By Precious Oboidhe

🔥 FLAMING HOT TAKE ALERT: Marketing can drive business goals, but it can’t save a bad product.

One financial company that understands this well is Wise, an international money transfer service I use.

According to Nilan Peiris, Chief Product Officer at Wise, the company aimed to build a product that “blows user’s socks off.”

That intended feat has come to fruition because a whopping 70% of Wise’s user growth comes through word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM). Even I discovered Wise through word of mouth.

In this article, I will share five inspirational examples of effective marketing for financial services. I also share four marketing ideas you can deploy to market your brilliant product.

Before delving into the strategies and examples, let’s discuss tips for solving your most fundamental marketing challenge — building a product customers love.

Table of Contents

• A Case Study of Wise: How to Solve Your #1 Marketing Challenge as a Financial Services Provider
• Financial Services Marketing Strategies
• Financial Services Marketing Ideas
• What I Learned

A Case Study of Wise: How to Solve Your #1 Marketing Challenge as a Financial Services Provider

Businesses in financial services deal with a slew of challenges, including regulatory marketing restrictions, lack of consumer trust, and commoditization.

These challenges are mitigated if you build a great product and provide a great user experience. That’s what Wise did.

Wise aimed to give customers “an experience they didn’t know was previously possible,” says Nilan. As they succeeded, their customers became their brand evangelists.

Below are three steps Wise took to build a product that won users.

Listening to Customers

They conducted customer satisfaction surveys to uncover the needs of their users. Over time, Wise narrowed customers’ most important demands into three features: Price, speed, and ease of use.

Delivering on Users’ Demands

Making cross-border money transfers fast and inexpensive was difficult. It took years to solve these problems. But solving them gave Wise a huge competitive advantage and a more defensible position in the market.

Understanding Customer Sentiment

They regularly use Net Promoter Score (NPS) to assess customer sentiment. NPS is a metric that measures customer satisfaction and loyalty based on how likely customers would recommend a company’s products or services.

The score can range from -100% to +100%. In the early days, Wise’s NPS was in the positive 20s and 30s. As they improved the product and user experience, their NPS score rose to 70%.

Many teams stop iterating once their product works and shift their focus to other marketing activities. This is a mistake.

According to Nilan, the ROI for NPS increase is much larger and more enduring than the ROI increase you’d get from improving your conversion rate.

The bottom line? Just because people are buying your product doesn’t get your job done. Collect customer feedback to uncover your customers’ needs.

With this data, you can iterate on your product and …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog