Approximately 1.9 billion people around the world are online, with about 266 million of them located in North America. Yet, the majority of bank marketing executives at the 142 FIs surveyed don’t know how much their company spendings on online marketing, or estimate that spending at 0% to 5% of the bank’s total marketing budget.
To say the results of The Financial Brand’s study on online marketing released today are shocking is a gross understatement.
As our friend Jeffry Pilcher, The Financial Brand’s author, put it:
Most financial institutions invest almost nothing in online marketing (or have no clue).This suggests one of two things. Either banks and credit unions don’t take online marketing seriously enough yet to invest in it, and/or they believe that online marketing doesn’t require a significant investment.
There are several important data points to consider. 22% don’t track or measure their online activities, while only 8% do so all the time. And while 45% of banks and credit unions don’t have any online marketing staff, 46.4% of the 154 respondents’ FIs have a Facebook page. This data suggest a sort of me-too, check-the-boxes approach to online marketing. More proof: “While most financial institutions embrace email marketing, a surprising 31% don’t,” The Financial Brand reports.
Banks should be doing better, a lot better.
Yes. The online marketing activities need to be handled by “professionals” and bankers can concentrate on business. IMO the main focus to enter into online marketing should be creating of awareness of new products and services, lead generation (reaching out to new customers and prospects) and customer service (through social media). If my website is not on top on search engines, if my website is not shown when someone reads something about my business, then the prospect may go to the competitors’ website. If my website is not on top on Google, then someone else’s website will be for a search keyword. In that case, I am helping my competitor to get business by not doing SEO.
There are still other factors and aspects like usability, PPC, navigation… jargons. I bet professionals can always put in the right efforts.
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