A suggested reading for marketing executives or CEO’s of community financial institutions is the BAI’s whitepaper - Competition, Innovation, and Strategy in the Financial Services Industry. As a digital signage provider reading the article I felt incumbent to post the article along with commentary to demonstrate how digital signage applies. In my experience, when a financial institution chooses digital signage as a marketing strategy, speed to market is consistently one of the top reasons.
The whitepaper delivers a clear message that today’s financial institution must develop strategies that allow for rapid changes in the environment. A distinct line was drawn between traditional strategies and suggested dynamic strategies.
Digital signage gives the financial institution the ability to instantly run a promotion on a product or service. As banks continue to function in a hyper competitive marketplace, (especially in a small community environment) the ability to introduce new niche products or services is critical. The article underscores the ongoing 20 year product innovation boom and indicates that a bank should always assume there will be new niche products popping up. The key is to acquire resources that can deploy those initiatives before the competition. Digital Signage positions a bank to do just that in a quick and affordable way.
Traditional banking strategies present special challenges in terms of personnel and culture as well. Financial institutions do not attract innovative individuals seeking change. Couple this fact with the heavy training burden and a dynamic strategy begins to become an impossible directive.
Front line employees are expected to handle transactions accurately, prevent fraud and comply with a large number of regulations. In addition, Financial Institutions ask them to consistently learn new products and seek a larger share of wallet which becomes a daunting task. The BAI whitepaper Front-line Challenges indicates that the top 3 challenges are sales skills, sales training and activity tracking. Other challenges include balancing sales, service and transaction duties.
Digital signage becomes an incredible assistant to the front line employee by prompting customers to ask questions about products making the cross sell exponentially easier and less time consuming. In fact, the Strategy Institute indicates that digital signage receives 10 times the eye contact of static signage and boosts sales of profiled products by 30%!
Now consider the ability to leverage the digital signage system into an employee facing training display. If there is a new regulation, process or product offering that requires training it is now possible to instantly distribute that information companywide. This ability paves the way for a quicker deployment which translates to a competitive advantage with a clear ROI calculation.
The ability of financial institutions to quickly distribute a new product or service to market and train front line employees can be facilitated by the right digital signage partner. Captive Indoor Media creates custom content and supplies its customers with a web based scheduling tool that allows for instant updates. Banks have the flexibility to schedule media long in advance or update their displays instantly and remotely at no cost.
If employing a dynamic strategy is important in today’s financial services industry, digital signage has to be a tool used in the equation.
Author: Greg Barrett - Director of Business Development - Captive Indoor Media
502-896-0947 or greg@captiveindoormedia.com
