To learn more about Distributed Marketing, sign up for our webinar “Localized marketing for financial services: Use cases and tips.”
Today’s financial services marketers are more stretched and stressed than ever. The industry continues to rapidly evolve, companies are racing to adapt to digital trends, and expanding data privacy regulations are making consumer outreach increasingly complex. But there’s a bigger and more fundamental issue demanding attention from both corporate headquarters and local offices: How do you authentically demonstrate empathy?
In times of crisis, it’s imperative that financial services firms find ways to reach out to customers with empathy and real solutions in a very personalized way, which is best done on a local level. When uncertainty prevails, customers need to know that they can count on their trusted relationships with their financial organizations and advisors. Many will witness closing and consolidation of branch and office locations. Others will find themselves in unfamiliar territory, using digital channels such as online, mobile, and SMS as alternatives to the in-person experiences they’re used to. They will need education, reassurance, and comfort from the local representatives they trust.
So, it’s time to reimagine your marketing and think about helping customers in a localized way. As they experience life-changing events, such as closing of small businesses, loss of jobs, working remotely, managing workloads and family dynamics, you should think about how to shift from product marketing to customer care and custom communications. Customers won’t stop purchasing, but the solutions they buy must be framed in their local context and offer assistance to their situations.
The research above illustrates the top priorities for financial services firms adjusting to the market shift. In this customer-focused world in which we operate, speed and agility are critical communication factors.
In general, customer expectations around communications have evolved. National outreach email campaigns with generic messaging that doesn’t address location-specific situations no longer work when sharing important information. People want and need localized and personalized content, with relevant updates, offers, messaging and guidance. Across all industries, consumers are making their voices and needs known, giving business to companies that get it right. But in the financial services industry, the stakes are often higher. The arrival of COVID-19 quickly escalated the importance of geo-specific updates and sped up the need for change.
Marketers are scrambling to address COVID-19 and local market changes, while also making big, time-sensitive decisions on a national or international level. Asking these over-stretched teams to produce tailored content for local markets is not the solution. Meanwhile, the local market sales teams are often under-resourced, filling multiple roles and lack the bandwidth or marketing experience to craft formal email campaigns. Both teams need help in order to meet customer expectations and continue to drive revenue. So what happens next?
Financial services companies can solve both of these problems with a distributed marketing strategy and platform. In a distributed marketing program, corporate marketers develop branded campaigns and then share them with local partners, who personalize and localize the templates, rather than creating emails from scratch. This approach saves both teams significant time and work, while increasing the quality of the content and delivering on a core customer request.
But planning and executing all this isn’t easy. Maybe you’ve encountered some of these pain points:
- Needing content and campaigns that can be quickly localized and personalized
- Not having the right tool to enable easy modifications
- Needing to easily scale content
- Wanting to empower local offices and agents to serve their communities with relevant and time-sensitive material
Distributed marketing can help solve all of these challenges. It can take your communications from one central campaign to many localized ones, quickly giving your customers the individual service they need, right when they need it.
In our continuing commitment to support you through these challenging times, we invite you to join our latest COVID-19 thought leadership webinar on June 25, “Localized marketing for financial services: Use cases and tips.”
We’ll discuss top industry use cases and common problems, providing guidance on how you can overcome some of your challenges by:
- Designing campaigns for local execution that take the pain out of planning and executing
- Building customizable templates for local offices and agents that make personalization and localization simple and fast
- Maintaining corporate governance and brand control with access control
- Creating powerful roll-up reporting for ROI-driven decision making