Inbound Marketing Strategies For Financial Services

The Inbound marketing methodology supplies financial institutions with tactics that will bring in long-lasting customers and clients without the heavy costs and uncertainty associated with outbound marketing. This magnified and refined strategy will ensure that firms market to the right audience at the right time, nurturing prospects into service qualified leads. In this article, we break down the processes taken to do just that. 

Covered in this article

What Is Inbound Marketing For Financial Services?
An Inbound Marketing Strategy For Financial Services
Email Marketing For Financial Services
CRM For Financial Services
Mobile Marketing & Chatbots ForFinancial Services

What Is Inbound Marketing For Financial Services?

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that attracts audiences to your brand, products, and services.

It takes advantage of the huge number of customers who spend their time online and it helps to solve questions in their customer journey while guiding them towards a purchase.

Because inbound is a strategy meant to create personalised experiences rather than mass outreach, it requires time and dedication from marketing teams, while outbound marketing tends to be a one-size-fits-all solution. Inbound works particularly well in today’s world, where customers want to do their own research before purchasing a product and don’t want to engage with invasive messaging or mass marketing.

It helps them feel in control of their purchase journey by giving them the right information they need at the right time when they are looking for it.

An Inbound Marketing Strategy For Financial Services

Thanks to the growth of the internet, more and more disruptive financial services are being created designed to wrestle control from traditional banking institutions and make managing money easier than ever before. Called the financial technology (fintech) sector, services including PayPal, Google Wallet and Apple Pay are changing the way people shop for goods both off- and online.

Inbound marketing helps financial institutions and consultants to better learn about and properly segment their audience. Demographics are constantly shifting and it's never been more important to research your market and reach out directly to the people you feel you can benefit most with your services.

Creating personas built on personal and professional levels is a key part of inbound financial services marketing, and social platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn can go a long way to helping you create an accurate representation of the leads you wish to attract. Once created, introducing some biddable media through search and social channels also allows businesses to reach out to investors and decision-makers in a highly-targeted way almost immediately.

Email Marketing For Financial Services

To keep up with the competition, financial services providers and banks are upgrading their communication and email game to remain relevant regardless of the fast-paced transformation. You’ve probably seen how other industries are doing so well with email marketing. And you’re wondering, “Can email marketing for financial companies be that successful too?”

Well, the answer is a resounding yes... and your competitors are already doing it. Email marketing for financial services is the process of setting up email strategies and delivering highly targeted and personalised emails to your existing clients to upsell designated, tailored packages or to attract and engage with marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Some email marketing for financial services strategies:

• Automating your sales cycle,
• Onboard new customers,
• Educate users,
• And convert MQLs to SQLs (sales qualified leads).

Most people read email on their phones or tablets. While this doesn’t account for everyone the vast majority at least check email on their phone. You have to optimise email for mobile but you should also tie in different aspects of marketing. This means linking in social media and mobile marketing to create more engagement and interest. We will touch more on this under the Mobile Marketing & Chatbots section of this article. 

CRM For Financial Services

For financial services with large sales pipelines and busy sales floors, partnering with an inbound marketing agency - such as Velocity Media, a Hubspot Gold Partner- able to provide marketing automation through market-leading software will also enhance and refine your sales systems, allowing your sales team to convert easier, higher-quality leads and nurture ones that are still yet to decide whether to use your services or not.

HubSpot offers a Partner Tier program to its top-performing Agency Partners. To be a part of this program, an agency must bring in the most clients using the inbound message. These Agency Partners also use the highest standards to deliver inbound marketing services to their clients. Agency Partners can qualify in a variety of tiers, including the first-level tier of Silver, Gold, Platinum and Diamond (the highest tier). These Agency Partners have met HubSpot’s metric standards based on actual inbound marketing success, managed and acquired monthly recurring revenue (MRR), retention and software engagement.

Inbound financial services marketing offers an enormous array of benefits for financial brands looking for better quality, more consistent leads and is yet to embrace the potential afforded by the digital landscape. Being a human presence during tough financial times, making audiences aware of your investments and services, competing against fintech upstarts and reducing costs-per-lead are just some of the amazing rewards inbound can provide.

Mobile Marketing & Chatbots For Financial Services

For financial institutions, how well they engage customers and deliver a great customer experience can differentiate them from their competitors. In 2020, COVID-19 forced customer engagement online, and according to Frank Rohde, President and CEO at Nomis Solutions, “post-COVID, the majority of customers will continue to engage digitally with financial institutions.”

This gives financial services the perfect opportunity to include mobile marketing in their repertoire of tools. In this section, we will cover this form of communication in both the traditional, ever-popular SMS format as well as WhatsApp and web-based chatbots. 

Mobile Marketing

Mobile already plays a big part in how customers engage with their banks and other financial service providers. Customers and clients frequently receive SMSes for incidents such as fraud alerts, identity authentication codes and payment reminders. And while those types of interactions are important in the mobile finance customer and client experience, more institutions are turning to mobile for marketing as well.

Mobile marketing can do wonders for driving brand value and demand for your products or services by leveraging mobile devices to connect with more consumers in real-time at any point in the customer lifecycle. Mobile is also growing steadily. 

Mobile marketing may include:

• promotions sent through SMS text messaging,
• MMS multimedia messaging,
• through mobile websites, or by using a mobile device to scan QR codes.

Chatbots

More than just a marketing tool, chatbots can alleviate the pressure experienced by customer service by taking care of FAQs and so on. It can be used as a mode to market new and existing products and to assist customers and clients with accounts, billing and service changes.  A prime example of this is the capabilities built into WhatsApp chatbot services, read our WhatsApp for Insurance article here.