What does the digital world mean for investment marketing?

Financial services marketing can implement inbound strategies to reach out to new audiences, investors and clients. A creative, transparent and bespoke campaign can target a huge volume of high net worth leads, at a high quality that won’t waste your sales team’s time. For more information on how you can create a high performing investment campaign read our guide to financial marketing strategies.

Investment marketing is more informed than ever before – for some companies, at least. Marketers can find out so much about audiences through their online behaviours. But consumers are also starting to behave differently in this digital era.

Cognizant’s latest report, Digital Marketing in Banking: Evolution and Revolution, highlights four key forces currently reshaping priorities in the banking and investment sector. The bottom line? Consumers are changing rapidly, and your investment marketing strategy needs to keep up.

1. Increasing competition

Cognizant claims financial institutions have historically taken a conservative approach to customer service. Some companies would simply rely on brand reputation to keep hold of customers, who felt secure and content with their lot.

However, new disruptive entrants are rapidly transforming the investment sector. The dramatic rise of peer-to-peer lending platforms in particular shows that consumers are relying increasingly on non-traditional services, making investment marketing more important than ever.

Organisations are now facing much more competition, and in line with this, consumers have loftier expectations. They expect banking and investment companies to be reliable, helpful and engaging. If service providers don’t appear to meet these essential customer needs, individuals won’t hesitate to take their business elsewhere.

2. Shifting demographics

It’s also important for companies to fit their investment marketing strategy according to their target demographic.

As a result of the 2008 recession, many millennials are wary of financial institutions. This probably isn’t helped much by large student debts and the struggles of the first-time-buyer in the housing market. However, millennials are really raising the bar when it comes to digital banking and investment.

Meanwhile, baby boomers (aged 50-70) outspend all other generations, and may want to diversify savings as they approach retirement. Baby boomers are also digitally literate, and spend an increasing amount of time online.

Both could both represent a valuable audience for your business, but require a very different marketing approach. Your investment marketing campaign needs to use the right language, tone of voice and messaging in order to relate to your audience and attract their attention.

3. New digital channels

Digital is the future for the banking and investment sector, most companies will agree. According to Cognizant, the next challenge is allocating marketing budgets accordingly.

Showing a positive return on investment has always been a challenge for marketers. With so many digital channels now on offer, marketers must identify the best ways to build brand awareness, promote engagement and win over their audience.

Take into account which digital channels are used by your target audience, for one thing. It’s not uncommon for pensioners to have a Facebook account nowadays. However, the odds that they use Snapchat or Vine are a lot lower.

Luckily, digital channels also make it easier than ever before to measure the impact of your investment marketing campaign. Most social media platforms will share a range of data with you. We also use HubSpot to monitor the performance of each customer touchpoint across the entire inbound marketing journey.

4. Multi-level marketing

The digital landscape has dramatically increased the number of ways in which a brand can connect with customer throughout all stages of the buying journey. It’s therefore essential to set out an integrated, holistic approach to manage the customer journey.

According to Cognizant, marketers must look for ways to improve the customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. By influencing decision-making across multiple platforms, companies can increase their chances of staying in the customer’s mind.

Here at Six & Flow, we can use HubSpot workflows to make any investment marketing campaign run effortlessly. Automated marketing emails can be sent to consumers, keeping them informed and nurtured. Meanwhile, automated notifications can alert the sales team to call clients once they have filled in a form or clicked on an ad.

Adjusting your investment marketing strategy

All in all, these forces are increasing the importance of a strong investment marketing strategy. It’s vital that companies target the right audience on the right channels, using the right messaging. Most importantly, they need to nurture leads through the customer journey to achieve a return on investment.

To find out more about accomplishing this, and using HubSpot to make the whole operation run smoothly, get in touch with Six & Flow – we love to help.

 Brands that perfect their inbound lead generation strategy see falling marketing costs, better quality leads, greater client engagement and other benefits that outbound methods simply can’t provide. If you want to know more about inbound lead generation, take a look at our blog 'Everything you need to know about Inbound lead generation.'