How Accounting and Financial Planning Firms Are Revolting Against Old Marketing Techniques

Keeping Up to Date

When print media was the main form of marketing and the digital world wasn’t as impactful, there was no need to change marketing strategies. Now, with 85% of consumers conducting their own online research before making any purchase, and around 60% thoroughly researching accounting services, it is essential for firms to update their digital presence and marketing strategies to align with the current consumer behaviour trends. Data collection on customers is now a priority for top firms, as they use this information to precisely target specific demographics through their marketing efforts. Firms of all sizes can take steps to develop this advantage by engaging with customers across digital marketing channels and collecting data to gain insights into your existing and potential customers.

Often times consumers are unaware of the range of services by these firms due to a lack of updated marketing strategies. By keeping up to date, your organisation will continue to understand your potential clients’ needs will help you develop the personalisation required to meet them. This is not only relevant to new clients, but the experience of existing clients as they will have only been exposed to a closed section of your offerings for so long, they are unaware of what else your firm can do to assist them. Failure to keep your business up to date and developing a modernised marketing strategy can result in trouble reaching new clients and keeping existing ones.

Key Marketing Developments Across the Industry

 Accounting and financial planning firms need to build trust with their prospective customers. With 92% of Millennials stating they do not trust banks, building trust is the single most important factor financial services firms need to develop in order to gain a new generation of customers. From a branding and marketing perspective, it’s necessary for your executive team to define and sharpen your core values. Consumers want to be able to see company values in action in the real world, not just hear about them.

One of the key aspects of marketing that holds companies back from reaching customers is a failure to effectively understand their customer base. While past marketing techniques have directed all their attention on the Four P’s alone (Product, Price, Place and Promotion) there has been a gap in researching their consumer base and identifying their needs, behaviours, attitudes and values, leading many organisations to remain unaware of any dissatisfaction related to their firm. With more than 8,000 MarTech solutions available in the market in 2020, up from roughly 150 in 2011, a failure to understand developing technologies has made it difficult for firms to compete.

It's no easy task to maintain fluency across different aspects of a financial marketing strategy. While this is not a unique difficulty to the financial services business, financial institutions must address it to succeed in their market. Most departments in the finance sector do not (or cannot) share data since the industry is so inflexible (in part due to laws). Because there is no cross-pollination between customer service and marketing, for example, each department's leaders are permitted to interpret branding rules in their own way. Without defined brand rules, it will be challenging for a customer service employee to stay on-brand when assisting customers leading to the lack of brand consistency.

What is Working for Accounting and Financial Planning Firms

Depending on your target demographic, people engaging with financial companies are seeking exceptional digital experiences, rewards, and convenience. In addition to establishing trust with your customers, branding, messaging and tone must be relatable and personalised to your target audience. The financial services industry is progressively learning to use content in the form of blogs and social media to attract and retain customers. Content is a great way firms can generate traffic to their site to not only educate consumers, but be also seen as leaders of topical conversations and even generate conversions. While trying to build a relationship with your audience, teaching them and leaving them better off than when they started can help build on that relationship. An important thing that firms should keep in mind is ensuring that marketing activities build towards a consistent brand identity and messaging strategy for their consumers.

Optimisation of digital user experience is another element of marketing that is growing and becoming essential. From ensuring your website design is compatible with all devices, the overall tone portrayed by the company to the emerging technologies of chatbots and email support, simplifying the user experience will draw consumers to your firm.

In the financial services industry, personalisation is constructed through the ethical acquisition of data that will make relevant recommendations to existing customers and introduce them to new services you offer. With 75% of consumers preferring to purchase from a brand that knows them and makes personalised recommendations, it’s clear to see the efforts of creating personalised experiences help attract and develop the loyalty of clients.

See What Works for You

No matter how well-researched your marketing strategy is, you'll never really know what works until you try it. It’s important to set growth targets, goals and track your results. Once data is collected, use it to optimize your marketing plan. Without tracking the performance of your strategy, understanding what works for your firm will be difficult and unpredictable. To track the effectiveness of your strategy it is suggested to observe the open, click-through, and conversion rates, identify which channels have the highest ROI, note what types of content get the most engagement, discover the reasons for leaving customers, observe the overall revenue and profit and track how your results compare to industry benchmarks.

How well is your marketing strategy performing? If your business requires a consultation in developing or revamping your marketing strategy, please contact us today.