The ins and outs of paid advertising

As algorithms change and people spend more time online, it pays to get your paid advertising strategy right. Paid advertising is a method of marketing where you pay for an ad to be displayed on relevant online platforms. Known as pay-per-click, paid advertising methods drive traffic to your site.

As Tara Cimino, Head of Social Media at The Dubs, states, “To decide on the most suitable strategy, it’s essential for finance brands to identify a key outcome.” She continues, “This will set out clear KPIs which will impact the content created, the channels used and budgets allocated.”

According to one study, paid advertisements have a 200% ROI. A paid advertising strategy can help you reach beyond your organic following and target new clients. But it has a number of other benefits:

• Increase brand awareness (ads can increase brand awareness by 80%)
• Improve leads
• Drive higher engagement
• Target specific demographics or geographic locations

There are several different types of paid advertising strategies including:

• Social media
• Paid search
• Display ads
• Native ads

Social media advertising

81% of financial marketers have picked up new leads via social media advertising, making it a great paid media marketing strategy. A paid social media strategy can be effective in amplifying your social content, enabling you to reach your target audience and nurture them down the customer acquisition funnel.

Ensuring you create content right for each social platform is where a successful social media strategy gets tricky. Remember to cater the content and ad to the platform and the audience you’re targeting.

Pros and cons
Social media advertising is a great way to improve brand performance online and reach beyond your organic following. With over 4.9 billion people in the world owning a social media account, it pays to have your brand’s ads visible to them.

Tara explains, “There are many pros to paid advertising, such as enhancing your organic following, generating new leads and scaling to as many markets as possible.”

However, while social media advertising is an effective marketing tactic, there are some areas of concern. If your target audience isn’t on social media or your campaign doesn’t resonate with them it can be a waste of time.

“On the other hand, if the content isn’t resonating with your target audiences or your strategy isn’t well produced or delivered, it could be costly for the business, with low ROI,” shares Tara.

Paid search advertising

Paid search advertising (AKA search engine marketing), is when you pay to have your ad show up on search engine results whether that’s Google, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. It’s one of the most common types of paid advertising strategies and one of the simplest to set up.

While SEO remains critical to any financial marketing strategy, paid search advertising can be beneficial to gaining those necessary clicks. PPC has been seen to generate twice the number of visitors compared to SEO.

Pros and cons
The best aspect of paid search advertising is you can effectively target the right audiences. A great example of this is the ability to remarket your site and brand to people who have previously visited your website, helping to nurture leads and improve brand awareness.

Another aspect is you always are one of the first options in search engine rankings. This can improve your leads and gain traffic to your website. In addition, paid search advertising offers easy analytics so you can track its effectiveness and make the necessary adjustments.

Paid search advertising isn’t perfect, however, and there are drawbacks to consider. The lack of visual accompaniments means your ad can sometimes not be seen of generate the same brand awareness or impact. Further, they can be costly and you have to pay each time a user clicks your ad.

Display ads

Display ads combine text and images that link to a URL where users can find out more information about your finance brand and services. While text with images is the usual go-to for display ads, they can also feature moving images and videos (also known as rich media ads). The most common form of display ads is banner ads.

Pros and cons
Display advertising can ensure your finance brand gets noticed and enable you to connect with prospective clients. It offers precise targeting, reaching the right audience based on demographics and interests.

Further, it increases brand visibility and awareness by appearing on relevant platforms. In addition, it also offers creative flexibility to your finance brand enabling you to showcase your unique value propositions.

Display advertising for finance brands has a couple of caveats to consider. Ad fatigue and accidental clicks are potential challenges, but with engaging creatives and clear visuals, these can be overcome. Ad blockers can also pose some hurdles.

Native ads

When done well, you may not even notice when you’ve seen a native ad. Native ads are designed to blend into the content they are surrounded by. So, if this is on a social platform, they will pose as a regular post while continuing to promote users to click and follow through to your site.

The aim of a native ad is to look organic helping to make it look more authentic and grab the attention of users.

Pros and cons
One of the strongest aspects of native advertising is that by their nature, native ads aren’t intrusive but they can still capture your audience’s attention. Their visual nature and targeted content also enable greater click through rates and audience impact.
“Native advertising can drive better campaign performance when compared with other ad formats, helping drive conversions,” Tara explains. “Native ads can also be contextually targeted towards target audiences, meaning there is a higher chance of interactions and engagement.”

One drawback is it can be difficult to monitor and evaluate their effectiveness. Tara notes, “However, measuring performance can be complex if your campaign goals and audiences are not considered properly from the start.”

The bottom line of paid advertising

In a study by MailChimp, it was identified digital advertising would soon make up 75% of all media spending by 2025. As digital advertising is increasing in importance it’s critical your finance brand understands how best to measure if it’s working.

Tara shares, “To optimise and measure your paid media strategy, you need to consistently analyse your social and website metrics.” She goes on, “Look past platform metrics such as likes, but identify how your media strategy influences web conversion rates to understand what is successful about your strategy and what isn’t.”

Just like with any marketing strategy, it requires constant monitoring to ensure it’s optimised for your KPIs and targets.

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Where to begin

Whether you’re media planning for a large-scale always-on campaign or a small, one-off campaign, your finance brand should start by identifying your goals and target audience. These two steps are critical to ensure you don’t lose sight of exactly what you want to achieve.

“Start by identifying target audiences, and how the message will resonate with those audiences based on demographics,” Sadiye says.

“Use this information to consider how to encourage audiences to engage with the brand. Establish clear goals and key objectives that are realistic to ensure the goals are achievable and within reach.”

How to create a media plan from scratch

Media planning consists of building an efficient marketing strategy that is regularly evaluated and adjusted to ensure it’s optimised to achieve your finance brand’s targets. It’s all about finding the best combination of brand messaging and media channels to achieve your desired objectives.

At the minutiae, a media plan consists of identifying the right message, at the right time, and on the right channel and effective targeting methods that will be most effective in nurturing and converting leads. Combining a variety of media types – earned media, owned media and paid media.

“Once a finance brand has defined its objectives and has a clear idea of target audience, it’s time to determine the target audiences and social platforms, consider content frequency and reach, and analyse and optimise performance throughout the campaign duration,” Sadiye says.

It’s important financial marketers understand that a media plan isn’t a hard and fast document that can’t be altered. Instead, a media plan is designed to be upended. If a specific message, channel or even targeting avenue isn’t performing well, it should be optimised in real time.

“Ultimately, creating a media plan for finance brands consists of formulating a strategy, evaluating its effectiveness and adjusting the execution of the strategy,” shares Sadiye.

The benefits for financial marketers

There are numerous benefits to having and implementing an effective media plan. Ultimately, by creating a media plan your finance brand’s marketing strategy will be more effective in generating leads, nurturing potential clients and pushing them through the acquisition funnel. It can also help you broaden your organic reach and ensure you’re consistently improving brand awareness and achieving key performance metrics.

Sadiye notes, “Benefits of having a media plan for finance brands include improving efficiency, analysis and optimisation, and improved ROI.”

How can financial marketers improve their media plan?

As discussed, a core component of any successful media plan is ensuring your finance brand consistently evaluates it to maximise your success.

Sadiye shares some things to consider when you’re looking to improve your media plan: “Think about broadening and defining the audiences and demographics that are being targeted, and keep testing these audiences to ensure the reach is being utilised.”

She adds, “Consider redefining budget allocation based on performance throughout the campaign duration.”

Ultimately, by failing to plan you are preparing to fail.

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What are the iOS updates?

Apple’s iOS updates have significantly impacted data sharing by enabling users greater control of their privacy settings and data. These changes to privacy settings and data sharing limit your finance brand’s ability to reach and engage prospective clients on both mobile devices and the web. Owing to this, as a financial marketer, you may have already noticed a decrease in ad performance and personalisation. This is particularly true for email and social media marketing campaigns.

Andrew Frith, Research and Social Media Director at The Dubs explains, “With the loss of granular detail in the user data these changes created, it meant that the usual reliance on specific analytics criteria to help shape marketing and advertising strategies had to be re-considered.”

For email marketing, Apple has placed numerous roadblocks to prevent marketers from accessing important data such as:

• Email open rates
• Ability to track online activity and location
• Finding a user’s email address

“Certainly email campaigns have been affected. Apple Mail and Apple mobile devices make up over 50% of the global email provider market share,” shares Andrew. “With the loss of the ability to access granular user data, it becomes more problematic to segment email campaigns based on important criteria such as location-based targeting, and gender/age segmentation and reduces the ability to A/B test things such as subject lines for marketing emails, and importantly the ability to understand email open rates which have always been an important KPI for email campaigns.”

Social media marketing has also been affected by the increase in privacy settings. Andrew states. “Likewise, social media campaigns on platforms like Meta and X have been more difficult to target specific target audiences for the same reasons.”

He adds, “Additionally, common targeting strategies on social media campaigns such as building remarketing and lookalike audiences become more unreliable when the user data is more restrictive.”

How does this affect B2C and B2B marketers differently?

The increase in privacy changes affects B2C and B2B marketers differently and each financial marketer should adjust their strategies accordingly.

“There is a distinction here between financial marketers operating B2C campaigns versus B2B,” explains Andrew. “B2C campaigns are more heavily reliant on mobile users as a target audience and so the iOS 15 and 16 privacy changes impact them to a greater extent. However, B2B audiences are still more desktop-based in their computer usage and so they are not as impacted as much.”

For B2C marketers it’s especially important to understand what the changes mean for them. So, how can financial marketers prepare and adjust their marketing strategies?

How can financial marketers adjust?

Andrew shares what he recommends financial marketers do to limit the impact of these iOS updates on social media campaigns.

He continues, “For financial marketers using a platform like LinkedIn offers the ability to target audiences by a rich dataset of on-platform user profile criteria which is not affected by the iOS 15 and 16 changes.”

“On social channels, financial marketers, especially B2B marketers can restrict their targeting to desktop only and avoid the user-data analytics problems caused by ios 15 and 16,” shares Andrew.

“Also, relying more on first-party data collected through other owned marketing channels that can be then used on social channels to create matched audiences that can be reliably communicated to is another option financial marketers should be looking at.” He adds, “Building first-party databases should always be a conversion goal for effective marketing campaigns.”

To limit the impact these iOS updates will have on email marketing campaigns there are also several things financial marketers can do to adjust their strategies for success. “For email marketers, prioritising different KPIs is a good way to lessen the impact of the iOS 15 and 16 changes.” He continues, “KPIs like click through rates (CTR) and click tracking is a good way to track engagement without relying on open rate data.”

To gauge the success of email campaigns Andrew suggests that “Website traffic analytics can be used to determine email traffic visits to important campaign landing pages or content destinations.”

In addition, he shares, “Unsubscribe rates is also another KPI that financial email marketers can still use to gauge the impact of specific content. High unsubscribe rates indicate a review of content might be in order whilst low unsubscribe rates indicate that the email content is hitting the mark.”

Final advice about the iOS updates

At the end of the day, these iOS updates were inevitable. Data breaches are almost a daily news occurrence and users have been crying out for greater control over their personal data for a while. In good news, these updates don’t spell the end for marketing campaigns entirely.

Andrew shares some final advice for financial marketers, “iOS 15 and 16 changes and other major internet policy changes like GDPR are here to stay and will be constantly evolving.” He continues, “Financial marketers need to be in for the long haul, keeping up with the latest technology changes and data policy changes.”

“Likewise, marketing and advertising strategies will always be constantly evolving and so financial marketers will need to stay on top of their game in responding to changes.” Andrews notes, “For every new obstacle in implementing effective communication campaigns, there are always new opportunities to explore.”

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Benefits of each media strategy and when to use them

A paid, earned and owned media strategy balances three key marketing objectives: brand awareness, lead generation, and client acquisition and retention. Each strategy works together to ensure your finance brand has a winning shot at not only nurturing and converting clients but also retaining them.

Tara Cimino, Social Media Strategist at The Dubs, notes, “The benefits are endless when it comes to finance brands using paid, earned and owned media.” She explains, “Being seen as a thought leader in the industry will strengthen existing relationships and create new ones, reaching new audiences such as Gen Z, building brand awareness and developing community trust. All of these are key elements to building a social media presence as a finance brand.”

But what are the differences between the three?

• Paid media strategy – This is a marketing strategy that involves advertising your finance brand via paid placements, such as pay-per-click (PPC) or social media advertising. The benefits of a paid media strategy is that it can be scaled quickly and easily.
• Earned media strategy – This is a marketing strategy that involves gaining engagement or promotion through organic means. The benefits of an earned media strategy are that it continues to improve brand awareness, gain leads and convert clients even when your paid media strategy is over.
• Owned media strategy – This is a marketing strategy that involves any content that’s created and distributed via channels your finance brand owns, like social media or your blog. The benefits of an owned media strategy is that your finance brand has full control over the content that’s produced, helping you to create tailored messages that are targeted at specific audiences. In the same way, an owned media strategy lets you respond to events as they happen, helping your content remain timely and useful.

How to get it right

Identifying both your short-term and long-term objectives is critical to finding the right balance. Ensuring you find an equilibrium between long-term brand building and short-term activation will enable your finance brand to create a sustainable marketing strategy that’s successful in generating, nurturing and converting leads. Overall, paid media strategies are overall more effective when supported by both owned and earned marketing campaigns.

“Finance brands can strike a balance between paid, earned and owned media by utilising all areas equally over a period of time.” asserts Tara. “Paid media will reach a large audience quickly, encouraging brand awareness on a larger scale. Earned media comes from recommendations, building credibility and trust which can help reach multiple potential customers. Finally, owned media allows brands to directly control their branding and messaging.”

How to measure the effectiveness of your media strategy

An important part of any marketing strategy is ensuring you are measuring it correctly to identify what’s working and what’s not. There are several things your finance brand can implement and analyse to understand if you’ve achieved a good balance between all three media strategies.

As Tara says, “Measurement of granular data and KPIs, analysis and goal attribution are key to achieving an ideal balance for finance brands.”

Paid media can retarget audiences, it’s easy to measure, and when used in conjunction with earned and owned media, can be more successful.”

Overall, striking the right balance between all three strategies can be difficult, but once achieved can make a huge difference in your overall marketing success.

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Ads retargeting: your finance brand’s secret weapon

Targeted and specific, ads retargeting is overall a successful acquisition strategy for finance brands when executed right. In fact, retargeted ads have 10x higher conversion rates than display ads. This is because retargeted ads are much better at identifying consumers that have buying intent from the get-go.

Other reasons why ads retargeting should be a part of your overall financial marketing strategy include:

• 91% of marketers who have used retargeting have found it to perform the same as or better than search, email, or other display ads.
• The click-through rate (CTR) of a retargeted ad is 10x higher than the CTR of a typical display ad.
• 3 out of 5 online viewers notice and consider ads showing products they viewed from another page.
• Website visitors who are retargeted are 43% more likely to be converted.
• 25% of online viewers enjoy seeing retargeted ads.

How your finance brand can nail retargeting

Nailing ads retargeting is all about thinking strategically about the message that is served to users who have visited your website.

Three tips for finance brands to help nail ad retargeting:

• Be relevant – Ensure your advertising material is targeted to your audience and provides helpful information that’s tailored to their needs.
• Segment your audience – Select a specific market segment that aligns with your finance brand’s strategic marketing goals, whether that be acquisition or brand awareness.
• Employ personalisation strategies – Make sure your ads are tied to what the user was browsing on your site, such as a specific product or piece of content. For instance, if a user visits the ESG page on your website, you could serve ESG-related research and insights articles from your content hub or research centre.

How iOS 14.5 has changed ads retargeting strategies

Apple’s newest version of iOS has altered retargeting strategies significantly. This new update has introduced mandatory permission users have to grant to apps and websites to use their personal data. Whereas previously, apps and websites could access this personal data much easier. Owing to these changes, the size of your retargeting audience may decrease and you’ll no longer be able to target users who have denied personal data access via their iOS device.

What changes do you need to make to your finance brand’s ads retargeting strategy:

• Reduce your retargeting of mobile users by device and operating type
• Employ geotargeted advertising strategies
• Utilise other retargeting strategies that don’t rely on device identification such as email retargeting

At the end of the day, ads retargeting is a great method of improving brand awareness and converting clients. By delivering relevant and personalised ads after a client has viewed your site or social media, you are able to effectively nurture leads.

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The value of social media advertising

Social media advertising is one area of a paid media strategy that can reap great rewards for finance brands looking to build greater brand awareness and generate new leads. A paid media strategy is particularly beneficial as it enables your finance brand to reach beyond its organic following.

Paid media buying is effective in amplifying your social content, enabling you to reach your target audience and nurture them down the customer acquisition funnel. At the end of the day, it can be difficult to be found organically on social platforms. This is why social media advertising can be your saving grace and a great tool in your overall financial marketing content strategy.

The dos and don’ts of social media advertising

While advertising is important to include in your overall content strategy, it can be difficult to get right. To truly nail your advertising content, you need to have an in-depth understanding of who your target audience is and what they will respond to. Additionally, you also need to understand the platform you’re advertising on and the types and styles of content that capture the user’s attention.

Here are three tips to help your finance brand nail its social media advertising content:

• Show a human face – Social media is primarily designed for people to connect with one another – whether that’s strangers, friends or family. By creating content that’s personable and relatable, you can begin forming an authentic relationship with your target clients.
• Tailor content to the platform – Each social media platform is different in regard to demographics, style of content and trends. Understanding what type of content performs best on each platform will help you create a tailored content program, that engages users from the beginning.
• Cater to your target audience – Different types of people respond to different types of content. Understanding what your target audience responds to will enable your finance brand to make a real impact and capture an interested audience.

How to get it right and convert leads

Social media advertising doesn’t stop at creating engaging content. Paid media strategies are effective in gaining a new audience and building brand awareness, but if your content strategy and website aren’t designed to nurture leads and convert clients it will all be pointless.

Optimising your website and content strategy to push clients through the customer acquisition funnel is vital to a successful advertising strategy. Adopting an always-on content strategy, ensuring your website has a great CX design and implementing personalisation strategies are all necessary to convert leads.

Don’t let your social media advertising go to waste, ensure your overall financial marketing strategy is aligned to nurturing and converting clients.

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The ins and outs of digital advertising

For finance brands, digital search advertising has an average click-through rate (CTR) of 5.07% making it an important aspect of any Singapore finance marketer’s overall strategy. However, while digital advertising is important it must be accompanied by a strong content marketing strategy.

Digital advertising needs to be supported by content marketing

Singapore finance marketers should accompany their digital ads with an always-on content program. Digital advertising alone isn’t enough to convert clients. While it’s a helpful strategy to generate leads and foster brand awareness, your finance brand needs to create meaningful relationships with potential clients.

Creating a content marketing strategy that’s tailored to your target audience, provides value and offers information clients need will help you push leads downs the acquisition funnel. Content marketing works for you, even after digital ad spending is complete. This is why it’s so important so your leads don’t go to waste.

But how can Singapore finance marketers nail digital ads?

Tips and tricks for Singapore finance marketers

Digital advertising is about capturing the attention of audiences quickly and incentivising them to click through to our website. Here are a few tips and tricks to help you get it right:

• Personalisation – With 72% of consumers saying they only engage with personalised messaging, your finance brand should create tailored ads for your target audience.
• Target specific market segments – Ensure your digital ads are targeted and caters to what consumers want to see.
• Create connections with the audience – Forming an emotional connection with your audience can foster brand loyalty, trust and awareness. In fact, customers who have an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will likely recommend the company at a rate of 71%, instead of the average 45%.

At the end of the day, digital advertising is an important component of any Singapore finance marketer’s overall strategy. While it can help generate leads when done right, it’s important every paid media campaign is supported by an always-on content program.

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What are Performance Max campaigns?

Performance Max is a new goal-based paid advertising campaign, that’s designed to help drive performance based on your specified conversion goals. Google employs automated services to ensure you achieve your campaign targets.

This campaign enables your finance brand to engage consumers across all of Google’s channels. This means you no longer have to make decisions about where your campaign will be housed and your ad can be shown in more places your target audience is.

A great aspect of this new Google ad campaign is that it utilises Google’s machine learning models to make accurate predictions about which ads, audiences and channels will perform best for you automatically. This enables your campaign to reach new audiences helping you to generate meaningful leads. In fact, brands who have used Performance Max campaigns have seen conversions increase by an average of 13%.

Recently, Allianz Spain utilised Performance Max campaigns with the aim of improving the efficiency and profitability of its advertising. Allianz was successful and “increased qualified car insurance leads by 15% at a lower cost-per-lead compared to generic Search campaigns.”

When should finance brands use it?

Google ads and Performance Max campaigns aren’t always the best strategy for every financial content marketing campaign or finance brand. To be truly successful, a paid media advertising campaign should be a part of a broader, multi-faceted content marketing strategy.

You should only use this style of Google campaign if your finance brand:

• Has a specific conversion goal
• Wants to expand reach and conversion beyond keyword-based search campaigns
• Wants to access and advertise across all of Google’s channels
• Wants to implement automated paid advertising that’s designed to expand reach and conversion

Benefits of paid media advertising strategies

Google’s new Performance Max campaigns can be a helpful addition to your overall financial marketing strategy, but only if it aligns with your finance brand’s goals. Additionally, a paid media strategy doesn’t have to live on Google ads either. Creating a paid media strategy across social channels such as LinkedIn and X can also help to expand brand awareness and extend the reach of your content. In fact, paid social advertising can result in a 25% higher conversion rate than organic social.

There are several benefits to including a paid media strategy as part of your overall content marketing:

• Scalability
• Reach beyond your organic following
• Generate new leads
• Build a captured audience

A paid advertising strategy shouldn’t be where your content marketing ends. Instead, it should be a part of a targeted strategy that spans across all social channels and website content.

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Best strategies implemented by bank advertisers overall

With the pandemic advancing consumer’s reliance on online banking technologies, it makes sense that the best bank advertisers utilised digital platforms to their advantage. Social media generated the most impressions for bank advertisers with YouTube being the top digital advertising platform. Short videos remain the top way to gain the most impressions across all social media platforms. Your finance brand should create engaging video content that is tailored to your audience and shared across your social media platforms to garner better engagement, generate leads and improve brand awareness. At the Dubs we created short doco-style videos to capture the attention of millennials where they already live, driving them to spark up a real conversation with the brand in Facebook Messenger.

Content that gained the most impressions were ones that were:

• Quirky – Comparethemarket.com’s ‘meerkat ad’ remains one of the most recognised and well-known finance advertisements in the UK and Australia. Creating fun, quirky and engaging content can create a lasting impression enabling you to generate leads and improve brand recognition and trust.
• Educational – Educational content shared across your social media platforms remains one of the top methods of advertising for bank advertisers and other finance brands. Understanding your audience and what information they need to know will ensure you build trust, loyalty and brand awareness.
• Emotional – Digital storytelling can help your finance brand create emotional connections with consumers improving engagement. This method can help you generate relatability, bridge the approachability gap and improve brand trust. Sharing finance stories like the NRMA’s Story of Help content hub or Allstate’s award-winning digital storytelling campaign ‘Worth Telling’ can help you build authentic customer relationships.

USA best bank advertisers

The top two most successful bank advertisers in the USA during 2021 were JP Morgan Chase and Fifth Third Bancorp.

Fifth Third acquired 441,698,444 impressions with an average estimated cost per 1,000 views of $0.12. Fifth Third showcases the importance of understanding and analysing third-party data to identify your target audience and the required paid media strategy to reach them. In line with their younger demographic, they created advertising that was personable and quirky with a woman clad in a blue suit acting as their brand ambassador throughout all ads. This helped to make their content memorable and improved brand awareness, resulting in a 21% increase in brand consideration over a one-year period.

Australia #1 bank advertisers

The top 2 bank advertisers in 2021 in Australia were the Commonwealth Bank and Westpac. The top places banks advertisers in Australia published content were Facebook, YouTube and RealEstate.com, with Facebook accounting for 90% of impressions indicating it’s still a widely effective platform for banks. The prominence of RealEstate.com.au also indicates the effectiveness of advertising on digital platforms that are intertwined with banking – as people look to purchase a house they can also be advertised tailored banking products. Additionally, RealEstate.com.au enables finance brands to share sponsored content across their site in the form of blog posts. This provides a space for banks to share targeted content directly to interested audiences with one such example being from the Commonwealth Bank ‘How to prepare to buy a home when you’re not on a deadline’.

Commonwealth Bank split their advertising across the three different channels relatively evenly with socials making up 39%, video making up 39% and banners making up 22% of their content strategy. Their video content was shared across all social platforms 100% of the time and garnered impressive engagement with their recent Instagram video feature football player Sam Kerr garnering 96,400 views. This video was released after the news that footballer Sam Kerr has beat previous Australian goal-scoring records making it timely and engaging. This reveals short video content that’s reflective of current interests is a great way of capturing consumer attention.

Westpac’s ‘Life is Eventful’ ad campaign was a large success as it was a perfect reflection of inclusive marketing. By being more inclusive and representing a wide variety of individuals’ lived experiences Westpac stands out from the crowd of generic bank advertising trends. This campaign has helped them connect with clients and create authentic relationships.

UK advertising winners

The top two UK bank advertisers in 2021 were Nationwide Building Society and Halifax.

Halifax has a 51% popularity score according to YouGov, a non-profit media company that rates and analyses customers’ impressions on businesses within the UK. Like Westpac, their 2021 ad campaign ‘It’s a People Thing’ saw the bank utilise a relatable lens to build brand awareness and trust. Following different people and families in a traditional British street, Halifax showcases the ups and downs of a wide variety of people, helping to minimise the approachability gap by creating personable content.

Nationwide Building Society, who has a popularity score of 57%, launched a savings campaign in 2021 which saw everyday people share their savings goals and tips as well as a chance to win £100 prizes. This campaign reflects the growing demand from consumers for banks to provide financial wellness services. It was largely successful with 183,500 accounts opened and more than £55 million saved since its launch. It indicates the importance of finance brands reflecting consumers’ needs in their advertising strategy as well as the importance of offering educational services in relatable and personable formats.

Lessons for finance brands

When analysing the top bank advertisers in the UK, USA and Australia it’s clear to see that personable and relatable advertising content is the most successful with consumers. Platforming real customers’ voices and a wide variety of experiences can help your finance brand connect and build authentic customer relationships. Offering engaging video content that is educational and inclusive can improve brand awareness, trust and loyalty. Finally, ensuring your advertising strategy is tailored towards your target audience is vital for your advertising to have the desired effect and generate meaningful leads.

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Sports sponsorships generate brand exposure

Live sporting events generate a massive amount of viewership around the world. The bigger the sporting event the bigger the crowds. In fact, the 2016 Paralympic games generated 25.6 million viewers in the USA, 28 million viewers in the UK, and 14.8 million in Australia and the 2021 Paralympics are set to be even higher. That’s a lot of potential brand exposure for finance brands who form a sporting sponsorship with the Paralympics.

Adding to this, the rise of social media use has meant the people who attend these massive sporting events or even the people watching from home are sharing the event with their friends and family. In fact, 80% of fans use social media during live sporting events. This can be a benefit to finance brands as not only are the people attending the event seeing your finance business but so is everyone on social media.

Visa sponsored the FIFA women’s world cup back in 2019 and saw huge success as a result of the combination of live coverage and social media sharing. A study by Deloitte found Visa generated 10,000 mentions by 5,000 unique authors, 355,510 engagements which resulted in an estimated potential reach of 9,000,000,000.

Sports sponsorships that target a niche audience

This high level of brand exposure isn’t only achievable through global events like the Olympics or Paralympics. Any sporting event can have large benefits for finance brands wanting to market a new product or improve brand recognition. Even minor events can be beneficial for finance brands if it captures a niche audience that aligns with your finance brand.

For example, Lawn Bowls Australia, which is a sport generally targeted at older retirement age Australians is sponsored by a number of insurance brokers. Apia who is an over 50’s insurance company, is one such finance brand. Apia is a prime example of a finance brand utilising sports sponsorships as a marketing tactic that can improve brand recognition and customer loyalty with its target audience.

In a different area, Canada’s TD Bank has recently sponsored eSports Overwatch League teams, the Toronto Defiant and the Vancouver Titans and Mastercard have also jumped on and sponsored Riot Games League of Legends. With 286 million people globally expected to be enthusiastic eSports viewers by 2024, finance brands should consider diving into the eSports industry and look to sponsor a team or event. ESports can help your finance brand reach a wide, mostly young audience, and can create intrigue into your financial services by altering brand perceptions from boring to creative and progressive.

What sporting sponsorship is right for you?

Not every sporting sponsorship will be right for every finance brand. It’s important each finance brand understands their target audience, budget, and the goal they’re trying to achieve through the sponsorship. Sporting sponsorships can come in many forms, including:

• Individual sponsorship – Aligning your finance brand with an individual athlete can create great omnichannel marketing, extending the reach of your brand across their social channels and other media sources. However, this style of sponsorship can pose the greatest risk to your finance brand as it places a lot of trust in the individual athlete to represent your financial service correctly.
• Team sponsorship – This is a great option for finance brands with a large marketing budget and can be beneficial as it creates high emotional connections with fans and viewers.
• Event sponsorship – This is a great sponsorship opportunity for finance brands as it not only aligns your brand with a fun and enjoyable event but it also aligns them with the values represented.

It’s time to play the game

Sports sponsorships can be an effective marketing strategy when it aligns with your finance brand’s goals and target audience, generating greater trust, loyalty, and positive brand perception for customers around the world. While large sporting events have the most brand exposure this doesn’t always mean it’s the most effective marketing strategy. Instead, consider who you’re targeting, what they’re watching, and always ensure the values of your financial services align with the individual athlete, team, or event.

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