Local marketing strategy for financial organizations
What if we told you there is one set of tools that can build trust among your clients, improve the image of your organization, and boost your general marketing in a digital world? Now digital is more strategic than ever, and we’re proud to share the local marketing strategy for financial organizations, step by step.
What’s inside
- What is local marketing for financial organizations?
- Local marketing for financial organizations: 6 golden steps
- Discover the power of Google Business Profile
- Manage the visual image of your branches
- Work with reviews
- Generate positive reviews to increase customer loyalty
- Use Google Posts to communicate value and share expertise
- Analyze your performance and keep an eye on your competitors
What is local marketing for financial organizations?
Let’s start with the basics. Local marketing is all about being visible to clients in search and on maps. It’s all about being where clients search for you, and providing them with all necessary information, so they finally visit your bank, ATM or company office.
According to Google Trends, the number of searches for a "bank near me" (and similar queries) has grown by 250% in 5 years. Google identifies the user's location and shows them banks/financial organizations nearby.
And this is where the competitive battle begins. Top results (the Local Pack — top 3 results in local search) are for those that work hard, and companies didn’t appear there by accident. That said, you have to give the most accurate and full information about your office, branch, or ATM, work with visual content and reviews. Basically, local marketing is about all this.
What is it all for? 88% of consumers who do a local search on their smartphone visit or call a bank, ATM or company’s office within a day.
Literally, local marketing helps you influence the purchasing behavior of your potential customers at the final stages of the marketing funnel.
Put simply, ignoring local marketing opportunities for your retail business simply means ignoring potential customers that are already likely to become clients or perform a small transaction.
In this article, we describe how to actually build your local marketing strategy so your bank, insurance, loan or mortgage company would be ahead of competitors in local search.
Local marketing strategy for financial organizations: 6 golden steps
We share the 6 easy-to-follow steps that banks, credit unions, savings and loan associations, brokerage firms, insurance and mortgage companies can take to boost their local marketing with, and ultimately get better visibility in location-based services.
Step #1 – Discover the power of Google Business Profile
We can’t talk about the finance industry without mentioning money, and we can’t imagine local marketing without Google Business Profile (GBP). Formerly Google My Business, GBP is a free tool by Google that “allows you to take charge of the way your business appears on Google Search and Maps”.
With your Business Profile, you can keep all relevant information up to date, share latest news and important updates, and connect with your clients. But let’s start small and first add all basic information to optimize your business for local searches and make it easy for clients to find your ATM, branch, office or company. Make sure to indicate:
- Business name
- Address and exact pin location
- Service area
- Opening hours
- Phone number
- Website
- Photos
- Attributes
- Category: it describes what your business is about. In 2022, there are nearly 4000 GBP categories. You can choose one primary business category and 9 additional.
With just a few locations, you can manage this data manually. However, if you manage a multiple location company, adding, editing, and removing the information can become a tall order and a time-consuming process.
That’s why we created special tools to help you add and manage locations, as well as keep information full and up to date. These tools will identify how many of your company’s locations are missing, add them to 30+ popular location-based services and manage existing ones.
Step #2 – Manage the visual image of your branches
Visuals help your business rank higher in local search results. Let the number speak for themselves: GBP listings with photos get 35% more website clicks and 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps.
However, simply adding photos isn’t enough. Just imagine this situation: your client opens Google Maps to find out where exactly you are located and sees messy, poorly organized photos in your listing. It may be because your clients or competitors submit unattractive and (sometimes completely) irrelevant photos. Or simply because no one within your organization took that seriously.
The reason why it happened doesn’t really matter. The good news is that you can take visuals over your control. Why? Because рigh-quality and relevant visual content persuades and makes your business trustworthy. How? You can add great pics to your GBP listing and submit complaints to remove bad ones.
This is an example of irrelevant visual content in bank's listing. The images don't clarify how branch looks and ehre exactly it's located.
With BrandWizard’s Photo Management tool, you get notified about newly uploaded photos from all locations, can filter them by tags or publication date, and remove irrelevant content — everything from a single user-friendly and comprehensive dashboard.
Step #3 – Work with reviews
Reviews are the second most important ranking factor in local search. And not only they influence ranking but customer behavior, too, as nearly all (93%, to be precise) people read online reviews before making any kind of purchase, and 15% of them don’t trust businesses without reviews.
So, what review management is about and where to start with? The strategy is quite simple: respond to all reviews, even to reviews without text and especially to negative ones. The odds that a client changes their negative review to a positive one are high, and we know how to convince them. Check out our guide to review management for simple yet effective techniques.
Big guide on how to manage positive and negative reviews
Discover how to respond to reviews to make your customers fall in love with you brand
Just like with visual content management, it’s all simple when you have one or just a few branches or offices. But imagine manually finding, sorting, responding to reviews on 30+ websites where customers leave them if you have multiple locations?
And here we go with our Review center tool that allows you to get notified about new reviews from digital platforms, never miss a single review unanswered, and manage employees responsible for responding to them.
Step #4 – Generate positive reviews to increase customer loyalty
There are numerous factors that make a person choose a financial organization. Positive reviews from customers and clients have proved hugely influential on final decision-making. These work as signals that your organization is trustworthy and will keep their sensitive information safe and secure. There are straightforward stats that say it all: customers don’t trust companies with lower than 4-star ratings.
And you can directly influence the number of positive reviews in your business listing. It goes without saying but we’ll mention this anyway: all reviews must be from real clients, as Google is very good at identifying fake reviews.
You can ask your customers to rate your branch or office or encourage them to do it by sending SMS or placing QR-codes at your location.
Step #5 – Use Google Posts to communicate value and share expertise
Google Business Profile posts show real engagement by a company. They are a convenient way to share updates, news, and interact with your existing and potential clients. Here are a few ideas of what you can post about: popular financial services, list of documents required for a credit card, partner banks listing, changes in working hours, interesting offers… and even events.
Posting in GBP is easy as 1-2-3. Log in to your Google Business Profile account → click "Create Post".
Then choose your post type → fill out all the fields→ click "Publish”.
To make the most of your posting, we suggest you post regularly (say, once a week), use emojis to structure the content, include relevant keywords, and add UTM codes to measure the effectiveness of campaigns.
Step #6 – Analyze your performance and keep an eye on your competitors
Local marketing shares a lot with the finance industry, more than it seems at first sight. It’s all about thinking about customers and, at the same time, thinking about money and output of effort invested. It becomes crystal clear what local marketing tools work for your business and what exactly they bring to your organization.
Listing impressions, built routes, calls, the number of reviews and ratings are basic local SEO metrics that indicate what works for your business and what local marketing activities should be adjusted.
Knowing what your competitors do is of vital importance. With Online reputation analysis tool, you get a detailed overview of their reviews, identify their strengths and weaknesses and arm your organization with robust data to make informed decisions on your local marketing strategy.
To make it all transparent and simplify decision-making for marketers, we at BrandWizard created the Advanced analytics tool that aggregates important and relevant data into comprehensive dashboards and monthly reports.
Wrapping up
Local marketing is a boost for your overall marketing strategy. When implemented properly, it has a good influence on the final decision of your potential clients.
To make local marketing work for your organization, make sure to:
- Use Google Business Profile to its fullest
- Manage the visual image of your branches
- Work with reviews
- Generate positive reviews to increase customer loyalty
- Use Google Posts to communicate value and share expertise
- Analyze your performance and keep an eye on your competitors
At BrandWizard, we combine the power of data, technology and local marketing to make that implementation easy as never before for managers. With tools we created, the online presence and reputation of financial organizations shine and become under (almost) effortless control.
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