Here’s how financial services brands reach and engage high net worth audiences

Digital expansion has allowed financial institutions to engage with more people than ever before with well-planned content, videos, and webinars – but this has also led to information saturation. Now, it’s harder for individuals and investors of all classes to find trustworthy information, with more non-regulated entities producing financial content and promoting it on social media.

Financial institutions need highly strategic, personalized and hyper-targeted digital campaigns designed to cut through the noise. Ultimately, this content must also build trust, a central pillar to effective digital marketing for financial services.

Financial institutions targeting ultra-high-net-worth individuals should be aware that it’s not always the individuals that they need to target; rather, it’s their trusted advisors and confidants, such as private financial advisors.

As such, campaigns aiming to build meaningful relationships with individuals need a two-pronged approach: one that focuses on targeting audiences with awareness campaigns, and another that also targets their advisors with detailed data-led content, establishing the brand as a trusted industry expert.

Relevance has developed strategic digital marketing campaigns for global financial brands targeting audiences and institutional investors. Here are just some of the ways financial services brands can engage and resonate through effective and highly tailored digital marketing strategies.

Digital marketing for financial services: it all starts with trust

Building trust is paramount. One way to achieve this is through well-researched content, providing information and data that are relevant and useful to target audiences.

Trends reports, outlooks, and weekly updates covering your sector of expertise are all powerful ways of communicating your point of view to clients and prospects while demonstrating in-depth knowledge and expertise.

Updates, including changes in legislation or regulation, can also be important pieces of content. Timely releases can show that you understand how regulatory changes can affect your audience and that you can help them navigate a complex web of taxation or legal hurdles when it comes to personal or business financial affairs.

Podcasts have become an incredibly useful content tool to connect with their audiences on a personal level. With a longer format, podcasts enable brands to develop an honest dialogue around topics that matter.

Webinars are also increasingly useful for financial institutions to host lectures and talks, engaging potential and existing clients. Webinars, like podcasts, enable brands to place their key industry players, including wealth managers, directors, and CEOs, at the center of the conversation, in addition to partnering with respected industry heavyweights.

By delivering research in multiple formats, such as video animations, interviews with heads of research or senior analysts, and audio transcripts and podcasts, you can appeal to individuals who may not have the time to read an article or research paper or who may wish to have it playing alongside other things they are working on. If you are targeting an international audience, alternative means of consumption may help non-native speakers explore your content.

If you have your own datasets or can license data from reputable suppliers, you can also build your own reputation in the market as a source for information on specific sectors. We’ve seen one of our clients build a hub of data and research around a focus asset class, generating hundreds of thousands of visits per year with tens of thousands of registered users repeatedly downloading raw files to consume in-depth market research to aid their planning and decision-making.

The right approach depends on your audience, sector, their content consumption habits and the scale of your distribution channels. By surveying your audience and their preferred means of exploring content, and by sourcing audience reports from media partners, you can craft a digital marketing strategy with strategic pillars of content designed to build trust, foster engagement, and drive action – all while developing your brand as a respected and credible voice in your market.

Engaging your audience with tailored messaging that appeals to their wants and needs

Online marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all. Content needs to be customized for individual target audiences, including high net worth individuals and their private wealth advisors. Additionally, age plays an important role. For example, younger individuals, including generation X and millennials, are far more likely to be drawn to digital marketing campaigns that focus on sustainable finance, corporate responsibility or philanthropy.

According to research by the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, sustainable finance is set to grow rapidly as Generation X and Millennials inherit wealth. Appealing to their sustainable and philanthropic values through customized messaging can ensure that these newly wealthy individuals engage with your brand.

For example, Lombard Odier, a private investment bank, focuses on its strong sustainability credentials to reach younger and more eco-conscious audiences across its digital channels. A web page is dedicated to encouraging potential and existing clients to “rethink sustainability”; articles and YouTube videos focus on how the bank’s net-zero investing strategies can help build, diversify, and decarbonize portfolios.

Older individuals, on the other hand, are more concerned about the preservation of family wealth. Therefore, marketing efforts for this group should focus on protecting wealth for the next generation.

For either group, however, it’s clear that content and marketing activity needs to appeal to quite a few different stakeholders and decision-makers, for example, wealth advisors, trusted confidants, assistants, family officers, and legal advisors.

As the research from the Oxford Smith School notes about private bankers: “[They] wield a considerable amount of power in the lives of clients, principally because of their extensive knowledge of the investment world and their utility as a ‘voice of reason.’”

The research highlights how half of high net worth individuals may defer decisions to others. This underlines the importance of a multi-pronged content strategy that targets high net worth audiences and those around them, helping them make sense of various markets.

Relevance offers a full suite of digital marketing strategies for the financial services sector. If you would like to discover more about our leading financial marketing services, contact our team.