In the financial services industry, digital marketing campaigns are created by marketers to attract digital consumers and increase website engagement and online conversions. This has been the case ever since the advent of the recent digital revolution. As consumers moved towards the digital medium, service providers too followed suit to woo them digitally with their offerings.
However, unlike offline marketing, digital marketing is tricky. A recent Microsoft research places the average human attention span at a shocking 8 secs. Therefore, to cater to a digital audience with such a low attention span requires a lot of skill.
Let’s look at some of the reasons why financial marketers fail when it comes to digital marketing:
1. Not tracking user behavior
Digital marketing campaigns that have zero elements of customization are bound to fail. The days of generic messages are long gone. Marketing to users with a basic message about a product or service is never going to work today. There was a time when it worked earlier, during the initial days of the digital revolution. But not anymore.
The current digital consumer wants personalization that is unique and catered to only him/her. To address this need, financial marketers need to thoroughly understand their customers. This is done by tracking their digital behavior such as their website activity, buying behavior, click propensity, etc. Once they understand what the consumer is looking for, they can tailor their digital marketing campaigns accordingly. So tracking user behavior is a must for making the campaigns successful.
2. Wrong channel targeting
Financial marketers make one common mistake after they have painstakingly designed a marketing campaign. They schedule the campaign to be delivered to every digital channel. This is a highly wrong approach. Yes, targeting users on multiple channels is good. But they need to be targeted on those channels that they like. User channel preferences are very important if marketers want their campaigns to be viewed and interacted upon by a consumer.
Therefore, it’s critical to find out the preferred digital channels and target users with personalized messages only on these channels.
3. Bad timing
When it comes to digital marketing campaigns, timing is important. Financial marketers would have created the right personalized campaigns but if they do not know when to connect with the customer, all their efforts would be in vain. Just as explained in the first point above, by tracking user behavior, financial marketers can deduce when a particular user would be available online.
This would be the time when the user interacts with your website or responds to an email, etc. Delivering a digital campaign at this precise time would yield better results than when the user is offline.
4. Failure to optimize marketing budgets
Every financial marketer has a certain marketing budget that he/she would need to stick to. Going beyond an allotted budget is not good and under-utilizing it is also not appreciated. By orchestrating campaigns on multiple channels especially paid ones, marketers tend to use up all their money. This would result in them overshooting their spend. At the same time, if they have a lot of money left to spend, it’s still not appreciated as the return on investment wouldn’t be quite less.
Financial marketers should correctly optimize their spend so that they can generate maximum ROI from it.
AI-powered Customer Data Platform (CDP) – The Ideal Digital Solution
There are many digital solutions in the market that can help financial marketers solve the above-mentioned issues. But the problem is that they don’t solve all the problems as a whole. They might be good enough to solve more than 2 issues but not all of them. Hence, an all-in-one digital solution is needed that can help marketers in deriving maximum revenue out of their digital spends.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can assist in efficiently managing customer data and create a unified customer view of every user. This helps financial marketers in extracting every important detail about the customer. Using these insights, marketers can craft personalized user journeys for all customers on an individual basis. Using AI with a CDP will immensely help in delivering personalization at scale. AI algorithms have the capability to target millions of users with unique personalized messages.
Conclusion
Financial marketers need to open their eyes and avoid getting caught in the factors mentioned in this article. If they do get caught, they need to use the right digital tool to get out of such a situation. An AI-CDP combination is the perfect solution that financial marketers can leverage to devise the right digital campaign that can strike a chord with customers and help increase digital conversions.
Implement an AI-powered CDP and create winning digital marketing campaigns that help your company flourish in the financial services industry.
By Bijoy K.B | Senior Associate Marketing at Lemnisk
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