What does success look like for your marketing team today?  

Marketing teams are being pressured to deliver more results while also increasing their efficiency. With budgets shrinking and new players in the industry, there’s a heightened need to prove the return on investment (ROI) of each marketing campaign and how those initiatives contribute to the business’s success. As a result, performance marketing is taking center stage.

Performance marketing refers to advertising and marketing campaigns where a merchant partners with an affiliate or marketing company and only pays them when the desired action completes (i.e., results.) This desired action could be anything from new customer acquisition, new account opening, or a product subscription. The value here is that your spend is directly tied to the campaign’s success, thus reducing the potential for sunk costs — particularly useful in today’s marketing landscape.  

Succeeding in this approach requires teams to be data-driven, proactive, and adaptable. Performance marketing is still an evolving space, and there are always new tools and methodologies informing how to do it best. To help you make the most of your financial institution’s performance marketing program, we’ve compiled some of the key trends for 2023 to keep top of mind. 

AI and Automation Are Taking on a Bigger Role  

AI and automation are quickly becoming commonplace across many different sectors. Within performance marketing, these technologies can help make your campaign more targeted and effective, ultimately increasing the ROI.  

As AI technologies become more sophisticated, they’re getting better at identifying patterns in customer behaviors, allowing marketing teams to target individuals more accurately. With these insights, teams can make decisions around performance marketing initiatives accordingly. In addition, affiliates enabled with AI technology can also use it to create personalized campaigns with your advertising materials, resulting in a more targeted approach.  

By using a combination of data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, AI-driven technologies can identify any non-compliant content across partnerships, social campaigns, and marketing assets. Its link monitoring capacity allows brands to track content to ensure accuracy, providing financial brands with complete transparency of where and how their products are being promoted. This also provides brands with enough knowledge to decide where to allocate their marketing dollars to have the most impact.  

When it comes to automation in performance marketing, there are a lot of manual tasks that can be automated. This includes building campaign reports, tracking affiliate activity, sending payments to affiliates, setting up content rules and managing logistics associated with the campaign. Ultimately, this reduces the burden on your team and the overall acquisition cost whenever a customer converts.  

Data Analytics Needs to Be Used More Strategically 

As teams look to increase the ROI of their performance marketing efforts, they need to leverage data to make decisions as much as possible. The good thing about using digital campaigns to execute these efforts is that there is a wealth of data — the trick is gathering the right insights and using these to make informed decisions.  

In 2023, attribution is a key metric. To determine the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives, you want to be able to track each purchase or membership back to a specific campaign. Sharing this data with your affiliates and partners can help them improve their efforts to foster more desired actions for your brand as, ultimately, they will get paid more.  

Beyond attribution, it’s also essential to leverage performance data from each campaign to determine what to do better in the future. Is the content reaching the audience you’re targeting? At what stage are people dropping off? Is there a better language that can be used to convert? Are people gravitating more towards one product type than others? Use data to test out your campaigns and inform where to go next. 

Influencer Marketing Can Help You Stand Out 

Influencer marketing is an area that is still growing across multiple industries. Customers are organically building trust with influencers in various spheres on an ongoing basis, which will continue for a while. And given that search on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok is on the rise, creating partnerships with these content creators can serve multiple purposes.  

An important thing to note is that, more often than not, influencers will only promote a product they are already using, which is becoming more prevalent in 2023. Their reputation is at stake, so they don’t want to lose followers by promoting a product that doesn’t align with their values or brand. As such, make sure you find individuals that are either already customers or are keen to try your product — these will be the ones that champion your product and encourage followers to convert. 

Influencers also allow you to put a face to the brand. In choosing your partners, consider the diversity of your target audience, and find ways to reflect that to them. In other words, hiring diverse influencers will ultimately speak to your brand values and build trust with a newer generation of potential customers.  

Here’s How Fintel Connect Enhances Your Marketing Efforts

As these trends continue to shape performance marketing, the companies that succeed are investing in technologies that harness the power of AI, automation, and data. At Fintel Connect, we’re dedicated to helping financial institutions make the very most of their performance marketing efforts by streamlining processes, increasing exposure, and reducing the overall cost of acquisition. 

Fintel Performance is a one-of-a-kind solution built exclusively for financial brands to ensure they reach new customers and scale their online growth safely and efficiently. The platform includes access to the following: 

•  Our curated publisher network, where we’ve gathered the only network of finance-focused influencers, publishers, and apps that you can partner with to achieve your goals. 
• A robust management platform, which provides a centralized location for you to coordinate with partners, and track revenue from all of your partners. 
•  An expert management service, through which our team delivers customized strategies and supports with recruiting and activating new partners.

Using our platform, customers have saved up to 70% on their acquisition costs, allowing them to increase their acquisition efforts while keeping costs down.  

Ready to get started but worried about keeping your marketing compliant? Our other digital offering, Fintel Check, is an AI-powered monitoring tool designed to help financial institutions protect their brand and keep their content compliant with regulations. Its features include:  

•  Link monitoring that reviews where and how your brand is being mentioned, alerting you when partners add new content and providing you full transparency into referring URLs.
•  Content compliance functionalities powered by our proprietary machine-learning algorithms. Fintel Check conducts regular scans to identify and address issues before they’re spotted by regulators. 
• An audit database that compiles all the information you need to meet auditing requirements. This way, you can safeguard your brand’s guidelines when promoted. 

By adopting these technologies and removing the burdens typically placed on your team, you can enable your performance marketers to be more strategic as they work to embrace the current trends.  

Interested in staying ahead of performance marketing trends? Speak with one of our experts and learn more about how our specialized technology can help.