5 Things The Finance World Can Learn From Marketers

After attending finance conferences we had noticed a trend in the industry. Everyone is very traditional. While tradition is not always a negative, it definitely shows a lack of diversity, change, and growth. Many of the executives we met at these conferences mentioned that they did not really spend a lot of time marketing their services and utilized the industry conferences as their marketing efforts for the year. While face to face networking is definitely a great way to build new business relationships, you must also work on maintaining those connections and stay in front of the people you meet. Marketing is the best way to help you execute just that.

Marketing your business year round shows your business connections that you are highly attentive to your consumers and well informed within the industry. My colleague and myself found ourselves giving advice to the financial professionals we met, not just about what SEO and Digital Marketing are, but also how we would implement it in their business and use it to draw business for them all year without having to attending all these conferences. So what can financial services professionals learn from the marketing world?

1.Traditional networking is not enough

With technology readily available at our fingertips, we have become impatient consumers. Traditional networking includes meeting face to face, exchanging business cards, or even running a direct mail campaign. While all of these methods still work in their own ways, they take much more time than directly connecting with a prospect on social media or email because the technology is right in their hand. It is immediate contact and a much more efficient way to get business done.

2. Being Social Shows Consumer & Product Attention

Break free from that rock you have been living under and log on to social platforms! Being social for your business shows that you value the connections you have made with your business as well as showing that you take initiative in broadening your business.

3. Product & Audience Targeting

You can learn a lot about what audience you should be targeting based on what financing products and services you offer from exploring social media platforms. You can navigate like minded business professionals, as well as study their search patterns, what they are looking for, what they are doing with the information, and what influences them to convert their search experience into a phone call or an email.

4. Adapt & Stay Ahead of The Curve

Search engine algorithms are constantly updating and changing what they factor for website rankings. In the marketing world we are obligated to stay up to date on the latest trends in ranking factors. The daily educating we do for ourselves in our industry allows us to produce and provide quality and effective service. There is a lot of trending financial information on the Internet, which an active financial marketer would gain an advantage from if they were active in online communities, forums, and blogs.

5. Be Customer/User Driven, Not System Driven

The last couple of Google algorithm updates have emphasized the importance of creating and building you website content not for search engine rankings but for what your consumers and clients need. Without spending so much time trying to keyword stuff content that does not really serve a purpose, we can spend more time figuring out what our clients are looking for and what they need, then generating conversation content that is unique and encourages more social sharing which in return increases brand awareness and business outreach.