Financial Brand Marketing Conference and Marketing for Banks

The Financial Brand Forum Arrives in Las Vegas

This morning I am heading to Las Vegas to attend The Financial Brand marketing conference.  The forum brings in great speakers in a great venue, The Cosmopolitan, and provides marketers in the banking and financial sectors with information they can use right away.

As a marketer myself, I actually enjoy the lineup for this show more than I do several of the shows in my own search marketing discipline.  The setup is modern.  The topics are relevant and useful.  Starbucks coffee is free (a nice plus).  The speakers are professional writers, speakers, and presenters.  It sets up to be a great show.

With all this said, I want to give you my opinion on marketing in this sector.  We at Go Local Interactive service several clients in the banking vertical.  That provides a unique window into the world of bank marketing that I will share with you.

The Lay of the Land with Respect to Marketing in the Financial Sector

You banks have some work to do.  I will leave the specific challenges for the section below, but suffice it to say, you have your challenges.  There is so much money in the financial world, but it’s not being put to work well for marketing.  What we tend to see is that bank and financial marketing lag quite a bit behind their peers in other industries.  For example, there are self-storage companies with marketing programs that sparkle and shine.  They invest quite a bit more in online marketing and they harvest quite a bit more fruit as a result.

Financial Brand Marketing Has its Challenges… and Its Strengths

So what exactly holds back the bank and financial industry from a marketing perspective?  Great question (I would think that since I wrote it).  Let’s knock out a list of a few hurdles for you financial marketers out there.

Financial Marketing Hurdles (In no particular order)

• Red tape
• Lack of budget
• Split budgets
• Too many decisions makers means…
  • No decisions are made
  • Decisions are made at each branch or bank location
• A penchant toward the old
• Analysis paralysis
• Intense security protocols
• Inability to move quickly

Now the Positive

My mom is the queen of the good, bad, good sandwich.  Have you ever eat one of those?  Well, now you have.  We started off being nice, then went into the “opportunities for improvement”, and now we will end with something that will leave you smiling as you make your way through the rest of this post.

Financial Marketing Strengths

• You have cash!
• There are a lot of good opinions.
• You have smart people.
• Already a penchant for numbers and results.
• You have access to great technology.
• The peer group is really strong in the financial marketing industry.
• As mentioned in the opening, the financial marketing conferences are great and offer a great source for learning.

Go Local with Your Approach

So here we go with a bit of a commercial for my marketing agency, Go Local Interactive.  Our whole approach for the banking and financial space when it comes to marketing, is to focus on the locations themselves and win each of the local battles.  It makes for a ton of work, but it pays off in the end.  These are the questions we need to answer.

Questions for Location-Based Marketing

1. Where, exactly, are we located? We need to know right down to the address.
2. What keywords do people really use to search for my product and service in each specific area? Find out. Don’t guess.  Your words are not always the words of the prospects.  As a matter of fact, there is typically a sizable disconnect.
3. What items affect the search and serviceability of my exact location? These obstacles are real.
   1. Highways
   2. Off-Ramps
   3. Rivers
   4. Medians
4. What devices are used to find the product and service I provide at this location? What is the mix of desktop to mobile to tablet?

Start with the Easy Stuff

As with any project, the location-based marketing approach for banks and financial service providers will take some serious effort.  The scale of the effort increases dramatically as the number of locations go up. So what do we do?  You eat an elephant one bite at a time.  Start with the easy stuff that provides the most benefit the quickest.

Easy Marketing Tasks for Location-Based Marketing

1. Submit your location data to Google My Business.
2. If your locations are already in Google My Business, then make sure you claim them and verify ownership of those listings.  The claiming and verification process is handled through the dashboard in Google My Business.  A phone call will be made to the phone number submitted, or a post card will be sent to the address submitted.  You will be given a verification code that will be entered into the dashboard for verification.  Make sure you do this.
3. Use bulk verification for location information that cannot handle phone calls or post cards.  The banking industry is full of these hurdles.  They are called ATMs.  Dealing with standalone ATMs can be tricky.  Utilize a bulk verification approach for those listings.
4. Do the same thing for Apple.  Many many people forget Apple when they handle local listings.  The problem is that Apple accounts for about 50% of the mobile devices in the world with their iPhones.
5. Submit your location data to the data aggregation companies.  These are Infogroup, Neustar, and Acxiom.  It is inexpensive and should be done.  I can explain why later, but you can believe me that it’s important.

Build Up Momentum

1. Enhance your local listings on sites like Google My Business, Apple, and Yelp.  Add pictures, hours of operation, categories, good keyword rich descriptions, products and services offered at the location, and anything else that will improve the user experience.
2. Make sure your website is fast.
3. Make sure your website loads well on a mobile device.
4. SEO your website.  You will be glad you did.  And by the way, don’t go cheap here.  This is one of the absolute best long-term investments you can make in online marketing.  Don’t leave SEO up to a web development company, a plug-in, or an off-the-shelf approach.  The real solution is to utilize an agency or a group of professionals who do this for a living.  We borrow money from banks because they have the experience in lending and the money to lend.  The same approach and logic should be used for investing in SEO.

It’s Time to Get Cute

We all want to be cute don’t we? OK, maybe that’s an overgeneralization, but it seems right, so let’s go with it.  At this point, you have the basics covered, you have done some work on the more difficult tasks, and now you are ready to see how fast you can make this baby run (the literal picture of that seems hilarious).  So how do we make the baby run?

Polishing Your Financial Brand Marketing (Get Help as Needed)

1. Optimize your code.  Look at the HTML, Java, CSS, php, or whatever you are using to present your website. Is your code as fast and efficient as possible.
2. Tune your website on your server.  As a matter of fact, tune your server.
3. Start buying traffic.  Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other sites allow you to buy traffic. It’s time to send the people to your website.  Open the floodgates and let them in.
4. Take a look at retargeting.
5. Utilize geo-fencing to strategically buy media.  You have locations, encircle those locations with media spend.
6. Take a look at YouTube.  Google swears that the inventory is high, the cost is low, and the effectiveness is where you will want it to be. We have found it all to be true.  It’s time to move your television advertising to the place where people spend most of their time watching videos.  That place is YouTube.

Finish Where We Started

Let’s wrap-up this financial brand marketing post by circling back to The Financial Brand Forum that started it all in the first place. First, I noted that I think the conference is fantastic and I can’t wait to attend. I’m literally writing this in air on a Southwest flight that has gone very smoothly (I probably shouldn’t write that. Don’t want to jinx us.).  I will share as much as I can from the conference when I get there.

Second, financial marketing has its challenges.  Like any business sector, the financial and banking industries have their similarities and their general characteristics.  Taking a positive stance on life, let’s look at these challenges as areas of opportunity.  We have an identifiable problem, so now we can start working on the solutions.

Last, there are some easy things that can be done to provide a minimum effective dose when it comes to financial brand marketing.  They are quick hitters and offer substantial value in this particular industry due to the prevalence of business locations.  Once we crawl, there is a clear path defined for the eventual walking and running phases.  It’s just a matter of putting in the work to get there.

Now bring on Las Vegas!