THE BUSINESS CASE FOR IMPROVED UNDERSTANDING OF CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR

Take a look at Deloitte’s “Collection of Financial Services 2020 Outlooks”and you’ll see that customercentric growth drivers are revealed throughout their insight reports. For instance:

What this clearly means to us is that financial services companies of all sizes and across multiple sectors must optimize their marketing investments to meet revenue expectations. That puts CMOs and their teams under more pressure than ever to accelerate business performance. Therefore, marketing organizations must audit their traditional practices and reevaluate what they’re capable of accomplishing and how they go about getting it done.

WHAT MARKETERS NEED TO DO DIFFERENTLY

According to Marketing Week’s “Why Behavior Beats Demographics When It Comes To Segmentation,” (behind paywall) their research uncovers that “marketers are shifting away from classic demographics to find more nuanced ways to segment consumers based on their behavior, personal interests and life stage.”

Their findings also show that “classic demographics like age and gender – despite being tried and tested for years – appear to be losing their popularity among marketers as the most common forms of segmentation.”

Frankly, we couldn’t agree more with their discoveries and say throw out your traditional marketing playbooks! Instead, focus on your target customer’s journey and understand where, as marketers, you can directly and indirectly influence their purchase decision through every available channel. Use data to map and measure their journeys and intimately understand the mindset of all your audiences.

TECHNOLOGY ENABLES STRONGER CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION

Technology has now enabled marketers to create a potent starting segmentation based on both traditional demographic considerations blended with prospect and customer behavior and interest metrics.

The true potential of the approach, however, does not stop there but uses technology such as marketing automation to learn more and more about individual prospect and customer interest and behaviors by tracking their digital and real-world footprints and in turn delivering back sharply targeted marketing communications that approach one-to-one messaging. These methods are proven to drive significantly more conversion to desired marketing goals.

BUT IF IT AIN’T BROKE, WHY FIX IT?

It has been our experience that “market leader” and “low-cost provider” brands are often the most resistant to transformation, especially pertaining to marketing innovation. Perpetuating methods of communications that force buyers through the traditional sales funnel may still work for some financial services brands. But we don’t see such thinking lasting within the competitive landscapes where the customer is in control of the information they consume, and therefore create their own journey. In “The Future of Financial Marketing 2020: ‘Show Me The Money,” we like how The Financial Brand describes why some companies choose to maintain status quo:

TAKE A QUICK SELF-ASSESSMENT OF YOUR READINESS TO EVOLVE YOUR CUSTOMER INSIGHT CAPABILITIES

How well do your current marketing efforts align to your customers’ mindsets along the entire purchase journey? Are you implementing new tools, technologies and techniques to the planning and execution of your marketing strategy?

Staying on top of the ever-shifting options is becoming harder and harder. But it doesn’t need to be if you understand how your current approaches rate.

That’s why we built an interactive self-assessment tool that can help you bring an informed point of view to making the right choices for marketing transformation in your organization.

Try it to see where you’re at and see what you can do about it!