The Biggest Challenges In Financial Services Marketing

There are some pretty unique challenges in financial services marketing. Very strict regulations, difficult subject matter on a wide variety of topics, low consumer trust and ever changing technologies are just a few of the sticking points that appear over the financial services marketing landscape. Not to mention economic climates of fear which scares people into holding on to cash in savings as well as a general lack of understanding and ability to run a marketing campaign by most advisers, it’s easy to see why there are so many challenges in financial services marketing.

Keeping Up With The Latest Platforms And Strategies

In as much as your target audience might be confused about what’s right for them and their money, financial advisers are just as confused with the amount of platforms, tools, jargon and strategies available to run marketing campaigns. In fact, one of the biggest challenges in financial services marketing is simply paralysis. There is too much to choose from and the potential to spend lots of money, time and effort and not really achieve anything at all. 

Before you start throwing money around and trying out all the latest social media platforms, and spending money on paid ads, it’s a great idea to think about what channels you are going to use. Build out a marketing plan and strategy and simply ignore the others. It’s incredibly tempting to try and work all the channels under the sun, but the reality is that you need to focus on the core channels that you want to work with. Want to create videos? Then look at a YouTube channel. Want to have long form explanations and opinion pieces? It’s probably best to start looking at a blog.

One of the key things to remember is that a new platform doesn’t mean that you need to be on it. Platforms move fast, but information is still the same. Work with what you’re familiar with and stick to the plan.

Understanding Who Your Audience Is And What Their Challenges Are

You’d be amazed at how many advisers we speak to who have no real idea of who they want to work with. Which is quite ironic when you consider the products and services they offer are very specific. Understanding who you want to work with and how you can help them is essential to overcoming one of the biggest challenges in financial services marketing. In fact, this is the very first thing we speak about when onboarding a new client. Who is your ideal client? What do they look like? Where do they live? What are their financial goals and objectives? Why would they not want to work with you and what would make them want to work with you over someone else? The wonderful thing about marketing is that, really, if you look at things from your prospect’s perspective, you start to understand their drivers. In doing so, you are able to speak to them about the things that matter to them, rather than things you think they want. This particular challenge is one of the oldest out there and yet the financial services sector largely doesn’t think about this. 

Compliance Challenges In Financial Services Marketing

This one’s the big one. Regulation in countries varies greatly. Then you have to contend with the product provider that you are working with. Many providers of financial services products are unwilling to let you use their name or branding in anything you do, making it hard to advertise around this. In the U.K. for example, all advisers need to be registered and licensed. Not only this, the FCA keeps close tabs on any financial advert that is run on any platform, including, social media posts, videos or on your website. This can make it very difficult for people to create any sort of advertising promotion for financial services products.

However, if we go back to the above point and we understand what our audience is really interested in e.g. retiring early, estate management etc… then it becomes easier to speak with the right people about the things they want to work on. 

Providing Valuable Content

This is where a lot of financial advisers get stuck. What do they need to speak about in order to provide valuable content to their audience? Valuable content is one of the toughest challenges in financial services marketing. You have to strike the fine balance between topics and content that matter to your audience, as well as being concise and simple enough for people to understand. It’s so easy to start waffling on with how the market is performing, or throwing data and stats out there, but what does that mean to your average client? How does this affect their savings plan? Will they be able to buy that house now? What does the latest budget announcement mean for them? Yes, there does need to be a bit of technical content delivered but it must have context. 

Think about other things that people may be able to use, like calculators, guide books, comparison charts, free webinars or workshops. These are the types of things that help people make decisions about who they want to work with. Answering some of the toughest questions that people have in regards to inheritance tax or trusts is super valuable to the people who need it.

Lack Of Internal Resources

If you work for a large financial services organisation, this can be more of a handicap than a challenge. When all the leads you get are not very good, or simply not very many, then you have to go down alternative routes to generating quality leads. What advisers and their business development teams then think is, ‘quick, make some calls.’ Whilst cold calling does have its place, it’s generally not a great way to drum up business and will likely lead to a bad mood. The reality is this. There are so many points of entry into a business these days, that people will reach out when they are ready. In order to be ready they need to find the info they want beforehand. Sadly, most of the large financial services organisations are way behind the pace, with many of them only now starting to spend money on adverts. To make matters worse, they aren’t doing them very well either. If you want to overcome the challenges in financial services marketing you’re going to have to invest in yourself. That means either learning how to create a killer marketing plan, understand your audience and create the content around it, or pay for someone to help you out, like the Adviser Leads team.

In Summary

Are there more challenges in financial services marketing than the list above? Of course. In fact there are many more, but these are the key challenges that need to be overcome before you can start to see any improvement in your lead generation activities. We wish there was a silver bullet solution that allowed all of these to be cleared up in a matter of minutes and you could start to generate high quality leads straight away. Unfortunately there isn’t. In much the same way there is no magic solution to generating unfathomable wealth with little to no risk or effort, you have to put in the hard work and think long term. If you can do this for a sustained period of time then you will start to see the benefits.

If you want to learn how you can rapidly increase your lead generation in 30 days, download our FREE financial adviser lead generation guide by clicking the button below.