Rising demand has changed the way financial brands approach customer or member engagement.
Banks and credit unions are seeking new and innovative ways to drive human connections. But, in their effort to build consumer trust and loyalty, they’ve become vulnerable to common marketing mistakes.
We’ve already covered pitfalls #1 and #2 in part one of our three-part series.
Now, Total Expert tackles two more pitfalls to avoid, as we detail how banks and credit unions must build strategies to track and measure their marketing and remove inconsistent brand experiences.
Pitfall #3: Failure to Track and Measure Key Marketing Metrics
Financial brands typically focus on revenue, expenses and operating cost — but these metrics alone won’t help you understand the impact of your marketing.
To better track marketing metrics, start by measuring what you can – things like email engagement, social analytics and specific goal completions. While you don’t want to spend too much time tracking vanity metrics, it is critical to start somewhere. As leading indicators, these metrics can help build a foundation to understand customers or members more deeply. As your ability to track other metrics grows, you will understand what metrics truly are an indicator of future purchase decisions and can modify the metrics you are tracking.
Financial brands should also use their data to identify the best prospects for specific products, such as the profile of the average business loan applicant. With this information in hand, financial brands can deploy messaging aimed at statistically motivated contacts in their database.
Finally, banks and credit unions should work to centralize their data, where possible, as a central view of consumer data makes it easier to develop marketing strategies that meet consumer demands.
By improving your ability to track and measure key marketing metrics, you’ll be well positioned for several key benefits:
- Sales velocity – Reduce friction across the customer or member journey using data-intelligent messaging to target the needs of the individual consumer.
- Marketing agility– Enjoy better feedback on campaign success – and enjoy it faster – to allow for simple marketing adjustments that better serve customers or members.
- Lifetime relationships – Anticipate customer or member needs and proactively serve them the right message at the right time on the right channel.
Pitfall #4: Inconsistent Brand Experience
Banks and credit unions trust relationship managers to elevate their personal brands alongside the overarching corporate brand. But striking a balance, so it doesn’t degrade the overall brand experience has been a challenge for many financial brands.
An inconsistent brand experience creates several negative effects, including:
- Confusion among customers or members.
- Reduced credibility.
- Lower marketing ROI.
- Inability to generate leads.
- Potential loss of revenue.
For branch interactions, emails, phone calls, social media and beyond, every brand touchpoint must offer a consistent experience to customers or members. The more consistent your messaging, the stronger your brand becomes in building awareness and inspiring trust and loyalty.
The strength of your brand can be measured in how effectively you connect consumers with valuable products and services across channels. Each engagement feeds overall brand experience, and each message can be targeted across the flywheel marketing model, which focuses on omnichannel marketing across the lifetime of a relationship.
Not all interactions with your customers or members must happen in one place – but it must feel like they do.
To the consumer, engaging with your financial brand is one long conversation, so stay focused on building cohesive experiences atop consistent design and messaging across all channels.
Banks and credit unions should offer united brand experiences at every customer touchpoint to help grow trust, drive retention and build stronger relationships.
Conclusion
To better serve customers or members, financial brands must focus on tracking and measuring key marketing metrics to strengthen consumer engagement and guide marketing strategy.
Banks and credit unions must also offer brand consistency to empower their products, services and relationship managers across all customer or member touchpoints.
Don’t succumb to these common marketing pitfalls and lose ground to the competition by ignoring key marketing metrics or your brand.
Don’t forget to catch up on part one of our marketing pitfalls series. And watch for part three coming soon on the Total Expert blog.
