Driving millennial adoption of financial products through strategic marketing – Brand Wagon News

By Ved Agarwal

Millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, have emerged as a crucial demographic for financial institutions in India. With growing incomes and evolving financial responsibilities, this generation represents a large opportunity for marketers. 

This broad cohort is maturing today and navigating a range of life stages—career advancement, home-buying, and family planning while facing financial pressures such as rising living costs & servicing debts, like home loans. With respect to their outlook to personal finances, a majority are self-reliant and independent. They have high-spending potential and choose to make decisions based on parameters different from previous generations.

A dominant trait that millennials display is of integrating personal values with purchase behaviours. For eg. They have a clear perception when it comes to political, social themes and choose to engage with brands’ basis conformity. Millennials prioritise brands whose values & beliefs align with their own. They’re looking for demonstrations of meaningful purpose from brands while also looking for the best-value and great-product. 

Shriram Finance to raise $1 billion for expansion in 6 months

Union Bank of India launches easy cash deposit facility by scanning QR Code with any UPI app

UK to review IT and engineering sectors, the largest users of work visas

The Shift to a Circular Economy: How Smart Technology is Driving Sustainability in Retail

Brands however cannot rely on generalisations or stereotypes for this demographic as there exists diversity within the cohort itself. This wide cohort has many ages-stages and a one-size-fits-all approach to messaging is unlikely to work. It is important for brands to build a deep understanding of these sub-cohorts in terms of their attitudes, values, beliefs, behaviour and motivators amongst others. Being relevant to your target audience is critical.

Apart from making your content mobile ready, being creative to stand out, driving conversations via credible spokespersons, being active across touchpoints- some additional themes that can influence millennial adoption for Financial Products are elaborated below:

Being Genuine: Brands need to be authentic across the board – from the tone of marketing to how customers are taking-care of post sales. Millennials hold brands at a high-bar wrt being honest, transparent and any diversion is a detractor. For Financial Products specifically- exaggeration of benefits like overstating of financial outcomes while camouflaging critical information such as risk or penalties is a watch out.

Driving personalisation: Building Human-like-relationships is a big driver for millennial engagement. This can be achieved by having a deep understanding of the consumer and building meaningful conversations thereof. For Financial Products, this becomes very critical and the possibilities are infinite. Offering the right products and messaging basis life-stage, browse & purchase behaviour can drive significant relevance and rapid adoption.

Using Social commerce: The big benefit with social commerce is the opportunity to browse through products on social platforms and make purchases directly – without ending up on a third-party website. Social media becomes a one-stop shop, allowing to go down the entire funnel- from product discovery to purchase. With social platforms now offering possibilities to do complex journeys like KYC and providing additional security features during transacting – this becomes a meaningful enabler. It ensures lower drop-offs and provides an opportunity to engage in 2-way communication.

Choosing Content over Advertising: Traditional marketing is not as effective with Millennials and can leave them cold. They want to find products for themselves, and their searches nearly always start on the internet. Creation and distribution of intent-driven, high-quality informational content can play a significant role during this ‘discovery phase’ and help brands present themselves impactfully. The context of low levels of financial literacy and a rapidly evolving Financial Products landscape presents a big opportunity for brands to meet this information-gap and drive strong preference.

Leveraging Community for Brand Advocacy:  Digital communities are places where people connect on common themes and come together to act. Millennials have a strong affinity with them as it gives them social capital, connection and expression in an otherwise fragmented world. This is a high-trust environment and participating in them can bring goodness for brands to drive targeted reach, awareness and tap into the network effect. Not only does this provide an opportunity for brands to have a human voice here but also a bigger opportunity to nurture and build large communities themselves.

Encouraging UGC: User-generated content (UGC) is considered more trustworthy than brand speech. Especially relevant for Millennials as they are digitally integrated and are engaged on social platforms – this provides an opportunity for marketers to give voice to delighted consumers and showcase a broader range of experienced benefits. UGC can provide social proof and authenticity to brand messaging and help build trust. In the context of Financial Products, where decision making is a stressful experience due to complexity in understanding – UGC content can play a meaningful role in simplifying product offerings, driving relevance, boosting confidence & enabling action.

While there are more themes that could influence action, these would be my top six for driving adoption amongst millennials. Cognizant of how rapidly the ecosystem of Financial Products is innovating and adoption behaviour is evolving – it will be important to keep a close ear to the ground, leverage data & analytics for insighting, listen intently to consumers and be agile to adapt to the new.

The author is CMO, Grip Invest

(Views expressed are the author’s own and not necessarily those of financialexpress.com) 

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook

_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}