Three Challenges in Marketing Financial Services to Millennials

Over the next decade, financial services marketing challenges will increase significantly.

Why? Because millennials stand to gain $68 trillion in wealth by 2030, becoming the richest generation ever. But millennials don’t have the greatest relationship with financial institutions. Consider these stats:

• 92 percent of millennials don’t trust financial institutions. 
• They’re 2.5 times more likely to switch financial institutions than baby boomers.
• 53 percent don’t think their bank offers anything different than other banks.

In the coming years, financial services marketing teams won’t be able to overlook this generational cohort. Every touchpoint with millennials will be a precious chance to provide an exceptional experience.

What should your marketing team do? 

Here are three challenges I often see financial services marketing teams encounter when marketing to millennials—and how you can overcome them.

Challenge #1: Your Blogging Efforts Aren’t Generating New Business

Have you ever published a blog about how awesome your credit cards are, but had nobody click the CTA to open an account? Or maybe an article about the features of your mortgages, but nobody applied? 

A lackluster blogging strategy is problematic for several reasons, and a content inventory an help you refocus your blogging efforts. 

The goal is to determine which content (including blogs) resonates with which persona and at which point during their Buyer’s Journey. (If you don’t have personas for your financial services firm fleshed out, here’s your shortcut on what to do.) 

Financial services marketers in particular should use the content inventory to ask: 

• Do our educational posts just repeat information from our product pages about our firm and/or products? If so, you’re probably turning off awareness-stage visitors who are looking for unbiased information, not a sales pitch.
• Do our calls to action and/or offers make sense for someone visiting this page? Providing a credit card signup as a call to action (CTA) may fall flat if your visitors are still doing research and deciding if you’re trustworthy.

A content inventory will not only help you visualize the content you have now, but it will also help you determine what you should create. 

Challenge #2: Your Financial Services or Product Pages Aren’t Performing Well

In my experience, “not performing well” for these kinds of pages is shorthand for two things: a low view-to-submission rate or low engagement with calls to action. Those two metrics, though, don’t tell the entire story of the page’s performance.   

Try performing a conversion-rate optimization audit (or CRO audit) to get the insights you need to improve page performance. 

Take a close look at:

• The behavior flow through your site: What are visitors viewing immediately before visiting your service or product page? What do they know at that point, and how does your page align to what they were expecting?
• Heatmaps and clickmaps: Are visitors scrolling far enough to reach your page’s offer? Which page elements are visitors engaging with, or which elements receive little engagement? 
• Page analytics: Are bounce or exit rates especially high? How many visitors are new to the page and how many are returning? Which device types are they using? 

Armed with a more holistic view of what’s really happening on your pages and who’s visiting them, you can make a more educated guess of what to change. 

Bonus points: if you’re on HubSpot’s CMS, create an A/B test of your page variations. HubSpot will show both versions of the page to visitors on the same URL, and you can revisit variation in performance later on to determine if your changes were statistically significant.

Challenge #3: You Aren’t Making the Most of Your Marketing Automation Software

Your contact database is the fuel of your marketing automation software. When that database only has an incomplete view of your prospect and/or customer info, your ability to target diminishes greatly.

For example: You want to create a smart offer on your personal banking page. Only existing customers above a certain wealth threshold will see a call to action on the page driving them to meet with a financial advisor. If your marketing automation software doesn’t have adequate data for such a visitor, nobody will see this targeted offer. 

One solution for this is to ensure that your marketing automation software is integrated with your other databases. 

Of course, financial services regulations may dictate that not all customer information can live in your marketing automation software database. Don’t think of this as a barrier, but as a creative constraint: Which new contact properties (or fields) could you create in your existing database that are not personally identifiable and can be passed into your marketing automation software for use in targeting. 

For example: You might use existing information in your database to populate a new field in that system called “buyer persona,” and then integrate that field with your marketing automation software. That way, marketers get the information they need, without needing to house every contact detail in your marketing automation software database.