-1.svg "Close Icon (3)-1")
.svg "Close Icon (3)")
- Share
-
For many of us, July heralds a new financial year – and with it a shiny new integrated marketing budget. The big question for financial services marketers is how to use it to keep sparkling all year round, driving brand awareness, delivering new leads and generally dazzling on the bottom line. We offer three must-dos that will help you get there. (Teaser: one involves a marketing unicorn.)
- Desktopocalypse. Commit to device-agnostic customers.
We’ve discussed mobile before in “Why now’s the time to mobilise (and here’s how to start)” but if you haven’t started, FY 2016 has to be the year to take this seriously. In May, Google told us that search on mobile officially surpassed desktop search. And according to eMarketer by 2016, in the US at least, mobile advertising will reach US$37 billion in spend, with desktop dropping to US$29 billion – an inversion of the current allocation.
“But our website is mobile friendly” you’re probably thinking (check if you’re right using Google’s mobile friendly testing tool). That’s all very well, but in today’s environment mobile friendly is just table stakes. The whole device-agnostic user experience is where your focus should be.
Action: Make it easy for customers to use fat thumbs to find the information they need and complete the on-line form (tip: how many fields to you REALLY need completed and can any responses be selected from a menu rather than typed in?). It also means allowing customers’ interaction with your brand to start on one device and be finished on another.
- SEO is changing. Build your online reputation.
The king of search is still Google. In fact it’s more than a brand, it’s a verb (need to google that?). But those cunning peeps at Google never stand still. They’re continually tweaking the search engine – and keeping financial services marketers on our toes.
Here are just a few ways the search engine results pages (SERPs) are changing – and what you should be doing about it.
- Introducing the Knowledge Graph, that is, information found on the right hand side of the Google results in some searches. Its purpose is to provide commonly sought information, saving users trawling through search results. Right now the Knowledge Graph is only generated for high volume searches, such as information about politicians, or movies, for example. But it’s likely to expand to other high interest topics.
Action: If Knowledge Graph continues to grow, it will more often take more of page one real estate, and there will be little point for your brand to rank for general topics or queries. Now is the time to deep-dive into your customers’ pain points and aspirations to deliver content that helps them solve their problems or realise their goals. In SEO terms, it’s the long tail that will build your reputation as the leader in what you do.
- Social presence will matter – even more. Google has long had an association with Facebook. More recently, it forged an alliance with Twitter as well as continuing to support its own channel, Google+. In a cynical, over-marketed world, social media allows customers to find the truth about financial services brands. That this volume of social chatter will lead to the increasing presence of social media results on page one seems entirely feasible.
Action: Get social – and make a plan to help make sure that when customers are talking about you, it’s all (or nearly all) about the good news.
- Ten is no longer the magic number. In the good old days – perhaps as long ago as last year – ten listings on page one of Google was the norm. Now, with the rise of the Knowledge Graph and other sources of information such as social media, sometimes you will see as few as four entries per page.
Don’t believe it? We’ve googled (see, it is a verb) Joe Hockey (remember him from our recent blog “He said WHAT? Three free lessons in crisis communications”) and you can count only seven results, one of which is his Twitter handle and three are around media stories, and a big Knowledge Graph entry. Times certainly are a changin’.
Action: SEO competition is only going to increase. As ranking is a medium to long-term strategy, the time to start is now. And by start, we mean identifying what your ideal customers want and delivering it to them. Forget the motherhood, low utility bumf. Because they will. And you won’t be found for it anyway because it’ll be covered by the Knowledge Graph. And of course positive news stories are great for both reputation and page one kudos.
- The magic is in the numbers - Be the marketing unicorn.
The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2015 global report earlier this year “The Rise of the Marketer” found that in three to five years, approximately four out of five companies will classify the marketing function as a revenue driver. That means full end-to-end transparency in reporting not only where the money went, but how it led to higher retention, bigger share of wallet or new clients (long-hand for revenue growth). Jerry Maguire’s “Show me the money!” catchcry has never been more spot-on.
Enter the ultimate in sparkle: the marketing unicorn. This elusive and mystical creature can marry a whole set of skills, from strategy, to implementation discipline, to data mining and analytics. It’s a big ask but a rewarding one. Marketing unicorns get to demonstrate to the second decimal place the value they’re adding.
So, our third and final tip for the new year is to invest in yourself. Be that marketing unicorn. Identify where your skills fall short and sign up for education. Not necessarily formal education either. There’s a world of information out there. Or a river – or a torrent. So strap on your life jacket and throw yourself in. To get you started, some of our favourite blogs to follow are Harvard Business Review, Hubspot, Neil Patel and Moz.... and of course BlueChip Communication!
Over to you. What are your top three priorities for the new financial year?
