Marketing Digitalization: The New Norm in Retail Banking.
We all know the COVID-19 pandemic has been a catalyst for digitization in banking, forcing us to find ways to serve consumers with more agility, less friction, and more efficiently from a cost and resource perspective. It has also exposed weaknesses in delivering a positive user experience, boosting the importance of data and analytics, technology, and strategy. It’s a tall order!
To help you get started, we’ve developed a Retail Banking Digital Marketing Strategy Assessment Worksheet to assess your bank or credit union’s abilities to effectively and efficiently utilize your marketing technologies to support your primary goals and initiatives. This assessment allows you to score your efforts and identify actions to take as you address banking transformation.
During every annual planning cycle, your financial institution identifies the high-level goals and objectives for the year, so you can begin there. This will help you to best align digital marketing efforts with the goals of your bank or credit union. This is not only important for the effectiveness of marketing in general, but also for executive buy-in as you identify areas of growth or investment in digital technologies or infrastructure. After writing in those goals on the worksheet, you identify the tactics your marketing department is taking to support those goals. If one goal is to increase products and services per household, perhaps the tactics are to 1) execute targeted omni-channel, cross-sell next-best-product campaigns, 2) implement re-marketing/re-targeting capabilities, and 3) develop a targeted email marketing campaign to promote sticky products to existing customers.
After you’ve determined the focus, you can self-assess and score your ability to execute your tactics.
You have to know where you are today to know where you’re going. After you go through the goals and tactics part of this exercise, you’ll need to identify your marketing technology platforms. There are 5 primary marketing technology platforms you should be using today, including your Core, a CRM, your Website/online banking platform(s), email marketing or marketing automation platform, your data tool(s) such as your MCIF and/or analytics, and any other tools you’re utilizing like social media management, survey tools, Google Analytics, etc.
Now, onto the scoring. In this assessment, there are only 4 scores to assign across tactics and technologies. This is a weighted scoring model allowing for more “points” to go toward better execution and integration of a tool, and fewer “points” for basic or no use of a marketing technology. This is important because this allows YOU to better prioritize actions once you’ve totaled your scores.
For example, if you’re using all of the functions of your email marketing or marketing automation platform, but you’re still loading manual lists and data, that would score a 7. If you don’t have marketing access to consumer web activity or online banking activities for marketing channel attribution, or for dynamic content creation, then score that a 0. If your data analysis tool is connected directly to your core and integrated into your CRM and Marketing Automation system, and you’re using that data to execute marketing campaigns, give yourself a 10!
Look at your total scores … which goal and tactic(s) received the lowest? Which received the highest? What are you doing differently and how can you close the gap? Which platforms could you be better utilizing the features and functions of? How can you better integrate with your technology infrastructure? Ask yourself these questions as you determine the actions you need to take to support your bank or credit union’s goals while serving your customers with agility and ease.
Try your best not to limit your actions and takeaways by your resource constraints or past struggles. This is your tool in identifying what needs to be done to get your marketing technology working optimally. In the next stage of planning your retail banking digital marketing strategy, you will navigate constraints, budgets, resources, stakeholder buy-in, and any other potential hurdles.
Now that you’ve gone through this exercise, and have compiled your actions and takeaways, you’ll need to prioritize. Start by identifying any items that are critical to your marketing operation’s success and working your way down to items that might simply be enhancements with minimal impact to the overall business. From there, you can begin to identify resources, timelines and costs associated with each item to begin your action plans.
Need help managing your digital banking transformation? Contact us today to learn how we can help you plan and execute your digital marketing strategy. We’re here to help set your bank or credit union apart from the rest, create frictionless user experiences, and measure results.