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Great financial business brands aren’t just built around savvy sales pitches, they’re crafted with great stories. Leading consumer brands have already mastered the art of storytelling by tapping into the human psyche to spark strong emotional responses. The story should be the same for financial services marketing. Prospects and leads are generated by well-crafted sales and financial marketing campaigns, but deals are secured when nurtured through stories that evoke emotion and personal connection to those financial brands, products and services. We’ve broken down 3 core reasons storytelling matters for financial services marketing.
Storytelling Elicits More Authentic Interactions with Your Brand
Traditional financial services marketing focuses on demonstrating four core principles: Price, functionality, features and benefits. These are essential to closing a deal with a lead, but those items shouldn’t be the first touch points your prospective customers see. The decision to engage in the sales process itself is driven by how much a prospect feels a financial brand connects with their specific pain points. They don’t initially care about features and benefits; they want to know how you’ll make their life easier, keep their bosses happy and maintain their bottom line. For instance, if a risk manager needs a specific product to reduce their exposure to an emerging market problem, they have personal reasons for wanting the service too: Protect their financial brand, maintain their job and achieve their goals. Developing your financial services marketing strategy through authentic storytelling during the first prospect touch points creates an immediate connection. Instead of pushing a sales pitch, you’ve created a layer of human connection between your brand and their specific needs, and desired outcome. A common goal is established and a foundation for trust is formed. This layer provides your sales teams with a solid foundation to transition into the next stage of the purchasing funnel.
Storytelling Reduces Friction between Sales Teams and Prospects
Engaging with a new financial services product or service comes with a degree of risk, and storytelling helps ease customers through that assessment process. Once you’ve established a trusted relationship with a potential partner through the power of storytelling, your sales team has a more seamless path to closing that deal. Cold calls and emails laden with details about prices, product functionality and features can quickly alienate customers. Authentic connections are formed by establishing why both parties need the financial business partnership. Storytelling bridges this gap in your financial services marketing activities. Storytelling paves the path for that process to happen, and removes the disconnected friction that customers often associate when a cold sales call or email hit their desk. Armed with stories about why a financial brand actually exists, the people behind that vision and how it translates into a specific market pain point, sales teams have a leg up in the competition once they’ve made that human connection. This enables a smoother sales and marketing nurturing process to continue during each stage of purchase decisions.
Storytelling Leaves a Longer Impression on Your Brand Value
Your financial brand needs a clear path to stand out among the ever-competitive financial services market. Everyone has a sales deck, product sheets and demos. What helps differentiate the companies who only care about selling products and services from those who value customer success is a company that invests in nurturing needs and desires specific to a decision maker’s checklist. Traditional sales and marketing tactics are hyper-focused on their own company, leading with why they are the best at X,Y and Z. A storytelling-driven strategy puts the problems of the customer and their specific market first, and the product and service features/benefits of the prospective company second. Storytelling provides a natural segue to showcase brand value from the start by showing how your company scales best through customer success. By replacing nuances of pricing, and the complexities of how a product or service works, storytelling softens each stage of the traditional sales and marketing funnel for your financial services business. Instead of limiting storytelling to the brand awareness stage, discovering a way to incorporate it throughout the additional decision-making stages keeps your brand top of mind — increasing the chances of a stronger impression of your financial brand’s value long term.
Performance Marketing Pros is a financial industry marketing consulting and services business. We help financial businesses achieve next level growth through proven marketing strategy and tactics designed by marketers with over 20 years each of experience in the financial industry. Reach out for a free consultation.
