In the world of financial services, it’s time for marketing to take the lead when it comes to sustainable growth. As the financial landscape evolves, firms across banking, wealth management, and investment services are under pressure to differentiate their offerings, deepen client relationships, and grow market share. It’s a paradox that many financial institutions are still underinvesting in strategic marketing. You can use this guide to turn that around and gain a competitive edge.
Financial services marketing goes beyond brand awareness. It blends digital precision with traditional reach to drive growth and customer loyalty. From SEO to email campaigns to ads and in-person presence, institutions are using a mix of targeted and broad-based strategies to engage clients at every stage of their financial journey. When executed strategically, these efforts can build brand awareness and convert leads into long-term, high-value relationships.
By employing data and technology strategically, you can engage decision makers in ways that are timely, relevant, and personalized. In this guide, we’ll explore why marketing matters more than ever in financial services, examine key challenges, and share high-impact strategies to drive results across digital, content, and email channels.
Why marketing matters in financial services
The financial services industry is experiencing a shift. Markets are volatile. Client expectations are rising. Regulatory complexity is growing. And the competition, whether it’s from fintech disruptors or global giants, keeps intensifying.
In this environment, marketing has the potential to be more than a support function. It can be a powerful lever for business growth. Yet, many financial institutions remain cautious. Legacy perceptions of marketing as a “cost center” persist, and compliance concerns often slow innovation. This hesitation can leave firms trailing competitors who are more agile in their approach.
Marketing leaders who are determined to break this cycle need to make the case for smarter, data-backed marketing strategies. Fortunately, the tools and intelligence now available make it easier than ever to build a strong, defensible business case.
According to the Financial Services Marketing: 2024 Benchmarks for CMOs by Gartner:
“Market dynamics have changed due to several factors: commoditization, disruptive fintech, lack of trust, regulatory barriers, and digital transformation. Financial services marketing brings innovative strategies that drive new business and foster customer loyalty.”
Key challenges in marketing for financial services
To design a successful marketing strategy in financial services, it’s important to understand the specific headwinds marketers in this industry face.
Trust and compliance: Financial services is a trust-based industry. Marketing efforts must always align with regulatory standards to maintain credibility.
Complex products and long sales cycles: Whether it’s asset management or private banking, the value proposition can be nuanced, and purchase decisions often involve multiple stakeholders.
Audience fragmentation: From institutional investors to high-net-worth individuals (HNWI), target audiences vary significantly in their needs and expectations.
Data silos: Many firms lack centralized, clean, and consistently updated customer data, making it difficult to accurately segment audiences and run effective, personalized campaigns.
While these challenges are persistent, they’re not impossible to overcome. With a strategic foundation and the right intelligence, financial marketers can navigate them. Better yet—you can turn challenges into competitive edge opportunities.
Strategic marketing starts with knowing your audience
The most effective marketing strategies in financial services are rooted in a deep understanding of your audience. This goes beyond demographics; you have to know who your clients are, what motivates them, and when they’re ready to engage. Timing makes a huge difference in grabbing attention.
This is where wealth and people intelligence comes in. By gaining visibility into an individual’s wealth profile, career history, and professional networks, marketers can tailor campaigns to resonate with what truly matters to their prospects. Audience insights are crucial for strategic marketing.
Want to plan a C-suite event for senior executives in private equity? Start with a filtered list of contacts who meet your wealth and job criteria. Need to expand your firm’s footprint among ultra high net worth individuals? Use career and ownership data to identify prospects likely to need your services in the next 6–12 months. That will help you approach leads with higher chances of converting.
Core marketing strategies for financial services
With audience clarity in place, let’s explore some of the highest-leverage marketing strategies we recommend for you to invest in:
1. Digital marketing for financial services
Financial services firms can no longer afford to treat digital channels as secondary. Websites, search engines, and social media are the front doors to your business.
- SEO and paid media: Target key terms relevant to your offerings (e.g., “alternative investment advisory,” “family office solutions”) to attract inbound interest.
- Retargeting: Use first-party and enriched data to retarget website visitors with personalized messages across digital platforms.
- Social media engagement: Focus on thought leadership on platforms like LinkedIn, especially for B2B decision-makers.
With better data enrichment, you can ensure your digital campaigns are reaching the right individuals, not just broad job titles.
2. Content marketing for financial services
Financial buyers don’t want a sales pitch—they want insight. Content marketing is your opportunity to build trust, educate prospects, and influence the buying journey.
- Thought leadership: Publish whitepapers, market forecasts, and timely commentary on market conditions.
- Client success stories: Case studies tailored to verticals (e.g., wealth preservation for family offices) can add credibility.
- Personalized content hubs: Curated content tailored to individual preferences can increase time on site and engagement. You can go further by increasing resonance. Use data on audience interests and passions to inform content themes and topics.
3. Email marketing for financial services
Despite the variety of digital platforms, email remains one of the highest ROI marketing tools.
- Segmentation: Use enriched data to segment lists by wealth tier, professional background, or known interests.
- Automation: Set up journeys for onboarding, nurture, and re-engagement tailored to user behavior.
- Performance tracking: Analyze open rates, clicks, and conversions, and refine based on performance insights.
Email marketing for financial services is most effective when it’s personal. Knowing that your recipient is a newly appointed CFO or a recent liquidity event beneficiary lets you time and tailor your messaging.
Use data to power account-based marketing (ABM)
Precision is also important. Think fewer mass campaigns, more hyper-targeted outreach.
Account-based marketing (ABM) is especially valuable in B2B and high-net-worth contexts. Success here depends on the quality of your data.
Ask yourself:
- Who are the stakeholders and decision-makers at your target firm?
- What are their professional and personal interests?
- Is your internal database complete, current, and enriched?
By using tools that support data enrichment, you can ensure your ABM campaigns are informed, relevant, and more likely to drive conversion. Data enrichment involves enhancing and augmenting existing data with further information from multiple sources. It can help you discover details about target audiences like career history, ownership data, and even personal interests.
How to get ahead with Altrata
Now that you see the value in a data-driven approach, success depends on how well you can identify, understand, and act on the right opportunities. WealthEngine by Altrata makes it all easier to accomplish. WealthEngine is a powerful, cloud-native platform designed to help you model, analyze, engage, and act from a single, unified interface.
Six ways to utilize WealthEngine for your marketing initiatives:
1. Search and surface better prospects faster:
Need to find the right contacts for a new market segment or campaign? WealthEngine allows you to search nationwide or apply refined filters based on wealth indicators, career data, location, lifestyle signals, and more. Built-in social search lets you connect social media profiles (like LinkedIn and Facebook) to individual records with a single click, enabling more personalized outreach.
2. Screen and consolidate your prospect lists:
Managing fragmented or outdated databases is a major barrier to effective marketing. With streamlined list uploading and profile features, WealthEngine lets you screen and manage millions of profiles in one place. This is ideal for keeping your client and prospect lists current, enriched, and ready for targeted campaigns.
3. Model your next best clients:
One of the most popular capabilities of WealthEngine is look-alike modeling. Need to replicate the success of a specific client segment? Simply apply filters to create a model that reflects your best clients and use it to identify others with similar characteristics. This helps you focus your efforts on high-potential leads with a higher likelihood of conversion.
4. Segment with precision:
Effective audience segmentation drives personalized marketing. WealthEngine enables you to build segments using filters in 10 different categories, including donation history, location, interests, wealth score, and more.
5. Score and prioritize with intelligence:
WealthEngine’s scoring capabilities allow you to prioritize leads using both pre-built and custom models. For example, the proprietary Wealth Score helps you instantly identify which prospects are most likely to convert or engage. You can add our own success metrics to create models specific to your institution’s performance indicators.
6. Act in real time via API:
For firms that rely on customer relationship management (CRM) or donor management systems, you can use Prospect API for real-time wealth screening. You’ll have access to enriched prospect insights within existing workflows without delays or gaps in data.
Leverage marketing to drive growth for your firm
In closing, the future of marketing for financial services is intelligent, strategic, and client-centric. Whether you’re at a private bank looking to expand your HNWI client base, or in asset management seeking to build influence with institutional investors, be sure to lead with the winning approach. Know your audience. Build with data. Grow with insight.
You can learn more about marketing priorities and insights across industries in our 2025 report: Chief Marketing Officers in the US.
Ready to take action on the strategic insights above? Here are two ways to take advantage of our tools to get ahead.
- To access unparalleled intelligence on the global ultra-high-net-worth population, explore our wealth intelligence solutions. You’ll be able to craft highly personalized campaigns and deepen relationships with the world’s most affluent and influential individuals.
- To identify, segment, and prioritize high-potential prospects through real-time wealth screening, predictive modeling, and deep lifestyle insights, our comprehensive profiles, analytics, and data integrations solutions can help.
Our experts are always here to help. Schedule a meeting with our team for advice on how you can adopt a data-driven, strategic marketing approach today.