How to create effective marketing for financial products

Today, the playing field for marketing financial products is more crowded—and competitive—than ever before. From student loans, credit cards, alternative credit, to mortgages, vehicle loans and checking accounts, financial institutions have no shortage of types of financial products to offer. But there is also enormous competition between financial institutions.

Winning the competition for customers hinges on a combination of real-time speed to market and laser-like precision. You have to find the right customers for your products and reach them before anyone else can. How can banks, credit unions and other financial institutions create effective product market strategies that will not only attract new customers, but retain and cross-sell existing customers as well? How can they create true and lasting brand awareness that builds trust with potential buyers?

While there are many proven ways to respond to these challenges, they all start with high quality, multi-sourced data. More often than not, that means supplementing internal data with aggregated information from a third-party provider.

The best way to market financial products: Add third-party data

Data is how marketing magic is made, and when it comes to how to market financial products, what you don’t know can hurt you—in the form of missed opportunities. While financial institutions have internal data on their own customers, such as demographic and transactional information, this pared-down data is limited in scope and lacking a level of detail needed to differentiate one marketing program from the rest. But these same financial institutions can partner with third-party data marketing specialists to enhance the basic customer information with a treasure trove of consumer and business data to take simple marketing into the realm of data-based targeting. Supplementing their internal data with aggregated information from multiple sources can help them gain a competitive edge to grow market share.

As an example, a customer has a checking account and a certificate of deposit (CD) with a financial institution. Using only internal data, a financial institution would learn only the basics about this customer. However, a third-party marketing data provider can determine how much money this customer has in liquid investments, their net income, any recent or upcoming life events and more. With this cache of data available, the financial institution can then logically recommend the next best product this customer might be interested in—from a home equity loan to a money market savings account and beyond.

5 data-driven ideas for how to market financial products 

Here are five ways to use data to gain a better understanding of your audience and their needs, and apply that knowledge to how you market financial products.

1. Combine demand generation and brand awareness

Demand generation campaigns are essential for financial institutions to build reliable brand awareness and interest, and to locate quality consumer and business leads. When working to generate demand, a financial institution must focus on using every opportunity in the customer journey to connect with customers and build awareness of, and interest in, its financial products and services.

When marketing financial products (as with all marketing), timing is key. At a minimum, institutions should be doing quarterly demand generation campaigns, but a more aggressive monthly campaign schedule may attract more interest. A person can say no five times, but the sixth time a financial institution reaches out may be the magic number.

This is why it's so important that demand generation and trigger-based marketing are done in tandem. By pairing demand generation with trigger marketing, marketers are building brand awareness for ideal new targets while also taking advantage of the consumers already in the market. (More on trigger marketing next.)

2. Watch for intent-based signals and life events

Let consumer behavior be your guide. Trigger marketing is one of the best ways to market financial products, and it operates on a simple premise: Life events often necessitate people make certain large financial decisions. Purchasing a home, having a child, getting married, selling a home – all these milestones come with the added complexity of financial changes. Utilizing event-based triggers, ideally on a weekly basis, is the key to understanding where people are at in their financial life journey and creating timely, relevant messages to connect with them at just the right moment.

Signal-based marketing should also include prescreening within these customer subsets to identify “hand raisers” on the verge of converting a financial product. A hand raiser’s likeliness to close on a financial product is higher than their peers because they aren’t just likely to need a certain financial product—they have actively signaled serious intent to purchase that specific product in the near future. So to seriously compete for their business, time is of the essence.

Once a customer is at this stage in their search, there is typically an immediate need, and they will complete their transaction quickly. For best results, you (or your marketing data provider) should monitor prescreen activity from multiple credit bureaus at least once per day, because if you spend precious marketing dollars delivering a message that reaches them too late, it might as well not reach them at all (but that budget is gone regardless). 

3. Defend your customer base by cross-selling financial services products

Demand generation isn’t just for bank customer acquisition—financial institutions need to continually reach out to their own customers to nurture relationships and cross-sell financial services and products. Identifying consumers and businesses who are strong candidates for additional products is important not only for increasing the value of your current customer portfolio; it’s also a defense tactic. Even if your bank isn’t talking regularly to your customers, it’s guaranteed another organization is.

Use internal and external data to stay on top of your customers’ needs and offer solutions to their challenges. Strong, active customer relationships are less susceptible to being acquired away by competing FIs, and cross-sell messages are more likely to drive conversion when they’re built on personalized recommendations.  

4. Drill down on customer-level data 

No two consumers are alike. And generally, no financial institution has an unlimited budget for marketing financial products. Therefore, using data to analyze different consumers can help marketers put their budget smartly toward consumers more likely to be eligible for and interested in their products and services.

Financial institutions doing demand generation and trigger-based marketing already have a great foundation to amp up product marketing to current customers and draw in new customers. When it comes to higher-level tactics that drive incremental growth at scale, it’s all about assessing intention, risk and retention. The best way to determine those levels for each current and potential customer is by relying on broad and deep data.

To start determining the marketing opportunity, begin by analyzing each current and potential customer by getting answers to a series of questions:

• Are they more likely to convert than other customers?
• Are they eligible for the product in question?
• Do they have enough funds?
• How likely would they be to remain a customer if they experience a major life event?

Finding these customers requires deep data assets that can help you identify opportunities first and quickly get to market before your competition. And many times, these assets are offered through a digital marketing partner.

For example, Deluxe’s data-driven marketing experts can discover approximately how much wealth a consumer has as a means to understand a given opportunity. Our data analysis could uncover that Customer A has $150,000 in liquid deposits, but only $30,000 of that is held by our client. That’s a huge amount of money going to a competitor. In-depth data can help our clients uncover such opportunities, put in place product market strategies to reach out to those customers, and ultimately lead to Customer A moving more money to our client’s financial institution.  

5. Identify financial product marketing gaps with in-depth analytics

Marketing programs based on data science result in greater conversions to new products or brands, according to Analytics magazine. In marketing, there’s a well-known theory called the “80/20 rule”: 20 percent of customers lead to 80 percent of revenue. This is particularly true for financial institutions where high-value customers make up the bulk of their business. By using targeted marketing, financial institutions can attempt to turn that rule on its head by breathing life into underperforming segments of their business.

With in-depth analytics and data marketing, financial institutions can look deeply across the entire marketplace. Data allows organizations to visualize the competitive and complementary services landscape around branches, find opportunity in the branches that are underperforming and much more. A small dent in the 80/20 rule can bring a wealth of revenue to a business.