Since the start of 2010, branch visits have fallen by more than half. Today, 89% of bank customers interact with financial institutions through digital channels as their primary means to engage with banks, an Accenture 2024 Banking Consumer Study reveals. At the same time, fintech startups that are fully online-native are eating away at the pie of regular banks by giving beautiful digital experiences that turn visitors into customers in minutes, not days.
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This shift forces every financial institution to rethink how it attracts and retains customers. Digital marketing for financial services isn’t about throwing up a website and hoping people find you. It’s about meeting customers where they already spend their time, whether that’s searching for loan rates on Google, scrolling through investment advice on Instagram, or streaming financial news on connected TV.
The institutions that master online marketing of financial services will capture the next generation of customers.
Digital Channels That Drive Results in Finance
Creating a digital marketing strategy for financial services involves selecting channels that align with your objectives and your audience. Different products require different approaches.
Here’s what works in 2025.
SEO & Content Marketing
When a person types “best savings account rates” or “how to refinance mortgage,” you want your institution showing up in search results. Search engine optimization makes that possible with website content that answers customer queries, landing pages optimized for specific products and services and technical help so Google can better understand what you offer.
Social Media Advertising
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube all enable you to aim at a carefully predetermined demographic. Recommending retirement accounts to people approaching 50, student loan refinancing to recent graduates or business loans to entrepreneurs based on their professional profile can offer the kind of immediate relevance that generic advertising never could.
Email & Automation
For financial organizations, email continues to be one of the best-ROI marketing for financial companies. Nurture campaigns are especially effective for complicated products, such as mortgages or investment accounts, where prospects can take weeks or months to educate. Someone may not be ready to refinance today, but when rates plummet in a quarter, you want to be the first name that pops into their heads.
Video Marketing for Finance Companies
Video beats virtually all other types of content when you compare them head-to-head. Banks still use video for product explainer videos (like explaining ETFs at UBS or wealth management products at a bank, with actual human voices), customer testimonials, and stories about employees who are people too. TikTok and Instagram Reels short-form video goes to younger viewers who will never see a 30-second TV commercial.
There are also new possibilities with connected TV and streaming platforms. When you run video ads during financial news programming or business podcasts, your message appears in front of engaged, relevant audiences. And the targeting options you get on these platforms are light years ahead of traditional TV.
Programmatic Advertising in Finance
Here’s where digital marketing for financial institutions gets truly powerful. Programmatic advertising involves the automation of ad bookings and placements on thousands of websites, apps and streaming services. No need to strike a deal with publishers: algorithms bid on ad impressions in real time depending on which are likliest to convert.
For financial services, this solves a critical challenge: reaching qualified prospects without wasting budget on people who’ll never need your products. You can target by income level, life stage, credit profile proxies, and financial intent signals. Someone who just searched for mortgage rates, visited real estate sites, and fits your ideal borrower profile gets your ad. Random people scrolling social media don’t.
This bidding is automated by a demand-side platform (DSP). It weeds through millions of impressions per second, predicts which will lead to applications or account openings and bids accordingly. The system is constantly optimizing, spending more on placements that are converting and less on those that aren’t.
The format flexibility matters too. Run display ads on financial news sites, video ads on streaming services, mobile ads targeting specific geographic markets, and native ads that blend into content feeds. All managed from one platform, all optimized by machine learning.
Financial institutions using programmatic report significantly lower customer acquisition costs compared to traditional channels. The key is working with platforms that understand finance’s unique compliance requirements and can target without violating privacy regulations.
Challenges in Digital Marketing for Financial Institutions
Marketing for financial services faces obstacles that other industries don’t. Regulations restrict what you can say and where you can advertise. Privacy laws limit how you can target and track customers. And the high stakes of financial decisions mean customers take longer to convert than they would for other products.
- Compliance tops the list. Every ad, landing page, and email must include specific disclosures. Claims about returns or rates need legal approval. Some platforms restrict financial advertising entirely or require additional verification.
- Data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA limit audience targeting. You cannot utilize sensitive financial data for ad targeting, even if the customer provided it to you personally. That means banking on demographic stand-ins and behavioral cues, not actual account data. The tension between personalization and privacy keeps getting tighter.
- Ad fraud hits financial services harder than most industries because acquisition payouts are higher. Bots that fake clicks or applications can drain budgets fast. Working with platforms that verify traffic and block invalid sources becomes essential. Reviews from real users on G2 show which platforms prioritize fraud prevention.
Expert Insight: The Future of Digital Marketing in Finance
Roman Vasyukov, CEO and Founder of BidsCube, sees AI and programmatic reshaping marketing and financial services.
Financial institutions that embraced programmatic five years ago now have a massive competitive advantage. They’ve built first-party data assets, optimized their conversion funnels, and understand what channels drive profitable customers. The institutions still relying on spray-and-pray advertising are burning money while their competitors acquire customers at half the cost.
Roman emphasizes the importance of transparency:
Finance marketers need to know exactly where their ads appear and who sees them. Black-box platforms that hide supply sources create compliance nightmares. Our ecosystem gives financial clients full visibility with real-time reporting and verified traffic, so they can prove to regulators exactly how their marketing dollars were spent.
The message?
Digital marketing for finance requires both sophisticated technology and ethical infrastructure. Partners who understand financial services deliver better results with less risk.
How BidsCube Supports Financial Marketers
Financial institutions need ad tech platforms that understand their unique requirements. BidsCube’s white-label solutions give banks, credit unions, insurance companies, and fintech firms the tools to run compliant, efficient campaigns while maintaining full control and visibility.
The supply-side platform (SSP) helps financial publishers monetize their content. With 85-100% fill rates and 100% traffic scanning for fraud, publishers can trust their inventory is being sold to legitimate advertisers at fair prices.
The platform processes 3.5 million requests per second, ensuring ads load instantly without disrupting user experience on financial news sites and apps. For financial advertisers, the DSP provides access to 102 million impressions monthly with 55+ campaign settings for precise targeting.
The white-label ad exchange connects both sides, handling billions of operations per second with 2 ms response time. Financial brands can run campaigns across display, video, mobile, and connected TV from one interface. The video ad server specifically supports CTV and OTT campaigns, perfect for reaching affluent audiences during their streaming time with financial services messages.
BidsCube’s community approach matters for financial marketers. Direct trading with 250+ verified partners means your ads appear on quality inventory rather than questionable sites that could damage your brand. Independent verification on Clutch shows how financial clients use the platform to scale acquisition while maintaining compliance.
Conclusion
The digital shift in finance is permanent. Customers who experienced seamless online banking won’t go back to branch visits and paper applications. Financial institutions that build strong digital marketing capabilities will capture these customers. Those that resist will lose ground to competitors who meet people where they actually are.
BidsCube’s solutions make programmatic accessible for marketing for financial institutions of any size. Whether you’re a local bank or a global insurance company, the platform grows with you while providing the compliance and transparency financial services require.
Ready to modernize your digital marketing strategy for financial services?
Contact us to explore how programmatic advertising can lower your acquisition costs while driving qualified applications.
Our tech staff and AdOps are formed by the best AdTech and MarTech industry specialists with 10+ years of proven track record!
FAQ
Why is digital marketing important for financial services?
Consumers research and select financial products online. If you don’t get your digital house in order, your would-be customers belong to a competitor whose name shows up higher in search listings and who stays on top of social.
What are the most effective digital channels for financial institutions?
So what works best? The channels driving the most success for B2B marketers are organic search through SEO, content marketing that educates their prospects, email automation to nurture leads, social ads which can be targeted across a range of different personas and programmatic advertising which is helping them to buy customers at scale all over thousands of sites and apps.
How does programmatic advertising support marketing for financial companies?
Programmatic is advertising that is bought automatically across websites, apps and streaming services. It’s used by banks to market to certain demographics, income brackets and life stages.
How can financial companies measure success in digital marketing?
Track cost per lead, cost per account opening, life time value of a customer, return on ad spend and channel attribution. Programmatic platforms deliver granular reporting around which campaigns yielded applications.
