6 Reasons Financial Institutions Choose Inbound Marketing

1. Inbound Marketing suits more complex services or 'considered purchases'

Marketing with traditional shotgun advertising like website banners or print placements gives you a tiny amount of space & a minimal word-count to convince someone to look into a solution that really requires a lot of consideration. It just doesn't work very well.

Instead, brands in the financial services space are seeing great results using inbound marketing strategies bolstered by resonant content and smart marketing automation used to qualify and nurture leads. And when we talk about smart automation, we're referring to emails that don't just greet the lead by name but also deliver content that they're most likely to be interested in based on past interaction. This has a lot to do with CRM (customer relationship management) and CRM platforms popular among leading inbound marketers.

"If a client wants a leads-oriented sales enablement strategy, we're likely to build it out for them on our CRM platform of choice, HubSpot. Crafting clean looking landing pages that sell as well as programming how leads are nurtured is super-efficient and get results."

2. Financial institutions are all about Marketing ROI.

Boosting a marketing campaign's ROI has everything to do with the conversion of leads that come as a result of an Inbound Marketing campaign. So as much as awareness-oriented campaigns are still a thing, leading marketers in the finance sector know that a 'by-product' of a leads-oriented campaign is awareness anyway. Therefore leads may as well be the focus. And that's Inbound Marketing. 

3. Inbound Marketing delivers qualified leads - and that's what financial companies sales teams need.

"Qualified Leads is our deliverable of choice because we know its what our clients want. It's how we're different, and that's what keeps them coming back."

Did you know?

• 71% of B2B marketers use content marketing to generate leads for their company, according to MarketingProfs.

A professional inbound marketing campaign uses trendy, freely available content to capture your markets attention and convince them to dive deeper and download a meatier content asset. This 'gated' asset sits on a landing page behind a form. In other words, one has to fill in contact information and perhaps answer a qualifying question like, "Do you currently have any off-shore investments?" in order to access the content.

To summarise: Once you've used your freely available content such as your blogs, social media posts and hopefully - video content to build trust, you'll be likely to gain leads through your gated, meatier assets, which all your free content eludes to.

For more about personalising customer interactions and getting more qualified leads using your digital marketing strategy, read our blog called, "Best New Digital Strategies For Financial Services"

4. Inbound Marketing content is educational and interesting, and market knowledge around finance is lacking.

Often, an important aspect of your more comprehensive, gated content assets is the chosen angle. So instead of offering a whitepaper about the benefits of your services (which is probably going to be perceived as boring and get a horrible CTR) you might want to craft something that's educational, while still more likely to have wider appeal. Something like, "Adapting to Financial Services Trends For More Spending Money" is far more likely to get clicked on. And guess what - you can still talk about your services here and there, plus you've captured their information and have automation to help qualify them.

In the end, an Inbound Marketing campaign bolstered by CRM lets your sales team focus on what they're best at - closing warmer leads.

5. Inbound Marketing caters for the No 1 priority for any FSI - Customer experience optimisation

According to findings in a recent study by Econsultancy, in partnership with Adobe, called, The “2018 Digital Trends in Financial Services” (a report based on a sample of almost 700 FSI (manager level and up) respondents worldwide)

• Companies in the financial sector are significantly more likely than their peers to regard customer journey optimization as very important over the new few years (81% for FSI vs. 69% for other sectors).
• 75% of FSI respondents said that their organization has a cross-team approach with the customer at the heart of all initiatives.
• 54% of FSI respondents said that their company fosters collaboration via tools that streamlines workflows between creative and content marketers/web teams.
• In terms of upskilling the workforce, 33% of financial services organizations plan to "invest significantly" in digital skills and education this year. Fifty percent said they would invest "somewhat" in digital skills and education.
• A whopping 71% of financial services organizations plan to increase their digital marketing spend in the year to come.

All these findings point to Inbound Marketing through an intuitive CRM platform Because:

• Inbound Marketing is all about: i) meeting prospects where they are; ii) being found as soon as they're looking for your services iii) and crafting a customer journey that builds trust and successfully moves them from 'warm' to 'hot' leads ready to be converted.
• By nature, Inbound Marketing adds value before asking for anything in return which builds enough trust to get prospects to give their information and enter your workflows. This is all centred around improving the way your market experiences your brand.
• CRMs are conducive to a closer, more productive relationship between marketing and sales because prospect activity coming from promotions into the sales funnel is tracked so well that both teams are empowered with useful information. Accountability is so much clearer too.

6. Inbound Marketing is geared towards sustainable long-term growth

Did you know:

• 8 out of 10 people identify themselves as blog readers, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
• 61% of all global internet users research products online, according to Ipsos.

With those stats in mind, creating Inbound Marketing campaigns using resonant content creates a long lasting impression online. And if written well, from an interesting angle and with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in mind - people will be finding, enjoying and sharing that content for years to come. SEO is taken very seriously when we're talking about content for an Inbound Marketing campaign. The beauty of smart SEO is that with time, your content gains more momentum and won't cost you a cent once it's out there. Your website needs to appear first when people search for keywords pertaining to your services and Inbound Marketing gets you there, sustainably.

If you enjoyed this content and would like to dive a little deeper to get more ideas about how Inbound Marketing applies to your brand, we know you'll enjoy the methodology and examples we go through in our Inbound Marketing eBook, which you can download below...