3 tips financial service marketers need to know to drive growth

The financial services industry faces a range of complex challenges, from changes in regulations to wavering consumer trust, making it crucial for banking organizations to identify opportunities where they can optimize growth.

Across industries, marketing has become a key driver in helping businesses generate growth. Unfortunately, marketing’s critical role is often overlooked as just 24% of CMOs reported sufficient budget to execute their strategy in 2024. Budget restraints mean businesses have limited resources to nail their marketing strategy and this, paired with the financial service industry’s specific challenges, means getting things right the first time is non-negotiable.

So, how can financial service organizations develop a marketing strategy that delivers the biggest ROI?

The steps financial service marketers can’t overlook

The key to any organization’s marketing success starts with building a strong foundation. While strategies won’t look identical, there are three steps all financial marketers should take to ensure they’ve established the proper groundwork to generate growth.

1) Set a clear objective and KPIs

A successful approach to driving growth requires marketers to have a clear objective and relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to help measure their progress toward their goals.

By establishing a clear goal and KPIs that measure success toward this goal, financial marketers can best determine the areas of their strategy that are working well and areas that need improvement. For financial services, there are three areas marketers should focus on to support business growth: boosting referrals, growing repeat customers and bringing in more inbound leads.

As marketers determine their objectives, they must clearly define end goals. For example, all financial businesses want to bring in more leads, but setting a vague goal like “increasing leads” doesn’t offer something tangible to track. Instead, marketers must define what this goal looks like for their business — for some, this could mean increasing new business by 15%.

By outlining a specific goal, financial marketers can determine how marketing investments should be prioritized to best align with the value of their business’s growth objectives.

2) Build a financial services marketing mix

Today, marketers need to understand not only the value each channel brings but also which channels are most effective within their industry. For example, while Google Ads is the top channel driving prospects to call businesses across industries—driving 37% of conversations—it plays an even more critical role for financial services, driving nearly half of all conversations.

A recent study from CallRail provides an inside look at the channels driving the most conversations across industries. The findings uncovered that for the financial services industry:

• Google Ads and organic search are the channels driving the majority of sales appointments
• Social ads, paid search and organic search are the channels with highest leads qualification rate
• Direct mail has more of an influence than it does in any other industry with 30% of calls reporting they were influenced by direct mail

As financial marketers build their mix, these findings provide unique guidance on where resources should be placed. When allocating budget to each paid channel, marketers in this industry should not overlook organic search. Given its substantial role in lead generation, investing in a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and the content development needed to execute it will make your business more visible and support your overall growth objectives.

By taking an industry-specific approach to their mix, financial marketers can focus efforts on the channels that are most impactful among their audiences, helping to drive the most, and the most qualified, leads to their business.

3) Have the tools to measure and optimize

Finally, financial marketers need the proper tools in place to measure and optimize their efforts. Luckily, these tools can be easily accessible and user-friendly, making it straightforward to do everything from tracking the leads driven from each investment to surfacing insights from every conversation. Financial marketers’ toolkits should include:

• Site analytics—Tools like GA4 offer valuable insights into campaign performance and website visitors’ behaviors. They give a holistic view of what’s driving visitors and their interactions so marketers can easily adjust their campaigns to optimize effectiveness.
• Call tracking—By creating a unique phone number for each campaign, call tracking tools allow marketers to pinpoint exactly which campaigns generate which calls and texts, offering unique insight into the customer’s journey.
• Conversation intelligence – Powered by AI, conversation intelligence can automatically analyze and transcribe calls while also pulling out critical insights like frequently used keywords and questions asked by callers and sentiment analysis.

The right tools allow financial marketers to track their progress towards their goals and offer actionable insights into how they can fuel further growth.

By clearly defining goals, building an industry-specific marketing mix, and having the right tools to measure progress, financial marketers have the framework in place to successfully generate business growth. These steps also allow marketers to highlight the ROI their efforts bring across their business, helping to unlock additional funding.

Emily Popson is VP of Growth Marketing at CallRail.