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Leveling Up Financial Services Marketing with Data

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Highlights you won’t want to miss from Alkami Co:lab’s Data & Marketing track

That’s a wrap for Alkami Co:lab 2024! Now, let’s recap what the brightest minds in banking and TechFin heard in our data and marketing track where we explored data analytics in banking and financial services marketing. Check out the key highlights below to see what we covered at this year’s event!

Client Panel: Top 4 Marketing Challenges & How to Solve Them

We surveyed 26 financial marketers at regional banks and community credit unions to ask this question: Why is leveraging data for financial services marketing so hard to do? From this research, we found four key themes that keep emerging:

  • Unlocking data for marketing
  • Making data easy to use
  • Winning the next generation of account holders
  • Proving the return-on-investment (ROI) of your marketing investment

In this session, Sarah Mealey, lead client success manager at Alkami, spoke with marketing professionals from five regional and community financial institutions: Alisha Johnson from Ideal Credit Union, Emily Stewart from Meritrust Credit Union, Kate Purdy from Signal Financial Federal Credit Union, Kathy Bushway from Premier Bank, and Todd Petelle from 3Rivers Federal Credit Union.

Financial services marketing client panel at Alkami Co:lab 2024

They discussed how Alkami’s Data & Marketing Solutions help them address these challenges on a daily basis. From this conversation, Alkami discovered a few key recommendations to make the most of data analytics in banking for financial services marketing:

  • Fuel campaign effectiveness and efficiency with data-driven marketing automation
  • Enable full-cycle campaign attribution reporting to measure the real results of your marketing efforts
  • Match your marketing content and channels to what younger generations prefer, such as social media and virtual consultations
  • Find a common language for marketing ROI that your leadership team can understand

With these recommendations, you can supercharge your financial services marketing to become the growth driver for your institution.

Driving Growth through a Marketing & IT Partnership

In the realm of data and marketing, fostering a strong partnership between marketing and IT is crucial. Sometimes, there can be a bit of friction between these two essential teams. However, overcoming this tension and working collaboratively is key to unlocking the full potential of data analytics in banking and digital financial services marketing strategies.

In this panel, Jennifer Cortez, vice president, demand generation at Alkami, spoke with Kate Purdy from Signal Financial Federal Credit Union, Kathy Bushway from Premier Bank, and Todd Petelle from 3Rivers Federal Credit Union to discuss where they are in their data and marketing journey. Discover how insights derived from transaction data become actionable marketing campaigns, fostering relevance and hyper-personalization through cross-functional collaboration.

Alkami Co:lab 2024 panel on the partnership between financial services marketing and data analytics in banking

This group drives data-forward strategies at their financial institutions to unlock the potential for rapid revenue growth with seamless marketing and IT strategies. From this conversation, Alkami discovered a few key recommendations to transform the marketing and IT partnership into a catalyst for growth:

  • Highlight the value and ROI of financial services marketing to secure support from leadership and internal stakeholders
  • Take a holistic approach to organizational needs and goals to bring better collaboration and communication across different departments
  • Data aggregation, standardization, cleansing and categorization, crafting a strategy, and building out daily operations is a journey, not a quick fix. While you might see some quick wins, true progress requires time and commitment.

Humans and AI: How to Maximize Marketing ROI

In this session, Alkami’s Vice President, Product Management Nate Shahan and Director, Product Management Joan Clark covered how to seamlessly blend traditional financial services marketing wisdom with artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) predictive capabilities to identify and engage ideal audiences more effectively, significantly boosting ROI through smarter, more precise targeting strategies.

Collaborative intelligence, which is a play off of the term artificial intelligence, is a strategy where human insights and artificial intelligence join forces to maximize the success of AI and minimize the risk. 

For years, marketers have been creating audience segments using hunches, keywords, metadata tags, and other segmentation tools to identify the most relevant audience for their message. Enter AI. Now, marketers can get even better results by augmenting human-directed marketing audience targeting methodologies with audiences intelligently identified by AI predictive modeling

Competitive Insights: Win-Back Your Wallet Share

Who are your competitors? It might not be who you think. In this session, Alkami’s Jessica Broome, senior demand generation manager, and Loni Luna, product marketing manager, showed how attendees can find their true competitors using account holder insights from data analytics in banking. 

As marketers, we have a deep understanding of what’s going on in the market. And as a community financial institution marketer, you know your competitors are not always mega banks. Marketers tend to rely more on their gut versus data, not only for campaigns, but also for new product additions. A combination of both, along with a little research, can provide the best results. This allows you to be proactive to win back your wallet share by turning competitive insights into actionable marketing campaigns.

What’s Next for Alkami’s Data & Marketing Solutions

In this session, members of Alkami’s Data & Marketing Product team, Joan Clark and Mark Leher, directors of product management and Jason Chilcoat, senior strategic product manager, shared what’s coming up for our Data & Marketing Solutions. They are focusing on delivering value to two personas at a financial institution: Operations and Marketing. 

For operations, the Data & Marketing Product team is creating single, consolidated sources of truth to efficiently consume raw data for back office processes. A real-time, user-centric reporting suite for streamlined end-user support and curated insights aim to provide critical metrics for day-to-day operations and future strategic planning.

For marketing, the Alkami Data & Marketing Product team is expanding integrations to enable valuable data insights in areas beyond the Alkami digital banking platform. In addition, the team plans to extend our data collection and track workflows to connect with users during the onboarding process. Lastly, data enrichment will provide financial institutions the option to use target audiences through external integrations. 

So stay tuned. Alkami’s Data & Marketing Product team has many exciting things to share this year and beyond.

Hands On Learning: Launch Targeted Campaigns in Minutes

Growing your financial institution in today’s competitive market is easier said than done. Alkami research shows that financial institutions that are growing 20% year over year are focused on results and democratizing data across the financial institution. Presented by Leeah Webb from Meritrust Credit Union and Alkami’s Principal Solution Engineer Rachel O’Neill, this session highlighted insights from our Digital Sales & Service Maturity Model, which was developed based on recently released research conducted across 215 U.S. financial institutions with at least $200 million in assets. 

These data-first financial institutions are able to personalize every engagement across channels and understand how to create relevant and hyper-personalized campaigns with insights derived from transaction data to illuminate a specific, targeted audience. 

Learn how organizations like Ideal Credit Union are seeing amazing results with data-driven financial services marketing. 

Want to be a part of the co:laboration? Save the date for Alkami Co:lab 2025. We’re headed to Nashville, y’all! 

Continue exploring all things Alkami Co:lab 2024! Read more.

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Alkami Technology
Alkami Technology, Inc. is a leading cloud-based digital banking solutions provider for financial institutions in the United States that enables clients to grow confidently, adapt quickly and build thriving digital communities.

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