As Outbrain’s head of amplify platform for APAC, Yoav Tourel is seeing financial services brands creating more content hubs, more videos, and increasingly leveraging their content to drive leads. “It’s great to see how these brands apply their years of knowledge in lead generation into the content world. It works!” Tourel says.
How finance brands can reach people in Consume Mode
Tourel believes the growth of financial content on Outbrain comes down to its ability to win the attention of prospects by focusing on that moment when a brand meets their audience – while they are consuming stories on publishers’ sites.
They are watching a video or reading an article and we’re there offering them their next interesting moment, based on their personal interest profile.
“The audience is engaged by definition at this moment. They want to discover interesting stories – and that’s why their engagement is higher.”
According to Tourel, the Outbrain model is very much ROI driven and gives finance brands access to performance data that allows them to optimise toward any KPI that is important to them, whether it’s time on site, multiple video views, certain actions on site – all the way to actual conversions. Cost per lead, cost per action and cost per app download are also measurable.
Advanced targeting tools
Tourel describes Outbrain as “a pull marketing channel based on reaching the right consumer, at the right time, with the right message.” Its proprietary Interest Graph matches brand stories to the most interested and relevant audience.
“We can segment each consumer based on their Personal Interest Profile (what does he or she view, when, on what device, where, etc.) and target them with the most interesting stories specifically for that individual,” he says.
Outbrain also has custom audience capabilities, which allow a finance brand to re-engage consumers who visited them in the past.
Data Management Platform (DMP) integration is another feature. Tourel cites the example of a finance brand being able to reach CFOs of companies with more than X employees or $ turnover, thanks to Outbrain’s integration with Bombora.
The Lookalikes solution, which is unique to Outbrain, allows brands to grow their pool of prospects with other consumers who share similar content consumption behaviour.
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Tips for making the most of Outbrain
Tourel believes the main challenges for finance brands lie in cutting through the noise of ad messages, winning the attention of consumers, earning their trust and driving them through the funnel.
“The key here is to create a true exchange,” he says. “To use finance terms – to trade consumer attention with some added value. When it comes to finance we see education, knowledge share and simplification as strong, successful themes in terms of engagement and conversions.”
Because headlines and titles are the invitation to a brand’s stories, Tourel says they need to be as accurate and targeted to the audience and topic as possible. They need to pre-qualify consumers and set their expectations for where they’re heading after the click.
“We’ve done a lot of analysis and studies on best practice for headlines and images across categories over the years and we keep updating our ‘how-to‘ which you can find on our blog,” he says.
Client case studies of finance brands who are using Outbrain well include Visa Asia Pacific’s Tumblr video newsroom, VisaAPnews and the content hub of personal finance aggregator Money Dashboard.
Other practical resources for financial marketers include this article on branded content, these insights to transform your finance content strategy and a further article highlighting three key challenges impacting financial services content.
“I think that Outbrain offers a unique proposition that combines data and data access, a granular level of targeting and optimisation tools that can assist marketers to sleep better at night,” Tourel says.
Related Article: Content On X – Tips For Financial Brands
Related Article: Content On LinkedIn – Finance Brands Win Back Trust
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