The Importance of Customer Messaging: What Financial Institutions Should Know

There is no question about it — the financial industry is more competitive than ever. With barriers to entry shrinking and more businesses entering the arena, financial institutions must work harder than ever to create messaging that cuts through the noise and appeals to clients. This message must be unique enough to gain a prospect’s attention, build trust, and demonstrate their value.

Developing the right message — then deploying it correctly — is not easy. More often than not, financial institutions must access outside expertise to ensure they get their customer messaging strategy right. Here’s what your institution needs to know.

Know Your Customer – Now, More Than Ever

A basic tenet of any marketing effort is that you must comprehensively understand your customer. As such, you must know your customer’s likely demographics, age, location, education, income, and more.

However, that just isn’t enough anymore. Do you know what web pages your customer uses? How do they access the internet? What financial websites have they checked out? If they’ve ever seen your website? Here’s the good news. Modern data tools allow you access to that information, and you can turn that info into your marketing success and develop customized messaging that applies individually to each customer.

For example, imagine a scenario in which you had potential customers who accessed a competitor’s website or liked their Facebook page. You could develop highly targeted ads for these customers, referencing their previous experience on your competitor’s website and noting your competitive advantage. You could create an offer where they would get a specific discount or fees waived. This message works on multiple levels. It shows that you can understand your customer, meet their needs, and develop specific solutions that work for them.

You can access this vast array of data using the right marketing tools and expertise. From there, you can understand how to make this information work for your financial institution.

Message Consistency Is Required

Marketing requires consistent messaging and an integrated approach. Advertising on just one platform is rarely enough for any business. Even before digital advertising, your bank would never advertise in a newspaper. Instead, you would select a variety of mediums to ensure that you were capturing as many customers as possible.

As such, your messaging is an essential component across all platforms. You must use the same tone, branding, content, graphic design, logos, etc. That’s not to say you should copy and paste the same messaging across multiple mediums. After all, each platform is different and has different requirements.

Consistency is crucial for a financial institution. After all, most financial institutions face particularly unique challenges regarding trust, credibility, and cutting through the saturated business environment. As such, you have to use the same messaging when advertising products. You must also ensure your message is minimally tweaked as you cross platforms. Adhering to this messaging consistency will enable you to reiterate the same point across multiple mediums, increasing the chances that your messaging will be successful.

The Importance of Timing

There’s an ugly truth in the financial world today — many banks simply aren’t doing well, and if a bank is in the news, it probably isn’t good. Recent events have shown that few banks are truly “too big to fail,” meaning your financial institution must swim upstream to ensure you develop the trust needed to work for your business.

What does this mean for your customer messaging? Timing is critical. You have to develop messages that work for your business and within the context of broader, current events. For example, You might be tempted to call off the product launch during turbulent news for the financial industry — like right now — believing customer sentiment about banks would be too negative to make any new product launch work. However, the collapse of this bank could represent an opportunity. How could you alter your messaging to fit the moment’s needs, building trust and credibility at a time when it was desperately needed?

Furthermore, timing also means learning when to talk to your customers. Digital solutions enable personalized and automated contact with customers. By appropriately deploying these methods, you could connect with your customers, make sure they were satisfied, and see if they needed additional products or services of yours.

Final Thoughts

Financial institutions need to consider their industry-specific marketing requirements. Your institution must understand your customer’s needs, develop consistent messaging, and understand the need to time your message appropriately.

At Madison Taylor Marketing, we understand you need industry-specific expertise to advertise your business effectively. Contact us today for more information on how we can help your financial institution thrive.