Digital wizard Andy Schulkind said it best: “Your prospects don’t care about you. Your prospects don’t even care about what you do. Your prospects care about what you can do for them.”
There’s a reason we now see fabulous corporate titles related to client experience and conversation marketing. In the old days it was called bullhorning—scary one-way selling (yup, we didn’t know better). Boasting about better products and services. A cascade of features and benefits. Identical selling language on countless financial sites, crammed to the brim with so much detail no mind could absorb it. In a word, corporate eyes looking inward.
OUTWARDNESS: THE NEW BLACK
Today “outwardness” for financial firms of every size has lots of moving parts—genuine client dialogue, a refreshed brand voice, a story that’s real, a more human sales approach, eye-level service, and reigning in the role of data.
Connection. Your clients talk to you all day long through various platforms. What do they say? What do they need? What’s your reply?
Voice. Our industry changes slowly. And the unexamined brand voice is not worth relying on. Thick, official financial phrases of yore have been translated into plainer, more life-like English. (Disruptor banking brands, for one, catering to younger audiences, have conversational speech nailed. So, too, does Virgin Money and Merrill Lynch, to name a few.) Imagine a style of brand discourse, and a lexicon, that reveals a beating heart. The possibilities are endless when you get out from under the numbers and market human.
Story. Take the time to tell your story. Or the market will tell it for you. And often get it wrong.
Design. Phew. So far, at least some of those creaky stock-photo office shots featuring generic financial staff have vanished from financial marketing. What’s taken their place? Photography, color palettes, and design strategies that allow audiences to respond emotionally, while locating themselves in a story the brand is telling. The collaboration between word and image in financial marketing has never been more vital in our very visual age.
Sales. Content marketing took the world by storm cause it works. When you, say, publish a trading magazine that helps clients live more-informed financial lives, and you ditch hard-core sales tactics, clients often trust differently. And do more business with you. Today there are terrific examples of financial content marketing. The point is: when corporate eyeballs look outward, who’s out there might just look back. And gossip about you in all the right ways. Human marketing is about helping, engaging, listening, and responding more authentically. And interrogating just what authenticity means at every level of the enterprise.
Service. Marketing human also means accountability. When financial brands mess up, it’s no long enough to have a far-way call-center rep tell a customer they’ll “make sure the feedback gets to the right department.” The industry is commoditized. Tremendous competition and too much public awareness to fall back on doing nothing. And it’s not just retail. Bad service and great service now happens across the spectrum: B2B, B2C, and B2B2C.
Data. Audiences engage financial brands though social media in profoundly different ways. They see you. And demand a new way forward that includes less spreadsheet and more client-focused human pulse. We love what Erik Devaney had to say about it on Drift.com: “Something is broken. We’ve become obsessed with tracking and measuring every metric imaginable: hits, clicks, emails, dials. We’ve become so focused on things like A/B testing, retargeting, email blasts, robocalls, form fills, marketing-qualified leads, and sales-qualified leads, that we’ve lost track of what really matters.”
WE’RE TOO BIG
Many category leaders would say a warmer, more intimate approach is fine for smaller companies not servicing millions of clients…that a sincere one-to-one strategy is too ambitious. Impossible to scale.
One reply? American Express.
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