Where are the customers?

Since consumers are spending more and more time online, particularly younger audiences, a strong bank must have a presence offline and online. Marketing is moving from a transaction-based effort toward an interactive online conversation, which allows active participation with your target audience.

With traditional forms of marketing, we must rely on pushing our content toward where we expect your audience to be; but interactive forms of marketing enable your target audience to actually pull your content or product toward themselves when they are interested in learning more about it, via search, blogs, e-mail, social networks and other online channels.

Interactive marketing can also be tracked and measured with online analytics programs, enabling you to track metrics such as: unique visitors, average time on site, page views per visit, bounce rates, top exit pages, traffic sources, top content and more. With interactive marketing, we can also constantly test new messages and creative concepts. We can see what drives our audience to respond and what inspires them most; and if something doesn’t seem to appeal to our audience the first time around, we can test, test and test until we get it right.

Therefore, as you look at strategically building out a marketing plan for your bank, think cross-channel marketing that coordinates the best of traditional media in conjunction with interactive services that reach people at the moment of relevance. Following is a list of key elements to consider in your marketing plan this year:

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  
  • The practice of buying paid search listings in any given search engine. Most often referred to as Cost-Per Click (CPC) or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
    
  • You can build and manage your PPC advertising campaigns across various search engines.
    
  • 77% of Internet users search daily, 38% search 4 or more times daily.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  
  • The practice of improving the technical, design, content and marketing aspects of a Web site to achieve optimal volume and quality of traffic via the natural/organic section of search results.
    
  • You will want to optimize your Web site in order to achieve more prominent search engine rankings.
    
• E-mail Marketing
  
  • Using email to distribute your marketing message.
    
  • You can create, send and track your email marketing campaigns with online dashboards so that you can see exactly who opened your emails, clicked through, and went to a particular landing page or web site.
    
• Online Display & Contextual Advertising
  
  • Formatted ads that typically include text and images.
    
  • You will want to do some research to determine where display and contextual advertising is right for you.
    
• Online Video Advertising
  
  • The delivery of either pre-roll, overlay or click-to-play ads that appear during video playback.
    
  • You will need to decide where and if online video is right for your brand.
    
• Social Media Marketing (SMM)
  
  • Marketing that refers to a collective group of Web sites and online channels whose content is primarily published by users. Social media is intended to facilitate communication and interaction between peers and public audiences. (Facebook, Twitter, My Space, Linked In and YouTube).
    
  • Now is the time to “jump in” and position your bank with an ever growing market. You will need to determine the social media channels that would work best for your bank.

Marketing has never been more targeted, more measurable, more precise, more affordable … more perfectly controllable. Interactive marketing opportunities enable you to engage with your target market in real time, and connect with them in the “moment of relevance”—that key point when they are searching for you and your services. Strategically, this could be so impactful to your organization right now, giving you the opportunity to highly target and measure your efforts through interactive media. These efforts will also help maximize your traditional marketing efforts. The result will be a consistent brand message built across all marketing channels.

> Learn more about how Financial Marketing Solutions can help you with Interactive Marketing Services.