For many business and marketing leaders, the realization that your marketing team is understaffed or underskilled happens naturally.
It may happen gradually, but having more work than people to do it is a fact that can’t be ignored for long. Deciding how to fix the imbalance of tasks and talent is another challenge entirely.
Cut the work? Unlikely.
Hire more staff? Too many internal factors at play.
Partner with a marketing agency? Sounds simple enough, but vendor selection presents a completely different set of challenges and constraints.
For fintech and financial services companies, this dilemma gets more complex due to the highly specialized nature of the financial industry and the relatively small pool of available talent compared to other industries.
But knowing how to choose a digital marketing agency doesn’t have to increase your blood pressure or throw your growth goals into jeopardy. In fact, hiring a financial marketing agency can be one of the most strategically beneficial decisions you can make as a business.
What you need is a framework to help you clarify your goals and the key insights to give you confidence in your selection process.
We’ve written such a guide and made it available as a free download on our website, and this article will introduce the core concepts from the guide at a high level.
What Is the Agency Buyer’s Guide? (and Why We Created It)
When my co-founder and I decided to write The Buyer’s Guide to Hiring a Financial Marketing Agency (referred to here as “The Agency Buyer’s Guide”), we knew that it couldn’t just be a self-promotional listicle of conventional vendor-selection advice.
It needed to condense more than two decades of experience from our time working inside corporations, trying to hire agencies, and the last decade of running our own agency.
The simple truth is that not all marketing agencies are created equal, especially when some agencies with zero experience in finance will tell you that the knowledge gap is “no big deal” and leave you holding the bag when it turns out to be a very big deal.
We’ve spoken with many banks, lenders, and fintechs with bitter disappointments in agency partners due to poor alignment, lack of industry expertise, and many unfulfilled promises.
You do not have to suffer that fate.
The Agency Buyer’s Guide can be your all-access pass to a future of productive agency relationships that accelerate your growth and help you build a lasting brand in financial services.
Why Selecting the Right Agency Is Critical
Financial services is a world unto itself, in the sense that few other industries, outside of healthcare, deal with as many stringent regulations or play such a vital part in the everyday lives of consumers.
That’s why the financial industry is sometimes referred to as YMYL (your money or your life). If the garbage truck fails to stop at your house each week, you’ll survive the inconvenience. If your paycheck gets delayed, the consequences are dire.
Choosing a digital marketing agency that doesn’t understand how to navigate the constraints of a YMYL industry could cost you in regulatory penalties or broken consumer trust, not to mention the potential for wasting money on tactics that aren’t suited to your niche.
The benefits of choosing the right agency, one with relevant experience, can extend to operational functions, such as how an agency protects sensitive data, how to leverage affiliate marketing, and the right way to differentiate your brand in a crowded market.
The benefits of working with an agency that specializes in finance might not be obvious at the outset, but they’re undeniable once you see them.
Key Takeaways From the Agency Buyer’s Guide
All in all, there are a lot of factors to consider, so let’s hit some of the specifics that will help you evaluate financial marketing agencies and choose the best fit for your needs.
What Financial Brands Should Expect From an Agency Partnership
In our experience, most agency buyers tend to fall into one of these three buckets:
- They need help growing and scaling their business.
- They want to update their brand and modernize their marketing.
- They’re about to launch a new brand, product, or website.
That seems straightforward.
But a surprising number of agencies don’t take the time to ask about your goals and gain clarity about what success looks like.
The number one reason companies end up disappointed in their choice of a digital marketing agency is misaligned expectations.
It’s best to look for an agency that is equal parts marketer and strategic business operator–a partner that thinks critically about using your budget for the maximum effect. Even better if you can find an agency that has worked with companies similar to yours.
You don’t need a partner who can predict the future, but they do need to know how to avoid the quicksand and alligators on the journey ahead.
Expertise Isn’t Everything—but It’s More Than You Think
The principles of marketing hold consistent across most industries. But that doesn’t mean that industry-specific knowledge and experience are unimportant; quite the opposite.
We’re honored to be in a position to leverage our experience to help our fintech and financial service clients ramp up their marketing faster, navigate compliance easier, and deliver campaigns more effectively than the competition.
And our specialty translates into a unique advantage for our clients.
Can an agency without finance experience get up to speed? Yes, but you’ll be paying for that learning curve one way or another, as seen with the SEC’s recent $75k fine against the RIA, Meridian Financial, when they—and their agency vendor—failed to comply with marketing rules laid out in the Advisers Act.
The Importance of Honest Feedback: Hearing the Ugly Truth
In the age of AI chatbots telling people what they want to hear, the role of truth-telling has never been more important.
It takes confidence and a high level of integrity to tell a prospective client that what they’re asking for is a bad idea.
Many agencies won’t do this. They’ll take your money, agree to the plan, and shrug their shoulders when the metrics disappoint.
Alternatively, when you find a partner who will say, “No, you shouldn’t do it that way, but here’s how we can get you to your goals, if you’re open to it,” you’ve struck gold. A small team of people who will stand up for their professional recommendations are likely to beat the “yes-men” any day of the week.
Balancing Innovation With Efficiency
Many would-be clients come to us hoping that our team can help them get to market faster than their internal team. They believe that the highest priority is to just “get some ads running” and see what happens.
This is a great way to waste money and time.
When it comes to YMYL brands, planning and strategic development beat uninformed speed, especially when you’re willing to learn and make adjustments along the way.
Once you’ve aligned on a thoughtful and proven strategy, you can deploy campaigns that generate lasting results, instead of rapid-fire activity that may not attract loyal customers.
Therefore, it is critical to find an agency that is committed to setting realistic expectations for clients based on years of proven campaigns.
Marketing success in financial services isn’t a fluke. It’s the result of consistently applying strategy and thoughtful creativity. Don’t settle for less.
Long-Term Thinking Drives ROI
Whether you like it or not, 95% of your target audience doesn’t want to buy from you right now. That statistic is based on the real-world research of Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Although Professor Dawes’ work focused on B2B companies, the principle is applicable for B2C brands as well: the majority of your target audience isn’t ready to buy right now.
Here’s what that really means for financial brands: your marketing strategy and budget need to be a careful mix of long and short-term tactics.
The majority of it should be brand marketing that builds your brand recognition and reputation, and establishes trust with your audience. The rest of it should be performance marketing that asks for the sale and targets the buyers who are most likely to take action.
This symbiotic combination is what drives long-term growth for fintech and financial services firms.
Short-sighted marketers and agencies who hear that you are hungry for leads might be selling away your future success for expensive, inefficient, and fragile instant gratification when they pour your budget into digital ads. As Dawes notes, “advertising mostly hits people (~95%) who aren’t going to buy anytime soon.” That’s pretty wasteful, especially if your audience doesn’t know you or doesn’t trust you yet.
Be careful not to overemphasize short-term demand generation at the expense of longer-term brand awareness. In reality, brand marketing is proven to be far more effective at generating demand in the long term. Look to partner with an agency that understands the power of brand marketing to build “brand memories” with your audience, so that when they are ready to buy, they think of you first.
Simply put, the brand that gets remembered is the brand that gets bought.
Good agencies know brand marketing should be your foundation to sustain your growth engine. And you can’t accomplish it overnight.
You’re in The Buyer’s Seat Now
While we would love for you to consider CSTMR as your agency partner, that’s not why we wrote The Agency Buyer’s Guide.
We wrote it because we wanted to equip small, medium, and large businesses to become informed buyers who can advocate for themselves.
The best results come from a collaboration based on mutual respect and appreciation.
We want to work with clients who feel empowered, not manipulated or tricked. That’s why we wrote the guide and we’re giving it away. A great marketing partnership is almost magical. And we need more of that in the world.
However, the reason that great marketing can feel like magic is because of the immense amount of preparation and diligence by everyone involved. As Steve Jobs once said, “It takes a lot of hard work to make something look simple.” That’s the kind of work we’re here to do.
If you’d like to learn more about partnering with CSTMR, we’d love to talk with you.
