September 11, 2018

Financial Services Digital Marketing Spotlight Roundup: 6 September 2018

By Caity Dalby, Content Manager, at Figaro Digital

On Thursday 6 September 2018, Figaro Digital were joined by digital marketers in the financial services sector at The Hospital Club, Covent Garden, for an informative morning of presentations, deep-dive discussion groups, and networking. With online banking and mobile apps dominating the way consumers manage their money and interact with brands, the financial services industry faces numerous challenges and opportunities.

We had a variety of industry and sector experts speaking at the event, including: Nathan Levi, CMO at TotallyMoney; Ross britton, Senior Digital Account and Project Manager at equimedia; Gareth Morgan, MD at Liberty Marketing; Shaun Miller, Digital Strategy & UX Consultant at Codehouse; and Lynzi Ashworth, Head of Digital & Growth Initiatives at Aon. Here, we dive into their presentations and take a look at the latest in digital experience design, scaling customer acquisition, and driving performance in the financial services sector from the #FigDigFS Spotlight.

Scaling Customer Acquisition for TotallyMoney

Google searches for ‘Credit score’ have more than tripled since 2004. In a bid to move with the market, TotallyMoney launched its free credit report service in July 2018. Everyone is aware of the explosion of fintech and, in the spirit of technological disruption in the financial services sector, TotallyMoney saw the opportunity to act as a challenger brand by providing their customers with a free credit report.

In his presentation Nathan Levi, Chief Marketing Officer at Totally Money, showcased how TotallyMoney launched their service in the UK and some of the key learnings from both their traditional and digital marketing efforts. With a marketing strategy heavily focused on TV, they soon realised that you have to approach your online marketing differently. In some ways we have less choice as marketers; Facebook and Google have become the amazon of online marketing. But, in other ways we have more choice because of the way we can utilise the data we collect. The direction of travel will make the old skills of channel selection and optimisation redundant. But the strategies of how to segment and target will always stay the same. Watch Nathan’s presentation to find out how TotallyMoney have come to use customer segments.

View Nathan’s presentation here.

Driving Performance Growth in a Challenging Market

“In an uncertain market, you can only count on consumer behaviour and influencing this”, therefore in a market littered with disruption and change through technological advancements, new legislation, and changes to the market, it is important to keep focused on your growth targets. And with companies in the financial services sector ranking “Inability to appeal to new generations of consumers” as their primary concern, it is more important than ever to focus on these targets and how to hit them by utilising data profiling, analytics, and situation analysis.

Ross Britton, Senior Digital Account and Project Manager at equimedia, discussed equimedia’s 4-step performance wave; conducting a hygiene test of all website and sales, using media targeting techniques to capitalise and grow efficient targeting segment, use new channels to grow, reach, and push more interest for the harvesting channels, and repeat the cycle to maximise on customer behaviour traits. These steps have allowed numerous brands to accelerate growth ambitions across paid, owned and earned media channels, optimising the entire user journey. Ross provided real client examples where brands have achieved this, and overcome challenges along the way.

View Ross’ presentation here.

Advanced Adwords

In his quick-fire presentation Gareth Morgan, Managing Director at Liberty Marketing, revealed how you can get ahead in the financial services sector using advanced adwords techniques and how to get the most out of your Pay Per Click budget. The most important aspect of any marketing campaign or strategy is knowing your target audience: who, what, where, and when? Whilst this is of the upmost significance, you also need to be asking (and answering using Advanced Adwords), what is your audience passionate about? And how do you know when your audience is ready to buy?

In this presentation, Gareth outlined 5 targeting options in 10 minutes to show you how you should be spending your money on targeting and how you can optimise your use of the incredible targeting options Adwords offers. These ranged from utilising ready-made affinity audiences to bid modifiers – using location, device, and time of day to modify what you are willing to spend on an ad.

View Gareth’s presentation here.

Meeting Customer Need – Digital Experience Design For Financial Services

According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, consumer trust in financial services as an industry is at just 54 per cent. And many surveys have shown there is a wide gap opening between what consumers want and what financial services companies provide. Something needs to change. Shaun Miller, Digital Strategy & UX Consultant at Codehouse, exaplined how financial services companies can creatively use data and customer research to design customer-centric services that market and sell themselves, and close the digital experience gap.

There are a multitude of ways in which machine learning and digital experience design can be utilised to meet customer need in the development of products or services that, amongst other things provide: investment or savings product recommendations, personal assistance, currency swapping recommendation, pending category clustering, and fraudulent activity detection. These end products or services can only be developed through the collection and use of data – public data, buying third party data, and existing product data or guided data. Watch Shaun’s presentation to find out how the self-sustaining system Spotify uses to provide listeners with their individual Discover Weekly playlist can be applied in almost any sector, including the financial services sector.

View Shaun’s presentation here.

Why Aon Has Quit ‘Content Marketing’

 Lynzi Ashworth, Head of Digital & Growth Initiatives at Aon, spoke at the Figaro Digital Financial Services Spotlight to explain why leading professional services firm Aon has stopped ‘Content Marketing’ and created a ‘Brand Journalism Strategy’. Aon position themselves as a brand where everything they do is underpinned by data and analytics; they try and instil this in their marketing efforts. But in such a large company, Aon found themselves publishing 200+ pieces of content each month, which made it hard to put forward one, solid brand message to current (and potential) customers.

This lead to Aon abandoning ‘Content Marketing’ and embarking on a journey of ‘Brand Journalism’. Lynzi explains how Aon worked to set a framework for published content. They had to define an “Aon Way” of creating and activating Aon Thought Leadership, with a consistent approach to strategy, content creation, activation, and measurement. This resulted in ‘The One Brief’: a champion of brand journalism that helps the company better articulate a story line across varying points of view to give their audiences insightful perspectives on important topics. Watch Lynzi’s presentation to find out more about Aon’s cohesive ‘Brand Journalism Strategy’.

View Lynzi’s presentation here.


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By Caity Dalby, Content Manager, at Figaro Digital