At Dentsu Marketing Cloud we endeavour to empower our users’ marketing endeavours by helping them harness every data piece in their arsenal to maximize insights, activate strategies, and optimize performance across all campaigns.
Our users work with clients across different verticals like automobile, healthcare, banking and finance etc. and each of these verticals come with their unique set of demands and are evolving in a myriad ways as consumers globally adapt to the digital landscape.
When it comes to banking and finance as a vertical, consumers have moved to a digital experience for several activities, 30% of global consumers said they were spending more time learning & accessing banking & financial information digitally since the pandemic. It’s essential for marketers to merge and gain insights from both proprietary media and non-proprietary media and capitalize on the nuances that a digital landscape can provide.
For Banking and Finance as a category, customers have high lifetime values leading to fierce competition in customer acquisition.
In this highly competitive environment, it is important that marketers utilize every possible touchpoint to communicate with and understand their audience to successfully reach them at lower CPL with a highly efficient targeting strategy that ensures minimal budget wastage. To get this right, it’s imperative for brands in banking and finance to understand their audience from different lenses to grasp the current needs patterns with respect to your brand and accordingly shape an effective marketing strategy around this. But even before this, we suggest getting the fundamentals right.
Challenges faced by Banking & Finance brands
- Due to competition, the cost per leads are high ( average CPL for APAC regions: $160 and non-APAC regions: $270).
- Proprietary CRM data is stored in silos and this prevents marketers from recognizing valuable leads.
- Unable to effectively gauge audience insights from offline data sources and capitalize on them to improve marketing strategy.
- Inability to audit marketing platform’s optimization engines, makes it challenging for marketers to get a view of the “why” hence unable to completely understand their audiences.
Build a Robust Foundation
The better you know the consumer, the easier it is to create a more relevant connection between them and your brand. Brands have poured millions into trying to generate the right primary data to help improve their marketing efforts. But the cost involved in getting the right audience to facilitate these research surveys makes it unappealing. Platforms like CCS can empower you with insights based on primary data from audiences that have a higher affinity towards your brand. CCS has a global sample audience across 52 markets, making it the world’s largest research of this nature. Leveraging insights based on questions answered by consumers themselves help shape your marketing hypothesis and strategies from the get-go.
Understand your Audience
To understand your audience, you need to start by analyzing the current consumer trends across the digital ecosystem for your industry. Let’s look at tools and products that can help us with this.
1. Discovering Consumer Insights and Trends
Platforms like Think with Google, Google Trends, etc help brands and marketers understand what the current consumer trends are in the vertical and can help a brand come up with meaningful insights that will help understand an audience’s current needs in a particular market.
Example: In india – In the second half of 2020, there was an increase in the following search queries: “home loan” (+22%), “personal loan” (+8%), “car loan” (+55%), and “phone loan” (+10%).2 In 2020, there were 2.5X more credit checks for loan applications than in 2017. Search interest outside Tier-1 cities grew by 2.5X for these keywords.
Insights like these will help shape your campaign’s message with respect to your goals.
2. Discovering the Right Keywords
You can leverage tools like the Google Keyword Planner to gain an insight into which keywords have large search volumes and what the competition is for ad impressions, to help you come with up with an effective bid strategy for your campaigns:
3. Discovering Video Consumption Patterns
Brands can use platforms like FInd my Audience to figure out people whose interests and habits relate to what your business offers. Like Avid Investors – People who actively invest their money, follow financial markets and regularly read financial or business news – is recognised as an affinity audience for banking and finance brands. For this audience, you can get details on:
- Top YouTube channels Avid Investors are likely to be watching
- What products and services Avid Investors are researching or planning to purchase?
- Avid Investors are likely to be part of some other audiences like – Value shoppers, Mobile enthusiasts, Health & Fitness buffs, etc
Understanding Your Audience using the Dentsu Marketing Cloud Product Suite
How can we help?
The Dentsu Marketing Cloud Product Suite aims to help marketers unify data obtained from various touch points to form a coherent and effective marketing strategy:
Let’s Deepdive into this:
Dentsu CRM Sync
With Dentsu CRM Sync you can leverage your CRM data in a secure environment.
You can identify interested leads – prospects who have personally filled in a lead form, filled in government id information, etc. through D-Sync, our ML identifies what we call ‘interested leads’ from your CRM data:
Being a Facebook Marketing Partner, we’re able to transfer the traits of an interested lead for enhanced marketing on Facebook’s platform and generate a strong pool of high quality customers for the client. We create a custom audience of these interested leads on Facebook, making it easier for the client to target this audience for future campaigns.
DMC Explore (Audience Lens) and DMC Campaign Planner
DMC Explore is powered with audience insights from a multitude of data sources. Our robust algorithm will help you determine what are the affinities of various audience cohorts depending on their demography and consumption patterns. DMC Explore is also able to give you a similar in-depth analysis on your own custom audiences and lookalike audiences created on Facebook via our Lookalike audience feature:
With DMC Explore you can get insights on audience’ demography and behaviour instantly.
You can identify which age & gender segments your audience falls in and what sectors they work in, get a view of their consumption patterns on web & OTT, discover the apps they own and understand the size and affinity of your audience cohorts and activate the most efficient ones.
DMC Campaign Planner uses a unique algorithm to formulate a comprehensive plan by defining three ad sets – Core, Affinity, Lateral. You get a view of the audience size, along with the recommended budget split, and the targeting for each ad set in the plan and can simply action this plan instantly within a few clicks on native consoles like Facebook and DV360.
DMC Campaign Manager
DMC Campaign Manager allows for the continuous optimization of campaigns to ensure that you are reaching out to the right audiences with the most effective communication. You can optimize different aspects of your campaign like interest based targeting, bid adjustments across platform and demography as well as creative optimization to ensure that you are going after the best quality leads at the most effective cost possible.
We have prepared a comprehensive schedule for utilizing the Campaign Manager for optimizations, outlining the DMC best practices for our users as an easy reference point:
Download our optimization schedule here.
We suggest all our banking and finance brands onboard to access tools and products for each phase of their marketing journey, right from research to activation. The workflow below helps put this process in perspective for all our marketers in this category.
Dentsu Marketing Cloud | Banking & Finance Playbook:
Let’s take some example briefs to deep dive into the kind of audience insights that DMC Explore and Planner can provide. By understanding your audience’ interests, consumption patterns & in-market affinities you can bring your brief to life and target the correct audiences with correct communications.
