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Digital technologies have had profound repercussions for businesses of all sizes and industries, including financial services. Organizations that know how to use, adopt, and adapt these technologies will be the ones best positioned for success in a constantly shifting business landscape.
Two recent marketing trends, marketing intelligence and personalization, offer the potential to reshape the way that marketing teams connect with their customers and prospects. In this article, we’ll discuss why marketing intelligence and personalization are so important for financial marketing.
What is Marketing Intelligence?
Marketing intelligence is any data that helps an organization’s marketing team gain a competitive advantage to beat their business rivals and better serve their competitors. The information gleaned from marketing intelligence can then be used in your data-driven marketing efforts.
CRM (customer relationship management) data is the most obvious source of information on a company’s existing and prospective customers. However, marketing intelligence data can also come from a wide range of sources, including polls, focus groups, surveys, and product trials, that seek to understand the mindset of your target consumers.
The various forms of marketing intelligence include:
- • Information about segments of your target audience, including their demographic, geographic, and psychographic makeup and their behaviors when buying your products and services
- • Information about the most effective ways to market to your target audience
- • Information about your products, including their competitive advantages and what differentiates them from alternate product options
- •Information about your business rivals, including analyses of their marketing campaigns.
How Marketing Intelligence Helps Financial Service Marketers Drive Growth
Simply put, marketing intelligence helps financial service marketing teams stay more informed on the state of the industry and the opinions of their customers. Although marketing intelligence can’t help you come up with a winning marketing campaign, it lays the foundation by showing you what kind of campaigns are most likely to attract and retain customers.
Of course, adopting marketing intelligence isn’t as simple as flipping a switch or buying the right software. Creating a “single source of truth,” (i.e., a centralized repository of enterprise data containing the most accurate and up-to-date information), will be essential to get insights to the right people and break down data silos. In addition, organizations need powerful marketing analytics tools and platforms to efficiently query and analyze this information and generate reports for key decision-makers.
With this technology in hand, however, marketing teams can leapfrog their competition and remain at the cutting edge. According to McKinsey & Company, “data-activated marketing” can improve a company’s total sales by 15 to 20 percent.
What is the Role of Personalization in Marketing Intelligence?
Every new bit of marketing intelligence offers fresh insights and perspectives on how your marketing team can succeed. Of course, some pieces of marketing intelligence are more valuable than others. In particular, information on how you can personalize your marketing initiatives is worth its weight in gold.
Below are just a few statistics on how important personalization is for financial marketing campaigns:
- • A full third of marketers in the U.S. are now spending at least half of their marketing budgets on personalization efforts.
- • 91 percent of consumers say that they’re more likely to purchase brands that offer them personalized offers and recommendations.
- • 67 percent of consumers are willing to share more personal data with their banks if it provides benefits such as special offers, reduced interest rates, and other rewards.
- • According to McKinsey, relevant, useful “targeted communications” can boost revenue by 10 to 30 percent.
Personalization is still a novel technique for many financial services companies. According to a 2018 survey, just 6 percent of financial institutions offer “advanced” personalization to customers, while 59 percent would say they have an “emerging” level of personalization. This means that financial services companies who get ahead of the curve, turning their raw data into personalized insights, stand to profit greatly in the near future.
Conclusion
Marketing intelligence and personalization are invaluable techniques for creating better campaigns for your customers and prospects. To learn more about sales and marketing strategies for financial services, check out the latest articles on our blog. You can also get in touch with our team today for a consultation about how we can help with your business needs and objectives.
