Is it better to listen to your heart or your head? It’s easy to assume that most financial decisions are made with the head, but the reality may come as a surprise. In fact, when faced with making decisions, consumers are more likely to go with their emotional responses over rational reasons and logic.
Connecting on an emotional level
Connecting with your audience, really connecting, is about more than showing them the product features and benefits of your brand. It’s about tapping into their feelings and eliciting an emotional response, whether that emotion be happiness, surprise, or even sadness. That can seem a scary thought to finance brands that don’t see the industry as being in the business of emotions. The savvy finance marketer, however, understands that even the most traditional finance brands can use emotional engagement to their advantage. Conservative doesn’t have to mean distant, after all, and finance doesn’t have to be ‘boring’.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is such a key metric for finance brands, and provoking an emotional response from customers right at the beginning of their journey makes it easier to establish a genuine connection. The result? An emotionally connected audience with higher CLV.
How to get it right
Emotions are so powerful, and so personal, that your marketing has to be genuine. One whiff of inauthenticity and your campaign will have the opposite effect, so make sure enough work goes into planning and creating your content so it really resonates. Can you go even deeper in terms of understanding your audience? After all, how can you connect with their emotions if you don’t know what drives them? Think about the life experiences that lead customers to need financial services, and focus on those. Whether it’s serious or humorous, creating content that taps into the emotional drivers that make your audience choose you over and above the competition is very valuable indeed.
Content that taps into the emotional drivers that make your audience choose you over and above the competition is very valuable indeed.
Brands already making an emotional connection
ANZ – BlueNotes
Not just a platform for brand news and information, the bank uses its successful content platform to really speak to and develop a meaningful relationship with its audience. Take 2019’s series celebrating International Women’s Day covering topics like returning to work with a resume gap, for example.
MasterCard’s – #StartSomethingPriceless
The campaign across platforms from X to YouTube started in 2018 and urges people to engage in a passion or purpose that helps to effect positive social change. Powerful, right?
Lloyds Bank – Get the Inside Out
In an award-winning campaign, Lloyds Bank tackled the stigma of non-visible disabilities to encourage people to talk openly about mental health. For a financial institution with such a traditional heritage, focussing on such a potentially sensitive subject was powerful…and very successful.
It may be a challenge for some finance brands to move away from more traditional content to strategies that are designed to engage emotions, but trust us, the CLV will make it worth your while. If you’re still not sure how to make it work for you, get in touch and we’ll show you how.
