Advancements in technology and a competitive business environment have increased consumer expectations in lending. As financial institutions strive to meet consumer demand for fast and easy-to-understand lending processes, competition in the market is increasing as higher interest rates and decreased demand reduce the number of potential borrowers.
To win new business—while maintaining the loyalty of existing customers—lenders need a way to tap into marketing intelligence and leverage consumer information to optimize the borrower experience.
For financial marketers, this requires a real-time understanding of buyer intent to better determine where prospective borrowers are in their journeys. They can then offer every consumer targeted and personalized information at just the right time.
Business Intelligence + Marketing Automation = Better Business Decisions
Financial marketers have massive amounts of internal and external data flowing into their organizations every day. Using business intelligence and marketing automation to analyze this data will help them develop insights to make better business decisions, improve customer outcomes, and remain competitive.
“Nearly 80% of marketing leaders say data, analytics, and insights are very important to winning and retaining customers,” according to a CMO Council study. “Practically every marketer says direct access to customer data provides them with a competitive advantage”—and that includes marketers at financial institutions.
But even as financial institutions collect substantial data about their borrowers, they often don’t have the means to analyze that data to turn it into meaningful insights.
Unique Challenges Faced by Financial Marketers
- Data silos. Consumer data is often siloed in separate business units, making it difficult for marketers to access.
- Unstructured/unusable data. Many financial institutions collect enormous amounts of unstructured data they never access—data that’s unusable because it’s never stored in their data warehouses.
- Limited reporting. Reporting typically only offers insight into a lender’s past performance, which isn’t all executives need to make the best business decisions.
To address these challenges, an increasing number of financial marketers are turning to advanced analytic and data intelligence capabilities to gain deeper insight into buyer intent. Using powerful business intelligence tools, lenders harvest more actionable insights from their data, allowing executives to make more informed decisions.
For example, financial institutions can use these insights to better understand consumer behaviors, as well as evaluate how their branches, various products, and even loan offers are performing. This enables lenders to remain competitive by personalizing their services to each borrower.
Lenders that use traditional marketing strategies to reach customers will never outpace their competitors. Merely generating real-time insights isn’t enough. To succeed, financial marketers need a way to take advantage of all their customer data.
Amplifying Business Intelligence With Marketing Automation
Business intelligence tools give lenders access to their information quickly so they can create key dashboards and visualizations to represent their information dynamically. When lenders use these tools in conjunction with marketing automation, they’re able to:
- Employ data faster and more effectively. Layering business intelligence on top of powerful marketing automation software allows lenders to take action on the data stored in their data warehouses.
- Better understand and communicate with consumers. The combination of tools also enables financial marketers to analyze data so they can better understand and communicate with every consumer.
- Offer personalized products and services. Tapping into analytics and insights tools to personalize and improve the customer experience can boost loyalty and increase profitability in both the short and long term.
In other words, lenders that combine business intelligence and marketing automation will likely outperform their less sophisticated counterparts.
MeridianLink Engage
Most financial marketers understand they can’t succeed on their own—they need outside resources to help them meet buyer intent.
MeridianLink® Engage is a marketing automation technology that helps lenders increase engagement and boost profits through data-driven marketing insights. As a comprehensive marketing automation solution, Engage develops an enhanced profile of customers so financial institutions can capture buyer intent.
Join us for an upcoming MeridianLink webinar on Oct. 19, 2022 hosted in partnership with CUInsight—3 Ways to Use Data-Driven Personalization to Exceed Member Needs. Learn how to build a frictionless consumer experience through integrated data solutions and enhanced marketing processes.
