3 Steps to Building a Customer-Centric Bank Using Digital Marketing

With the rise of customer savvy fin-tech disruptors and the erosion of customer trust in financial institutions, banks face significant challenges in deepening their share of wallet with existing customers. As personalized customer experience becomes the bedrock of thriving businesses, banks need to successfully transition from product-centric to customer-centric sales. However,a PegaSystems survey revealed that 29% of banking professionals surveyed globally are still deeply stuck in product-based selling approaches. For banks to achieve positive outcomes for both customers and the organization, rethinking the entire sales approach including identifying opportunities and capturing customerinterest is pivotal. So how canbanks reset and strengthen their relationship with customers?

Digital marketing is the key to factoring in customer needs and preferences by leveraging insights gleaned from transactional and interactional relationships. Fuelled by the promise of big data, digital marketing enables organizations to build customer profiles with automated data flows for holistic customer journey mapping and digital channel optimization. The outcome:  client centricity combined with the ability to turn relationship selling into positive outcomes.  

These three critical steps can help banks build a customer-centric organization using digital marketing:

Step1: Leverage customer analytics: Given the stringent regulations and low interest rates, the banking industry is going to stay revenue challenged in the foreseeable future. The only way out is to improve customer targeting,better manage sales leads across channels, and influence customer behavior through incentives and rewards. Banks that embracethe power of customer analytics gain invaluable customer insights for improving cross-selling, upselling and share of wallet. For instance, a leading Indian bank leverages AI-based solution to record facial expressions of customers to understand if the customer is happy with the services. Leveraging customer analytics for digital marketing helps deliver personalized and contextual interactions and increase likelihood of purchase. For example, using sentiment analysis and social media analysis, banks can make unique, timely and relevant offers while optimizing marketing spend and closure rate of sales leads.

Step2: Invest in digital technologies and new skill sets:A leading Canadian bank became a digital marketing powerhouse by investing in the right technology and ramping up its employee skills. The lesson to learn: if you don’t have a skilled workforce, you are not going anywhere with your digital marketing initiatives. With 64% of Indian organizations agreeing that digital talent gap is hampering their digital transformation initiatives, there is no doubt that building data science teams that work hand in hand with marketers is imperative for digital marketing success. Banks and financial institutions that focus on building capabilities in retargeting, SEO, social media optimization and mobile advertising will find it easier to tap and retain customers. 

Step3:Increase digital engagement: A leading American bank has been able to provide tailored account insights and personalized financial guidance through predictive banking that analyses customer accounts. This has helped them increase customer value. Increasing digital engagement with customers on their preferred channels requires data-driven personalization supported by valuable and engaging content. For maximum consumer impact, organizations need to link customer data to build a cohesive narrative across the customer journey. This helps capture customer interest and convert leads using targeted messaging. 

For banks looking to build competitive advantage, digital marketing can never be an afterthought. With mountains of data being generated from social media platforms and marketing channels, banksmust develop ways to generate meaningful insights through rich data sets and robust algorithms. As banks respond to new customer demands, developing capabilities in predictive analytics and machine learning can become a prime value creator in identifyingand engaging high value customers, creating sustainable business value.