Big spend. Ambiguous results. Creative that looks good, but says nothing. 

These are just a few of the common frustrations felt by CMOs and business leaders when it comes to advertising for financial services. As an agency specializing in the space, we hear – and see – these frustrations all the time. The stakes are high: financial institutions, credit unions, investment firms, and traditional banks are all competing for the same potential customers, often with messaging that blurs together.

Below are some of the common failure points, and what needs to be done to approach financial services advertising differently and successfully.

Common Mistake: Oversimplifying Campaign Objectives

Almost every advertising investment starts with a question from the CFO or business leaders: “What’s the return?” 

This is not a bad question, nor is it misguided. But too often, marketers react by oversimplifying their answer by saying, “The only KPI is lead generation.”

Here’s the problem with that oversimplification: it fails to recognize that in financial services, customer trust matters deeply. After all, you are asking consumers to hand over their hard-earned money, their sensitive personal financial information, or a combination of both. Therefore, any marketing campaign tasked with the top of the funnel has to consider brand-building — in other words, trust-building — as well.

Only devoting money and measurement to bottom-funnel advertising will limit the quality of leads, the quantity of conversions, and ultimately, the success of the campaign. Real business growth in this space comes from nurturing customer relationships at every stage of the funnel, not just the last mile.

Common Mistake: Putting Advertising on an Island

How often have you seen salespeople say “Yeah, that’s an ad campaign. I had nothing to do with that.”

Segregating advertising from the rest of your business is a huge issue. Financial services is, at its core, a relationship business. You want the people representing the brand to support and advocate for the message you’re putting into the marketplace. You want them armed with marketing content and educational materials that bring the message to life. You want the advertising to extend into an experience that builds brand loyalty and leaves a lasting impression.

Think of advertising as telling people what’s on the menu at your firm. The experience you deliver afterward — whether that’s personalized advice, seamless onboarding, or a responsive savings account offering — is the dish. The menu sets the stage, but your people and customer satisfaction are what create real impact in financial services advertising.

Common Mistake: Not Defining Target Audience

We get it: Your business can serve everyone. However, that doesn’t mean it should serve everyone.

In today’s fragmented digital marketing landscape, relevance matters more than ever. And you only achieve relevance by thinking hard about your audience and speaking directly to them. Whether you’re targeting wealth management clients, first-time borrowers looking for loans or credit, or small businesses exploring investment services, clarity of audience is everything. Who are you speaking to? Who aren’t you speaking to? What are their pain points?

Speaking to everyone means speaking to no one. The more narrow and segmented your audience, the more relevant and impactful your advertising will be — and the more efficiently you’ll reach potential customers who are genuinely ready to engage.

Common Mistake: Spreading Media Too Thin

Most financial services firms aren’t operating with unlimited budgets. This makes it essential to think intentionally about where your brand shows up.

Corny, but important metaphor: Envision your spend as … peanut butter. The landscape is a piece of really, really big toast. If you spread your budget across multiple digital channels, TV commercials, email marketing, Google Ads, landing pages, and more, is there enough for your audience to have a taste of your message? The answer for most brands is “no.”

You need to pick your places. Think about where your audience is and where you want to place the most chips to look bigger than your spend really is. Lean hard into those channels and you’ll see results.

Sometimes hitting less people by spending more in a few smart channels is a good thing.

Common Mistake: Advertising by Committee

Here’s the truth: Compliance will absolutely have comments on your creative campaign. So will executives. So will marketing stakeholders. So will the agency.

And thus, you are destined for a watered-down creative campaign.

Getting to something truly bold and eye-catching takes a deliberate effort on the upfront. You need to involve compliance early and ensure that you aren’t building a non-starter concept. Designate a streamlined steering committee who can approve and fast-track work. Let your executive team know why less people involved means more results.

Common Mistake: Work without Testing

Many agencies fear testing. We do not. Here’s why:

First off, testing with your audience helps ensure that you don’t have a high-visibility disaster on your hands. Exposing your campaign to as little as 8 people in 1-on-1 sessions can help you ensure that a word or image isn’t destined to create a firestorm.

Second off, want to avoid the “watering down” effect of stakeholder feedback? Show them the data. Get outside of what you think – tell everyone what your audience thought about your campaign. Testing helps protect users from miscommunication and helps you protect the integrity of the work internally.

Finally – and this is the obvious one – it makes the work better. A few choice adjustments help you optimize for maximum efficacy in the marketplace and better engage customers from the first impression.

What Effective Financial Services Advertising Actually Looks Like

When it comes to advertising for financial services, the keys to success lie in deliberately planning around the aforementioned pitfalls most financial advertisers face. Below is a playbook for how to do just that:

• Spend Deliberate Time Surrounding Alignment and Education: Time needs to be spent with stakeholders across the business educating everyone around what success looks like, and the real, measurable roadmap towards implementing a successful campaign. If everyone understands the KPIs – and how they connect to one another – then the advertising campaign can be more successfully integrated into the business as a way to advance the strategic priorities of your firm.

• Integrate Stakeholders into the Process: Beyond the above, your advertising campaign needs to incorporate the inputs of critical stakeholders across the organization – it’s not just about marketing. Assign sales stakeholders who can offer feedback and source insights from loyal customers and existing customers alike. The adoption and alignment of the full sales and marketing team throughout the process will make your campaign go much further when it’s in the market.

• Pick Your Audience and Your Places: Your brief should clearly define who you’re targeting and, perhaps more importantly, who you’re not targeting. Similarly, if your budget is limited, clearly define the media channels and venues you want to own, and again, where you won’t be as a result. The goal here is to draw a line in the sand for how you will win

• Go Beyond Advertising: The campaign itself matters. But a well-honed advertising idea should have the ability to scale and permeate the entirety of your business. Ensure that the “big idea” isn’t just limited to advertising – it’s also proved against tactics like earned media, guerilla marketing, sales activation, and more to help your campaign go even further

• Test: Deliberately plan to test the work with your target audience. Use the feedback gained to both hone the work as well as help socializers gain confidence in the creative

• Don’t Over-Optimize: Measurement is essential – but it’s also critical to give a campaign time to breathe and settle into the marketplace. Gain alignment with everyone involved that, while you’ll be watching metrics throughout the campaign, you won’t be making drastic changes and optimizations in the first six weeks. You want to get to a foundation of real, in-depth insight and then use that insight to optimize and enhance the efficacy of the campaign

Financial Services Advertising of Substance

Want some examples of these principles in action? Our site is filled with loads of them. Here are a few to reference:

• Janney Recruitment Campaign: After developing a powerful messaging platform (“Never about us. Always about you.”) that was tested and optimized frequently with advisors, we created an integrated go-to-market strategy with advertising as the backbone. This meant designating key local markets where the campaign would live, focusing all targeting on captive wirehouse advisors, collaborating closely with local sales managers, and even executing out-of-the-box advertising placements like outdoor advertising that boosted engagement. 
• Canvas Annuity: Canvas had historically been focused on bottom-funnel search – but Substance was brought in to experiment with adding top-of-funnel support across video, social, and display. Early on, the work showed strong CTRs and online engagement. But as the program grew over time, the team saw something far more powerful: Higher conversion rates, more branded search, and a more efficient cost-per-acquisition. 

Ready to Make Your Financial Services Advertising Actually Work?

At Substance, we help financial services companies move past the common pitfalls and build marketing campaigns that earn attention, build trust, and drive results that matter. From strategy to creative to execution, we bring the expertise to make advertising for financial services perform the way it should. 

Want to see how we approach financial services advertising differently? 

Explore our thinking — and get in touch when you’re ready to build something that actually works.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does financial services advertising often underperform? 

Too often, marketing teams don’t spend adequate planning time before a campaign launch to make the campaign successful when it enters the market. Missing things like stakeholder education, alignment around objectives, and deliberately defining target audiences and media channels can cause a campaign to fail before it ever launches.

What makes advertising for financial services different from other industries? 

Financial services advertising faces two key challenges: First, highly quantitative internal stakeholders who only want to focus on immediate returns vs. long-term investments that yield deeper results. Second, and perhaps because of the prior point, most financial advertising doesn’t consider enough the importance of brand-building and trust in feeding actual conversions and business results. Unlike most industries, financial services involve asking consumers to share deeply sensitive information, whether it’s for loans, credit, insurance, or wealth management — which makes trust not a soft metric, but a hard business driver.

How do you balance compliance and creativity in financial services ads? 

Understand that compliance is necessary! Involve your compliance team throughout the process to ensure your work isn’t dramatically changed or watered down late in the game. Avoiding misleading claims, deceptive practices, and staying within local laws doesn’t have to kill creativity, it just has to be planned for from day one.

What should a financial services advertising brief include? 

The traditional elements — clear target audiences, digital channels, core message, supporting messages, and proof points — are a starting point. But a strong brief for advertising for financial services should also include: who you’re not targeting, which media channels you’re avoiding to let your message stand out, compliance-sensitive or misleading claims to steer clear of, and a clear competitive landscape view to ensure you’re carving out communication territory that’s truly unique and not already owned by another financial institution or financial services firm.