In the ever-evolving landscape of finance marketing, understanding the intricate balance between brand marketing and performance marketing is crucial. As financial industry marketers face more stringent expectations of proving return on investment, there is an increased need to adeptly blend these strategies to drive awareness and influence perception, all while creating measurable outcomes.
Defining marketing strategies: brand versus performance
All brand marketing is performance marketing, but not all performance marketing is brand marketing. While brand marketing aims to build awareness, performance marketing is about measurable outcomes. In the finance industry, this distinction is vital, as it informs how marketers choose objectives that directly support business goals and prove value.
Brand marketing in finance focuses on efficient reach and qualitative metrics such as brand sentiment and awareness. It’s about creating an emotional connection with the target audience. Emotional connections are built when your message resonates in a way that makes your brand stand out with your target consumer. For example, a B2B campaign offering valuable content to financial professionals can foster trust and positive brand perception, ultimately leading to long-term, incremental business growth.
On the other hand, performance marketing drives bottom-line business goals in the short-term, such as lead generation and sales. Without performance indicators across the funnel, it’s impossible to know whether you’re doing the right thing and adding value to the organization.
Strategic applications in finance
Integrating brand and performance marketing strategies is not only possible but necessary for financial brands. For instance, we run awareness campaigns with well-known financial publications, aligning our brands with reputable industry publications using endemic display ads and sponsored social posts to drive users to our client’s website. This approach primes the audience through broad awareness before guiding them to conversion-focused actions.
Precise and effective targeting is another cornerstone of this integration. It’s crucial to ensure you’re targeting a relevant audience and channels match the user journey, which ensures marketing efforts align with natural customer behaviors and support the sales team’s objectives.
The role of content and ABM in finance marketing
Content marketing and account-based marketing, or ABM, play pivotal roles in brand and performance strategies. Brand media’s role is to build a relationship with the target audience. Providing valuable content, such as articles, guides or calculators, can establish trust and positive sentiment toward the brand.
ABM, particularly in finance, allows for tailored messaging to specific segments of the target audience. This customization helps avoid wasted impressions and ensures that content is relevant to where the consumer is in their buying cycle and tailored to their unique needs — all of which is critical to driving that bottom-line value.
Challenges and insights
Navigating the regulatory environment is a significant challenge in financial marketing. It’s important to incorporate new technologies without overstepping or overpromising. Integrating partners such as LiveRamp and Salesforce can help activate customer relationship management lists while maintaining privacy.
Generational differences also affect marketing strategies. While COVID-19 has closed the gap between older and younger consumers’ tech usage, expectations vary. Younger consumers, accustomed to digital convenience, expect prompt responses and seamless online experiences, whereas older generations might value more traditional, personal interactions.
To adapt, financial brands must leverage traditional and digital channels effectively. Streaming viewership has surpassed traditional TV, yet print and event sponsorships remain relevant. Rather than thinking of these as separate categories, consider them different tactics, each playing a unique role in the user journey.
The future of marketing in finance
Looking ahead, technological advancements, particularly AI, will continue to shape finance marketing. AI can process information and analyze data faster than any human, but there’s understandably hesitancy in using AI for financial decision-making due to data input nuances and algorithm transparency. For finance brands, a good place to start is with AI-powered personalization tools that can optimize content and offers for individual customers, enhancing brand relevance and fostering trust.
Conclusion
In the finance sector, integrating brand and performance marketing strategies is essential to achieving awareness and conversion goals. Understanding your business goals, brand goals and marketing goals, and knowing what indicators support each objective, sets you up to successfully measure brand and business growth.
By harmonizing these strategies, finance marketers can navigate the complexities of their industry, meet evolving consumer expectations and leverage new technologies responsibly.