When it comes to growing any small financial institution, knowing how to market is critical to getting the best results. In fact, U.S. businesses rank email marketing, advertising, and social/paid social media in their top three most valued channels for growth and retention.
Furthermore, content marketing helps financial marketers spread brand awareness, reach their target audience, and increase web traffic. If your small bank or credit union wants to maximize growth and build a strong loyal customer base, you’ll need a strong marketing strategy.
Here are four tips to ensure your marketing has a big impact on your small financial institution.
Know Your Audience
Do you know your current customers? How do you make them loyal to your business? Do you know how to stand out to new customers so they choose your financial institution over your competitors? These are just a few of the questions you need to answer to develop an effective marketing strategy.
Understanding your target audience is key to growing your business and fostering a loyal customer base. If you want to see your marketing efforts pay off, tailor your marketing content to resonate with your audience.
Tracking data points like email open and click-through rates or the number of calls made to an advertised phone number helps give your business useful insights into your customers’ behavior. This snapshot of information can help your business overcome any uncertainty over the impact of your marketing efforts.
One easy and efficient way to collect data is through email marketing, where you can analyze how your target audience responds to different content and make better informed marketing decisions. Access to actionable reports gives you the opportunity to prioritize the metrics that matter most for your business and lets you analyze customer behavior throughout the sales cycle.
Make Time for Marketing
Figuring out when to write marketing content while juggling a busy schedule is one of the biggest hurdles banking and credit union professionals face. Many large financial institutions have a dedicated marketing team equipped with the manpower, time, and resources to plan and produce timely marketing content.
In contrast, your smaller bank or credit union might not even have a dedicated marketing team, which makes producing consistent marketing content a more challenging task than at a larger bank or credit union. Each person on your team is likely juggling multiple day-to-day tasks and projects needed to help keep your small financial business running. These daily responsibilities might make marketing seem just out of reach for your team.
So how can you make time for marketing without the sacrificing other projects? By focusing on creating content that requires less time and energy, like email marketing. An email marketing campaign can be automated and outsourced to a vendor partner, which saves time. This way, your team can output more personalized content in a timely manner without neglecting any of their other responsibilities.
Work Smarter When Creating Content
While making sure you have enough content is tricky with a busy schedule, ensuring your content is creative and stands out from your competitors requires even more work. Knowing how to efficiently create interesting, new, and diverse content that grabs your audience’s attention is the cornerstone of marketing.
But consistently coming up with new topics that fits your business and resonates with your audience requires dedicated time and research. And that’s not to mention the work needed to convert these topics into fleshed-out content you can use in your marketing emails, social posts, newsletters, and more.
Marketing is a lot of work, but you can make this job easier for your team by getting help from a digital marketing service. A dedicated team of experts acts as an organic extension to your marketing team so you won’t have to worry about running out of content ideas.
These professional content creators know your industry and can write for your small financial institution quickly and efficiently. Your marketing team will have more manpower and resources to ensure your content stays fresh and relevant. Plus, these experts can help tailor your marketing content to engage your audience.
Have a Robust Editing Process
Becoming a trusted voice to your customers means making a good impression every time they open one of your emails, view an ad, or see any of your marketing content. You should consistently make not only a variety of content but also quality content.
This means checking that your marketing content reflects the same standards as any other project in your bank or credit union. Customers will notice when ads have a broken link, when an email is riddled with typos, or when an article lists incorrect or false information.
To build a good reputation, send your marketing through a thorough editing process where it is checked and rechecked for mistakes before being published. Plus, you can make sure all your content meets regulatory and compliance standards.
Don’t let simple errors turn off your customers. Make it a habit to review your work and send it to another editor. If your team struggles to review all your content thoroughly, consulting a team of professional writers can help your business produce engaging and compliant content that has already gone through review.
Don’t underestimate the importance of great marketing. Follow these tips so your marketing can make a big impact on your small financial institution’s growth.