Will TikTok Take Over Digital Attraction for Banks?

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms to date.

From a marketing standpoint, the social platform has enormous potential. However, the app is also known for attracting a particularly young audience. With these factors in mind, how might TikTok affect digital attraction for banks?

TikTok has the potential to be a powerful marketing tool. For example, videos posted on the app can garner thousands to millions of views. For the FinTech industry, TikTok may be ideal for increasing digital attraction.

This article will explore what digital attraction for banks is, and how TikTok can be useful. By discussing the advantages of the platform, we will strive to answer the question:

A Closer Look at Digital Attraction for Banks

When discussing digital attraction, it is crucial to examine the role of the customer.

Building digital interest in products or services requires businesses to understand their audiences. Therefore, learning more about your audience is key to learning how to attract them. 

Banks must approach digital attraction the way someone might approach a new relationship. A solid foundation of trust must be established first.

Digital attraction has 3 core components

•       Empathy: Showing a customer that there is complete understanding of their problems
•       Compassion: Demonstrating a high level of care for the customer’s well-being
•       Ease: Soothing customer worries by providing planned out solutions

Fulfilling the core needs is essential for guiding customer’s through the buyer’s journey. It places the business or professional in the role of a trusted guide or advisor. In this role, the guide can then lay out the exact plan of action for the customer to take. 

It is important to understand that digital attraction can take time. Like in relationships, trust and loyalty build up over time. Giving the relationship with customers space to breathe is key.  

This focus on the needs of the customer requires banks to examine their target audiences. Looking at demographics helps identify missed opportunities with specific groups of people.

Additionally, to learn more about their customers’ needs, banks must develop buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a highly detailed profile of your target customer. It will describe their specific wants, needs, and problems.

Creating multiple buyer personas will help compartmentalize your audience. From these, targeted ad and marketing campaigns can better attract each persona.

Finding Banking Clients Digitally

Once you have determined your target audience, there is the matter of reaching them.

Three main kinds of digital marketing are used for attraction:

•   Content Marketing: This is where you’ll find a lot of blog writing and social media sharing. Content marketing uses keywords and tags to help find the desired customers.
•   Email Campaigns: After piquing a customer’s interest, it is crucial to keep the brand on their mind. Email campaigns help nurture relationships with customers until they are ready to commit.
•   Paid Advertising: Paid advertising, such as PPC and social media ads, can be highly useful. They can gain impressions from highly targeted audiences and demographics.

Typically, a strong digital attraction strategy will include a combination of marketing methods.

Determining the specific needs of customers is essential. This process helps to both onboard new customers and retain existing relationships.

Trends in Digital Attraction for FinTech

An increasing digital attraction for FinTech and banking requires paying attention to ongoing trends.

Mobile-friendliness and intuitive designs are two important components of FinTech. Both of these come into play for digital attraction.

Having a FinTech platform optimized for mobile use provides tremendous value to customers. Likewise, an intuitive and responsive design is also helpful in attracting customers.

Besides mobile friendliness and design, several other digital factors affect digital attraction. These include:

•   Branding: The way a FinTech company or bank brands itself is important. Branding helps to make a business more relatable to the customer.
•   Social Media Presence: Social media is a valuable and powerful tool. It helps connect professionals directly with their customers. Plus, there are millions of users across the many social platforms. This makes social media a great place to seek out customers.
•   Video Content: While written content is good, visual content can be more effective. Video content goes hand-in-hand with changing technologies. This makes it a complementary element for digital attraction.
•   Engagement: For financial professionals new to the digital space, engagement is crucial. It helps you to connect with customers. Driving up engagement will help to attract more new customers to the company.

Using Social Media as a Tool for Digital Attraction

Since the days of MySpace, social media has only continued to grow. Over the past decade, social media has come to dominate the digital space. This growth in popularity makes social media a powerful tool for digital attraction.

Using social media as a primary digital marketing tool has several benefits, including:

•   Building and Maintaining Relationships: Social media provides a much closer connection to audiences. Responding to comments and engaging with followers is important. This will help to both build and maintain relationships with customers.
•   Boosting Revenue and Traffic: Heavy digital traffic passes through social media every day. Finding ways to direct this traffic to a business account is critical. It can help boost both sales and traffic on your pages.
•   Creating a Digital Reputation: Customers trust businesses that offer transparency and accessibility. A strong social media presence can help achieve both. In addition, social media helps professionals build a digital reputation that can significantly affect success.
•   Staying Ahead of Competition: Many top brands already use social media. These companies have acknowledged and benefitted from the advantages of social media. As such, establishing a presence on the platforms is the key to staying ahead of the competition.

This article will focus on digital attraction through TikTok. However, all social media platforms have powerful potential.

Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest have all shown massive capabilities for boosting sales. These platforms are also great for building greater brand awareness.

Meanwhile, platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter can help build a professional network. 

Creating a widespread social media presence aids in increasing digital attraction. A truly strong social media strategy will make use of multiple platforms.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence plays a significant role in digital attraction.

If social media is the hero, then AI is the brainiac sidekick supporting the hero from afar. Social media provide the opportunity for tremendous growth. Once this growth occurs, however, it can be hard to keep up with the new influx of followers.

This is where AI comes in. The most common use for AI on social media is the creation of automated chatbots. These chatbots can serve several functions, including:

•   Virtual Shopping Assistants: AI is super useful for helping customers to navigate a site and find the products or services they need.
•   FAQ: FinTech is a new concept to many average consumers. Having AI set up to respond quickly to frequently asked questions is crucial. AI can help manage the influx of questions and concerns through automation.
•   Customer Support: As a business’s following grows, the volume of messages received per day increases. AI helps provide 24/7 customer support even when a human representative is unavailable. A chatbot will often include a responsive and conversational design. This will help troubleshoot specific problems a customer is experiencing.

It is important to be cautious of the overuse of AI on social media. Many consumers see social media as the best way to connect directly with brands. If a bot authors every message sent to customers, this can feel disingenuous and be a turn-off.

Examining the Power of TikTok for Digital Attraction

Since its initial release in 2016, TikTok has grown immensely.

The social media app focuses mainly on short-form video content. However, users can also leave comments, send direct messages, and create direct responses to other videos.

Compared to other social media, the ability to go viral on the app is much more common.

TikTok uses a combination of both hashtags and an algorithm. This helps to create a personalized feed for each unique user.

Thinking in terms of digital attraction, this personalized content is key. It will help financial institutions on the app to target their ideal audiences.

Here are a few important considerations for using TikTok to drive digital attraction:

•   Influencer Marketing: Like all social media, TikTok is full to the brim with influencers. Taking advantage of this and partnering with influencers to promote a business is smart. This will help a company to reach a much larger audience.
•   TikTok Ads: TikTok offers a few different styles of ads. As it stands now, Facebook and Instagram still reign supreme in offering effective social media as. However, using TikTok ads now can help businesses prepare for the future as the app continues to grow.
•   Bite-Size Education: Though TikTok is primarily used by younger people, finance is still a profitable niche on the platform. The key is to offer short and simple video content centered around education. Providing useful educational resources on finance will help build trust in an audience.

The Demographics of TikTok

In the U.S. alone, TikTok had roughly 65.9 million users in 2020. Statista predicts this number to increase at a rate of 22 percent each year.

TikTok’s most notable demographic is the age group it attracts. The app has a reputation.

Here are some stats to consider about TikTok’s age demographics in the U.S.:

•       People aged 10 to 19 make up 25 percent of the user base in the U.S. This gives them the title of the largest age group on the app.
•       The second-largest group is aged 20 to 29 and makes up 22.4 percent of the user base.
•       The third-largest group is people aged 30 to 39 and makes up 21.7 percent of the user base.
•       The fourth-largest is aged 40 to 49 and makes up 20.3 percent of the user base.
•       Finally, people aged 50 or above make up only 11 percent of the app’s users.

Looking at these numbers, it’s clear to see that TikTok attracts more than just teens.

While the largest group is also the youngest, people aged 20 through 49 also make up a significant portion of the user base.

TikTok and FinTech

Finance and teenagers are words not commonly used together. Yet, despite this, the topic of finance is a hot one on the teenager-dominated TikTok.

When looking at TikTok’s userbase, there is a clear interest in both finance and technology.

On the finance side, users are particularly interested in the following topics:

•       Investing and the stock market
•       Cryptocurrencies
•       Personal finance tips and advice

Younger generations often get a bad reputation for being irresponsible with money. However, money and finance are major points of concern for many Gen Z adults.

The Common Stressor

81 percent of Gen Z adults view money as a common stressor, according to a 2018 American Psychological Association survey. 46 percent of those surveyed also reported stress over the economy.

As a result, financial videos on the platform can perform very well. It all depends on the content being produced and targeting the right audience.

Connecting with Younger Generations and “Fin-fluencers”

With the rising interest in investment and cryptocurrency, a new breed of influencer has emerged – the fin-fluencer.

We have already discussed the usefulness of connecting with social media influencers. Focusing on influencers who create FinTech-related content is highly recommended.

Some younger consumers are inherently distrustful of branded accounts. They don’t want to feel like they are being tricked into making purchases or decisions.

By focusing on fin-fluencers, banks can access audiences already interested in learning more about finance. In addition, this is an excellent method for attracting

customers who may be resistant to brand accounts but fans of influencers.

Final Thoughts: Is TikTok the Digital Attraction Hub for Banks?

So, is TikTok the future of FinTech marketing? The answer is – maybe.

Like any social media platform, TikTok has its pros and cons. Having a fairly young user base can make it more difficult for brands to connect. However, the younger audiences found on the app are not without interest in finance.

The key when using TikTok is to leverage its best features to your advantage. For example, connecting with influencers in the finance niche and providing educational resources are two great ways to build a loyal TikTok following.

As more banks embrace FinTech and digital transformation, digital attraction will continue to swell in importance. When used wisely, apps like TikTok can help banks to find new audiences and future success in the years to come. 

Image Credit: cottonbro; pexels; thank you!