How LinkedIn Can Support Your Customer Journey Mapping

Customer Journeys in finance matter profoundly. According to research by McKinsey: “Two-thirds of the decisions customers make are informed by the quality of their experiences along their journey.” In the research report, McKinsey urges financial services marketers to embrace this challenge; “Banks need to craft a compelling customer experience where all the interactions are tailored to a customer’s stage in the decision journey.”

To overcome the hurdle of operational silos, a number of forward-thinking financial services institutions are reconstructing their operational teams explicitly around critical customer journeys such as "The first-time home-owner journey."

The same thinking is being applied to savvy financial content marketers. Rather than barricading their valuable assets in a dead-end content ghetto, they are tailoring content formats and topics specific for each journey stage, and then sequencing them through different channels to propel prospects through new "Customer Engagement Journeys."

Our recent "Taming the Financial Content Beast" webinar explored how forward-thinking brands such as Nationwide, State Street and Legg Mason are rethinking their content journeys. Likewise, at LinkedIn Financial Services Marketing, we’ve given much thought to how we position our own marketing solutions to help brands accelerate their customers’ journeys. Our model is below:

There are a number of observations that marketers can take away from this model:

• You don’t just have to "pay to play." Many of the solutions are "owned" properties that brands are already leveraging for free.
• It doesn’t involve a plethora of new products. Our core marketing solutions such as Sponsored Content can be adapted for each stage. What changes is the content format and topic a brand might activate. For example, an Asset Manager might sponsor a pithy infographic on market trends to hook prospects at an "awareness" stage, but then follow this up with sponsored promotion of a webinar looking deeper at specific markets to move targeted audiences closer to conversion.
• The Journey continues post-purchase. This is not just a matter of cross-sales to other areas of a business. It’s also about harnessing the power of recommendation and amplifying the voice of your advocates to fuel your new journeys.

To support this, our Client Showcase of case-studies is now focused explicitly around how financial services brands have accelerated their customer journeys. Our Thought Leadership is similarly anchored around research into "next generation" journeys in different financial services verticals.

Follow our blog for fresh thinking on this. We hope you’ll join us on the journey! Subscribe to the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions blog today!

Photo: Alexander Rotker/Unsplash