When Influencer Marketing Meets Finance
The application of influencer marketing in a more regulated industries is often unheard of, however, with the rapid expansion of today’s digital landscape, industries such as financial brands started to seek leverage of these powerful KOLs’ voices.
When it comes to financial institution, usually, one wouldn’t normally go near social media due to its strict regulations and often confidentiality issue. However, a large number of banks, insurance companies, and personal finance institutions start to look for social media influencers’ help to create promotional content.
The growing interest of these financial service brands in working with influencers is often considered as part of companies’ strategy to catch up with the current marketing trend. Still, what can influencers possibly do to humanize these financial institutes’ images? What kind of content would trigger the interest of the younger generation from the relatively-mature-friendly industry?
Personalized Content
While authentic content is the most important element that brands of any industries are looking for from influencers, but it is particularly imperative for financial services. Influencers are there to help financial brands to transform their uptight and intimidating images to friendlier and savvier vibes that could resonate easily with today’s digital consumers.
It is extremely crucial that the content created by these influencers is personally relevant to a life experience that every customer could relate to. Take an example from an Instagram user, phoebelapine, who already has more than 29.5 million followers. Her area of expertise is health as well as upscale cuisines. Lately, she posted a post about ‘being financially healthy’, sponsored by Chase, one of the biggest banks in US. In the post, she, as a recent house-owner, is trying to figure out how to maintain her financial situation in a healthy way.
Chase is following the golden rule of influencer marketing, that is developing a content that relates to the influencer’s personal experience, in this case, one of the major life milestones: buying a house. Other financial brands seeking collaboration with influencers can follow suit the example to create a unique and personalized content for their marketing campaigns.
The point is, financial brands could promote their products and service in the context of life stage or current challenge that most people usually face from time to time. From helping a recently engaged influencer-couple to save money for their wedding or helping retired influencers or their families and friends to manage their retirement plans, the possibilities are expanding for this stodgy industry to exert the power of influencer marketing.
Subtle Misdirection
Let’s be honest, when you talked about finance, such as banks, credit cards, loans among others, it’s almost guaranteed that young people will easily get distracted, dozed off, or just shut down their brains. Believe it or not, these ‘heavy’ topics could be the ‘death’ of influencer marketing for financial brands.
To create something that sounds ‘youthful’ about financial products is a challenge for influencers working with financial institutes. So what do they do instead? An advice from Sprout Social resonates directly to how influencers successfully create an authentic content that strikes to the heart of other social media users while delivering the brands’ messages at the same time. What “Embrace the lifestyle, not the product” stands for is instead of trying to directly sell the products, influencers can wittily demonstrate the lifestyle possibilities offered by these financial products.
Here’s an example from a post made by Finn Harris, an Instagram Influencer who has more than 1.5 million followers. In his post, he shares his shopping experience during one of his travels to Japan. He talked about how he used credit card issued by American Express to make purchases there and along with it, he attached a picture taken in a random street of Japan. This post is a perfect example to see how clever an influencer could be in subtly promoting financial brands by using ‘story-telling’ method instead of direct advertisement. This way, the audiences will feel that this post is about his experience rather than a sponsored post by American Express.
And of course, “travel” and “shopping” are two hot topics among millennial. This way, not only did he successfully delivers the value propositions of the financial product the brand represents, i.e. credit card, but he also spreads the message to wider audiences, possibly beyond the initial target audience of American Express.
So What is Next for Influencer Marketing?
It is obvious that the influencer marketing is expanding beyond commerce and retail. Hospitality, travel, and now financial industries are following suit with the trend as they try to figure out the best way to leverage influencers in their marketing strategy.
While financial brands could benefit from influencer marketing, however, the decision to work with them will come down to the type of the products. Moreover, financial brands do have to be extra careful with their content, especially in regards to investment-related products as it could trigger unwanted issue with government regulations.
Still, while both marketers and audiences are being captivated by the power of influencer marketing, the question of what comes next for this multi-purpose marketing tool remains. With the arrival of new, influential technology, there is no denial that influencers will become even more valuable in the future. More brands are expected to focus on alignment with influencers to improve content control, increase overall transparency, and improve customers’ confidence.
