Financial Website Marketing March 3, 2010 at 6:32 am
In order to effectively market an online finance based site, you need to take into consideration what field, in the wide range of financial services available today, your company falls into. Once you have determined this, you can look at the following factors to determine what type of marketing mix you need to follow:
Trust Factor – Whenever dealing with any form of financial services, especially financial services offered online, you need to consider the trust value of your brand. The bigger and more respected your brand is on the world stage, the higher your initial trust factor will be, for example, a bank like HSBC has a very high trust factor when it comes to offering financial services, whether offline or online, as it is a well known and respected international financial brand. This means that when they do advertising, the marketing mix used is not based on consumer trust ratings, but rather on best value for money in regards to ROI (return on investment).
However not every company offering financial services and marketing online has a trust rating as high as an internationally renowned bank. Now-a-days, with more and more companies offering financial services online, especially with the recent rise of the international Forex broker community online, it is becoming more and more important to take the trust factor into account when advertising online. When determining the trust factor of your marketing, you need to look at the trust ratings of the websites that you advertise on. For instance advertising on websites like Bloomberg.com and FT.com automatically increase your trust rating, because they already have such a high trust rating. The biggest problem with working on the trust factor is that the higher the trust rating of a site that you market online with, the more expensive the campaign is going to cost.
Value Factor – This is quite a simple notion, the better the ROI from a site you advertise on, the more valuable the site is in your marketing portfolio.
Relevancy factor – Although having your advertisements on relevant sites should lead to a higher value for the advertising campaign, you also need to consider the fact that advertising on a relevant site with a high trust value will also help increase the trust rating of your site. Advertising a financial service online on the worlds leading fishing site will not help you build trust or give you good value for money on your advertisement.
Once these three major factors have been considered with your financial service site in mind, it is time to set out finding the ultimate mix of online advertising tactics. For financial services, it is strongly recommended that you stay away from e-mail marketing to anyone but your own customer database.
To find the right mix of advertising, you need to put the 3 factors above into perspective.
If you are a new company offering financial services, whether online or offline, your most important factor will be the Trust Factor. This is because you have a non-existent brand in the financial services world, and you will need to develop your brand over time. Many people are very conscientious about who they will trust with their money, it is therefore more important to earn a trust rating rather than obtain value for money on your brand.
If your brand is somewhat established, you can start looking more towards the value factor than the trust factor, however you will still need to develop a stronger trust factor, and should not abandon all trust building advertising.
If you have a well established brand, like HSBC mentioned in the trust factor above, you can concentrate purely on the value factor of your advertising, as your brand is already very well established, and people trust your services.
The most important thing to remember in all three of the above cases is that no matter where your company stands in the brand development stages, it is important to stay relevant with all of your online advertising for your financial services website.
To find out how TW Web Design can help you develop and implement an effective online financial services website, and how we can help you plan your marketing activities, please Contact Us.
Leave a Comment or Question