3 Reasons for Financial Services to Invest in Video Marketing

One of the most effective ways for financial services firms to connect with customers is through video. Video is hands down the best medium for engaging, educating, and encouraging consumers to act.

Although many banks have integrated some video content into their marketing, changes in consumers’ expectations and banking habits have made a robust, well-conceived video strategy more important than ever.

In this blog, we’ll cover:

• Three reasons why video marketing is so valuable for banks
• Ideas for harnessing the power of video in your marketing programs
• Advice for overcoming obstacles to video marketing in the financial services industry

1. Building a trusted, standout brand

Trust is a bank’s lifeblood. For most financial marketers, earning consumer trust involves brand building and offering educational resources on money matters. Video can help you achieve both of these objectives.

Elevate Financial Education

About 90% of banks offer educational content to their customers. Helping consumers increase their financial literacy is a way to promote loyalty and achieve a trusted advisor status when people are making critical life decisions. In a study by J.D. Power, 59% of consumers said they want banks to help improve their financial health.

Video is the ultimate medium for creating digestible, engaging content about complex financial topics. A consumer researching budgeting strategies might be turned off by a long webpage of text. But a 60-second video on “5 Steps to a Better Budget”? It’s so much easier to sit back, watch, and learn.

With the right content strategy, you can use video to engage consumers at all life stages—from recent graduates to first-time home buyers to retirees. This will keep your brand top of mind as consumers navigate their financial affairs over time.

Educational videos are also a smart investment for appealing to Millennials and Generation Z, who are looking to banks for more guidance on how to best manage their money, according to the 2021 Consumer Banking Report.

Strengthen Brand Identity

Telling the bank’s story with video is one of the most effective ways to build and differentiate your brand.

Video excels at evoking an emotional response. At a time when fewer people are visiting bank branches, video can deepen the connection consumers have with your brand and their understanding of your unique promise.

You can establish a strong rapport with consumers by using video to bring to life your bank’s values, personality, and culture. Videos that showcase philanthropic activities—such as employees volunteering at a local food bank—can further strengthen your brand. Today’s consumers want their bank to demonstrate strong social responsibility.

Video testimonials are also extremely powerful brand builders and very credible. Clips of customers describing how they fulfilled a financial dream—like starting a business or paying for college—inspire trust in a bank’s ability to meet consumers’ needs.

2. Winning more business for the bank

Whether your goal is to attract new customers or cross-sell existing ones, video gets results. Video offers new opportunities to grab consumers’ attention, convert viewers into leads, and leverage rich insights for customized follow-up.

Generate More Leads

Video is a valuable addition to any campaign selling financial products and services.

For starters, nearly three-quarters of consumers prefer to learn about products and services through video—way more than the 11% who prefer text or the 4% who’d like an infographic. In fact, 56% of consumers reported that video played an important role when purchasing financial or investment products.

Second, financial products and services can seem intimidating and complicated to consumers. With video, you can convey a clear product message quickly and convincingly, often in a fun or entertaining manner. Explainer and teaser videos can demystify financial products and vividly illustrate how they fit into the consumer’s financial plan.

Finally, you can use interactive video elements to capture prospect data and guide consumers to the next step in the buying process. In-video calls to action increase consumer engagement and conversion rates. For example, a video on investment products can become a lead-generating machine by adding a link to a brokerage account application and a form to sign up for a meeting with a financial advisor.

Act on New Customer Insights

Video enables a more personalized, data-driven approach to marketing and cross-selling that benefits both the bank and your customers.

When consumers click play, they reveal a lot about their needs and interests. Was the video they streamed about building wealth or paying off debt? Did they watch the entire video on auto loans, or did they abandon it after only five seconds?

With the right video platform, you can track who watched what video, when, and for how long, and then feed that data into your CRM or marketing automation software. This gives you new information for lead scoring and the ability to make relevant, well-timed product recommendations based on an individual’s viewing history. If a consumer streams several videos on home-buying, it’s a good bet they’d be receptive to a promotional offer on a mortgage loan.

In the crowded financial services sector, increasing customer loyalty and lifetime value is the name of the game, and the insights gained from video interactions can help you win.

3. Enhancing the customer experience, day one and beyond

Retaining customers requires your bank to deliver an amazing customer experience from the get-go. While there are many options for customer engagement, video should be at the top of your list when it comes to onboarding new customers, then supporting them over time.

Improve Customer Onboarding

Onboarding sets the foundation for a lasting customer relationship, and video content can be a valuable building block in that process.

Using video, you can welcome new customers in more personal, engaging ways, such as adding a “meet the team” video to a new account email. This creates a positive first impression and helps consumers feel like valued members of your community.

Videos are also useful for familiarizing new customers with the features of your products and services. Imagine serving up a 2-minute video on what’s included with a small business checking account or a short clip on how your credit card rewards program works. Videos like these help reinforce the value of your products and give customers the information they need to make the most of them.

Informative videos on mobile banking and digital payment apps can increase the uptake of these innovative technologies, moving new customers towards a more cost-effective, digital-first relationship.

Streamline Customer Support

Support is a huge opportunity area for using video to improve the customer experience.

Many consumers would rather solve problems on their own than call an 800 number and wait on hold for an agent. How-to videos make self-service support easy and convenient, especially when the content is organized in a knowledge base or online resource center.

Help customers find the answers they’re looking for with video tutorials for everyday banking tasks, like how to send a wire transfer or request a stop payment. Videos that address common concerns like fraud and scams are also worthwhile. Sending these out at the first sign of an emerging threat protects your customers’ financial wellbeing and demonstrates the bank’s commitment to security.

Modernizing your support experience with video can boost customer satisfaction while reducing the burden on your customer service team. In fact, 93% of video marketers say video has reduced the number of support calls they receive.

Overcoming Obstacles to Video Marketing in Financial Services

Now that you’re sold on the value of video in financial services, it’s time to secure some funding. When presenting your business case, you’ll need to defuse issues raised by budget owners and IT partners.

Here is some ammo for countering the most common concerns about video marketing in the financial services industry. In many cases, the answer lies in selecting a video streaming platform that meets the strict requirements of financial institutions.

• We already use YouTube. Isn’t that enough?

Many banks publish videos to YouTube. It’s a solid strategy for extending reach, but you have little control over the customer experience. Viewers have to sit through annoying ads, and your video can appear next to a competitor’s—not a good look for your brand.

A video streaming platform lets you create carefully curated customer experiences. You have complete control over branding, with options like customizing the video player with your logo and corporate colors, setting up a branded video portal, or going big with your own streaming channel. Plus, you get richer, more actionable data about your audience and content than YouTube’s basic video views.

• Any technology the bank adopts must have strict safeguards for content and users.

Enterprise-class video streaming platforms provide the security measures and controls needed to comply with the most rigorous regulatory and corporate requirements. Brightcove’s comprehensive, multilevel approach to security protects your video assets, customer data, and brand integrity. On top of that, the company submits to an annual third-party audit of our security protocols.

• What about ADA video compliance? We don’t want a lawsuit or a PR black eye.

Brightcove’s Marketing Studio helps banks meet compliance guidelines for the Americans with Disabilities Act. Features that increase video accessibility include closed captioning, live captioning, transcription, audio description, and compatibility with screen readers for the blind or visually impaired.

• We’ve invested heavily in our marketing tech stack. How will a video streaming platform fit in?

Solutions like Brightcove integrate with popular marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and CRM systems. Sharing data between these systems is a ROI win-win. You can use video analytics to better segment, target, and convert prospects. On the flip side, you can employ marketing analytics to determine—and increase—video’s contribution to pipeline and revenue.

Up-leveling financial services marketing with video

There are many compelling reasons for financial services firms to integrate video more fully into their marketing and customer engagement strategies. Financial services marketers are embracing video to build brand trust and loyalty, increase campaign performance with new consumer insights, and enhance the customer experience from onboarding through ongoing support.

Of course, you need the right video platform to address the unique needs of financial institutions. But video marketing delivers results that you can take to the bank.