It All Adds Up: 5 Tips for Financial Marketing

It All Adds Up: 5 Tips for Financial Marketing

Discover how to stand out in a crowded industry.

For any business, getting noticed can be challenging,  For banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, and financial planners creating awareness is critical. After all, financial services companies don’t offer ordinary services. In fact, many consumers consider financial services on par with emergency services—important, urgent, and vital.

So how do you, as a financial services provider, stand out from the competition in the critical moments in which your services are most needed? It’s not a quick fix, but if you follow these five tips, we can help you streamline your financial marketing and guide prospects to your solutions when they’re ready to act.

Create Awareness with Repeated Messages

Consumers need to be aware of financial services businesses well before they’re ready to buy:

  • Consumers equate name awareness with trust and stability— key attributes for financial services. By repeating your message over and over, you’ll create the kind of exposure that allows your business to come to consumers’ minds when it matters most.
  • While there’s no magic formula for creating awareness, it’s good to know that many marketers believe consumers must see a message a minimumof three times before it begins to sink in.
  • Leading financial marketers are exposing consumers to their message hundreds of times before the consumer is ready to make a decision. The more often a consumer sees your message, the more likely you are to build top-of-mind awareness.

Build Trust by Surrounding Your Ad with Credible Media

What you say is important, but where you say it is equally important:

  • Have you ever found a stranger’s business card on your windshield? How did that make you feel about the business? It might be an effective strategy to get people to try a new burger joint, but it doesn’t convey trustworthiness.
  • While it’s easy to see that print has more credibility than windshield flyers, it takes a little more time to figure out if your message is surrounded by compatible messages.
  • If you’re a conservative financial institution, you probably won’t want to be surrounded by ads for local nightclubs. However, if you’re a financial planner that focuses on helping the arts community, you might want to consider running ads in the newspaper’s cultural section or entertainment magazine.

Make Contact Simple with a Clear Call-to-Action

Once consumers start noticing your advertising and see that you’re advertising in the kind of media that they like and trust, they may want to contact you to learn more:

  • It’s important to remove any roadblocks in the communication path.
  • What phone number are you including in your advertising? Once readers call the number listed, will they get a real person, or will they be sent to an automated phone system? Did you list a website in your ad? Are you directing prospects to a website that isn’t mobile-friendly?
  • All it takes is a single barrier or frustration to lose a potential customer, so it makes sense to spend time reviewing what kind of call-to-action you want to include in your ads. Make sure you run through the call-to-action yourself so that you can see or hear what the customer is experiencing. This will help you identify potential road blocks beforethey happen to your prospects.

Resist Changes and Stay Consistent

Whether you are a chef creating nightly masterpieces or an athlete training for the big race, consistency is key. The same concept applies to your marketing. Maintaining your core message and values conveys stability and trustworthiness, traits that consumers look for in their financial service provider:

  • Is your brand consistently and accurately reflected through the proper colors, logo, and tone of the content? Keep track of how you’re using your logo, and make sure you use it in exactly the same way every time.
  • While marketers tend to get bored seeing the same messages and logos over and over, customers see these messages only a few times. Consistency isn’t boring to customers, it’s a recognition tool and helps consumers remember and internalize your brand benefits.

Have a Plan and Stick with it

It’s important to stick with a media plan, even if you’re not seeing immediate results. Financial marketing is rarely a sprint. By building awareness in credible formats, staying consistent with your message and adhering to your brand standards, you’re building a solid reputation.  Don’t be tempted to change ads, media, and messages when your internal marketing team gets bored. Remember that your company’s goal is to communicate stability and trust to consumers. Stay the course and you’ll build the kind of brand equity that competitors will envy.

Want to learn more tips for financial marketing? Ready to set up a free consultation? Contact us here and we’ll start talking about ways to build your financial services business today.

LNP Media Group is committed to delivering exceptional experiences to our audiences, our customers, our vendors and our employees throughout Lancaster County and Central Pennsylvania. We provide value to our marketing and advertising partners by building effective and innovative solutions and by delivering exemplary customer experiences.