I ask you, as somebody with a vested interest in financial marketing, to read this article with an open mind. We will start with these introspective statements to help you position which category you are in.
- You’ve heard of the term ‘360-degree marketing’ but deep down you feel that it’s just an unachievable objective like ‘thought leadership’ and ‘page 1 of google’. You might also think that branding is only for giant brands like McDonalds and Coca Cola.
- You are already equipping your financial marketing team with the tools to execute a holistic marketing strategy. You understand how to create a lasting digital footprint for your brand but your team is feeling overwhelmed and your ROI is negligible.
- You try to stretch your budget on quick wins and spend countless hours staring at data, wondering why your investment isn’t translating into money in the bank.
If you truthfully cannot identify with any part of any of the above statements, then congratulations, your marketing efforts are 100% perfect. Or, perhaps you fall into more than one of the above categories. My goal – by the time you reach the end of this article – is for you to have an action plan, or at least some ideas on how to optimise your marketing approach.
It serves well at this point to note unabashedly that financial brands must embrace a 360-marketing approach to be competitive.
My personal approach to making 360 financial marketing work for our clients is this:
Combine your uniquely useful and sharable content with impactful branded visuals in any place that your clients and potential clients are, using right-messaging, right-time placements.
Here is a broad-strokes checklist for you: (Extra points if you tick off at least 6 of the below)
PPC / search engine marketing
Retargeting
Display campaigns
Content marketing & advertorials on relevant websites
Offline events
Segmented email automation
Community management
On page and off page SEO
Webinars and virtual events
Fast user experience from first click to first trade (for instance)
Paid and organic social efforts
Strategic partnerships
That’s a lot of work. I am known for often discussing how there isn’t a financial marketing team in the world that can do all this without extra hands on deck. Experienced agencies like financialmarkets.media have been doing this for years. They can be the extra pair of eyes on your digital footprint. The extra voice to affirm your positive messaging online. The extra brain to produce seo-optimised content, and a strong negotiating partner for reduced rates on lead acquisition or traditional media.
Or, on the content side, perhaps you choose to use AI to help you?
As my good friend chat GPT says:
A 360-degree marketing approach refers to a comprehensive and integrated strategy that ensures a brand’s presence and messaging are consistent across all relevant channels and touchpoints. The focus is on meeting the audience wherever they are and guiding them through a consistent and personalized customer journey.
I’m sure you didn’t even read the above italicised content. So, why did I use chat GPT in my example? Clearly not to show off my ability to copy and paste. Clearly not to win your respect. I wish to demonstrate how AI can be used to support your messaging but should not be used to write your message that should be tailored in your voice for your specific client at the specific point in their journey.
What does 360 financial marketing look like for you? Not one size fits all. Use the marketing principle of 7 to decide how and where you should be incorporating appropriate marketing platforms into your strategy. Don’t overdo it. Don’t do work for the sake of work and don’t flood or fatigue your database. Or ask your marketing agency to help you strategise, to save on wasted work down the line.
Why should you hire a financial marketing agency? Here is a broad-strokes checklist of what you don’t want as a result of your marketing strategy:
Repeated data fields in forms and on landing pages
Spam / notifications that the user didn’t ask for
Fatigue of your brand through repetition
Content for the sake of content. Not sharable or relevant to the user
Supposedly cheap leads who do not convert
A quick fix for this is to have somebody QA-ing your user experience. Every. Day. Or at least once a week as they are likely to produce a week’s work of actionables that need fixing. Consider this as time very well spent.
The less quick but no less important fix, is to trust in your strategy over the long term. If all goes well, your potential clients will start to convert only after they have touched your brand – in theory – 7 times. That means that your brand needs to be in 7 places in an interesting and relevant way. You might feel that this is expensive, but (at risk of degrading my message), no money, no honey. There are so many flaws in attribution that your data might only tell half the story. That lead you just brought in who converted into BIG money, might have come from that campaign that you ditched because the data looked bad.
I’m not advising that you throw money against a wall to see what sticks. Holy moly, no. I’m advising you to cooperate with professionals to help assess targeted spend across multiple platforms, and to strategise for the long term.
My closing sentiment is to implore you to invest into a long-term all encompassing marketing strategy that spans across multiple platforms and timeframes. Like the long term investors who never look at the daily pricing of their investments, likewise – you cannot search for results the day after you invest. Support your team to do what they do best, by utilising the network and expertise in agencies like financialmarkets.meda, TOP providers of 360 financial marketing services.
