Exploring market data allows the crafting of data-driven, intelligent campaigns that are specifically designed to target a certain group of customers.
By Ally Akins
A 2023 survey of bank marketers reveals that nearly 50 percent of bank marketing departments are responsible for bank data and analytics functions. Although use of data and analytics is not typically considered a marketing discipline, more bank marketers are tasked with executing a strategy around these. And that means it is more important now than ever to demonstrate the value that using data and analytics can have on improving marketing and business results across the bank.
READ MORE: Recent ABA Banking Journal articles focusing on bank marketing data issues include: Mark Gibson analyzes key 2024 bank marketing trends and describes what an effective bank data strategy looks like, while Ally Akins provides a bank marketer’s guide to justifying a budget increase.
- Creating better understanding and communication with target audiences.
- Improving targeting and segmentation.
- Optimizing performance results.
- Increasing efficiency using technology.
Understanding your audience to effectively communicate
Data and analytics can help you better understand your target audience by providing insights into their demographics, interests and behaviors. This information can be used to create more relevant and personalized marketing messages that are more likely to resonate with your audience.
For example, if your bank is trying to acquire younger core deposit customers in 2024, there is market data and research to suggest what attributes of a financial institution are most important to these younger consumers and what products or messages will resonate with them.
Analytics can also suggest the best marketing channels to reach your target, as each segment will have different media preferences where they find their information and learn about new products. For instance, if you are trying to reach certain consumers, traditional media such as TV, newspapers and direct mail is more effective. However, younger consumers are more likely to use digital channels to find information about financial services and products. Therefore those channels will be more effective in reaching your target audience. Your advertising agency or media studies can provide insight into each customer segment’s media habits.
Another key way to use analytics to improve effectiveness in communicating is by identifying “triggers” or behaviors among your existing customers to target them with specific messaging to retain or deepen relationships. Using this data can provide a very targeted campaign with high response rates. Examples are numerous, but can include large deposits, large withdrawals, loans that are one payment away from being paid off, customer change of address, customers with large monthly credit card payments to another institution (all first party data). Three common and successful third-party data triggers are: A of customer applies for credit; searches for a financial product; and prospects move into your branch trade area (new mover list).
Using data to improve your targeting and segmentation
Refining the targeting of your audience can significantly improve your response rate on marketing campaigns and activities. Market data allows the crafting of data-driven, intelligent campaigns that are specifically designed to target a certain group of customers. By combining first-party and third-party data, you can better understand the characteristics of who is likely to buy a specific product, and how large the opportunity is. This allows you to better estimate the expected results of a campaign and develop the appropriate marketing budget.
An obvious example of this is market data that provides the ability to append email addresses and phone numbers to your target prospect data, which can allow for precise IP-based digital advertising that is strictly viewed by your target audience.
This can also improve the efficiency of marketing campaigns by reducing the likelihood of existing customers viewing our marketing campaigns using reverse targeting, or negative targeting.
Another more complex example is using third-party data to find customers or prospects who are most likely to be large-deposit customers, credit-worthy customers or who have a propensity for investment products. This allows you to target more precisely, often reducing your marketing spend and significantly increasing your response rate.
Optimizing results regularly using routine analytics
Many marketers are so focused on developing and launching campaigns that too little attention is paid to the results that are generated. However, CPG has found that, particularly with digital media, you can’t ‘set it and forget it.’ Our clients have found that when performance results are gathered and frequently reviewed, optimizations to the media mix and sales efforts can improve results by 50 to 100 percent. This is all contingent on setting up a 360-degree feedback loop of data.
For instance, if you are running a campaign on paid social channels, data is being collected in real-time every day and should be analyzed at least weekly to be able to identify the best-performing ads and campaigns, make tweaks and improve the overall success and efficiency of your paid marketing spend. The more you measure, the more you can improve. Continuous data allows us to test and learn what our audiences are responding to because every campaign is different. What worked once, won’t necessarily work again. Gathering and analyzing that key performance data yourself or with the help of your ad agency or analytics partner is essential to perfecting this process.
Critical to this process is marrying the advertising analytics you or your agency is gathering with sales performance data so you can correlate marketing’s effect on sales. Google Analytics and other tools can help you track metrics like impressions, clicks, and landing page visits. But that’s only half the picture. Be sure to track down data on digital applications and opened accounts as well as accounts opened in the branch. This will help you understand the relationship between your marketing tactics and sales performance, so you can better understand which tactics or media channels have the most positive impact.
Increasing efficiency using analytics technology
One of the key trends for 2024 and beyond is taking advantage of advanced automation and intelligence tools to improve efficiency and free up human hours to work on higher-value marketing activities. If you can “outsource” reporting by using automated tools to aggregate, organize, and visualize results, the optimization process can be significantly streamlined and free up time for you and your team to spend deploying and refining additional campaigns.
A related trend to watch for in 2024 will be the increased use of machine learning and predictive AI to begin analyzing performance results and making optimization recommendations. Generative AI is already being positioned as a marketing tool to help with:
- Generating marketing content and messaging based on specific prompts.
- Creating personalized experiences for segments of prospects.
- Designing brand-consistent visuals and graphics.
- Analyzing customer data for potential opportunities and trigger behaviors and deploy automated marketing campaigns.
Work with your marketing execution partners to understand how this could save you and your team time and money as these technologies become more accessible, secure and frequently used.
Wrap up
Marketing has been handed an immensely powerful tool in being responsible for customer data analytics, but with that responsibility comes an expectation it will be leveraged to benefit the business. By utilizing data to better understand customers, better target future customers, continuously optimize marketing tactics and save time and money using technology, the impact marketing can make on your organization can be improved exponentially. And it’s a win-win for your organization and customers. Better messaging and personalization make your marketing more effective and drive revenue. And by understanding each customer’s unique needs, bank marketers can improve the level of service and utility they provide.
Ally Akins is a consultant at Capital Performance Group, a strategic consulting firm that assists banks in making the most of their customer data. She can also be reached on LinkedIn.
