Quick Take On The Meeker Report For Financial Marketers

Its that time of the year again for digital marketers - Mary Meeker’s Internet trends report for 2019 is out! The highly anticipated report dropped last week, and we’ve seen an endless stream of analysis about what this could mean for the future of digital marketing. We’re here to slice through that analysis and see what current trends might mean for digital marketing in the financial services industry. 

Here are three key takeaways:

1. Mobile should be your channel of choice.
   
   People are spending more and more time online through their smartphones with digital media usage accelerating by 7%. In the US, the average time spent on digital media overall was 6.3hr per day, of which 3.6 hours per day is dedicated to mobile usage compared to 2.0hr per day for desktop/laptop.
   
   For financial marketers digital media usage is essential to determine your channel strategy for the future efforts. With mobile being the primary method for content consumption, it would be prudent to prioritize this channel as the primary distribution for communication, promotion and campaigns.
    

2. Use imagery in your content.
   
   With a +2x growth in five years digital video is making headway, with digital viewing now up to 28% overall compared to 14% viewership in 2013. While TV viewership is still strong at 72%, it is significantly losing ground to non-traditional sources. Couple this rise in video viewership with the development of Instagram and Facebook features supporting rich media, the need for investing in digital channels supporting rich media content, is evident
   
   For financial marketers, using more imagery in your content helps convey your message to your target audience, and ultimately improving engagement rates. This will be especially true with more users staying connected via their smartphone devices and expecting to engage with better, more interactive videos and other media sources. 

1. DATA | DATA | DATA
   
   The proliferation of data is showing extraordinary growth with data propagation also expanding rapidly. With this comes a parallel acceleration in digital tools utilizing the data to unlock new capabilities and core competencies. This acceleration has made such tools affordable to smaller organizations, with subscription pricing models offering various levels of functionality per digital tool.
   
   For financial marketers the utilization of such tools can significantly improve the impact and reach of their campaigns, promotions and messaging. Such proliferation of data has lead to new roles in marketing - growth hackers for example,  who develop marketing strategies on a shoe-string budget. This highlights the affordability of digital tools that can provide strategic data insights at a discount. Now it is up to marketers to leverage all of this data to improve their selection of marketing tactics and create new insight that accelerates return on investment and enables us to do more with less. 

It is clear to us that many of the trends in 2019 are a continuation of what has characterized the internet over the past decade. It highlights that financial services organizations can no longer count on the old way to conduct their marketing and sales, that a new more data-driven-digital approach will be necessarily for the years to come. Harvest is lucky enough to be positioned to help the finance industry navigate this digital transformation. Want to know about how we can support your investments in 2019’s latest marketing trends? Get in touch with us here .

- Ahmed Rosowsky

Sr Director, Growth and Product Marketing