One of the major challenges in trying to provide financial advice is getting people interested enough to engage in the first place. As Sam Seaton, the Commercial Director at MoneyHub shared: “When I take my car to be serviced, I have no interest in what they do or how they do it – I just want it done. But I also know people who do want to know the ins and outs. It is the same in the financial advice arena.”
There is clearly a marketing job to be done in terms of segmenting the ‘consumer’ base to ensure that the right messages are being targeted at the right people, not just in terms of their demographic, but also in terms of what life stage they may be at. If we want to get ‘twenty somethings’ thinking about retirement planning and issues that they will probably naturally want to shy away from, then we have to get smarter about how we actually engage them.
Its’ a bit like buying a house. It’s a really long drawn out and often stressful process, but we put ourselves through it because we are motivated by the end result.
So could we see new opportunities opening up for creative marketers and digital gurus within the financial advice arena? There certainly seems to be need for it if a lot of the current marketing material is anything to go by – material which often uses language that is impenetrable to the general public. What’s now needed is material which speaks to the end user – not jargon.
So what does that mean for providers? More market research, more customer segmentation and more creativity around their messaging. But what that also means is that they will need to hire the right people to help them deliver those messages to the right people at the right time.
Download: The New Rules of Enagement
Our roundtable debated issues such as the financial advice gap and the difference between guidance and advice, the need for more engagement, consumer segmentation, the future of the IFA, and the tech generation.
