Community banks and credit unions that use the power of the digital world in their marketing efforts reap a cornucopia of benefits including loan, earnings, and deposit growth. Remarketing, audience targeting, and other SEM tactics are potent tools just waiting to be used.
In today’s world, any community bank or credit union with goals and objectives that demand marketing strategies needs a digital plan. Why? Because digital tactics can create awareness of a brand like no other medium. Just take a look at how these tools can help.
Remarketing for financial
Your customers have begun using your website to bank online to pay bills, check balances, and transfer funds between accounts. But that may be all they do before they leave again. Wouldn’t it be nice to bring the people who are already your customers back to look at all you have to offer?
Remarketing is a great tool to make that happen. Remarketing targets those people – whether or not they are existing customers – who have spent some time on your website by showing them your ad or Facebook post while they are elsewhere on the Web or social media platforms. Remarketing allows you to gently and effectively remind them that you are here and just a click away.
In addition, you can create tailored ads based on which areas of your site your users visited.
Example
Suppose User Sue checked out your page on car loans. Remind her that you offer great rates and service by getting your auto loan ad in front of her the next few times she’s surfing the web.
TruChoice Credit Union in Portland used remarketing as part of their digital marketing campaign to increase loan growth. As a result, they exceeded their full year loan growth in just four months.
Financial audience targeting
In the early days of digital marketing, targeting options were restricted to demographic, geographic and some time-based information. But as digital usage grew so too did the ways in which advertisers could leverage audience behavior. Today, audiences can be targeted for a whole host of behaviors.
Example
For example, Skowhegan Savings Bank recently launched a brand awareness campaign. To create an audience, VONT began by targeting users living in a 10-mile radius around branch offices, which are focused in Western Maine.
But because Skowhegan recently launched a mobile banking app, VONT also targeted Facebook mobile app users who had previously visited the Skowhegan Savings Bank website.
The thinking? Facebook mobile app users are already on their mobile device when posts come up for Skowhegan’s mobile banking app.
In short, Skowhegan is now reaching users who are already comfortable with mobile apps and are most likely customers of the bank already. From there, mobile banking is literally just a click away.
Facebook paid promotion for financial audiences
With Facebook’s recent change to its algorithm, it’s become nearly impossible to reach customers – let alone potential customers – organically through Newsfeed. Promoted posts are the best way to reach an audience.
The good news is that because promoted posts look like regular posts as opposed to advertisements, people are more likely to pay attention to them. Promoted posts are not considered interruption media and that provides them access to places other media forms cannot go.
Once you create your audience profile, you then decide how frequently your posts get seen. The right timing is a matter of choosing a number frequent enough to get noticed, but not so frequent to turn off potential customers. In the case of the Skowhegan Savings Bank campaign, posts will be seen roughly three times a month.
AdWords
Google AdWords is a great tool for finding potential customers. Through AdWords, advertisers can target an audience at the time of intention. That means your ad is shown at the moment users are looking for what you have to offer.
How great is that? A car buyer looking for auto loans types in ‘auto loans’ and your financial institution’s ad appears at the top or side of the search engine results page (SERP).
Best of all, you only pay when the user clicks to visit your site or call (if they click from a mobile phone).
The takeaway for digital marketing for financial institutions
Taking advantage of all the digital world has to offer can pay dramatic dividends. When used together, remarketing, fine-tuned audience targeting and other SEM tactics provide the basis on which to build an awareness campaign more responsive than any from the past. Stay tuned for future stories on digital marketing techniques for B2B financial services.
About VONT Performance Digital Marketing
At VONT we believe that change is the only constant in the digital world – and that excites us. When tools and environments are constantly changing, new opportunities to help our clients achieve success are constantly arising. Each new advertising technology, social platform, or design approach allows us to improve on the results we achieve for our clients.
We believe in this idea of continual fine-tuning so much that we named our company VONT, which means to achieve exponential improvement in incremental steps. It is our core belief, and the reason why we are not simply a web design company or simply a digital advertising agency, but rather a long-term, single source partner providing a comprehensive array of web development and digital marketing capabilities for a variety of areas including financial digital marketing.
In short, we’re here so that our clients achieve success in the ever-changing digital world. If you’d like to learn more about VONT and the work we’ve done with our financial clients, visit our Work page. Or, if you have a question, contact us. We’ll get right back to you!
