Financial services companies face a difficult road when it comes to marketing. With so many restrictions on advertising online, how can financial services reach more qualified sales leads? Compared to other industries, digital marketing for financial services requires a calculated, niche strategy for success.
Banks and financial services in the U.S. are forced to fight stringent federal regulations on advertising and digital marketing strategies, including everything from training requirements for bank marketers to statements that must be included in ads related to a number of financial products. Google has also placed severe restrictions on financial services ad content.
On top of that, many financial services companies like credit repair businesses, binary options platforms, initial coin offerings, payday lenders, and more are barred from using Google Ads altogether.
This has led to a variety of smaller industry players to abandon paid advertising. Thankfully, there are a lot of great digital marketing trends to help fill the void.
Here are six financial services digital marketing ideas to improve your company’s online presence.
Table of contents
- Build trust and brand awareness using social media
- Get published in local newspapers and industry publications
- Improve your website’s visibility in search engines with SEO
- Create and maintain a Google My Business profile
- Use industry directories for local SEO
- Start content marketing to draw in organic website traffic
1. Build trust and brand awareness using social media
You don’t have to attend marketing conferences and become an expert on financial marketing to know that social media is an effective way to build brand awareness.
Social media is one of the best ways to build trust with customers and clients while simultaneously promoting your financial services business. Every major player in the financial services industry has a very active social media presence.
Still, sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what to post. One of the best tips to get started with an effective social media campaign is to develop a content strategy, leverage data analytics, and use hashtag research.
Hashtag research for financial companies
Hashtag research helps you find and analyze top Twitter and Instagram hashtags related to your business so you can create relevant, valuable posts that trend.
Two of the best tools for hashtag research are entirely free: Instagram autocomplete and related hashtags. With these features, you can find trending topics to tailor your content towards in under a minute.
For example, #financialfreedom has over six million posts behind it and is trending now. You can see how using a hashtag like this in the right post could help generate traffic for your social media.
Knowing what to share on social media
One great option is to share blog content. The majority of social media posts from financial services companies have content from their blogs. That way, they can position themselves as experts, help inform the public and increase engagement with their website at the same time.
Here’s an example social media post from UBS, the Swiss multinational investment bank. It uses hashtags and a link back to content on their blog, along with an original graphic to draw in readers.
And here’s an example from a small credit repair company. They, too, are using hashtags and a link back to their blog content as the material for their social media posts.
However, sometimes engagement with blog content can be poor—especially for smaller businesses.
That’s why it often pays to post relevant, informative content on your social media from industry publications. This article from Advice for Investors was shared over 270 thousand times on Facebook.
Putting something like this up on your social media is a great way to draw in readership and fill out your accounts with quality posts.
No matter how you do it, social media is a must for financial services companies.
2. Get published in local newspapers and industry publications
Getting published in local newspapers, industry publications, and more is a great way to build brand awareness through financial services marketing. We aren’t talking about promotional articles that only sell your financial services. Instead, the goal of getting published in these publications is to establish yourself as a thought leader. On digital mediums specifically, you also get the added benefit of securing links back to your website.
These do-follow links from other websites help increase your website’s domain authority. Domain authority helps determine your site’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs), making this process very valuable to more than just your brand.
Plus, you’re forging lasting business partnerships when you make contacts with local publications in your niche industry.
3. Improve your website’s visibility in search engines with SEO
When someone is looking for a financial services firm, where’s the first place they go to start looking?
That’s right, Google.
It’s no wonder there are over 67,000 searches performed on Google every second.
The best way to reach those potential clients on Google is with financial services SEO. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of increasing a website’s visibility on search engines.
SEO all starts with an in-depth audit in order to determine where your site could improve in terms of SEO best practices.
Then, after doing some industry research, competitor analysis, keyword research, and more, you can create an SEO strategy and start moving up search engine results pages.
SEO can be a time-consuming, complicated process, but here are a few actionable tips to help get you started on one of the most effective marketing ideas for financial services.
- Download, install and start using Google Analytics.
- Check out Google’s Page Speed Insights if your site is slow.
- Start to build your backlink profile with citations.
- Publish quality, informative content consistently.
At the end of the day, 95% of people only look at the first page of search results, which makes SEO a must.
4. Create and maintain a Google My Business profile
Did you know an incredible 46% of all Google searches are local?
Local SEO helps increase the visibility of businesses with physical locations on Google local searches and Google Maps to capitalize on this increasingly local search trend.
How? It all starts with a Google My Business (GMB) profile. GMB profiles feature your business on Google Maps and in local results.
Here’s an example Google Maps results from a search, “Best capital lending companies Tempe.”
All the companies listed on the side have GMB profiles that rank for the specified location.
And it’s not just Google maps. GMB profiles help your business appear in regular search results in the local section. Here’s an example using “best financial advisors in new york city” as the query.
These financial advisors appear below paid ads but above organic results.
If you want to find out more about GMB profiles, check out some of these articles we’ve put together:
5. Using industry directories for Local SEO
After you’ve set up your GMB profile and start seeing results, there’s no doubt you’ll want to take things further with local SEO.
A citation is an online reference to a business that contains a name, an address, and a phone number (NAP) at a minimum. Citations help build your backlink profile and affect local search results. In the digital marketing field, the more citations, the better—as long as they are always accurate and updated.
6. Start content marketing to draw in organic website traffic
According to the experts at CMI, a whopping 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing. There’s a reason why—it works.
Using SEO content that targets a human audience, while simultaneously engaging search engines, you can increase your website’s organic traffic.
Every major financial services company has a blog filled with captivating financial services blog topics. For example, NerdWallet’s blog draws in thousands of readers monthly.
And here’s an example post from UBS discussing social media on their blog that includes a video.
No matter the size of the company, or the specificity of the product, a blog is a necessity.
How well can these blog posts perform, though? Are they worth your time?
The following blog from Financial Freedom Funnel got almost 475,000 Facebook shares since it was published. That’s a lot of traffic for a single page.
There’s a reason every major company in the financial services industry does content marketing. It not only brings in more organic website traffic, but it also builds trust with customers and clients. Access strategically focused content that targets customers in innovative and creative ways with the right digital marketing strategy.
No paid ads, no problem
Contact Markitors and see what our digital marketing efforts can do for your business.
Markitors is a digital marketing agency specializing in SEO. We help small businesses rank higher on Google to get more traffic to their websites and increase revenue. Explore what’s in our SEO toolbox: audits and keyword research, digital PR, technical SEO, and local SEO.
