Understanding Financial Services & Banking Market Research Needs
We know you’re the numbers people, and guess what? So are we. But there’s more to marketing than just the digits—customer behavior, preferences, and perceptions also play a massive role in shaping your brand and driving success. That’s where market research comes into play. At Campos, we combine hard data with human insights to help financial institutions like yours remain competitive, customer-centric, and forward-thinking.
Insights from focused financial services market research guide key initiatives, such as rebranding projects, customer satisfaction studies, ad testing, prospect acquisition, and more. Our team equips financial and banking institutions with the strategic market research and consulting they need to thrive.
Use Bank & Financial Services Market Research to Guide Branding
A strong brand strategy is crucial to attracting new customers and building trust and loyalty among them. Through comprehensive financial services market research, retail banks, credit unions, fintech companies, and beyond can develop and refine their brand strategies to better resonate with target audiences.
Brand Strategy Development
A brand encompasses everything an organization is, says, does, and believes. A brand strategy, then, is a clear plan for how the organization will communicate who it is, what it does, and what guiding beliefs it holds. And a strong brand strategy is one that communicates these things in a way that is compelling to target customers and differentiated from competitors.
A strong brand strategy will help attract target customers, retain critical current audiences, and build trust and loyalty among both. This strategic focus on trust and loyalty is particularly essential in an industry where these qualities are non-negotiable.
Developing a strong brand strategy typically involves some level of research to ensure the brand is compelling, believable, and unique. Several areas in which research is often needed include identifying your target customers and exploring their category motivations and perceptions, understanding who your current best customers are and what they value in you, and assessing your competitors and finding white space in your category. With these insights and others, we can craft a clear brand positioning statement, define the brand’s personality and values, and articulate its purpose and core essence.
Together, these elements form the foundation of bank branding, serving as a blueprint for marketing, customer service, and all communications, ensuring your brand’s promise is consistently conveyed across all touchpoints.
Brand Health Research
To remain competitive and responsive to evolving market and customer needs, tracking your brand strategy’s performance and making iterative improvements is essential. Brand health research, or brand tracking, is the process of regularly measuring key brand metrics like awareness, familiarity, and consideration through surveys of a representative sample of your target customers. By tracking these metrics, financial institutions can assess the effectiveness of their marketing and advertising efforts, as well as external influences on bank branding and performance, such as economic shifts or regulatory changes.
Brand health tracking studies are typically conducted once or twice a year, though some organizations field more regularly. Regardless of cadence, our analysis focuses on understanding changes over time and identifying the factors driving those shifts. It’s also essential to monitor the brand health and performance of key competitors, to put your ratings into context. Driver analyses can also pinpoint which brand attributes most impact critical outcomes, like consideration or satisfaction.
To deepen these insights, qualitative market research for banks and financial institutions can complement the quantitative data, helping to inform survey design (e.g., identifying relevant competitors and brand attributes) or exploring the “why” behind shifts in brand perceptions more deeply. This dual approach provides a comprehensive understanding of your institution’s brand and market position, as well as the key factors shaping its reputation within the financial services landscape.
Use Bank & Financial Services Market Research to Inform Marketing
Marketing strategies must be data-driven to connect with the right audience, and financial services market research plays an essential role in informing these strategies. Campos provides detailed insights that help financial institutions and banks optimize their marketing efforts.
Market Segmentation
Market segmentation is a powerful quantitative tool for financial institutions, enabling them to divide their market into distinct segments based on shared characteristics, like financial attitudes and banking behaviors. Rather than marketing to all potential customers as a monolith, a bank or financial services provider should identify specific customer segments likely to engage with their products or services in a profitable way and explore how to connect with them specifically.
Consumer market research plays a crucial role in this moving to a segmented marketing approach, offering insights into category preferences, motivations, and behaviors. By conducting surveys that capture demographic, behavioral, psychographic, and motivational factors, institutions can understand how different segments use financial products and why they make the choices they do. We can use this survey data, as well as existing customer data, to identify which segments to target, why, and how. This allows marketers to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing, or segmenting marketing based on more simple factors, like age and income.
Message & Creative Testing
When developing new messaging or creative elements, financial institutions often conduct market research to gather feedback and refine these assets before going to market. This research ensures that new messaging is clear, resonates with target customers as intended, and motivates target customers to consider the organization for their banking or financial services needs.
Feedback from target customers, often identified through prior segmentation research, provides valuable insights when testing new bank logos, financial product ad campaigns, or revamped website designs. Financial institutions can use both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess how well these elements connect with key audience segments. The goal is to optimize messaging and creative by gathering diagnostic feedback, ensuring the final assets position the institution effectively in a competitive market.
Use Bank & Financial Services Market Research to Improve CX
Customer experience (CX) is a critical differentiator in the financial services sector. To deliver exceptional experiences, financial institutions must deeply understand their customers’ needs and pain points.
Voice of Customer (VoC) Research
One of the most effective ways to improve CX is through Voice of Customer (VoC) research, which captures direct feedback from customers about their various interactions with a brand and its products or services. When used correctly, VoC research plays a critical role in shaping offerings and improving experiences.
VoC research often involves collecting data via multiple channels, such as surveys, interviews, social media, reviews, and interactions with customer service. Critically, all that data needs to be synthesized in a way that identifies CX pain points to address and identifies opportunities to drive meaningful improvements. By learning more about customer segments, their needs, and their perceptions, financial institutions can better understand what drives loyalty and retention and optimize their experiences and communications accordingly. VoC programs are essential for building stronger, long-lasting customer relationships in a highly competitive and trust-driven market like banking.
Conducting Effective Market Research for Banks & Financial Institutions
Market research for banks and financial institutions is essential to stay competitive and adapt to a rapidly evolving economic landscape. For market research to be truly effective, though, it’s critical you home in on your research objectives before you decide what the right methodology is. This is because the former should inform the latter.
A partner like Campos can and should collaborate with you to clarify your objectives and advise on the right methodology. Below, we provide a brief overview of some of the market research methodologies we deploy for banks and financial services.
Customer Surveys
Customer surveys can be hyper-focused, moment-in-time engagements, like gathering feedback on a proposed new product name, for example, or they can be part of a larger, ongoing initiative to measure satisfaction or understand the customer experience. In any customer survey, it’s crucial you have clear alignment on what you want to learn and why. In other words, what do you want to do with this research? Campos ensures any survey we draft will produce the insights needed for our clients to take action based on our research.
Market Segmentation Surveys
As previously noted, segmentation surveys are vital for identifying and prioritizing distinct groups of consumers in a market based on demographics and category behaviors, psychographics, and motivations. This data enables financial institutions to design more targeted marketing strategies and create product offerings that cater to the specific needs of each segment. Segmentation provides the foundation for personalized customer engagement and tailored financial services.
Brand Tracking & Driver Analyses
Campos partners with many institutions to measure their brand health and track changes to these metrics on an ongoing basis. These market surveys typically include an assessment of our client and their competitors along key brand attributes. We then use a driver analysis to understand which factors most influence brand perceptions. By pinpointing critical drivers we advise institutions on what to prioritize in their messaging to move prospects down the brand funnel.
Focus groups
Focus groups offer a valuable opportunity to collect qualitative insights from a group of consumers, such as people representative of a target audience segment. A trained moderator leads the conversation using a discussion guide designed to provide each individual the opportunity to be heard and to foster conversation amongst the group. Focus groups can be used to better understand customer and non-customer groups, dig deeper into quantitative research findings, test messages and creative, and inform product and experience improvements.
Ethnography & Diary Studies
Ethnography and diary studies are beneficial for understanding how customers interact with financial products and services in their everyday lives. By observing customers in real-world scenarios or asking them to document their financial behaviors over time, banks can uncover pain points and identify opportunities for product innovation. This research is particularly valuable for new product development, as it highlights how financial tools are integrated into customers’ daily routines and where enhancements could improve the user experience.
Secondary Research
Secondary research involves analyzing data from existing sources, such as industry reports, government agencies, or competitor web presences. Secondary research is often essential for understanding the broader market environment and identifying trends that affect the entire financial industry.
Campos specializes in competitor secondary research in particular. Successful branding and marketing depends must set your organization apart from other competitors. That’s why we often conduct competitive audits to understand how others in the category are positioning themselves and speaking to customers and prospective customers. This allows us to avoid well-tread messaging territory and identify white space for your organization to occupy.
The Benefit of Partnering with Pros
To thrive in the competitive and fast-changing financial services sector, banks and financial institutions rely on market research firms to help design, field, and report on quantitative, qualitative, and secondary research studies.
At Campos, we specialize in helping banks and financial brands connect the dots between what we’ve learned and what it all means. We never data dump on our clients. Instead, we elevate the most important findings and help our clients think through the implications when it comes to their brands, marketing plans, products, and experiences.
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