Recent research by PricewaterhouseCooper for Google reveals that personal finance advertising is way behind the consumer demand for Internet services.
Consumers are going online in droves to purchase personal finance products, but the companies selling them have been extremely slow to allocate funds for online promotion.
Overall research has found that 85 percent of consumers use the Internet to research finance products such as mortgages, credit cards and loans. And already 55 per cent of them go on to buy that specific product online.
Add to that a whopping 60 per cent of people say that they have become aware of new financial products through the Internet.
Yet financial service companies are spending less than 10 per cent of their media advertising budgets online. They are actually allocating over 50 per cent of their budgets for print advertising, in spite of the fact that it is far less cost-effective than either online, television or direct mail marketing.
The head of financial services for Google Europe Ian Carrington said: "Consumers across Europe have been swift to discover that the internet offers huge improvements to their shopping experience for personal finance products."
"For the sake of their customers and their own commercial success, finance firms need to move faster and more fully online."
In the case of media and music companies their battle against the inevitable is a little understandable (though futile) but in the case of finance companies, this just doesn't make any sense. To advertise in a failing medium that produces far less results than another medium is charity not investment.
Just because you see print medium slowly disappearing isn't any reason to aid them in their demise. (buddy can you spare a dime?)
So there should be an aggressive, high priority embracing of online marketing by any financial firm, whose products are tailor-made for Internet sales.
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