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Since the beginning of the digital age, the financial industry has gone through a shake-up, and it is now estimated financial services make up 14% of spend is invested in online marketing channels. However, attributing the success of these channels throughout the customer journey, whether online or offline, is proving to be a common challenge within this sector.

According a study by Experian, 51% of financial businesses are relying on simplistic, inaccurate forms of marketing attribution, while some are using none at all, meaning they have no clear, data-driven insights into which channels are driving the most conversions and ultimately the highest return on investment (ROI). Furthermore, considering it takes six to eight touchpoints before a sale, determining the success of each channel should form the foundation for allocating marketing budget to avoid wastage.

To achieve this level of understanding, the financial sector needs to start introducing multi-touch attribution (allocating credit to every conversion (a completed call-to action such as filling a contact form, accessing a live chat or picking up the phone within the customer journey) to evaluate their marketing success. However, getting to grips with this can be tricky.

Here’s exactly why multi-touch attribution is key to shaping the future of marketing for the finance sector.

Paid Search

Out of all the marketing platforms available, paid search is appearing as one of the most successful within the financial sector. According to research by Growthpoint, the finance industry has one of the highest paid search conversion rates at 7.19%; indicating that many consumers are using paid search throughout their journey. However, they also have the third most expensive average cost-per-click (CPC) at $3.72.

When looking into the most popular keywords for financial advisers in Google Keyword Planner (see above), it’s clear the average CPC increases substantially, with ’independent financial adviser’, ’financial adviser near me’ and ’financial advice’ appearing as the top three most expensive keywords. Considering that high cost paid search expense seems inevitable for those in this sector, staying ahead of the game and determining how much ROI paid search is driving for your business is crucial.

Instead of blindly throwing money at the most obvious keywords, the smart financial marketer needs to be thinking of how they can optimise their other keywords to reduce the cost of customer acquisition, whilst maintaining click and conversion rates. To do this they need to attribute how effective particular keywords are throughout the customer journey.

For example, although the digital presence of the finance industry has grown rapidly in recent years, it doesn’t mean that consumers are no longer converting offline, for example by picking up the phone. In fact, a recent survey found that consumers are 2.8 times likelier to call from a paid search ad for financial services than other industries when researching their options.

Let’s say you’re a mortgage adviser who is bidding on the term ’best fixed rate mortgage rate’. How exactly can you attribute the number of phone calls this keyword has driven throughout a customer’s journey?

Call tracking attribution software from Mediahawk, allows you to connect them all, and the activity that generated the call, together, enabling you to analyse the impact phone calls have during the customer journey to determine campaign success. It can also show the full value of the mortgages generated from this specific keyword enabling you to attribute your full ROI from paid search.

Price Comparison Sites

As we’ve already stated, digital marketing is proving to be a popular, yet expensive choice for the finance sector. However, the prospect of high-value conversions means being competitive in this market doesn’t come cheap and these channels include price comparison sites.

When it comes to finance, no consumer wants to feel like they’ve overpaid for a policy for instance, or a mortgage or loan; which is why 60% of consumers are ’very likely’ to use a price comparison site when researching or buying a financial product.

Considering that they’re playing such a crucial role in the customer journey, financial services should certainly advertise on price comparison sites to drive desired results and profits. But this is a rather saturated market and future growth can depend on any changes that might occur to the comparison sites themselves. Therefore, the most successful financial marketers will be those who can hold their position on price comparison sites whilst optimising other channels to achieve growth.

By optimising other channels, such as social media, remarketing and PPC (pay-per-click) whilst maintaining efficient price comparison site coverage, financial businesses can prevent themselves from becoming too reliant on a singular advertising outlet, compensate the costs created from the comparison sites and continue to drive traffic through less costly methods. Determining the success of these campaigns can be a difficult task when financial businesses are using their current marketing tools. With the extensive digital competition that financial marketers are facing, an effective marketing measurement solution is essential for staying ahead, which is where multi-touch attribution comes in.

By making a correlation between actions and revenue, multi-touch attribution can paint the full picture of marketing effectiveness and highlight opportunities to optimise campaigns further. This is essential for finding an even balance between advertising on price comparison sites and external marketing activities.

Paid Social Media

Although it might not appear as an obvious choice, social media is becoming a popular marketing platform for the financial services industry with more and more companies using various platforms for consumer retention. According to research conducted by Community Rising on social media within the financial sector, 87% of respondents said their business uses Facebook, while 52% are using Twitter and 47% are using LinkedIn. The advantages of paid social media are clear and, although it won’t drive as many last-click conversions, it plays a crucial role in portraying a positive image of your company and building brand identity.

In a world where competition is significantly fiercer for financial services, and where it is considerably more expensive to obtain new customers than keep existing ones on board, paid social media is providing a clever, new way for financial businesses to market themselves. However, it isn’t without its issues. Typically, social media platforms play a more nurturing role within the customer journey and lack any real influence at the beginning or end of path to purchases. This means that when it comes to measuring effectiveness, both first and last-click attribution models have become obsolete.

To really understand the vital role paid social media platforms play in financial marketing, a data-driven multi-touch attribution model is essential. By incorporating, into your reporting, exactly how often social media is used during the customer journey you can obtain real insights to aid decision-making over strategy and spend. Furthermore, you can home in on specific channels to maximise your optimisation efforts.

 

 

 

 

 

With the ongoing spat between the United States and China, which seems to be only getting uglier, Katina Hristova explores the history of trade wars and the lessons that they teach us.

 

Trade wars date back to, well, the beginning or international trade. From British King William of Orange putting steep tariffs on French wine in 1689 to encourage the British to drink their own alcohol, through to the Boston Tea Party protest when the Sons of Liberty organisation protested the Tea Act of May 10 1773, which allowed the British East India company to sell tea from China in American colonies without paying any taxes – 17th and 18th century saw their fair share of trade related arguments on an international level.

 

Boston Tea Party/Credit:Wikimedia Commons

 

Trade wars were by no means rare in the late 19th century. One of the most infamous examples of a trade conflict that closely relates to Donald Trump’s sense of self-defeating protectionism is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (formally United States Tariff Act of 1930) which raised the US already high tariffs and along with similar measures around the globe helped torpedo world trade and, as economists argue, exacerbated the Great Depression. As a response to US’ protectionism, nations across the globe began striking each other with an-eye-for-an-eye tariffs – countries in Europe put taxes on American goods, which, understandably, slowed trade between the US and Europe. As we all know, the Depression had an impact on virtually every country in the world – resulting in drastic declines in output, widespread unemployment and acute deflation. Even though most countries began to recover between 1932 and 1933, the world was hit by World War II shortly after that. In 1947, once the war was over, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established - in an attempt to regulate international trade, strengthen economic development and hopefully, avoid a second global trade war after the one from the 1930s.

 

Schoolchildren line up for free issue of soup and a slice of bread in the Depression/Credit:Flickr 

 

Another more recent analogy from the past that could be applied to the current conflict between two of world’s leading economies, is the so-called ‘Chicken War’ of 1963. The duel between the US and the Common Market began when European countries, feeling endangered by US’ new methods of factory farming, imposed tariffs on US chicken imports. For American poultry farmers, the Common Market tariffs virtually meant that they will lose their rich export market in West Germany and other European regions. Their retaliation? Tariffs targeting European potato farmers, Volkswagen campers and French cognac. 55 years later, as the Financial Times reports, the ‘chicken tax’ on light trucks is still in place, predominantly paid by Asian manufacturers, and has resulted in enduring distortions.

 

 

 

 

 

President Trump may claim that ‘trade wars are good’ and that ‘winning them is easy’, but history seems to indicate otherwise. In fact, a closer look at previous examples of trade conflicts seems to suggest that there are very few winners in this kind of fight.

For now, all we can do is wait and see if Trump’s extreme protectionism and China’s responses to it will destroy the post-World War II trading system and result in a global trade war; hoping that it won’t.

 

 

The controversy surrounding Facebook and privacy issues has made news headlines. However, data brokerage and the miss-use of information is nothing new.

The subtle manipulation of the way in which users respond to certain information stimuli is currently a hot topic of conversation. This after the recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal literally broke the internet in a way that no amount of funny cat video footage has ever managed to do. Whilst it certainly is no surprise that Facebook users find this kind of intrusion on privacy and thought manipulation to be exceptionally disturbing, it is interesting to note that many people consider this to be news, when in fact, it has been going on for a very, very long time. The only difference being that it was called by a different name.

The truth is, data, or information brokers have been around and doing business for almost as long as what the internet is old. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry and its not bound to come crashing down anytime soon. In many ways, the need for this type of intellectual trade is fuelled by everything from over-supply to economic recessions.

Companies have become increasingly more desperate to get a grip on effective marketing in order to sell their products to the best possible target market. Making the most profit from the least amount of effort and capital input has become the driving force behind every conceivable marketing strategy under the sun.

Information Is Money

Data brokers collect everything from census information, motor vehicle and driving records, court reports and voter registration lists, to medical records and internet browsing histories. The idea is to gather as much information about every conceivable human profile as possible.

This information is then categorised and grouped into typical market profiles, providing an in-depth analysis on everything from religious affiliation, political affiliation, household income and occupation to investment habits and product preferences.

It doesn’t require a technological genius to see why this information is worth thousands of dollars.

No Control

Individuals are usually not able to determine exactly what is known about them by data brokers. Most data brokers hold on to the information that they have obtained for an indefinite period of time. Loosely translated: the information may very well never go away. Part of the efficacy of the gleaning process is that historical information can be compared with the latest information in order to better determine customer trends as well as the rate at which certain dynamics evolve.

A very scary thought indeed, especially considering the fact that entities like social media giant Facebook still consider allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica to continue trolling its pages from an insider’s perspective, knowing full well that this is the case.

More Than Marketing

Moving away from the manipulative marketing point of view, information in general can be a very sensitive issue. The truth is, somewhere along the line, many of us have dabbled outside the borders of a marriage or relationship or have even discussed sensitive information relating to criminal behaviour and activities with contacts via instant messaging apps.

It’s safe to say that most of us would pay considerable amounts of cash in order to protect information of this nature, especially since the leaking of this information to interested parties can have dire effects on the very quality of our lives.

When considered in this light, blackmailing activities become a real and imminent danger, no longer something found only in crime and drama series on television. There’s also the risk of users information being used in scams, and con-artists are well versed in identity theft and assuming other peoples data as their own.

Its Free For A Reason

People have long been aware about the many dangers of over-sharing information on social media. Many people have fallen prey to identity theft and have lost everything but the clothes on their backs due to this. Imagine now the dire nature of the situation now that the problem is no longer criminals trolling social media pages that have not been sufficiently hidden from the public eye, but instead, are being handed sensitive information on a silver platter, for a minimal fee.

The question begs: is Facebook more than just a social media platform? Or has it been headed towards being a modern-day surveillance tool all along?

Perhaps there is a more sinister reason behind the fact that its free, and always will be, than what meets the eye.

Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_broker
https://hbr.org/2018/04/facebook-is-changing-how-marketers-can-target-ads-what-does-that-mean-for-data-brokers
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-says-its-ending-use-of-information-from-outside-data-brokers-for-ad-targeting-1522278352
https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2018/03/29/facebook-to-block-data-brokers-from-its-ad-network/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/04/05/the-data-brokers-so-powerful-even-facebook-bought-their-data-but-they-got-me-wildly-wrong/#6740e0193107

Bitcoin will not become the world’s sole currency in 10 years - there will be many successful cryptocurrencies - and Ethereum is likely to take over Bitcoin’s dominant status, affirms the deVere Group.

The comments from Nigel Green, founder and CEO of deVere Group, follows bullish Bitcoin claims from Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of social media giant, Twitter.

In an interview with The Times, Mr Dorsey said: “The world ultimately will have a single currency, the internet will have a single currency. I personally believe that it will be Bitcoin.”

The deVere CEO, who in February launched the deVere Crypto app due to “soaring global demand”, comments: “Unlike Jack Dorsey, I do not believe that Bitcoin will become the world’s sole currency in 10 years.

“The original cryptocurrency is likely to remain the most dominant one in the market for some time, especially with its scalability issues being tackled.

“However, I am confident that there will be many successful cryptocurrencies alongside Bitcoin. This is primarily because they all have different inherent characteristics, strengths and values and, therefore, they are useful in different ways for people and organisations.

“Also, the market itself is set to grow exponentially, resulting in greater usage of and investment in all the major cryptocurrencies. This growth in the market will be driven by many factors. These include that simply an increasing number of individuals, firms and organisations are becoming aware of, have a better understanding of and use cryptocurrencies; and also because financial regulatory bodies around the world are increasingly looking to regulate cryptocurrencies, which will give investors even more protection and confidence in the market.”

Mr Green continues: “Jack Dorsey is, clearly, extremely bullish on Bitcoin, but I believe that its closest rival, Ethereum, could in the near future take over as the world’s biggest and most important cryptocurrency.

“I’m noticing a huge shift towards considering Ethereum as a blockchain [the revolutionary technology that underpins cryptocurrencies] platform rather than just a cryptocurrency.

“Many companies are launching their Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), which are the cryptocurrency equivalent of IPOs, on Ethereum.  In addition, the fact that it uses smart contracts makes it significantly superior to the ‘transaction based’ Bitcoin.”

The deVere CEO concludes: “Whilst I disagree with Mr Dorsey’s claim about the world having one single currency in 10 years and that it will be Bitcoin, it does underscore the growing assertion that digital currencies are here to stay and that the market is growing – despite the best efforts of financial traditionalists.

“There is a huge and growing demand for digital currencies in our increasingly digitalised world.”

Protagonist of this week's news, Alexander Nix is the executive at the centre of the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook controversy surrounding political campaign influence, sly data based marketing and supposed behind-our-backs data harvesting through everyone's favourite social media platform.

In this video CEO Today delves in to the life of Alexander Nix, a very private individual, listing some hobbies, interests and much of what he's been up to to get where he is today.

Facebook, Google, and now also Twitter have all moved to ban cryptocurrency-based adverts on their sites. This means that any ads pertaining to ICO platforms, bitcoin wallets, token sales, crypto-trading etc. will be banned.

Much of this spouts from illicit ads and fraudulent activities. Therefore, there will be some exceptions and policies are still being put together. Analysts currently believe dips in market values and trading of crypto are being caused by the regulatory scrutiny and ban on ads.

This week Finance Monthly hears from BrokerNotes CEO Marcus Taylor on what this means for the crypto market as a whole: “The cryptocurrency market is taking a battering at the moment. It’s being viewed by consumers and big businesses as a wild west environment riddled with risk and instability. Google’s move to ban cryptocurrency ads, following Facebook’s decision last month, will light a fire under the industry to introduce the regulation needed to make the crypto market one consumers can trust in the long term.

“But what about the short-term impact? A recent report shows that 58% of online cryptocurrency traders are millennials and it seems logical that removing advertising from social media channels like YouTube and Facebook should have a major impact on their overall interest in the market. The reality will be different though.

“Although 18-30s represent a huge chunk of the market, 52% identify as experienced traders. The ban will simply serve to protect the ill-informed making bad decisions and bring market stability, rather than put a stranglehold on cryptocurrency trading.”

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