In recent years, the financial sector has opened up to the digital part of advertising. With businesses going online and new technologies opening up doors for peer-to-peer lending applications, customers are also provided with a new view to finance business. The next step for established businesses to inhibit what they know of their customers is to market personalized financial products and services. Finance is a delicate subject, and the industry is yet to take advantage of the opportunity offered by data-driven advertising.
IAB accounts financial sector to spending over 7.19 billion on displayadvertising in the year 2015. This reflects a massive development in the industry, two out of five US financial institutions are now willing to move 20-40% of their offline advertising budget to digital in the coming years. As, advertising digitalizes, financial institutes are also adapting to the digital way of advertising. A study recently revealed that a majority of larger financial organizations (with over 500 employees) have already diverted 20-40% of their spending in programmatic display advertising.
Understanding Your Audience:-
Any form of advertising first requires you to know your target audience. Programmatic helps you in giving an insight into what a potential customer may attribute to. For instance, for a typical online borrower/credit applicant for a credit card or loan application, your target audience may look like-
• Likely to be young, professional living in a big city.
• Twice more likely to have a graduate degree.
• Twice more likely to be in the top income bracket.
• Who often searches for an international travel destination and fine
dining.
• Frequent purchases on retail sites, travel booking or searching for
homes.
If a financial brand has three different credit card services, on the first look all three credit cards may seem similar products with similar audiences, but in reality, each product has its own set of audiences, which may differ from each other. Understanding audience to the niche helps in providing a relevant product with personalized advertising.
Another part of understanding your audience involves knowing where your audiences are. Mobile phones are on the rise ever since their emergence. A study reveals, 51% of large financial brands are receiving over 41% of their total web traffic from mobile devices. This gives the advertisers a direction to where the campaigns have more leverage to customers, in this case, it being mobile phones.
Financial experts and campaign managers reveal that it takes on an average 23 days since the first ad seen for a viewer to convert. They also say mobile devices generate more traffic on weekends while during weekdays the desktop ads receive more traction. This raises questions for the advertisers like, how to manage all the variables in the digital media plan? How to follow and make the best use of the past online behaviours of your viewers in ad display and how to make choices between platforms, and retargeting opportunities in the 23 days period. This overwhelming condition can be solved with the implementation of Programmatic strategies.
Leveraging Programmatic Technology:-
Programmatic Advertising gives advertisers an opportunity to automate the purchase and delivery of ads to consumers through ad exchanges, which are capable of serving hyper-targeted advertisement. This process is also more enhanced and assures efficiency and effectiveness by minimizing human intervention. The ads are delivered to consumers at the right time, on right devices and for the right products.
Unlike traditional advertising, Programmatic advertising enables targeting based on the browsing behaviours and interest of the users. They crunch up the data collected and provides you with effective ad displaying to potential customers with precise messages. Understanding and following the path the user is taking, keywords he is searching for and other browsing behaviours help us to get to know the intent of the user and gives a fine hint into what can push the user to conversion.
BFSI is the industry where account-holders, i.e. the customers stay loyal to the institutes for years to go. To build such kind of long term relationship, it is necessary to connect with your customer. This is achieved through a steady engagement process starting from the initial awareness building up to the final action. Programmatic is the easiest and safest option for providing a sequential procedure to maximize your reach throughout your sales funnel.
Prioritizing Your Budget:-
The target areas for advertising in any financial markets include the
following,
- Growing their Customer Base
- Retaining Customers
- Driving Conversions
- Influencing sales funnel
- A rise in the number of Site Visits
- Branding.
Prioritizing amongst these targets is how the budgets for each campaign are decided. For most of the financial services, marketers allocate more of their digital budgets to prospecting (i.e. bringing in new customers to their site) compared to retargeting (driving conversions from site visitors.)
Influencing the sales funnel is not the only objective. To 90% of the financial marketers, branding plays a more important role in their
advertising budgets. Generating brand awareness for key target audiences even before they are seeking your products or services can build a strong brand affinity. With the right kind of message, it is easier to influence marketers from the initial stage of Awareness to Consideration and finally to Conversion.
Niche Targeting with Programmatic:-
Programmatic advertising provides you with various targeting options, implementing which advertisers get to set their target audience and create ad creatives which may influence the potential audiences into conversion. Tracking your audiences’ browsing behaviour provides a very perspective insight which aids in providing personalized ads to get audiences to convert. This tracking is only possible by installing tags or cookies in the marketer’s websites to study the path visitors are taking before exiting from the site.
But, in the financial services market, privacy is even more of a fragile matter than in other markets. The data a financial website holds is the subject of concern for many. And consumers may promptly withdraw from the brand if the privacy is hindered in any form. Thus, marketers need to ensure the data of their customers stay secure.
Financial marketers will definitely benefit from the programmatic technologies, which provide real-time changes according to the behaviour of the audiences. Consumer engagement with mobile devices is only increasing, so while it has been difficult for financial marketers to formulate a strategy for mobile advertising, investing in programmatic will provide them with the aids for the complete campaign with financial institutes. While they have vast access to customer data, it is crucial on how they are using the data to identify the prospects and creating models for new audiences and strategizing on personalized ad creatives.
Programmatic provides a platform which has a solution to all your advertising queries. Financial marketers can approach their audiences on all their digital devices with the help of cross-device targeting. The Data Management Platforms provide marketers with data on when their audiences are most receptive. With a right message at the right time, marketers can scale up on the consideration set of their audience and usher them through the sales funnel, resulting in conversion. The ultimate objective for any
and every marketer is to identify his/her potential customers and reach them, create an impression before their competitors do and increase their sales with customer relations that stay long for years to come.
