Let’s take a moment to remove ourselves from the shoes of being financial marketers. Just for a moment. Instead, put yourself in the shoes of one of your consumers. You are now seeing the world through their eyes. You are experiencing marketing and advertising as a non-marketer. You are not (most likely) in the habit of thinking about your bank’s or credit union’s brand on a daily basis.

Now that we are all in this mindset, the real purpose of this exercise is to evaluate how often your customers or members really, truly, are thinking about us. And by “us,” we’re talking about their primary financial institution brand.  The place they go to in order to pay the bills each month. Where they might look for rate information when they want to do some home renovations.

Does the outlook from this vantage point look fruitful? My guess is that if you sat down with a few customers and asked them how often they think about their PFI and what your brand stands for, you may get a confused look. And herein lies the problem with conventional marketing in today’s digital world.

Consumers are bombarded with so many messages in the span of a day, it’s easy for any brand to get lost in the shuffle. For this reason, brands are increasingly finding unique ways to deliver their messages more effectively and more frequently, lest we forget they exist for a moment or two.

The Financial Brand recently published an article titled “The Top 10 Reasons Marketing Automation is No Longer Optional.” The article opens with the following:

“The challenges have never been greater for bank and credit union marketers. Doing marketing the way we have done in the past is no longer adequate in a world where the demands are so much greater.”

Making the argument for marketing automation has many positives to pick from. One of the most important, in this financial marketer’s opinion, is the idea that automation lets you consistently and frequently deliver your brand message to your audience. Not in a way that would become annoying, but just enough to keep your brand – or, at the very least, the name of your financial – at the back of your customer’s mind.

  • Land in their inbox. Having a well-utilized automation platform at your disposal allows you to create top-of-mindedness with your customers by more frequently landing in their inbox. Gone are the days of sending out promotional emails to share your latest campaign. Automation allows you to create value and brand recognition through frequent and useful communication.
  • Customize communication. One of the single greatest aspects of a well-oiled automation system is that it learns about your customers better than you could. Which in turn allows you to better customize communication, keeping engagement levels high.
  • Trigger the sales process. This is more of an added bonus rather than simply keeping top of mind. Most automation systems will allow you to set triggers within the system based on features like lead scoring, behaviors, social media interaction, etc., that signal a person’s level of interest to buy.

No matter which system you prefer or how you choose to implement it, the article from The Financial Brand is correct. Marketing automation in today’s communication world is no longer an option. Communication is now at a level that this is what consumers expect, even from their community financial institutions.

Want to learn more about automation? Drop us a line at MarketMatch, or look for our forthcoming white paper on Marketing Automation next month!