PW Financial Services Marketing is a comprehensive marketing consulting practice backed by full-service agency capabilities. More than just an agency that “does” financial services, our practice was uniquely founded by a 30 year client-side marketing veteran in retail banking and wealth management. This means we’ve ingrained a client’s perspective into everything we do accompanied by a deep understanding and empathy for what our financial services clients need. Especially today this includes bringing innovative solutions to clients that help them better serve customers whose needs have changed as a result of seismic cultural shifts and new, primarily digital habits.
Whether working with our wealth management, retail banking or or lending clients, PW Financial Services Marketing understands the depth of insecurity that financial service customers experience when making a decision to trust their financial future to a company. Likewise, we see and understand the challenges that financial institutions are facing with engaging Millennials. We specialize in developing customer insights that help our clients overcome the difficult trust issues involved with financial decisions. This helps our clients measurably grow their businesses whether that measurement be new loans, net deposits, assets under management, or new clients.
In 2017, Hilliard Lyons was prepared to introduce a rebrand of the company designed to better capture the essence of the firm. Outside of a handful of markets, measured brand and contextual awareness of the brand was at levels considered unhealthy by industry standards.
While the ultimate goal of firm marketing initiatives is always business impact, the decision was made to take advantage of the rebrand to build top-funnel awareness of Hilliard Lyons and its unique relationship-driven proposition with various prospective clients. In addition, the newness of the brand required simultaneous message testing to determine what messaging resonated with the audience.
Objectives were to increase brand awareness across key markets by 5-10 percent, increase engagement on and “vetting” of brand on new Hilliard.com website using standard engagement measures, and leverage media to message test different consumer propositions to provide messaging direction for future campaigns.
PriceWeber launched the campaign in twelve key test markets over a six-month period. We leveraged hyper-targeted TV, print, radio, display, pre-roll, native, and paid search across all key target life stage groups, pulsing media to maximize effect and optimizing creative based on digital performance. In addition, we applied custom research to everything from target client feedback to branch office signage visibility, earned media, competitive presence, and client market penetration to formulate a market segmentation guide that will define future media strategies.
Creative test successfully defined messaging for each key life stage customer target.
