Overcoming 4 Main Challenges to Innovations in the Financial Sector with Good Marketing

Finance is often considered a clumsy, deep-rooted, and slowly evolving sector when comparing the rate of innovations with other niches. Today’s fintech companies stand out by making a breakthrough and building customer-centric solutions.

People need banking, not banks. In the end, fintech is all about delivering top-notch customer experience.

However, the overall stiffness of the banking sector is deeply embedded in customers' minds, making convenient and effective solutions look unreliable. And that's where all the challenges branch off.

Marketers in the finance sector have to walk an extra mile to gain trust, educate audiences about the downsides of conventional banking, and create a community around their products. Not to mention the data security, data silos, and other data-related aspects that complicate marketers' lives.

We share some of the most disturbing challenges for marketing teams working in finance and actionable advice to turn these challenges into opportunities.

#1. Trust issues

The banking industry itself has often suffered reputational damage. Internet services have suffered even more. 

The main driver of credibility for banks is, not surprisingly, their physical presence.

It seems safer to entrust money to an institution running thousands of branches around the world than to entrust your money to a digital solution, with terms of service being the only document that guarantees the safety of your investment.

Financial organizations need to create the same level of trust provided by traditional banking while at the same time demonstrating their advantages. Quite a challenge, huh?

Before switching to digital financial solutions, prospects are often trying to figure out several things:

1. Is my money secure with this solution?
2. Is my personal data secure with this solution? 

Solving the challenge: invest effort in educating your audience on the benefits of digital solutions

Gaining your audience's trust takes time. Content marketing should be the #1 priority on your list. Blog articles, videos, e-books, and publications on noticeable media platforms grow brand awareness and help you accustom prospects to your product.

The content you create should educate in the first place and advertise in the second. If prospects can naturally understand the value behind your product, you won’t have to pitch it at all. 

Revolut’s blog is a good example of how to communicate product values with just words. The company highlights product updates, shares technical guides about banking, and shows how users can benefit from Revolut, without actually saying “Get Revolut Now!!!”. 

However, content marketing isn't a magic wand that will '10X your growth'. It takes effort to build a content pipeline, develop resonating messaging, and eventually, start seeing results. 

Plus, when promoting a new type of product, there's no beaten path to success. You must experiment and analyze the performance down to each banner, headline, and button caption to find the right words and use them more frequently. 

Consistent messaging across different channels and offering a cure to your prospects' pains make you stand out.

#2. Lack of cross-departmental communication

Finance organizations is somewhat slow to innovate internal processes due to gigantic amounts of data and disparate tools across the company.

While security regulations require treating clients' data with the utmost care, there's nothing to comply with regarding internal communication and internal data handling within the company. 

Spreadsheets are the bread and butter for finance marketers. However, the number of channels, campaigns, and initiatives is constantly growing, and so grew the spreadsheets' size. Now, the monstrously large spreadsheets take hours to load and twice more hours to run a VLOOKUP function.

While the spreadsheet loads, a marketer drops a line to a fellow sales rep to know how the sales are going. But the sales rep replies in two days with a .CSV export of opportunities from Salesforce for the recent period. 

Now, our marketer has to union two different tables to attribute revenue to marketing campaigns and pray that their PC doesn't set on fire. Eventually, it took a solid week and a new laptop to get a 'quick' performance rundown. 

And the reason is the outdated processes that aren’t going to change because of the data complexity and enormous amount of time required to organize data the right way.

Solving the challenge: upgrade your data infrastructure

The main problem behind the lack of cross-departmental visibility is that vital data sits in silos. In not very user-friendly and indigestible silos.

Each department accumulates data and stores it in a way only known to this particular department. What does the sales metric "op_c_w" mean? Oh, opportunity closed-won? Who could've thought?

Without a unified naming convention for data across the company and centralized storage for data, the analytics process becomes a mess. 

Organizations need to think about a unified data warehouse with the growing amounts of data. 

Centralized data streamlines your marketing efforts and allows you to:

1. Eliminate data silos within your organization
2. Speed up the data exchange process between departments
3. Make sales and marketing collaboration more efficient

Learn how marketing data centralization helps build better dashboards and improve analytics

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Unified naming conventions will keep all teams on the same page. Knowing what metric is responsible for what will help you build a better analytics process and help demonstrate the actual value of marketing efforts.

#3. Marketing performance measurement

In a finance-centered niche, marketers are expected to frequently report on their activities and demonstrate how these activities impact revenue. 

Teams need to understand which marketing messages, channels, and campaigns work to double down on activities bringing the desired outcome quickly.

This process always involves comparing sales data with marketing performance data. 

And no, it's not only about data centralization. Having data in unified storage is only half the battle. Finance marketers also need the proper analytics skill set and tools to understand how their efforts contribute to revenue.

Solving the problem: setting up a marketing data stack

A marketing data platform solves most analytics challenges in finance marketing.

These platforms join marketing and sales data to build a single source of truth for revenue operations. Here's what to look for in the all-in-one marketing data platform:

• Automated data extraction. Marketers no longer have to copy-paste performance data to spreadsheets from tens of channels. The platform takes care of it.
• Data transformation. Since not all marketers are SQL or spreadsheet gurus, the platform helps them deduplicate, map, and normalize disparate data from different platforms.
• Data drilling. The platform should allow drilling into different dimensions to analyze performance from different angles (campaign or ad group levels, breakdowns by gender, age, device, etc.).
• A centralized data warehouse. A reliable platform always offers you a choice. You can either store your data on the vendor's side or load it to your warehouse. Your data should never be held hostage.

The list may go on, and these are only must-have features to make your marketing analytics routine easier.

On the other side, you have attribution to help you understand the touchpoints across the funnel generating the most revenue. 

You can develop a custom attribution model in-house or find an attribution vendor to get an out-of-the-box solution. Whatever you choose, our research on attribution models will help you decide on the model that fits your business request.

A marketing data platform combined with attribution help marketers get from data to insights faster and stop crunching numbers manually.

#4. Social media interactions

Maintaining a social media presence is as crucial for finance companies when marketing a new product.

Social media helps you gather a community around your product, engage with users and prospects, and understand their needs. Community-oriented marketing strategy has tremendous potential for customer acquisition and increasing product adoption rate.

However, finance brands often don’t pay the necessary attention to social media. Companies often think that effort isn’t worth the end result or consider it hard to come up with engaging content fitting the platform.

As a result, community managers and social media departments are nonexistent in many companies. Instead, content marketers serve as part-time social managers.

Solving the challenge: enabling social media efforts with marketing automation

In a perfect world, finance marketing teams need a community manager and a social media dept. But if it's not the case, there are some tools to make the most out of your social media.

Social listening tools such as Sprout Social can help you track all brand mentions across social media and tap into discussions about your product. It might help you increase brand awareness as well as handle mentions from dissatisfied customers or doubting prospects.

AI tools can help you spice up your content with different types of posts. For example, Jasper can draft short or long-form social media content in a few minutes. These posts still require some finetuning, but they'll drastically accelerate your content production rate.

Synthesia is an AI-based video platform to help you kick off your video marketing. You can paste the desired text, and one of Synthesia's AI narrators will voice it in a video format.

When it comes to social media analytics, you can use Improvado. It extracts both organic and paid ads data, unifies it, and loads it to pre-built cross-channel dashboards. Marketers can then merge these insights with data from other platforms (organic search, paid search, sales CRM, etc.) to build a holistic picture of their marketing performance and recreate the entire customer journey.

Of course, community development and social media don't only revolve around tools. It's about the strategy in the first place and execution in the second. Still, these tools might save you a significant amount of time and jumpstart your social media strategy with minimal effort invested.

Navigate financial marketing waters with confidence

We know the everyday finance marketing challenges. The speed at which fintech companies change the industry, the need to keep pace with them, and retain the market share. On a grander scale, setting the right ICP and creating content that resonates with your audience is a good start.

Improvado can fulfill all your marketing analytics and operational data needs when it comes to tracking performance and identifying revenue growth trends. Check other articles from our blog to get deeper insights into fintech marketing analytics. 

If you want to have a quick chat about your marketing analytics goals and how Improvado can get you there, fill in the short form below.