Mass marketing monotony: How banks can shake things up to reach new, high-value customers

Every year, thousands of Australians are looking for a new bank. In fact, our research found 541,000 mortgages and 1.4 million everyday bank accounts are ‘in motion’ in Australia every year as customers open new accounts or switch banks.

The competition to reach ‘openers’ and ‘switchers’ is fierce with banks spending millions of marketing dollars to win them over. But with customers increasingly expectant of personalised, relevant communication, current mass marketing methods are falling short. The switchers are switching off.

The death of snail mail and the boom of streaming services has diluted the effectiveness of traditional marketing channels. ‘Above the line’ campaigns on TV, radio, print and billboards – which are expensive and the results difficult to track – can raise overall brand awareness but don’t tend to hit the spot for an increasingly disparate and distracted audience.

Online marketing can reach a more targeted audience than traditional marketing, but it still relies to some extent on the law of large numbers. Thousands or even millions of impressions across countless devices are needed to find the needle in the haystack: the customer you may be able to convert. 

With just a few key players dominating the online marketing space (and tightly controlling data), organisations are forced to commit to an ecosystem of marketing. Consequently, most banks are competing for the same audience in the same way on the same platforms, with little differentiation.
So, if marketing to the masses isn’t hitting the spot, neither online nor offline, what’s the answer?

As we’ve shown through our cutting-edge banking toolset, Acquisition.AI, it lies in identifying the micro-markets that contain ‘extractable’ customers, those who can be won and are looking to change. The areas where consumers are looking for new banking products and, crucially, a new bank altogether.

Customers run large parts of their lives in the digital world, but they still exist in the physical world and much of their behaviour and needs are driven by offline actions and effects. Bringing these two worlds together is how we really understand people. It’s how we create the insights needed to share the right information at the right time to meet their needs and attract them to our brands and products. 

We’ve done that with Acquisition.AI by combining a raft of rich data sources, deep primary research on banking preferences and the latest machine learning techniques to create a powerful tool. One that gives banks the insights to create hyper-targeted, tailored campaigns that work across all channels and connect users with the products they care about most.    

In our next blog in this series, we share research and insights into why customers are switching and how banks can win them back.