The Impact of Marketing Automation for Financial Services
Keeping up with all of the technological advances in marketing can feel overwhelming. You find yourself wondering if you really need to use the latest tech in order to get ahead or stay relevant. In this case, marketing automation is one area you actually do want to stay up to date on.
In this guide you’ll learn about digital marketing automation for financial services including the topics:
- What Is Marketing Automation?
- Impact on the Finance Sector
- Benefits for Financial Brands
- Use Cases for Financial Brands
What Is Marketing Automation in Financial Services?
Marketing automation is a form of technology that allows digital marketers to automate marketing tasks, processes and campaigns that would otherwise need to be performed manually across multiple channels such as email, social media, and your website. This enables financial services to focus on improving customer and prospect experiences, loyalty, and trust.
Simply, marketing automation allows you to track your customer or prospect user journey via a single platform.
The Impact of Marketing Automation on the Finance Sector
Marketing automation has already had a monumental impact on the financial sector. It has been incorporated into areas such as SMS messaging, email marketing, social media, landing pages, etc.
Going from awareness to conversion in financial services marketing requires multiple touchpoints and usually a longer lead time than other industries. Currently, 76% of companies use marketing automation. These tools are used to help businesses reach different goals, including optimizing overall strategy, improving data quality, identifying ideal customers, optimizing campaigns, and improving personalization.
Because of the benefits associated with marketing automation, it is expected that many companies will incorporate it into their digital strategy next year and will allot more of their budgets for such tools. Financial services that do so will be able to scale campaigns, which in turn, will produce more leads and sales.
It has also been reported that other reasons for implementing marketing automation include minimizing manual tasks (30%), optimizing workflows (25%), integrating/centralizing data (21%), improving marketing attribution (17%), and improving multi-channel touch (10%).
Marketing Automation Benefits for Financial Brands
Now comes the infamous question, “…but what can it do for MY business?” As previously mentioned, there are numerous benefits that result from marketing automation for financial brands. While there are many, we will focus on some of the more prominent benefits – ROI impact, efficiency, personalization, and scalability. Each of these plays an important role in growing your business.
ROI Impact
Every business out there is looking for what is going to get them the best return on investment, or ROI. With so many types of marketing promising to be the “best”, it’s sometimes hard to trust that the strategy you choose is going to pay out. According to Nucleus Research, marketing automation pays out $5.44 for every dollar and most companies recover from their initial investment of software within the first six months.
Efficiency
There’s a lot of small-detail, behind-the-scenes work that comes with marketing. Many of these details are things that need to be repeated over and over. Marketing automation allows for the repetitive steps to be completed quickly and accurately. This will free up employees to focus on the work that matters most, such as creating content that builds loyalty and trust, retains customers, and keeps your brand relevant.
The financial industry is also highly regulated so consistency and compliance are a must. Marketing automation reduces the risk of errors and also inherently applies a standardized approach to campaigns.
Using automation to minimize administrative tasks, like automating emails and social media posts and collecting and analyzing data, allows employees to be more efficient and, ultimately, enjoy their job more. An added bonus could be labor costs may also go down, since smaller teams can accomplish more with marketing automation.
Personalization
Building and maintaining a strong relationship with customers and potential customers is paramount for financial services. This cannot be emphasized enough.
Marketing automation allows your service to use personalizations to further that goal. Customers will receive relevant, personalized offers and content based on information that is gathered through each engagement and interaction. Customers can be segmented by different characteristics and behaviors in order to make sure they never get irrelevant content.
Account-based marketing is a popular tactic that can be built and executed via marketing automation.
Scalability
As your business grows, so does your marketing program. Marketing automation naturally scales with your marketing program, without requiring any additional work from you. The same processes that worked for a few hundred customers maybe continue to work for a few thousand. A clear view of the strategies and processes that work will enable you to zero in on anything that might need adjusting.
Marketing Automation Use Cases for Financial Brands
The applications of marketing automation for a marketer are almost limitless and, thus, a beautiful breath of fresh air. Looking at different ways that automation can be incorporated into a marketing strategy provides a view that engages all aspects of marketing, from social media to email to advertising, to analytics. Each channel of automation offers multiple benefits that will provide ease to your marketing team.
Here at Vested, we’ve used marketing automation tactics for clients like Grayscale, CFA, and HSBC.
Social Media Automation
When it comes to social media, engaging and connecting with your customers is essential. This, however, requires a massive amount of time and effort, which could be devoted to creating content that resonates with your customers instead.
Social media marketing can take on all of the administrative aspects of management, such as scheduling and publishing content across various channels, automating responses, and analyzing data to track how effective your campaigns are.
Social media automation can also assist with the “social” aspect of engaging with customers and potential customers through social listening tools. Tracking mentions, feedback, and conversations about your brand allows you to respond quickly to your customers.
Benefits of social media automation for financial services:
- Plan a content calendar with weeks to months worth of posts ahead of time
- Saves time by scheduling and publishing posts across various channels in advance
- Use analytics to plan future posts and campaigns based on effectiveness
Digital Advertising Automation
Similar to social media automation, digital advertising automation can streamline processes by taking over admin tasks such as ad placement, scheduling, and tracking. It also helps with retargeting customers as it automatically adjusts its strategy in response to customer behavior. Since consistency and reliability are pretty much required expectations of financial industries, having consistent ads and messaging across all channels is extremely important. Being able to replicate copy and messaging in different channels builds a trustworthy image.
Benefits of digital ad automation for financial services:
- Saves time analyzing data and guides future campaigns
- Self adjusts strategy to target and retarget customers based on analytics
- Builds trust and loyalty to the brand with consistent messaging across channels
Email Marketing Automation
A common misconception is that email automation is just sending automated email responses. While automatic email sequences based on customer behavior are important for nurturing leads and engaging current customers, that is not all that can be done with email marketing automation. Automated emails can be segmented and personalized. This is another way to build loyalty and trust with customers.
Maintaining your email list is also important and email automation can automatically add new subscribers and remove inactive members. This keeps your list up to date and your engagement rate high. Automated emails can also save time since they are scheduled responses.
Benefits of email marketing automation for financial services:
- Nurtures and engages your current customers and new leads
- Builds loyalty and trust in the brand with personalization
- Save time by automatically maintaining your email list
Analytics Automation
Any successful business knows the importance of data. Analyzing that data is even more important, but it can take a lot of time and effort to do this manually. Analytics automation does this automatically for you across all channels. This information is essential in planning and adjusting your marketing strategy.
Customizable reports help determine which campaigns or strategies are successful. This makes it possible to implement future marketing strategies that have the ability to be just as successful. Platforms like Google Analytics (GA4) have advanced in the last few years to allow you to build custom dashboards seamlessly.
Real-time tracking of performance metrics such as engagement levels, open rates, and conversion rates provides immediate feedback. This allows your team to quickly track trends and adjust as necessary to foster success.
Benefits of analytics automation for financial services:
- Save massive amounts of time analyzing data collected across all channels
- Get a clear picture of what marketing strategies are working with customizable reports
- Real-time tracking of performance metrics allows for quick adjustments
Marketing Automation and You
At this point, it should be pretty clear that marketing automation is something that you should incorporate into your marketing strategy if you have not already. The impact and benefits that can be gained span across many different channels and ultimately make everyone’s job easier and more enjoyable.
If you’re ready to look into how your business can benefit from digital marketing, Vested is ready to get you set up for success. Reach out today to get started.
