Targeting the Future Customer: Event Summary

Alex Reidegeld

Senior Events Executive

The Financial Services Forum

Targeting the Future Customer
Tuesday 26 June 2018
Hosted by: Siegel+Gale

 

Advertising your brand to the customer of tomorrow will be shaped by their media consumption. With an increasingly diverse offering, which channels should marketers focus on to attract new customers? Four industry experts provided their insight and opinions on which channels the customer of tomorrow will favour, and how companies can make themselves more attractive to potential buyers. Alex Reidegeld, The Financial Services Forum, summarises the key findings.

 

Three pillars of building trust: loyalty, creativity and personalisation

  • Inertia isn’t the same as loyalty! Customers in Financial Services are “habitually loyal”. 40% say they have never switched bank and 75% say they have been with the same provider for at least 6 years.
  • 58% of customers say that trust is what makes them engage with a brand. In second place was ‘lower prices’, with 30% of customers citing that.
  • Be transparent about the data you collect and use it to let customers shape the experience they get from your website.
  • Face-to-face contact is still important in creating trust, especially for younger generations. Omnichannel can provide the solution. A mix of a dedicated virtual assistant to help with banking tasks but also the option to have face-to-face help from a customer service rep in branch.
  • Reward loyalty (61% value this), for example through access to exclusive discounts or offers.

 

Societal change shapes customer expectation

  • New technology + new experiences + new business models = societal change.
  • Gen Z, the biggest upcoming consumer group, are more globalised, grew up with the internet and smartphones and expect brands to have a purpose and support bigger causes.
  • The primary touchpoints are mobile devices, but tell your brand story across different streams, rather than focussing on mobile only.
  • The most successful brands focus on usage, not buyers.

 

Marketing in the ‘Age of Assistance’

  • FS companies and their digital offerings are competing against the very best of digital experiences that customers ever had, for example by companies like Uber or ASOS.
  • Modern consumers are more demanding, more curious and more impatient.
  • 50% abandon a transaction if the experience is bad, 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if the site doesn’t load within 3 seconds, and users perform ever more search queries before deciding on a product (Over 50 million personal finance questions were asked from Google in 2017).
  • Improving page load time is therefore critically important to decrease bounce rates and increase the chance of conversion.
  • New opportunities across digital channels: social media, YouTube, Live TV etc.

 

Thank you to our speakers:

  • Rachel Aldighieri, Managing Director, dma
  • Oliver Robertson, Head of Research, Thinkbox
  • Erik Mashkilleyson, Director, Digital Experience, Siegel+Gale
  • Adam Chalk, Senior Industry Manager, Google

 

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