What Financial Advertising is Working?

It seems like a simple question, yet the answer can be elusive. Most financial marketers look at direct response (if at all) in order to gauge performance. Metrics like click through rate, inbound telephone calls and even leads generated are tracked back to their source and tallied in cost-per-action type figures. This can be misleading.

For instance, when a broker does a big banner campaign they may look at the amount of leads per banner placement and divide the cost of the placement by that number in order to arrive at a Cost per Lead.

This is good because it shows how effective your marketing mix is at generating attention and allows you to do more of (what is an educated guess at) what works. An educated guess is better then nothing. But what it doesn’t show is that certain channels, messages and creatives generate leads and client types that are heavily skewed in one way or another.

For example, a PPC search ad for the keyword ‘Free Charts’ might generate lots of leads because these people are interested in the free charts on your platform, but nothing might ever happen in the way of opening funded accounts. On the other hand; these leads might be cheap and right in your target audience, and a shrewd marketing campaign might convert enough to make it a profitable enterprise. But how do you know?

This is where ‘integration’ comes in. The basic principle is that you need to be able to record all client behaviour, from the first impression till the very last trade the client does – in order to know what works & do more of it. The systems involved are various, from Analytics software, a phone tracking service, the CRM system to a demand generation system and banner serving systems – they all need to ‘talk’ to each other to have a granular ROI figure.

When these systems all talk, you’ll be able to learn from past behaviour of clients, and adapt your strategy to market to prospective ones in real time. In financial marketing, remember what Ogilvy said:

“If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”

This is MGL’s philosophy, and we’re sticking to it. From helping you implement the systems to analysing and acting upon the data; we do this for a living. Contact us today for a free, no-strings-attached marketing consult, or go to MediaGroupLondon.com for more information.