Digital marketing can go a long way to help you establish your financial services company’s reputation. When used correctly, social media, content marketing, and other digital strategies can go a long way toward creating trust in your brand and brand loyalty.
Here’s how you can use digital marketing to establish your financial services company’s trustworthiness and build customer loyalty.
Know What You Bring To The Table
When you’re performing any kind of marketing tasks, it’s important to know what makes your company unique and stand out from other similar companies. With financial services, this is especially an important step.
Knowing your unique selling point will help you to better create a loyal following and it demonstrates to your target market that you’re not just casting your net to everyone needing help with their accounting and finances.
Being clear about what you offer to potential clients is also important when creating brand loyalty.
After all, if you offer a specific edge the other company can’t match, then it’s more likely that your clients will return to you rather than seek out other avenues for obtaining the services you render.
Stay True To Your Own Voice
With digital marketing, it can be tempting to try out a variety of styles and voices to see what might work best. With digital marketing and financial services, stifling one’s own voice for a “pseudo-professional” voice can be a huge mistake.
Instead, be sure to maintain an authentic voice throughout your digital marketing efforts and avoid jargon and overly-technical content.
Connect With Clients Using Social Media
In 2018, if you’re not using social media, you’re missing a large opportunity to connect with clients and potential clients. You’re also going to make people wonder why your financial services company hasn’t gotten with the digital program.
It’s not enough, though to have a presence online, you also have to be present.
Share information that is useful to your followers, interact with followers – ask questions, thank them for following, engage with their content. Answer their questions and respond to their concerns – doing so openly.
Be Consistent With Content Creation
Sporadic posting isn’t good enough. If you only post something when there’s an announcement to make or something new to offer clients, you’re not going to gain the following you need to build trust in your brand. Don’t just post during tax season! So many companies make this mistake.
Financial services are needed year-round, and brand loyalty and trust are created in the off-season.
While everyone else is taking vacations and backing off, keep consistent with your content creation and social postings. This goes a long way to ensure your clients keep coming back to you – because you are still fresh in their minds.
Aim To First And Foremost To Help Your Audience
We’ve all seen those accounts on Twitter where someone is posting links to their own website every 15 seconds or so. Those accounts are super-annoying, and their posts don’t exactly evoke trust or brand loyalty. Instead, they evoke an urge to click the “unfollow” button.
Rather than trying to help yourself, aim to ensure that every bit of your digital marketing strategy aims to help your readers, potential clients, and current clients.
When you first strive to help others, then others are more likely to follow you, and by that same token, they are more likely to come to your page to learn more about the financial services you offer.
Maintain Professionalism
Be sure that you present a professional appearance on all platforms. From your website design to what you pass along on social media, it’s important to balance your own personal voice with your company’s branding.
While financial services companies don’t have to be completely somber, there are some designs that serve better than others and some memes that are better left unshared with your followers.
Never Lose Sight Of Compliance
Speaking of maintaining professionalism, it’s important to ensure that anything you say online is compliant. One of the ways to do this is to ensure your legal team is included in the content creation process.
That way, you don’t waste time creating content that will never see an audience – or worse – create content that will cause your firm legal issues. Issues of compliance are one of the biggest challenges for digital marketers in the financial services sector.
Be Sure That You Are Available To Customers With Questions Online
Customers need to trust that they can come to you with questions and that you will answer them in an honest and timely manner. Make sure that you’re paying attention to what people are saying when they interact with you online.
If you need clarification on an individual’s question, ask! Today’s consumer is quite savvy when it comes to reading past canned responses.
While you may have a standard answer to a certain frequently asked question, be sure that you’re taking the time to ensure that each interaction with your followers is authentic. It’s also important that if you don’t know the answer to a question, or if you need to run an answer past your compliance expert, you say so – and then follow up!
Maintain Transparency With Your Audience
More than ever before, consumers want transparency. They want to know what you’re going to do with data you collect. They want to know how you provide your services and what working with you will be like. They want to know how you will protect their financial data and their privacy. Be sure that you’re honest and forthright in all of these areas.
Make Data Security A Top Priority
Speaking of customer data, we’re all familiar, at this point, with various financial service providers’ data breaches. Make data security a top priority for your company. By ensuring that your clients’ data and private information is safe with you (and by being transparent about the lengths you go to in order to protect said information), you go a long way toward building trust (and long-term loyalty).
Talk To Your Audience, Not “At” Your Audience
One of the advantages of knowing your unique selling point and how you will talk about it with your audience is that you know what level your audience is at. Be sure to speak to your target market, at their level, in language they can understand and relate to.
By taking the time to hone your content such that it speaks directly to, rather than at, those you wish to sell financial services to, you create a community that believes in your company’s ability to help them solve their problems.
Respond Constructively To Criticism And Encourage Feedback
Not all interactions on digital platforms will be positive, and not all feedback will be stellar reviews of your services. Make sure that you quickly and constructively reply to critical reviews and those who are less than completely satisfied with the services they received.
By doing so, you can be sure that 1) you’re encouraging feedback, both positive and negative, from your clients and 2) that you’re providing transparency in how you respond to difficult situations and those who are dissatisfied.
Employ Storytelling Techniques In Your Content To Highlight Strengths
Everyone likes a good story. Good stories make financial content engaging, and engaging content creates a rapport with the reader.
By using storytelling to highlight how your company solved a client’s problem using your financial services, or to demonstrate how you helped to save a company money, you can create a level of confidence in your offerings. you can also use storytelling as an opportunity to share client testimonials with your audience.
Focus On Locality
Location-based services are growing in popularity again. While it’s tempting to focus on a wide-audience, when you’re first building trust and brand loyalty, it is more productive to target your market efforts to your local community. People are more likely to want to do business with those who they can work with directly than those which are solely web-based.
What Can You Do To Help Your Customers Trust You?
By now, you’ve probably jotted down quite a few ideas and notes. Remember that a little honesty goes a long way – never promise what you can’t deliver and ensure that your digital marketing efforts are compliant.
Ronda Bowen is VP of Editorial Services at Creative Mindscape. She also provides editorial consulting services to a variety of businesses and individuals, runs a handful of blogs (including WiningWife®), and serves as Fundraising Director for JB Dondolo, Inc. In her downtime, she’s a distance runner, a foodie, a wine and coffee aficionado, seamstress and crafter, and board game enthusiast. Learn more about Ronda’s various projects on her website.