But, as with any new technology, there are challenges and drawbacks to consider. To say GA4’s rollout hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing is putting it mildly. Many users have faced challenges transitioning from Universal Analytics to GA4 – what’s a financial marketer to do?

At The Dubs Agency, we decided to leverage contacts built from 25+ years of industry experience. Below, the views of those in the know offer their take on GA4, which research shows is currently used by more than 14 million websites globally.

GA4: The good

Jon Morgan, Founder and CEO of San Francisco-based consultants Venture Smarter, says despite user teething problems, GA4 is worth the time investment.

“The focus on events and user engagement metrics provides a richer understanding of user behaviour, helping businesses tailor their strategies more effectively.

“Plus, the integration of machine learning and AI capabilities offers advanced insights, making it easier to uncover trends and opportunities. It’s like upgrading from a standard map to GPS navigation – more precision and a better overall experience.”

SEO expert Deepak Shukla points to the enhanced user privacy features of GA4.

Shukla explains, “GA4 is built with user privacy in mind, providing more powerful controls for data collection and administration. This includes features like enhanced consent mode, which helps enterprises deal with rules like GDPR more effectively.”

Ian Lockwood, a Digital Marketing Director explains, “Some of the Explorations (particularly funnels) are far more powerful than anything in Universal Analytics (UA), along with the ways to define segments/audiences. And the Engagement Rate provides a more meaningful measure than the Bounce Rate (still available in GA4, albeit only by customising reports).”

Marketing expert, Grace de Cruz adds, “One of the best new features of GA4 is the ability to view app and web data within the same property, which was previously siloed, allowing businesses to get a much more complete view of a user’s journey.”

Digital entrepreneur Udemezue John says, “GA4 offers a future-proof approach to website and app analytics. Its event-based model provides deeper user engagement insights, and privacy features address evolving regulations. Additionally, cross-platform measurement and built-in predictive capabilities are valuable assets.”

GA4: The bad

Ian Lockwood may be supportive of some features in GA4, but the expert questions the “thought process” behind the development of GA4. “GA4 feels like an unnecessary and poorly-executed rebuild of Google Analytics,” he says, adding: “I can see the sense of moving to event-based data for everything and perhaps the legacy infrastructure of UA was getting too creaky and expensive to maintain, but it feels like Google really didn’t try too hard to give us a smooth transition.”

Andrew Frith, Media Director at The Dubs Agency adds, “For those previously comfortable in Universal Analytics, moving to GA4 was met by many with resistance, as having to adjust to a completely new interface and way of doing things just didn’t feel good.”

Furthermore, some features available in Universal Analytics aren’t directly transferable to GA4 – like custom reports and certain dimensions – requiring marketers to adapt their tracking methods and reporting processes.

Marketers accustomed to session-based data might require time to adapt to the event-driven model.

Frith adds, “For advanced users, GA4 offers new opportunities but for the average less technical user or newcomer to analytics, GA4 can be quite a daunting learning curve.”

Erman Küplü, co-founder and CEO of Analyzify, agrees, “The transition process hasn’t been seamless for everyone. Some users have reported challenges with data migration and adapting to the new interface.”

“Moving from Universal Analytics to GA4 can be difficult for enterprises, particularly those with complex tracking installations or considerable historical data,” explains Shukla. “The discrepancies between data models and reporting interfaces may necessitate extensive modifications and reconfiguration.”

GA4: The ugly

While GA4 offers advanced tracking capabilities, marketing expert Nathan Chen from Silverstone Technologies flagged the potential for concerns about data privacy and compliance if marketers don’t tread carefully.

“With increased emphasis on user privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, marketers need to ensure their data collection practices align with these regulations when using GA,” says Chen.

“Failure to comply with data protection laws could result in legal consequences and damage to a company’s reputation. It is crucial for businesses to prioritise data privacy and implement proper consent mechanisms when utilising GA4 for analytics.”

In a month when Reddit finally went public, it felt appropriate to give some of the last words to users of the social media platform – who are rarely short of a few things to say on any given topic. Taking to r/marketing, one user wrote this savage missive:

“They wanted to make an analytics that works well for apps, too. They sacrificed the most important functionalities for websites for that.

“Imagine car manufacturers suddenly decided their cars should work as boats now, too, and they sacrificed trunks for that.

“Very few people need boats and most get a standalone vehicle for that. The manufacturer doesn’t care. Everyone is now suffering from the compromises resulting from it.

“That’s exactly why everyone is angry at GA4. We want our f’ing trunks back.”

So, what can finance marketers do?

If this sounds too doom-and-gloom, there are some ways finance marketers can use GA4 to their advantage—if they’re willing to stick with the new programme.

Chen advises, “GA4 introduces a more user-centric approach to analytics, focusing on individual user interactions across platforms, which can lead to more personalised marketing strategies and improved customer experiences.”

As Search Engine Land put it, you could persist with GA4 by “rolling up your sleeves and making the most of what GA4 has to offer”.

They add, “Ultimately, I still think GA4 will be a useful platform that will be a necessary touchpoint for marketing teams – particularly if the platform can incorporate insights on SGE as Google expands that footprint.”

All things considered, it remains key to keep your GA4 expert on hand, especially if Google Analytics is your source of truth for your finance brand’s data. Reach out to The Dubs Agency and we’ll be able to guide you through the latest developments, including how changes can be used to your advantage as a sophisticated, full-funnel marketer.

The post GA4: The good, the bad and the ugly appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What is digital analytics?

At the heart of it, digital marketing analytics is the utilisation of data to inform and evaluate your marketing strategies. By analysing your customer’s reactions and subsequent actions to your content, you can better understand what is working and what isn’t, as well as where you may have information gaps.

Overall, the goal of digital marketing analytics is to have a better sense of your client’s behaviours, motivations and purpose so you can make better, more personalised content.

Benefits for financial marketers

It goes without saying that understanding your clients better will always improve your financial marketing content strategy. When you have implemented strong analytics into your marketing strategy, you will always beat out the finance brands that haven’t.

When you begin producing better content that not only attracts an audience but also retains them and pushes them through the acquisition tunnel, you have a winning marketing strategy. Digital analytics can help you achieve this.

Here are some benefits to understanding your digital analytics:

• Remove the guesswork from your content creation
• Reduce risks
• Personalise and improve the customer experience
• Understand your clients better
• Identify information gaps
• Predict customer behaviour

How to use your digital marketing analytics effectively

To gain a better understanding of how financial marketers can utilise their digital marketing analytics more effectively, we spoke to The Dubs’ Social Media Director, Andrew Frith.

“Analysing how specific content is performing relies on the ability to identify specific content in the analytics platforms,” Andrew explains.

“A common technique is to add a UTM tag at the end of clickable URLs that attach categorisation information for the content clicked. This allows campaign, distribution platform and content identification to be captured in the analytics platform and then analysis on specific content can be applied.”

“Once a target audience has landed on a finance brand’s website, it is their website behaviour that determines whether your content is working or not,” Andrew says.

“First, the desired actions of the audience on the website content needs to be defined. For a website article, that may be having the audience read the article in full. Analytics platforms allow a finance brand to see how long a user spends on a page, or ‘scroll rate’, which will give a good indication as to whether visitors are actually reading the article or not.”

Alternatively, a finance brand may want the target audience to read a series of articles to understand a topic in depth. In this instance, analytics platforms allow a finance brand to see the ‘multi-page’ journeys, as well as user-journey path visualisations, that will give insight into whether visitors are clicking through to more content after their initial entry onto the website.

Bear in mind that website UX will play a part here such as strong CTA’s and intuitive navigation systems.

In addition, video content can also be measured via digital marketing analytics.

“The effectiveness of video content on the website can be measured by capturing video completion rates whilst also looking at partial completion times,” Andrew says.

Finally, Andrew explains events such as button clicks on the website can also be tracked to determine if more bottom-of-the-funnel activity such as signups to newsletters, downloads of reports, request form submissions are making a desired impact.

There is a myriad of information available at financial marketers’ fingertips that can be used to make informed decisions. “The key to successfully interpreting data is establishing what website behaviours are desired and then configuring the analytics platform to capture that information,” Andrew says.

What is A/B testing and how can finance brands make use of it?

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is an important tool in a financial marketer’s arsenal. A/B testing is simply a randomised experimentation process, that involves two or more variables being shown to different website visitors. This is used to identify what variable works best and enables your finance brand to optimise accordingly.

Andrew says a range of tests can be used such as testing the length of written content, short vs long; testing the visual component of the content e.g. photos vs illustrations; or testing the actual content format e.g. video vs static images.

“The most important thing is to test only one component at a time so that clear conclusions on the A/B test can be made. Changing two elements at the same time will defeat any analytical conclusions on content effectiveness.”

Final thoughts

Ultimately, if your finance brand is not utilising digital marketing analytics to the best of your abilities you’re making a mistake. Analytics is designed to provide you with real client data that can inform your marketing and content decisions. Not using it is a waste of your finance brand’s potential.

The post How to use analytics to supercharge content marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What is the biggest mistake finance brands make when measuring a social media campaign?

“A big mistake finance brands fall into is putting large media budgets behind paid social media campaigns and driving traffic to a site with a poor user journey,” explains Cimino. “There’s no point driving users to your website if it isn’t ready for them.” Financial marketers need to strike the balance between a website that delivers a good user experience that also converts customers.

From Frith’s perspective, the biggest mistake financial marketers make is they collect campaign data and measurements, maybe put them in a report, with no interpretation or follow up actions. “The biggest mistake is failing to interpret measurements and turn them into practical actions that either improve the campaign in terms of its objectives (conversions, traffic, costs etc) or take on learnings that inform the next phases of work,” he says. “Whether that be making changes to messaging and content, changing user-journeys and UX or optimising channels. Measurement is about improving performance.”

What are best practice examples of how to measure and act on social media performance?

“We recently worked with Citi who took advantage of the precise audience targeting on LinkedIn to create a range of audience segments that were tested frequently and optimised for best performing over time,” says Frith. “Citi’s approach was a good example of measure often, optimise frequently.”

“Our team here in London encourages clients to set up hard and soft onsite goal conversions and put monetary values to each of those goals,” says Cimino, whose work with Aberdeen Standard Investments has picked up more than 20 awards including the MFEA Best Social Media Campaign and Digital Innovation awards. “Attention time on site, +2 pages per session and scroll rate could all be softer goals, but a harder goal could be a user watching a certain percentage of an onsite video, downloading a PDF, completing a form submission or visiting certain pages of your website that aren’t the landing page of the ad.”

What tools would you recommend financial marketers use for social media measurement and tracking?

For Frith, the right measurement tool comes down to the level of understanding and sophistication of the marketer. “Native ad platforms (Linkedin, X, Facebook) provide good reporting which may work well for more sophisticated marketing teams, while easy to understand dashboard platforms such as Funnel or Google Data Studio can be useful when sharing metrics across the wider business,” he says. “Other tools such as SEMRush provide great insights into important aspects of campaigns such as keywords.” There’s a whole host of free and specialised SEO tools that every financial marketer needs.

“Google Analytics or Adobe Experience Manager are essential for tracking campaign activity on the destination website or landing page and for monitoring user behaviour once they have entered the branded digital environment,” says Frith.

How frequently should finance brands be monitoring social media marketing campaigns?

“The frequency of measurement depends on the objective, duration, budget and content of each individual campaign,” says Cimino. “For some of our clients, campaigns need to be monitored multiple times daily, while others are just twice a week.”

What’s one of the biggest misconceptions around measurement and ROI?

“Measuring the success or effectiveness of a campaign isn’t just looking at an ROI figure in £ or $ but looking at how users engage with the site and analysing the onsite soft and hard goal completions,” explains Cimino.

Frith adds, that attribution is still one area that isn’t well understood, which is made more difficult by the fact that it isn’t a precise science. “The full user journey for any digital offering needs to be mapped from beginning to end (which may include offline components) and the role of paid campaigns in that user journey needs to be understood so that any analysis of ROI is making accurate or at least well-informed attribution.”

How is finance marketing different to other industries in terms of measuring effectiveness?

“Most finance businesses are looking for long-term loyal customers versus other industries that may be more reliant on one-time customers or purely product-based activity,” says Frith.

“To gain customer loyalty, trust and transparency is crucial, and an ongoing effort finance brands must always work towards. This results in a heavier focus on content and social media marketing centered around education, expert insights and thought leadership as opposed to the product promotion favoured by other brands,” he says.

“While the impact of content on trust is far less clear cut to measure, trust is an important metric that can be quantitatively measured through engaging surveys and also tracked to a certain extent by engagement metrics.”

Wherever your brand is based in the world, The Dubs has financial content marketing experts who can help you implement a social media marketing strategy that delivers measurable results. Get in touch.

The post How to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.

What they don’t have is endless time or endless resources.

Digital tools are vital to remaining competitive in the finance content marketing game, but there’s an art (and science) to knowing which ones to use and when—and for what purpose.

Digital tools are vital to remaining competitive in the finance content marketing game, but there’s an art (and science) to knowing which ones to use and when—and for what purpose.

The good news is, you don’t have to figure that out from scratch. The world’s high-performing marketers have done the hard work for you—and the results of their efforts are in the sixth edition of Salesforce’s handy State of Marketing Report.

Here, we take a look at which tools are on the rise in marketing, and how finance brands are using them to their advantage.

Artificial intelligence leads the way

Of all the tools available, artificial intelligence (AI) is the one to watch. 84% of marketers reported using AI in their work in 2019—up from 29% in 2018. What’s more, 56% of high-performing marketers are planning on using AI more in the next year.

The big question is how?

Well, the top five uses of AI so far are to:

1. provide personalised experiences in individual channels;
2. improve customer segmentation;
3. surface insights from data;
4. drive next best actions (such as offers); and
5. automate customer interactions.

In finance content marketing, industry leaders include London-based fintech start-up Cleo, a Siri-style voice recognition platform integrated with Facebook, Alexa and Google Home, which allows users to track spending, set budgets and receive alerts, as well as San Francisco’s Olivia, a virtual financial assistant that uses AI to learn users’ spending patterns, predict purchases and recommend ways to increase value for money spent—among many others.

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Social marketing comes in runner up (just)

A close second to AI is social media marketing, with 53% of high-performing marketers planning on using it more in the coming year.

Essentially, high-tech social marketing tools help you keep up with the busy pace of social media, by automating a lot of the work for you and providing AI-powered insights.

Such tools range from content managers, which take care of publishing, posting and commenting; to chatbots, which provide users with personalised responses to their questions; to tools that collect and analyse data on everything from audience behaviour to conversational trends.

One finance brand that’s embraced the power of social marketing tools is US-based bank Wells Fargo, whose Facebook chatbot answers questions about everything from how much the user spent on food in the previous week to the location of the nearest ATM.

Bronze goes to marketing analytics and measurement tools

Marketing analytics and measurement tools are key to financial services content marketing success. They give you the truth about which of your finance content is working and why, so you can create a data-driven content strategy focused on more of what customers like and less of what they don’t.

High-performing marketers keep track of a wide range of analytics, including revenue, sales effectiveness, web and mobile analytics, customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, digital engagement rates, social analytics, marketing leads, customer acquisition costs, customer referral costs and lifetime customer value.

And smart finance brands are doubling the value of data by transforming it into popular finance content. A cheeky bit of humble bragging, to see boring data made beautiful, check out The Little Book of Data we created for Aviva Investors.

The rest …

The other four tools that high-performing marketers expect to rely on in the coming year are video marketing tools, with 50% looking to use them more; customer data platforms, which are on the mind of 48% of marketers; marketing automation tools, which have the attention of 47%; and voice recognition tech, which is on the radar of 43% of marketers.

Wondering how you’ll bring tools into your finance content marketing strategy? Get in touch.

The post The digital tools favoured by high-performing marketers appeared first on Financial Marketer.

As a finance marketer, you create content to communicate with your audience and provide value in an effort to achieve conversion and content ROI. However, with so much content available, it can be difficult to differentiate what your financial company produces from the pack. When 48% of consumers say content is too long and boring, you have to find a way to stand out, because if your content isn’t consumed, there’s no conversion. Certainly not a case of steering clear of long-form content, content ROI comes down to whether you’re creating content that is relevant and relatable to our audience’s interests and needs.

You have to find a way to stand out, because if your content isn’t consumed, there’s no conversion.

We look at three tactics finance marketers should be using to make sure their content stands out and gets consumed.

Create Video Content

This isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last time you hear about the power of creating video content in your financial content marketing efforts. It tops other content types in terms of what consumers prefer and will continue to rise in popularity. A study found that 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool.

WealthSimple is an investment technology company with offices in Canada, the United States, and London. They create video content for their Youtube channel that has garnered almost 27 million total views. Not just a case of capturing attention, a strong content marketing strategy needs to map out how each piece of content leads customers down the funnel and ultimately to conversion and content ROI.

Collaborate With Micro-Influencers for content ROI

Another way to make your financial content marketing stand out is to use micro-influencers. Large companies do it all the time when they hire celebrities to promote their products on social media and star in their commercials. As a financial services company, you can do the same. Who are the influencers that relate to your audience? Are there popular financial bloggers or thought leaders you can collaborate with to create content your audience will find interesting?

American Express did a great job with this by collaborating with Instagram travel influencer @MyEpiphany. With over 64,000 Instagram followers, she created sponsored posts to share her experiences with the company. This collaboration connected the brand with tens of thousands of people who might not have previously considered using them. Not convinced that travel and finance go hand-in-hand, we spoke to Taryn Williams, founder and CEO of TheRight.fit about how to use influencers in finance marketing.

Incorporate Breaking Financial News

You want to be the first port of call for your customers which means you need to stay abreast of what’s new in the financial markets and the industry more broadly. While you don’t want to chase down stories like a reporter, you can find ways to incorporate financial news that’s relevant to your audience.

Visa created a X account specifically for reporting financial news. They regularly tweet information that their audience will find useful. You don’t have to create a separate social media account to incorporate news. Just add it to the platforms you’re already using.

Achieve content ROI

Countless financial content marketing strategies are dull and fail to hit the mark. But if you stray from the pack and discover how to stand out, yours doesn’t have to.

If you need support in developing a financial content strategy that will captivate and convert, that’s our specialty. Learn more about our financial content marketing services and how we can help.

Related articles

• 3 financial content marketing trends to master by 2020
• ROI and the case for content marketing
• How much video content is needed to make a splash on YouTube?

The post Finance marketer’s guide to achieving content ROI appeared first on Financial Marketer.

Google Analytics out of the box

Let’s start at the very beginning, with the installation of the Google Analytics tracking code. There are two ways to do this:

1. Install the tracking script provided directly onto your site or
2. Install it using Google Tag Manager.

We recommend using a tag manager if possible. This is a ‘container’ that is placed onto your site which the analytics tracking code is then added into. That container then allows you to quickly and easily add other potential tags (e.g. Facebook pixel, AdWords tracking) onto your site without the need for additional development work. The Tag Manager also allows you to set up quick, customised Google Analytics tracking such as listening for specific button clicks – again with minimal development required.

Know your metrics

Different platforms use slightly different terminology for key metrics, so it’s important to be clear on what the numbers actually mean. Here’s a breakdown of the most important metrics, as defined by Google Analytics:

• Users
  A user is an individual person on your site, based on a unique browser cookie. A user can visit the site multiple times and look at multiple pages but will only count as a single user. As the user is based on a cookie, if they visit on two different devices, they will count as two different users. Google Analytics also has a more advanced User ID feature that will allow you to track across devices based on Chrome logins.
• Sessions
  A session is a single visit to your site, which times out as default after 30 minutes of inactivity. If a person is inactive on your site for more than 30 minutes and then performs another action, this will count as a new session. A session can include multiple pageviews or interactions with the site.
• Pageviews
  A pageview – as defined by Google – is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a user clicks reload after reaching the page, this is counted as an additional pageview. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second pageview is recorded as well. This metric is often used to review the most popular content on your site.
• Unique pageviews
  A unique pageview – also defined by Google – aggregates pageviews that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique pageview represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.
• Bounce rate
  In Google Analytics, a bounce is calculated specifically as a session that triggers only a single request to the Analytics server, e.g. when a user opens a single page on your site and then exits without triggering any other requests to the Analytics server during that session.
• Make it custom
  A simple but often overlooked part of the Google Analytics toolbox is its reporting. The reports as seen in the Google Analytics dashboard are only the tip of the iceberg, and often only provide a glimpse of what you would like to see. The Custom Reports section may seem intimidating to begin with, but once you’ve mastered the basic building blocks there’s no limit to the useful insights you can uncover. Custom reports allow you to compare and measure metrics in any way you choose, rather than limiting you to the pre-made dashboards automatically provided.

The Custom Reports section may seem intimidating to begin with, but once you’ve mastered the basic building blocks there’s no limit to the useful insights you can uncover.

To make the most of your custom reports ensure you’re tagging any traffic sources that aren’t automatically recognised by Google Analytics or that you wish to provide more details for, such as your email marketing or any paid advertising activity. The Campaign URL Builder is a useful tool to ensure you create correct campaign parameters for this purpose.

Don’t get tripped up

Google Analytics is only as useful as the data it collects, and the way it collects some of this data is defined by you. A couple of areas that often trip up analytics users are:

• Filters
  Don’t forget to filter out your own IP address(es) in order to ensure you don’t count your own visits when reviewing your traffic stats.
• Naming conformity
  Google Analytics will see two pages/campaigns/tags that are labelled even slightly differently as two entirely different entities. For example, if you use both lowercase and Title Case when naming your campaigns in the campaign builder. Pick a single naming convention and stick to that across the site to avoid getting tripped up.

The power that comes from understanding how your audience is interacting with your website content is immeasurable. Start with the basics, learn vital information from your data and optimise from there.

Related articles

• 5 ways finance brands should re-think Google advertising
• How Adobe Experience Manager can help finance brands
• Wikipedia for finance brands make your page an asset

The post A finance marketer’s cheat sheet to Google Analytics appeared first on Financial Marketer.

While it might seem all well and good to have a cheap click and a high CTR, you need to consider what’s happening to these users once they’ve clicked and left the social platform to engage with your content? Are they the correct audience and therefore sticking around to engage with, your content? Or, are they outside your target audience, barely hanging around long enough to glance at your page? To really understand what’s driving the success of your content campaigns on social media you need to arm yourself with the right data and insights. Here’s how to set your finance brand up to do just that.

Website engagement for content campaigns

To measure the success of a content campaign on social media you need to consider and track website engagement, which initially will require some work to set up. There are a number of ways to do this, but the simplest and most effective way is to use Google Analytics in conjunction with your chosen social platforms, be it Facebook, X, LinkedIn or Instagram.

This includes setting up a variety of Google Analytics goals and events to track, including:

• Page view duration
• Page scroll rate
• Video plays to 50%
• Clicks on Contact Us or product pages
• Pages per session 3+
• Conversion (purchase or form completion)

This alone will help you to establish a good understanding of how users are engaging with your website. But you can take it a step further…

UTM codes

Tagging all your content with UTM codes is an essential step in measuring the success of your social campaigns. A UTM code is a simple code that you can attach to a custom URL in order to track a source, medium, and campaign name. It will allow Google Analytics to tell you where website visitors came from and the specific campaigns that got them there.

By including targeting details in your campaign name, you will be able to track the success of that targeting and the effectiveness of every single campaign line, attributing a cost value to each website engagement metric. Armed with this data, you will then be able to change tact where necessary to achieve the best possible results.

UTM codes should be added at the end of every ad. There are multiple UTM Code builders available for free on the internet, including this useful template.

A UTM code allows Google Analytics to tell you where website visitors came from and the specific campaigns that got them to your site.

Attribution

Along with tagging, it’s best practice to run multiple campaign lines at once, promoting the same content with variations on targeting. And because all ads have appropriate UTM codes, you will be able to attribute the best Goal Conversion Rate and Cost per Goal Completion to various source, medium and campaign names. You can access this in Acquisition in Google Analytics.

Optimising your content

Once you have goal data and platform spend per campaign line you can attribute a cost per goal completion for each campaign line. This will give you an idea of how well your money is being spent, optimising your content where you identify inefficiencies.

Collating data and insights

Tools such as Funnel IO allow you to collate multiple data sources into dashboards, making it easier to track, review and act on performance insights.

Not enough to simply measure the success of your social campaigns, you need to be responding to these insights and optimising your approach in real-time to achieve the best results.

Still struggling to argue the case for content? Here’s how to prove to the c-suite that it’s worth the investment.

And to extend the reach of your social content, familiarise yourself with the 17 reasons why people share on social.

The post Measuring the success of content-led social media campaigns appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The amount of big data available to financial institutions has grown exponentially in the past 15 years, with the average person leaving a staggering trail of digital data daily. To put this into perspective, the four biggest online storage services are estimated to warehouse a combined one million terabytes.  If you aren’t clear on exactly what Big Data is, start here. 

Using data to market more accurately

Mathematical modelling has long been used as a tool for defining and growing customer market share. For example, local consumer preferences can be predictive of usage, to the extent that in the US, companies such as StreetLight deploy mobile and GPS-based data to help banks choose retail branch locations. Equally, by drawing on data collected via commercial loans, merchant services, brokering and insurance, banks can build pools of information to inform their future marketing decisions. Every finance product or service enables a detailed dip into each individual customer’s personal or business life, opening up opportunities for more targeted consumer engagement ‒ and also to connect audiences to additional services or potential partners.

Insurance companies also are visibly harnessing big data analysis to not only personalise products and services according to drivers’ records and habits but also to influence R&D, pricing, distribution and claims processing. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Hyundai Marine & Fire Insurance Company in the US lowered its fraud rate by 20% by adopting a security system that applies predictive modelling to detect risks in customer claims.

Chase Bank in the US tailors offers based on what it knows about customers’ wealth, family size, recent spending and borrowing patterns. This takes the form of just-in-time marketing messages designed to be of specific interest to the customer. “If someone is buying a lot of things at the home-improvement store… maybe we should call them up and ask if they need a home-equity line,” says Bob Hedges, a partner at consulting firm A. T. Kearney.

According to an A. T. Kearney report, China CITIC Bank increased the volume of transactions in some areas by as much as 300% after tracking customer comments on social media and then using this data to provide tailored recommendations and special offers via the same platforms.

In addition to facilitating more informed decision-making, partnerships with information-rich service providers such as telcos enable precision. For example, the report says, Japan’s largest non-mutual private insurance group Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co teamed up with mobile communications company NTT DOCOMO to launch a novel joint insurance product: as the telco’s users arrive at a golf course they receive a message offering injury and damages cover on the day’s game, along with a sweetener ‒ for an additional 300 yen (AUD3.35) payment, if they hit a hole in one they receive JPY300,000 for entertaining their match mates.

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Where to draw the line with data

Does this degree of scrutiny smack of Big Brother? “There’s that balance,” says Melissa Stevens, US bank Fifth Third’s chief digital officer. “You want to show that you’re utilising and embracing new technologies, but you also don’t want to freak people out.”

You want to show that you’re utilising and embracing new technologies, but you also don’t want to freak people out.

In addition to traditional finance brands employing innovative uses of big data technology, new players are using its potential to enter the finance sector. Internet company Ali Finance has leveraged its parent sales giant Alibaba’s e-commerce platform to forge inroads into areas such as third-party mobile and online payments, online banking and lending, money market trading and cloud transactions for major online traders in China, including Tmall, Taobao stores and their service providers. As its operations expand, the flow of information from one function to another increases with the customer base, along with predictability, precision and ‒ apparently ‒ customer stickiness.

In the same way that finance brands are using data analysis to tailor their products, so too should they be using this data to deliver content tailored to the customers’ needs and designed to support customers at each stage of their purchase journey.

Big data analysis is proving such an effective tool for customer engagement that if finance brands don’t move decisively to harness its business growth potential, other operators ‒ like Alibaba ‒ certainly will.

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The post Big data: should finance brands toe the line? appeared first on Financial Marketer.

It’s been here all along

Finance companies, particularly those with quant teams and a heavy investment focus, have long been data pioneers whether they realise it or not. The analytics involved in day-to-day assessment and strategy already drive content efforts. Companies now increasingly employ data scientists to take that raw traditional data, discern patterns and draw further insights to predict what content will work best in a particular scenario.

Heads or tails?

The best definition of data science is from GE Digital: “Data science is the art of looking at data and applying scientific principles to figure out how to make heads or tails of that data.” And data is in overabundance. Geolocation technology tells you where customers live and purchase history can predict future shopping. A data scientist will take this information and tease out insights to engage and entice customers.

Brands use data science to develop new products and services. Consider LinkedIn’s ‘People You May Know’ feature, iTunes’ suggestions that predict what films or songs you’d like based on your buying history. Facebook is brilliant at analysing what you’ve liked, shared, and responded to – and giving you more of it (at the possible peril of users living an online echo chamber). Of course, Wall Street, and political prognosticators, through advanced algorithmic trading and polling, rely on data science for their very existence.

Companies now increasingly employ data scientists to take that raw traditional data, discern patterns and draw further insights to predict what content will work best in a particular scenario

Data science in finance

The onslaught of big data in the financial sector promises consistent new avenues to break down and benefit from. New insights and corresponding application can revolutionise user experience: from mobile app interactions to social media shares, market feeds, mock-ups, livestream simulations, and much more.

Streaming analytics is a key development the financial industry should leverage. This lets you manage and monitor performance and customer experience inside of streaming data by way of real-time query alerts. For example, setting an alert each time users spend more than two minutes on a transaction or receiving an alert if an IP address tries to sign in incorrectly more than five times. In this way, financial institutions are able to track and exploit opportunities, while targeting trust concerns such as possible fraud or malfeasance. Streaming analytics is the future of data science.

The crystal ball

By cannily ascertaining what content will work for (and expand) their client base, strategies become more targeted. Predictive analytics combine content data with powerful statistical models. Finance companies can work out the factors that best help sales or engagement. For example, what age demographic most responds to a marketing post; what is the most used (or most avoided) tool on an app; what exactly has people clicking to sign up most of the time? Data science streamlines the experience – and can make assumptions and adjustments without the need for a costly, old school focus group or customer questionnaire.

Watch this space.

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Ask any content marketer and they’ll tell you content has great potential to attract, convert and retain customers. While more organisations than ever are adopting content as part of their overall marketing strategy, many traditional marketing executives are still wondering if it’s worth the investment. And, to be fair, someone has to front up and answer for where the money goes and if was worth it.

Understanding ROI

In the past, traditional marketers used media circulation and reach to justify their budgets. As technology has become more sophisticated, marketers have been offered new opportunities that drive a more complex way of looking at user engagement and conversions. As Darren Woolley, Global CEO at TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultants, explains, “Digital technology allowed us to have greater insights into consumer behaviour and therefore be better able to engage with them to achieve the desired results.”

“With well-defined goals, brands can better measure the real value of content”

The problem with content marketing and one of the reasons content fails to deliver ROI, Woolley says, is that, “People are often measuring the wrong things. They’re not going deep enough to measure the metrics that count and instead settle for the ones that may look good but are largely meaningless.”

Too often, he adds, marketers are looking at metrics such as social media likes or unique page views, which are increasingly considered superficial and not a true indicator of success. Instead, Woolley believes, “The starting point is the strategy. A good strategy is based on achieving specific and measurable objectives. “With well-defined goals, brands can better measure the real value of content and whether or not it generates leads and eventually conversions.”

Building a case

To make a strong business case for content marketing, author Michael Brenner suggests finding out the cost of producing content, how it will be utilised and how it is expected to perform. Brands should then compare these components against the company’s average marketing ROI to determine if their efforts are worthwhile. “To answer the content marketing ROI question for your business,” he says, “you need to build a solid case based on a deep understanding of your business,” Brenner says in a Content Marketing Institute article.

Improving ROI

Data collected during the building of a business case is extremely valuable for marketers, who can then use it to implement changes to create better quality content that engages the right audience. An easy way to do so is to experiment with calls to action or content types. Perhaps your customers are more inclined to follow through to a product page on your website from a blog post. Or maybe more are subscribing to your email list after watching a video. Whatever you choose to do, it should be delivered against the objectives you set in your initial strategy so as to not lose sight of what you are trying to achieve as a brand.

Admittedly, content marketing ROI is a hot topic right now. Amid the sea of content, it’s unlikely all brands will deliver the viral campaigns so many executives are desperately hoping for. But content marketing can pay if assessed against the right metrics. Or as Woolley puts it, “It’s what people do with content that counts.”

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