Digital marketing practices stand to benefit finance and investment brands far beyond the limits of standard SEO. Keeping your firm as close to the top of the right Google searches will reap untold value, but there is so much more that can ignite meaningful conversations and establish enduring trustworthy associations with your name and image. Good faith is valuable when handling others’ hard-earned money and making the most responsible decisions to ensure it safely builds ongoing personal wealth. Earnest conversation lies at the heart of all successful digital marketing campaigns. Prove you can show customers how to put their money to work passively making more money while minimizing risk, and you will always have an enthusiastic following hanging on your every word. That starts with knowing who to reach and how to find them. Read on to find out how today’s digital marketing practices are changing finance and investing. Hopefully, you will find some things you can apply to your own business practices.

Digital Banking

Banks competing in today’s digital arena can ill-afford to settle for giving away a bygone era’s cheap tote bags or toasters in exchange for opening an account. Even low or nonexistent fees, free checking, and cash-back gimmicks won’t cut it. Instead, credit card companies and banks prize expense tracking, automated online bill payments, and catch-all mobile apps as the more practical perks that dependably earn customers’ business through personal utility. Today’s digital marketing practices revolve around this personal utility, emphasizing ease of access and the lack of a physical location. This makes things like banking more accessible to consumers of all ages, abilities, and wealth brackets, and puts the power to invest and save directly into the hands of consumers.

More and more banks and investment institutions have eschewed brick-and-mortar locations entirely in favor of existing solely online. That includes many traditional institutions swayed by trends toward paperless mobile banking rooted in on-the-go convenience dependably available at any given time, anywhere in the world. Proper SEO practices like white label SEO and reputable links help boost companies in Google search results as well, bringing them to consumers. Digital banking and other companies can take advantage of this to boost their institutions in search results. This is changing how consumers react to banking and investing.

YouTube & Social Media

From memes and GIFs to messaging apps and innovative portals where customers can instantly address service issues or questions at a moment’s need, social media platforms have changed the very nature of modern human conversation. The genie is never going back into the bottle, either. Online word-of-mouth can now turn a single annoyed customer’s complaint embarrassingly viral in under 24 hours. Meanwhile, the fact that only Google outranks YouTube among the world’s most powerful search engines demonstrates online video’s incredible potential reach as a nearly omnipresent advertising channel. Rather than avoiding in fear of accidentally damaging reputations and wasting time on an advertising avenue they perceive as lacking value, companies not tapping into their followers’ social habitat could instead gain significant competitive advantages by incentivizing customers to share their experiences and interact with the brand online.

Meanwhile, instead of using YouTube advertising to intrude on consumers’ viewing in the style of traditional television advertising, financial service companies could instead produce a higher volume of informative, sharable and engaging videos to educate and attract potential clients with memorably personable impressions rather than irritating them. High-quality content both nurtures streams of new customers by providing highly useful education and allows firms to target ideal customers with carefully tailored messages by leveraging each video’s marketing analytics to guide their campaigns. Youtube and social media are changing how marketing advertisement works, and how businesses reach consumers. Look into how you can shape your social media to best reach your consumers.

Conversation

Finance and investment institutions have learned well the value of talking to customers rather than at them. That includes investing in conversational banking by allowing customers to communicate via messaging, chatbots, and voice search in response to many consumers feeling more comfortable talking about their finances with guided AI than what they may view as dubiously trustworthy human beings. Advancements in integrated voice-assistant technology allow customers to forego direct calls or emails and limited, predetermined responses in favor of conversational banking that allows each virtual assistant to steadily learn, analyze and respond dynamically to text and speech as interactions progress. Responses are instantaneous with no need for customers to wait on hold, and these results can be achieved by countless bots chatting simultaneously.

Influencer Marketing

As customers spend increasing time immersed in social media, influencers will only increase their value as catalysts for broadening a banking or investment firm’s audience through trustworthiness established among a personality’s most loyal followers. Every financial marketer prizes a continuously positive conversation surrounding their brand. Influencers are generally seen as far less likely to be driven by sales than acknowledged brand representatives are. After all, their clout is explicitly grounded in their fanbase’s ongoing faith. That leaves little long-term incentive for deception or subtle agendas. By taking advantage of influencer marketing, businesses can thrive in today’s digital market.

Firms that successfully build above-board relationships with influencers can gain access to built-in audiences likely already engaged in their market’s hottest topics and channels. Reaching these potential customers directly foregoes digital display ads and focuses on the most optimal customers. It only takes one look at an influencer’s follower list to determine exactly who a message is bound to reach.

Digital marketing has changed advertising for the better by making it more personal and less intrusive. Instead of having their time intruded on by shotgunned sales pitches, customers more often experience thoughtfully presented content meant to address actual needs and to teach people how to better address them. In the end, well-informed customers enter relationships with finance and investment firms better prepared themselves to make the most knowledgeable decisions when setting the course for their financial futures. Everyone comes out ahead. Look at these digital practices and think of how you can apply them to your business.