Inbound Marketing in the Finance Industry: Beyond B2B

Inbound marketing is often thought of as a B2B methodology used to grow your business through lead generation and nurturing. While it is that, it has the potential to be so much more for consumer-facing businesses.

Financial institutions have the challenge of engaging with both consumers and businesses for their banking and lending needs. While the products have similarities, the buyer personae and sales cycles are quite different. Banks have to build out messaging strategies to successfully engage each audience while instilling trust, honesty and security. The need to engage, upsell and cross-sell current customers adds an additional layer of complexity.

Database Segmentation

In working with Financial Institutions, we collaborate to identify opportunities and  help with prioritizing and planning those strategies. For example, defining your audience though database segmentation can help to prioritize your efforts. Some segments to review include:

• The number of prospects vs customers
• Commercial vs. Consumer
• Segmentation by existing product lines
• Segmentation by product interest

Once you have taken a look at your database, you can also look at the website traffic analytics to determine if the numbers align. When your website pages’ and landing pages’ traffic are disproportionate  to the number of leads those pages are producing, the data begins to quickly identify opportunities.

Bridging the Gap Between Goals and Data

Additionally, looking at how the company goals align with the database and traffic numbers can also help prioritize opportunities. For example, if the majority of the website traffic is from the personnel checking product pages, but the goal is to increase the business lending business, then strategies need to be redefined to correct this misalignment.

Of course, your data can only guide you so far and it must be seen through the lens of your company goals. For example, if the company-wide goal is to grow your commercial lending business by 30% but the traffic and leads numbers are not following that trend, you can prioritize optimizing those pages and forms for conversion.

Starting with Smart Inbound Marketing Strategies

You can easily see how an in-depth understanding of the company’s conversion opportunities, priorities, and goals is crucial, but what are some of the strategies that can help financial institutions reach those goals? A few places to start include:

• Personalization of content in email, landing pages and content modules within the site.
• Optimizing content for organic search around topics and keywords
• Creating automated email workflows that are built around customers actions and personae
• Using lead scoring for commercial leads to quickly and effectively identify web leads that need to be contacted by a product specialist like a loan officer or business banker
• Use Lifecycle stages to identify how and when prospects become customers, what content is converting them and how long the process takes
• Use a CRM to effectively communicate actions between

Using inbound marketing strategies that include list segmentation, web traffic analysis, and a clear set of priorities can easily increase conversion numbers and improve long-term customer retention. With these methods in place, financial institutions have limitless potential to engage consumers and businesses when built on careful planning and trust.

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