A personal experience is essential for financial services customers, where it is people’s income or savings that you may be guarding. Mass-distributed messages are unlikely to make users feel a true emotional connection with your organization.
What makes an interaction personal is, naturally, personalization. Finding out about your customers’ needs and behaviour and making sense of it in a way that can scale across the user base is a major challenge.
The theory is simple – get the right data, assemble the correct content for each individual (web pages, marketing updates, messaging text, etc). However, there’s more to it, as we’ll explain.
Personalized Marketing Content
Personalization in relation to marketing content, can be viewed as extending the value of content marketing.
“Content marketing is the fastest growing area of marketing for a reason,” said Joe Pulizzi, founder of The Content Marketing Institute. “Brands want attention and can’t get it without creating value ‘outside’ the products and services they offer. It will be an interesting ride as more money moves from other sources into quality, targeted and consistent content.”
The targeting part is powered by the use of big data, AI, advanced analytics, and cognitive computing, which were ranked (together) as second on the top 10 trends for retail banking institutions in 2017 (DBR Research, 2016).
Marketing For Customer Engagement
We know that personalization pays off. When content is more relevant to customers, they feel more engaged, spend more time and money with your business and spread the word to friends and family. Read more on the benefits of personalized user experiences.
Gartner found that by 2020, smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%.
Customer Journeys Driven By Content Marketing
So, what happens if you don’t go down this route? There’s an increasing risk of your business being displaced, either by fintech startups or incumbents using sophisticated digital technology. A 2015 survey by the Global Center for Digital Business Transformation found that financial services companies were at high risk of disruption, second only to the energy sector.
If competitors are creating a better experience for customers and your company has failed to keep up, it risks stagnation or loss of market share. “Dissatisfaction with the overall banking customer experience, from confusing web sites to staggering call centre times, leaves banks vulnerable to churn,” said Accenture in its Banking Customer 2020 report.
A hybrid approach to avoid this is to collaborate. Examples include banks signing up to provide the payment platform while consumer brands such as Apple enable user-friendly transaction technology like Apple Pay.
Data-driven Storytelling
Personalization changes the relationship between a brand and its consumers. The emerging Internet of Things means that purchases are no longer a closed off part of the customer’s journey but simply a gateway to a long-term interaction. The data is a crucial aspect.
Done successfully, this can strengthen customer loyalty and speed up the repeat-purchase process. If, as Accenture suggested, financial companies aim more towards becoming providers of advice, “recommending specific, targeted buying suggestions,” then you can flourish.
Knexus helps financial institutions to understand data, match marketing content to users’ behaviour and automatically deliver it on any digital touchpoint in real-time. Book a demo.
