes to try to capture millennials for their marketing, let’s not forget about the crowd with the most money and buying power, which is the 50+ crowd. This is not to say you shouldn’t market to under 50 year olds, but that requires an entirely different campaign, creative, and landing page experience than what an older person requires. Ensure that your ads are tailored to this audience, and that the landing page experience matches what resonates well with older users. In addition, make sure that the page is easy to navigate for an older user, as well as giving them the option to call someone directly to complete the deal, as they often times do not want to complete that online either due to the complexities of the web, or not wanting to put their information onto a website.
Tip #3: Leverage as many digital channels as possible.
At Jump, we run ads for many financial services clients, and we find that the clients that run ads on more channels tend to be more successful. While other verticals can potentially get away with just leveraging the Facebook and Google properties, the financial space has many more options that are available and perform incredibly well. Platforms such as Gemini, Taboola and Outbrain are all great Native channels that should be turned on (as long as you have proper landing pages that make sense for those platforms). The more you can own the consumer journey across the suite of sites that people visit on a daily basis, the higher likelihood for success you will have in driving conversions!
