If you’re a marketer working in the B2C finance sector, you probably know how challenging it is to stand out from the crowd. While finance used to be a face to face industry, this isn’t the norm any longer — from foreign exchange to insurance, everything has moved almost entirely online. To get through the hurdle of attracting customers (and keeping them), you need to have a display and email campaign that’s specifically targeted to your audience and customer journey.
With retail marketing, you know that customers are attracted to items that they want or need. And when marketing for travel, it's similar — consumers either need to travel for work or pleasure. Those verticals in particular offer tangible products and experiences, but what happens when your business revolves around B2C finance? How do you create an effective display and email campaign that captures (and re-captures) interest?
Today's consumers aren't fans of being sold to and expect an instant and seamless shopping experience. Something like purchasing insurance isn't any different — people still expect the same easy process, and you still have to be mindful of serving the right ads during the right time. However, the B2C finance customer journey is infinitely more complicated. Instead of a few steps until a conversion, one person can have multiple interactions with brands before settling for one — after all, these are heftier decisions than buying something like a t-shirt or tickets to Maui.
While dynamic ads are essential for most brands, this isn’t the case with B2C finance ads. Why? Because insurance companies don’t have product feeds. So, how can you stand out from the crowd with generic static ads?
The answer is with personalization. For example, if you’re running family insurance, get creative and use family lifestyle images, or create video content that speaks to the emotions and makes it clear that you’re there to help.
With that in mind, I’ve broken up the fundamental components of building a marketing campaign and also included suggested ad types to serve.
Brand awareness happens before the research phase. When a brand awareness strategy is effective, it'll create brand recall — meaning, consumers will have your website in mind before they even begin researching their insurance options.
Lookalike (Facebook + Web): These are ads that reach new people who are similar to your best existing customers.
Contextual (Web): These ads are designed to show your ads on sites that have to do with B2C finance.
Demographic and interest ads (Web): Demographic and interest ads are served to people who are interested in a subject related to your brand or product. For instance, you may target people interested in your competitors.
During the "consideration" phase, people have some level of recognition of your brand and they're performing actions such as googling insurance companies.
Examples of retargeting options by intent:
Web and app / Facebook and Instagram - insurance:
Emails: Consider serving an onboarding email series to get people acquainted with your brand. It helps if you provide an incentive, such as a promotion or a discount.
During the "loyalty" stage, your job is to maintain your position in customers' minds. CRM retargeting is an excellent loyalty strategy because it uses a marketer’s owned customer data to match known customers across any device or browser within logged-in media like Facebook, Google Search, and email.
Web and app / Facebook and Instagram CRM - loyalty: The goal is to target past customers. People will always need insurance — it’s essential to provide continued engagement.
Emails: Serve re-engagement email campaigns to past customers.
For more on how to build campaign strategies:
How to Build a Campaign Strategy for Travel
How to Build a Campaign Strategy for Retail
Last updated on September 20th, 2023.