It's time to embrace digital! Financial services companies have lots of opportunities they should be taking advantage of in order to differentiate from competitors and penetrate markets and demographics easily and efficiently. Combine these thoughts and strategies and you will dominate the dojo that is the financial services sector.

Content Personalization 

Precision Targeting, Audience Segmentation, Product Personalization

Rethinking your companies approach to communication and content delivery can be valuable. Many institutions are programmed to provide information quickly with little strategic thought around why, what and how. The belief that everyone on your distribution list has the same needs is flawed There are tools available that allow you to act strategically around your marketing and content personalization.

Think about the possibility to have your web site evolving and changing depending on the user, serving up specific pages and specific content tailored to that visitor. Then think about that visitor’s traffic patterns and begin to understand your users needs, allowing you to better tailor the content in your next set of emails to increase open rates and clicks. The data collected by site behaviour and email actions will allow you to serve the right products or solutions to the right audience at the right time. The marketing automation capabilities of content personalization tools makes this easily achievable. This process should be your reality.

Challenge your company to get a better understanding of how to introduce and implement these tools to gain significant competitive advantage.

Lead Generation 

Pipeline Management, Sales Integration

The collection of leads through your website is also something you should think about strategically. Lead capture forms for users interested in specific products, newsletters orgeneral updates should feed directly into a CRM system, such aslike Salesforce. This would allow you to develop a customer profiling strategy that you can also incorporate into your communication strategy. Different customers have very different needs, so use the insights you gain from previous customer behaviour, segmentation and profiling to tailor and target your products and services. Be greedy in your collection of customer data; it will only help you be successful in the long term.

Design Thinking

Extending Past Brand, Strategic Design Thinking

Taking a new approach and applying strategic design thinking to your business has a lot of value. Simply put, it asks you to look past the traditional and at the thoughtful, bringing a qualitative vision to your services and products. It challenges you to take an alternative view of your products and services and evaluate customers, not necessarily by what they buy but why.

PR and Social 

Storytelling

Storytelling is valuable in all sectors, including financial services. Whether you are talking about a fund, insurance or quarterly earnings, there is a story to be told that can engross your readers. Justissuing the occasional press release as your content strategy is lazy. Quick, smart content paired with sector analysis and data will be clicked on by more potential customers, shared by more readers, and reach a wider audience.

Author: Shane Davis 
Digital