The Challenges Behind Measuring Bank Marketing ROI

One of the most challenging aspects for bank marketers this year continues to be the measuring of their marketing efforts, proving return on investment. According to the Digital Banking Report’s sixth annual Financial Marketing Trends survey, the DBR asked execs in 300 financial institutions about critical trends shaping banks’ and credit unions’ marketing objectives and investments and found that, as in past years, only 8 percent of financial organizations said proving ROI was not a challenge.

Organizations are holding marketers responsible for measurable results. Successfully showing the impact marketing has on a bank’s bottom line usually increases budgets, but the measuring is still tricky when there is a need to understand all aspects of the program success but channel success as well.

Assessing Marketing Effectiveness and Budget

Large size and small size financial institutions have the same issues with ROI. When asked to rank the statements that best reflect their organizations’ approach to assessing marketing effectiveness, large banks, small banks, and credit unions all agreed on two key points.

• “We use a sophisticated and/or accurate marketing attribution model” was the least true.
• “We could do a better job establishing marketing ROI” was the most accurate statement for all three types of institutions, large, small and credit unions.

So, what does that tell us about what’s going on? Financial institutions of all types are having trouble proving ROMI, and they’re not using sophisticated measuring tools. The correlation seems clear, and it’s difficult finding tools to measure ROI successfully.

Additionally, when asked what their top concerns were about their marketing budgets for 2018, the three top concerns had to do with digital marketing, marketing technologies, and ROMI. These are 3 of the essential components.

• “How much should we allocate to digital marketing channels?” was the top concern for 63 percent of financial execs surveyed.
• “How do we establish marketing ROI?” was the top concern for 60 percent.
• “How much should we be investing in marketing technologies?” was the top concern for 62 percent.

Having a proper measurement can help to alleviate some of these budget challenges. When you can prove the value of marketing and let it shift from being only thought of as an expense, it helps to create a better story to get more budget. Measurement also helps clear up challenges around how much to spend and where it will be paid.

Marketing Automation Can Address These Issues

The answer to this problem may lie in technology. Marketing automation software helps these marketers work more and more efficiently. It’s technology that streamlines and measures marketing programs to improve their ROMI.

According to the report, what it will do for your department is to store and analyze data, giving you:

• A central marketing database. The first marketing database stores all prospect and customer interactions and behaviors.
• An engagement marketing engine. A platform for creative management and automation of marketing processes and conversations across all channels.
• An analytics engine. The overarching measurement tool for understanding what works and what doesn’t.

How does this help with demonstrating ROMI? It works in tracking the effectiveness of all marketing communication across the entire prospect universe and all touchpoints. This then helps to determine who to contact and how to contact them. It’s not just about ROMI. The automation of marketing software helps you in each step of the marketing funnel with the end goal of attracting and engaging customers and closing sales. By automating much of the marketing process, you’re working way smarter, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your efforts and measuring the results in real time.

The main take away from the 2018 Financial Marketing Trends Report, found that most marketers are acutely aware of what needs to be accomplished, but have not made the necessary changes to their marketing organization or their priorities to succeed. Instead of making the required adjustments to marketing plans, most organizations need to start from the bottom and completely restructure their marketing plans.

Once this is done financial marketers can put it all together with confidence. If not, they will continue to feel overwhelmed, and digital opportunities will not be optimized. Until the available tools for more advanced data analytics and marketing automation are purchased (and used), it will be most likely impossible to keep up the pace with marketplace changes.

The organizations that can recognize the need to make changes to these past behaviors and respond to marketing challenges by investing in digital tools, training, staffing and inside/outside support for digital activities will be gifted with better results and more satisfied customers.

Financial service organizations must invest in digital tools to succeed in the future.