If your role at a financial services company even hints of marketing, there is a good that chance governance of digital communications is on your radar. This is an important topic in the financial services industry as digital communications expand in importance. Marketing organizations are increasing their use of email, social channels and nurture campaigns to help promote engagement with their clients. For companies with multiple business units, the challenge of communications governance tends to be paramount. Let’s review the four qualities of digital marketing campaigns that deliver results to help build a model for communications governance:

  1. Send a communication to the right people – as targeted as possible
  2. Ensure it is through the right channel – the digital “watering holes” that your prospects frequent
  3. Send the message at the right time – the appropriate stage in a buyer’s journey to purchase
  4. Send or post the right content – tailored, relevant messaging and offers

Communications Governance – Right People

It may seem logical, but the first step to improving digital communications is to send the message to the right people. Segmentation of your audience members will help you provide the right content at the right time to the right people. Find the correct data attributes that define your audience. Don’t have the right data attributes? Ask for it. Invite your audience to share more about themselves. This data will add value to your audience members and can establish a trusted conversation. Trust with your audience is critical in developing your digital marketing communications.

Communications Governance – Right Channel

Send the message to the right “watering holes” frequented by your financial services prospects. Finding the right digital locations is key to your successfully connecting with your audience members. Coordinate with your colleagues within all of the business units that share your contacts. Be sure to keep the message in the proper channel that compliments the conversation with your prospects in each business unit.

Communications Governance – Right Time

Send the message at the right time in the buying cycle – not the sales cycle. Understanding how your audience buys your product or solution will allow you find your content gaps so you are putting the right content in front of your audience when they are actively seeking it. If you don’t have the right buying cycle stage or are not sure which stage needs attention, invite your audience members to select the content that resonates with them. This may indicate which stage in the buyer’s journey they are at that point.

Communication Governance – Right Content

Send the right content to the right people at the right time. It appears to be a simple requirement, but can be one of the biggest challenges, especially for financial services organizations. Selecting the right content requires a thoughtful and purposeful process which requires your sales and marketing team to work together. Content selection is the key to your success with audience members engagement.

Next Step

An effective measurement of improved communications governance is client engagement. Engagement success rests with the right time, right content and right cadence of that content.

Here are a few questions to consider in communications governance discussions around financial services digital marketing:

  • How best to personalize the message to your clients who may be marketed to by multiple business units?
  • What is the cadence for the best performing email or nurture communication when two business units have the same prospect?
  • Do I have the right client data to optimize segmentation that is marketable, measurable and meaningful?
  • Is the content engaging and can I measure that engagement index with key performance indicators (KPI)?

Improving governance in all of these areas of communication is not easy. But it’s important to continually work on best practices to drive a more cohesive environment as an internal team. Doing this will subsequently improve all of our financial services digital communications to your customers.