Are you a financial services providing company or fintech company? What is your marketing strategy? Hopefully, you have one. If you don’t, you should consider account-based marketing (ABM).
Over 50 per cent of small businesses admitted to marketing with no plan in place in 2019. That number has since dropped some, but there is still a large number of businesses with no marketing plan.
Account-based marketing for fintech companies and financial services plans to change all that. Marketing is evolving along with the FinTech industry. Voicebots, robotisation, and mixed reality will all soon become part of the FinTech space.
As each sector within the FinTech space evolves, so will its customers. Shotgun marketing tactics won’t work anymore for our industry. You need a way to contact people who want what you’re providing.
And that’s exactly the solution ABM can provide.
So, if you want to get better leads for your financial services or fintech business, while spending less marketing money, read on.
Account-Based Marketing For Financial Services
Account-based marketing (ABM) for financial services is a way to bring a precise plan to your marketing efforts. Every industry has its own ideal customer avatar. Financial services are no different.
Today, we’re going to talk about how you can market more effectively for those ideal financial services customers. We’ll talk about what account-based marketing for fintech companies looks like. We’ll also go over the benefits of the ABM strategy to financial services. And, finally, we’ll talk about how making a target account list for fintech companies can help you to succeed with your marketing campaigns.
The key to account-based marketing is diversifying your tactics and following the data. But, just because you’re shifting your marketing to be more account-based doesn’t mean you should completely abandon old strategies. In fact, account-based marketing can piggyback off of your other marketing efforts.
In any form of marketing, you want to have multiple channels working together as one. Account-based marketing is no different.
The other great thing about account-based marketing is that recent technologies allow it to be scaled to companies of any size. This is amazing news because it allows smaller-sized companies to compete in the same arena as some of the big guys.
ABM also encourages flexibility. It’s primarily used for B2B applications, but the performance of an ABM campaign can be measured in real-time. This means that, although ABM is used a lot with longer sales cycles, it can adapt to a wide variety of companies.
Improving the Customer Journey
In the past, companies took a very mathematical approach to marketing. But, using marketing matrices and other formulas are a thing of the past.
Data is still a very big part of the marketing recipe. And, we’ll talk about that more later. But, in recent years, marketers are acknowledging the existence of the customer journey.
Customer journey marketing is the idea that all customers go on a “journey” before arriving at the decision to buy your service or product. It’s rare that a customer buys your product the first time they’re introduced to it.
They need to see your offering multiple times, and each time they see it, they go further down the road of an emotional “journey” in their head. When it’s done right, that journey culminates in them buying your product or service.
We, as marketers, are responsible for shaping that customer journey. So much so, that 87 per cent of financial services marketers say adopting or refining customer journey strategies is a priority for their marketing teams.
Top Marketing Priorities
As financial services marketers, there are a few items that need to remain at the forefront of our marketing efforts. Implementing or adjusting your customer journey marketing campaign is aimed at addressing those concerns.
The first, and probably most important, priority is to engage with customers in real-time. Our world is so fast-paced now that any delay in customer response can lead to lost revenue. Bigger companies can tell you how much every minute in delayed customer response costs them down to the penny.
The next priority is to optimise your marketing mix. ABM shouldn’t be the only marketing strategy you use. You want to test and track every marketing strategy you think might be effective. But, after you start to gather some data, you need to fine-tune and tweak your mix of marketing channels to provide the best return on your marketing dollars.
The third most important priority, which we already touched on, is adopting or revising a customer journey strategy. We won’t say too much more on this, but it’s where the marketing of the future is headed.
Customers want and need to be lead down the path of buying your product. They also need to know that you care. Over 75 per cent of customers say they expect companies they work with to have an understanding of their individual needs.
Key Marketing Metrics For Financial Services
Every industry has Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that need to be tracked to assess how well you’re doing. The financial services industry is no different.
Revenue growth, sales effectiveness, and customer satisfaction metrics are the top three for the financial industry. The key is to meet customers on their terms.
Financial services marketers are turning to social and other channels to accomplish this task. Healthy customer relationships, although they rank third, are probably the most important KPI. If that’s handled properly, the other two will fall into place.
Financial services companies are starting to track customer satisfaction and retention just as much as customer acquisition. This shows you the importance companies in the industry are starting to place on the happiness of their customers.
What Problems Does ABM Solve?
So, we understand the marketing landscape is changing in the financial services industry. But, what does that have to do with ABM? How can ABM help companies be more effective in the new world of marketing?
Let’s take a look.
A More Human Approach
Regardless of your industry, looking at marketing from your customer’s perspective is one of the most effective techniques you can implement. Marketers call this forming a “buyer persona”. The idea is for marketing teams to answer the question “Who would want to buy our product or service”?
But, ABM goes deeper than that. Our customers are human. It’s not enough to form a buyer persona for them. We also need to realise that buyer personas change. This is because customers’ needs change at different points in their lives.
In the wake of the recent pandemic, customers are spending less and checking in with their finances more. Also, since most of the world’s gone remote, the way that customers do both of those things is changing, as well.
ABM focuses on creating a buyer persona. But, it focuses on constantly updating that persona, as well. Doing so is the only way to keep your finger on the pulse of what your buyers actually need and want.
It makes for much more efficient marketing spend and a healthier business overall.
Keep ROI High
Financial services and fintech companies need to get the most out of their marketing dollars. With fintech companies relying on investors for capital, and financial services companies competing with a lot of other players, there isn’t much room for error.
ABM solves that issue by focusing on a low-stakes, highly-targeted marketing approach. The goal of ABM is to spend your marketing dollars to attract the clients that will bring the most value to your company—whether it’s a financial services company or a cautious investor looking at your fintech offering.
When ABM is done properly, there aren’t many wasted marketing dollars. Sounds too good to be true, right?
How do they do it? How do financial services and fintech marketers maximise every dollar through ABM?
Target Account List For Fintech Companies
The way fintech marketers maximise their marketing dollars is through a Target Account list for ABM. To prove how effective this can be for companies that provide fintech verticles, Zelite performed a case study.
Zelite crafted target account lists for a fintech company providing a platform to UK-based lenders to deliver retail financial services. Zelite worked with the in-house marketing team to develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Once that was developed, the Zelite team got to work.
They used a bespoke secondary research method to scour an extensive list of 5,000 financial institutions that fit the ICP for their client. The result was Zelite was able to return 3,500 lending institutions that fit the customer’s ICP exactly.
Now, marketers for the emerging fintech company can maximise their marketing spend by focusing on 3500 leads, rather than 5000. What’s even better is that those 3500 leads are the “perfect fit” for the fintech company.
That means higher conversions. Not only are they spending less on marketing, but they are getting higher revenue for every dollar they spend. Now, that’s what we, at Zelite, would call a win-win.
Emerging Trends
It’s clear that as we move forward, marketing in the financial services and FinTech spaces will become much more data-driven. Salesforce predicts the amount of data management platforms in the industry to grow by 51% over the next 2 years.
56% of financial services professionals say they are meeting customers’ needs in real-time across multiple channels. So, what does it all mean for you as a financial services professional or FinTech company?
Customers expect you to know exactly what they want and they expect you to give it to them in real-time. That’s why forming a list of target accounts based off of ABM practices is absolutely vital to your business.
The New Marketing Movement
Account-based marketing for financial services could be considered the new marketing movement. Account-based marketing for fintech companies and financial services is changing the landscape of the marketing industry as we know it. We saw the new concerns of financial services and fintech marketers who need to adapt to the customer journey.
We also saw how making an ABM list for fintech companies can change the way they do business. Now, the ball is in your court.
If you’d like to put ABM to work for you, contact the team at Zelite today. We’ll talk to you about your business needs and work together to craft the perfect ICP and marketing plan for your company.
We thank you for joining us for this article, and we look forward to helping your company thrive.