Harnessing the power of data

The ability to collect, analyse, and interpret massive volumes of audience insights is at the heart of data-driven creative. As financial marketers, you now have unprecedented access to analytics ranging from user behaviour and preferences, to industry trends and competitor insights. Intelligently leveraging these insights can result in highly personalised and relevant creative campaigns that resonate profoundly with your finance brand’s target demographic.

In today’s climate there is now a growing importance for creativity to produce stellar results alongside other critical drivers like ad placement choices and audience targeting.

A small guide to utilising data

Speaking to The Dubs Head of Social Media, Tara Cimino, she explains, “It’s important for finance brands to strike a balance between creativity and compliance, ensuring creative strategies comply with relevant regulations and ethical guidelines.”

She continues, “Finance brands can utilise creativity in various ways to stand out from the competition by developing a unique brand identity and voice, customer engagement, and interaction that builds an emotional connection.”

1. Understanding audience behaviour

The capacity to obtain deep insights into audience behaviour is one of the most significant benefits of data-driven marketing. Utilising analytics to detect patterns, preferences, and pain points allows you to create innovative content that precisely addresses the demands of your target audience.

2. Scalable personalisation

Building audience trust is critical. Data-driven creativity enables your finance brand to develop personalised experiences at scale, ensuring every audience feels appreciated and understood. Your finance brand can tailor personalised communications around customer demographics, previous interactions, and financial habits. This personal touch has the potential to significantly enhance brand loyalty and drive conversion rates.

3. A/B testing to improve performance

For improved success, data-driven creative should be dynamic and constantly optimised. A/B testing can be used to identify which creative aspects, including ad images, copy, and call-to-actions, are most effective in driving clicks and conversions.

A/B testing can lead to significant insights that drive future creative decisions as platform algorithms become more competent at understanding customer behaviour. “A/B testing creative across different targeting options is best practice to ensure content that’s resonating most for each audience group is being optimised towards,” says Cimino.

4. Data-driven storytelling

Incorporating statistics into creative storytelling can help your finance brands’ messaging gain traction and authority. Data can provide greater depth to your content, whether it’s emphasising great financial achievements or demonstrating the impact of your services on customers’ lives.

As Cimino shares, “Data-driven insights provide informative and engaging content for finance brands to distribute. Including stats in social media creative drives higher engagement and is an effective way to drive traffic onsite.”

Data is the cornerstone for creating interesting and powerful creative assets, whether it’s designing eye-catching images and infographics or writing appealing ad content.

“Infographics are a great way to utilise existing data and showcase it in a visual and engaging way that’s perfect for use on social media.” She adds, “Whitepapers and research already undertaken by finance brands will be full of statistics and figures that can be repurposed into moving animations or graphics to then entice users to click through.”

Stay ahead of the game

Increasing personalisation strategies can assist your finance brand to remain competitive and relevant as digital marketing platforms deliver greater data and control. Data is becoming an invaluable commodity to delivering exceptional and targeted content. Financial marketers can unleash the potential of data-driven creative to produce remarkable results by studying audience behaviour, personalising ads, A/B testing, and using data-backed storytelling.

Utilising data to enhance your creative strategy is critical to your future success. Cimino explains, “Investing in a creative strategy allows finance brands to differentiate themselves from their peers. Innovation is at the core of everything we do for all our clients.”

Using data to drive creativity will be the critical differentiator for any finance brand trying to stand out, develop meaningful connections with their audience, and generate significant growth in a highly competitive industry.

The post How to use data to drive your creative 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.

Given this intent, website page session times for organic search traffic are generally longer than other sources of traffic (including advertising, social traffic, email traffic and referral traffic), making them the exact type of website visitor brands are hoping to attract – one that’s interested in and engaged with their content and therefore their brand.

However, ranking well on search engines is no easy task. It requires strategic planning and research, creative content execution as well as a vigilant approach to maintaining high technical website standards. This all takes time, money and expertise.

When you’ve done all that hard work and finally managed to get good and consistent page one search results, it’s heartbreaking to see that traffic suddenly drop off or even slowly decline over time.

Here’s what to do when your organic search traffic takes a hit.

Triaging spikes and trends in organic search traffic

When analysing any data there are really just two things we’re looking for – ‘spikes’ and ‘trends’ – and a drop in organic search traffic can be either.

Firstly, to diagnose a drop we need tools to actually see what’s happening. Google Analytics and Google Search Console (which used to be called Google Webmaster tools) allow us to see in a myriad of ways how traffic is arriving, behaving and exiting a website. Another very powerful tool is the SEMRush platform which can slice and dice website traffic data in a number of ways and provides deep insights into the technical health of a website as well as content performance (there are other platforms similar to SEMRush as well such as Ahrefs, Moz and Alexa). 

If a sudden drop in traffic occurs it’s not necessary to go into full panic mode quite yet. Small or moderate spikes in organic search traffic are quite common and will in most cases return to normal in a short period of time. There are many factors determining SEO rankings which makes it difficult to pin down the exact cause of a temporary drop. The recommended action when a sharp decline is first detected is to wait a few days or even a week or so to see if it corrects itself. At this stage there’s no point in pulling everything apart and putting resources into action unnecessarily.

However, when the traffic graph looks like this there’s certainly cause for concern.

Barring some major technical problem on the server itself (e.g the website is down), a major traffic drop like this means either a Google penalty has happened for a number of reasons or there’s been a Google algorithm update the website has ended up on the wrong side of.

This is why having it’s important to have Google Search console set up as this is where Google will send a notification if the website has incurred a penalty. 

How to avoid Google penalties

Google penalties come in a range of guises and some of these include:

• Cloaking redirects
• Cloaking images
• Hidden text 
• Keyword stuffing
• Spammy structured markup
• Unnatural links to and from your site 
• Hacked site

Most of these penalties will only apply if the website has been employing some dubious if not outright nefarious means to rig the website for attracting traffic. For most brands this shouldn’t be an issue, but if you’re employing 3rd parties who claim they can dramatically increase your website traffic make sure they’re a reputable business so you don’t fall afoul of one of these penalties. If you do, Google will require you to explain the cause of the problem, resolve it and put in a request for reconsideration – for a business that relies on organic search traffic this is a disaster.

The impact of Google algorithm updates

Google frequently updates the search algorithms that determine how websites and content are ranked. While some of these updates are incremental and go unnoticed, some are major updates that can have serious impacts on your organic search traffic. It’s important to keep up to date with upcoming major updates and be prepared in advance of major changes so you can take action with your website content BEFORE not AFTER the major algorithm changes have taken place. 

A good example of this was in July 2019 when ‘mobile-first indexing’ was introduced as a Google algorithm update. This was a major change and caught a lot of brands napping as most websites up until this point were SEO optimised for desktop and may not have even had a mobile-responsive version of the website in place. Those that weren’t prepared saw massive drops in search traffic as a result. And be forewarned now, there’s a big algorithm change coming in May 2021 that will be focused on ‘user experience’.

SEMRush allows you to see when Google updates have happened and understand how organic traffic spikes may be related to them. Knowing which Google algorithm update may have caused a drop in search traffic allows you to then take actions to correct it.

The slow trend down

Even if you adhere to all the best technical Google practices and abide by all the rules you can still find your organic search traffic slowly trending down over time.

Getting great organic search engine rankings isn’t a one-time set-and-forget practice. It needs to be part of everyday business practice and there needs to be a robust content strategy and program in place to support it. If organic search traffic is slowly declining over time this usually means the competition has caught up and is outperforming your website and content.

If you’re confident your technical practices are in place and up to date then the cause of the decline is the website content itself.

This is where a platform such as SEMRush can help by allowing you to deep dive into how your content is performing in terms of its ranking, keywords/phrases being indexed, traffic being driven to the website and how all of that compares to your competitors as well. 

This research provides invaluable insight into the gaps and opportunities that when targeted with quality, relevant content will see the reverse of your traffic decline. 

To find out how your website SEO is performing, use our free SEO website audit tool.

At The Dubs we employ SEO best-practice to ensure your content gets found. Get in touch.

The post How to diagnose a drop in organic search traffic 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.

How does the Internet of Things affect the finance sector?

To put it frankly, as a technology phenomenon that analysts predict could be worth up to $15 billion by 2020, the Internet of Things is simply too big to ignore. The basic principle of the Internet of Things involves using sensors to collect comprehensive real-time data. Data sets can be based on human activity like behaviour, health or fitness, natural events like rainfall or industrial markers like shipment deliveries. It is predicted that of all the sensors used within the Internet of Things, 50% will provide relevant data to the finance sector by 2020.

How are finance brands leveraging the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things is already having an impact on the finance sector, particularly in the areas of insurance and payments.

The Dubs wrote recently about insurance companies leveraging wearable fitness trackers to help determine health or life insurance cover by using real data about policyholders. The trend is continuing as Tesla recently announced a similar set up using data from their cars’ Autopilot setting to adjust policy rates. Other interesting pairings are taking place between car and finance brands. Honda and Visa are working together to develop car-based apps to help simplify payments at places like gas stations.

How should finance brands leverage the Internet of Things?

There are a few key considerations for financial organisations looking to use the Internet of Things.

• Decide what is appropriate for your brand. While the data collected by the Internet of Things opens the door to countless possibilities, getting involved in connectivity doesn’t need to be a huge gesture. For ASB in New Zealand, a series of wireless enabled piggy banks brings the Internet of Things into the home, teaching children the value of money and making handing out pocket money a cashless process.
• Keep it secure. Needless to say, every new connection in the Internet of Things presents a data security vulnerability. If you are going to get involved with connected devices (as an organisation or an individual) then ensure you account for security risks.
• Always add value. The Internet of Things might be trendy, but if you’re going to incorporate it into your business processes, it must add real value to the end user. Consider how you can collect and analyse data to improve or personalise customer experience and make sure your venture into the Internet of Things is meaningful.

Last but not least, think about where your brand sets the boundaries when it comes to tapping into the Internet of Things. Read our article about Black Mirror for a taste of how a connected world can get very strange very quickly…

The post Does the Internet of Things impact finance brands? 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.

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.

Newsroom.ly’s number one purpose is to help content marketers make a big impact through a simplified and universal platform.

As a content marketer, competing for attention online is harder than ever. In a competitive space like financial marketing, where consumer trust can often falter, it can be even more difficult to build a relationship with your audience. It’s one thing to put a content strategy in place, but how do you know if it’s having the desired impact? Is it offering a return on your investment? How do you measure it? As Leon Bombotas explains, these are questions Newsroom.ly seeks to answer, as elegantly and effectively as possible.

What value does Newsroom.ly offer content marketers?

We help content marketers and editors easily measure the impact of their publishing activity and, more importantly, uncover insight that helps them boost page views, time-on-site, conversion and revenue. We do this by applying our proprietary scoring algorithm to determine the impact of the content. We then use a combination of text-mining and data-science to determine the ‘narratives’ that are resonating with audiences and are associated with desired outcomes.

Content is becoming more data driven, and data is becoming more crucial. Do you think this focus on data impacts negatively on the quality of content we’re seeing?

Negative? No. On the whole it will have a positive impact on the quality of content. Absolutely. For example, if we can confidently predict what won’t have a meaningful impact then we can more efficiently allocate resources to creating content what we think will. There will always be a place for publishing untested, unproven and experimental content. The opportunity is to use data and technology and turn success into repeatable success.

Organic reach on Facebook and Google has dropped precipitously over the past few years and will get worse. Both platforms are, essentially, pay to play.

Some of your biggest clients are Australian brands Medibank and MamaMia. How has your platform helped them specifically?

Each in slightly different ways. Brands such as Medibank benefit from having a single measure of success to report to their executive leadership teams. Newsroom.ly allows them to easily measure the performance of content across several platforms and various KPIs, scored and distilled into a single measure of success. Publishers such as MamaMia are able to track impact across categories, rank and compare authors, and by publish date. It’s easy to find content that’s best for new vs returning users, for social or search, for mobile or desktop or any combination thereof. In both cases it’s helping them uncover insight to make decisions that grow their audience, increase attention and drive conversion.

Can you tell us a little about the impact score you’ve devised?

The impact score is a score out of 100 that measures the effectiveness of every piece of content. It’s a single measure of success calculated by an algorithm that takes into consideration a client’s specific goals around Views, Engagement and Conversion. Every client can customise the impact score to reflect their respective content marketing objectives.

Finally, what do you think is the biggest challenge content marketers will face in the next decade?

Achieving reach is increasingly difficult. Organic reach on Facebook and Google has dropped precipitously over the past few years and will get worse. Both platforms are, essentially, pay to play. As competition for attention intensifies, bids to drive click-throughs will continue to increase. For brands this means an increase in customer acquisition costs. Increasing the effectiveness of organically produced content by measuring it and optimising it will eventually offset the need to spend so heavily on traditional methods of customer acquisition.

It’s clear that platforms like Newsroom.ly will have a major role to play in the future of content marketing. With over 130 trillion pages of information on the internet, discerning what’s valuable and what isn’t is a monumental task, but bit by bit marketers can start to build an accurate picture of what their target audience wants to hear, and start relating to them on multiple levels, across multiple platforms.

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The post Newsroom.ly: data and tech for repeatable success appeared first on Financial Marketer.

The financial services industry is ill-prepared for its ongoing digital transformation

Financial services brands continue to lag behind most other industries when it comes to embracing digital. The 2016 Digital Business Global Executive Study and Research Project suggests that the industry is still struggling to embrace its digital transformation. 90% of those surveyed strongly agreed that digital technologies are disrupting the industry but only 46% of respondents believed that their firms are adequately preparing for that disruption. At only a 2% increase on the year before, this suggests too little is being done to bring them up to speed despite awareness of the need.

Spend in digital engagement continues to grow but finance industry is lagging

Digital media remains the key growth driver across global advertising according to a forecast by GroupM, taking $0.72 of each ad dollar, with an expected increase to $0.77 through 2017.

Financial services spent the third largest amount on digital advertising in the US of any industry in 2015, behind retail and automotive according to a report by eMarketer. The expectation is it will stay in 3rd position until at least 2020, with the financial services’ expected growth in spend below the industry average. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) and healthcare and pharma are making up the difference.

Banks need to balance the older generations’ preference for in-person interactions with the younger demographic’s digital fluency

Customer loyalty is key to growth

According to a report published by Accenture Global in July 2015, “customers are buying, but less so from current providers. Globally, 27% of bank customers purchased/subscribed to a new financial product/service over the last six months. However, more and more consumers intend to buy less from their current providers.”

With the influx of new, agile players on the market, today’s customer does not view changing provider as a chore and will switch more frequently if the offer is good. 80% of customers who switched providers stated that it was due to poor service, while 61% of banking customers said they expect to have more online interactions through digital services.

Customers want a better digital experience but brands are slow to pivot

With 67% of millennials using mobile banking compared to only 18% of those aged 60+ (US Federal Reserve study), banks must adapt their business models to this shift in user behaviour. Banks need to balance the older generations’ preference for in-person interactions with the younger demographic’s digital fluency. According to a report by The Financial Brand however, only 37% of organisations have a formal customer experience plan, with technology still mistakenly viewed as a lower priority driver of customer satisfaction.

Social media is a key tool for data-driven marketing

The finance industry has always used data to better understand their customers however the level of information now available is at an all-time high. This does have negative connotations however.

A survey by consultancy EY found that 78% of respondents believed that companies used their data to make more money. However another EY survey found that around half of more digitally savvy customers were happy to share additional personal data in exchange for more favourable offers such as cash benefits, discounts or loyalty rewards. Social media is more than a communications device; it is also a key tool for customer data collection, bridging demographic gaps across age, education, shopping habits etc. Data collection combined with analytics and customer segmentation is crucial to ensure companies are future-proofing their brand’s marketing.

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The post 5 hard truths about financial services and digital marketing appeared first on Financial Marketer.