The financial services industry is ever-evolving, with shifting customer or member expectations, disruptive technologies, and increasing competition. To truly succeed, you need more than just financial expertise—you need to truly understand your audience.
Market research for financial services provides the clarity to uncover what banking customers want, where the opportunities lie, and how to stay ahead.
In this blog, our financial services market research company will guide you step-by-step on how to conduct market research tailored to the unique challenges and opportunities of banks, credit unions, and financial brands. Ready to gain a competitive edge? Let’s dive in.
What Is Market Research For Financial Services?
Market research for financial services is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data to better understand a certain topic such as customer needs, market trends, and competitive landscapes.
In a complex and competitive industry as financial services, suffering from a lack of information can be challenging. We like to see market research as the foundation for making informed decisions to help navigate this challenge. Whether it’s navigating shifting regulations, adapting to digital transformation, or outpacing competitors, market research provides the insights needed to grow and succeed.
In this case, market research covers any kind of research including brand research, customer satisfaction, pricing research, product development, segmentation research, and more.
How Important is Market Research For The Financial Services Industry?
Reduce Risk
This is the number one motivator and factor behind market research. With a lot of market share, capital, and products at risk of losing money - market research can be the reason that companies don’t lose money on poor decisions or things like bad product launches for example.
Since every big competitor has competing products, strong brands, and a loyal customer base - deploying market research can be the one way to get ahead of these blockades.
It seems like an impossible task to out-perform any of your competitors, but with your own custom data from a market research project, it’s possible to make data-driven decisions.
The biggest example is if a company is launching a new product targeting their customer base but doesn’t do any research on concept testing for the product or pricing research - how will they know what is a fair price or a good product without data? That’s where market research fills in the blanks. With good quality data (note quality, you do NOT want to be using bad data) it’s possible to accurately represent the outcomes with a solid market research project.
Your new launch can go from losing 100,000s of dollars to success with the right data and insights.
Increase Profits
Similar to above, instead of having mediocre success, your project can have tremendous profits with the right decisions (using data). If your company’s prices are too low or if customer loyalty is lacking - market research data can uncover these problems and provide an avenue to fix with high-quality data.
A lot of companies leave margins and profits on the table by not deploying data in the right spots to further increase their current winnings. With competitors doing research constantly, it’s important to deploy the right market research to collect the data to use for your brand.
That’s what helps companies win back market share, increase their margins, and drive profits up.
Accurate Forecasting
With the financial industry especially, forecasting is nothing new. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what to expect from future performance from data? Financial experts are not unfamiliar with forecasting in their own industry, it’s also important to use it for the brand itself.
The reason is deploying market research data into future decisions and business strategy can help estimate future success (from things like potential market share, revenue, and margins).
Since some companies rely on this forecasting, it’s critical to do using data instead of simply guessing.
Types of Market Research Best for the Financial Industry
To see real results, it is important to choose a bank and credit union market research option best for your unique goals and objectives. Below, we explore the methodologies that deliver the most value to financial institutions and when best to use them.
Competitive Rate Analysis
Staying competitive in the financial industry often hinges on understanding how your offerings compare to those of rival institutions.
Therefore, many FIs choose to conduct ongoing competitive rate analyses. This involves conducting secondary research to identify the interest rates, fees, and terms offered by competitors to understand how your financial institution compares in the market.
For example, a bank might hire a market research company like Drive Research to conduct a competitive rate analysis to assess how their mortgage rates compare to rivals in a specific region. The insights gathered can guide adjustments to pricing strategies, ensuring the bank remains attractive to potential customers while maintaining profitability.
Brand Research
Another great methodology to consider is brand tracking research. We believe it is essential for financial institutions aiming to understand their reputation, customer perceptions, and overall brand performance over time.
Whether it be through customer surveys, non-member surveys, focus groups, or a combination of all three, brand research provides valuable insights into how customers view a bank or credit union compared to competitors, and whether its branding efforts resonate with its target audience.
For instance, we’ve worked with credit unions to track customer awareness, satisfaction, and loyalty levels across multiple touchpoints. The results helped the CU refine marketing strategies and align the brand’s messaging with the needs and expectations of its customers.
Concept Testing
Within the financial industry tons of products exist and new ones are born each year. With new products, concept testing is critical to know so you can understand what customers need, what they are willing to pay for, and why they would buy yours over others in the market.
With the right concept testing, you can launch a successful product or not. It really can be a night and day difference, even from a larger brand.
Market Segmentation
Financial companies normally have different audiences they serve. It’s important to know how to speak to each of those audiences to stop from losing that section of customers. If your marketing is all geared towards banks, you might lose your individual customers that use your services everyday.
A market research segmentation project can help financial companies understand each of the audiences that buy from them and what their needs are from those products.
How To Conduct a Financial Market Research Project Like a Pro
Set your Goals
With every market research project, you have to set your goals. Without them, it’s impossible to know which projects are a success or not. These objectives can be anything your organization is trying to achieve but they should be laid out.
If you’re working with market research professionals, they will help you set realistic goals that can be achieved from a solid project.
Find Your Audience
This is the key part, from every audience you want to get data from, you need a solid sample. Lots of market research projects involve a good quality sample (using bad samples can ruin data quality).
You’ll want to make sure you have a good audience sample lined up that represents the audiences you want to collect data for.
Collect Your Data
This is the key part. You’ll need to have good quality writing and project setup (whether that’s a good moderator, good survey programming, or more). You’ll need to know what to do from a market research perspective to avoid biased questions, leading questions, and other things to keep your data quality clean.
If you’re not presenting un-biased data that is easy to understand to your audience it can be hard to collect the right data.
Clean Your Data
A lot of market researchers and companies skip this step but it’s probably the most important one. From start to finish, you need to make sure your data is clean and viable to use for business decisions. That means using the right sample, questions, setup, and getting rid of bad responses. It can be tempting to skip this to complete the project but not doing this is even worse.
Having quality data means you can actually get the right insights from your project instead of the wrong ones (which can be costly for big projects)
Use Your Insights
If you’re working with the pros, they will give you great insights that are taken from the project. You’ll be able to understand trends and outcomes from the project you can directly apply to your business decisions.
On the other hand, if you’re doing it yourself you’ll need to uncover the insights from the raw data you have. This is the part where you’ll uncover the answers to your initial questions that your research is based on. You’ll need to uncover the trends and more to use for your quality decision making.
Get Expert Financial Services Market Research Help
If your brand has questions that require answers from quality data, then don’t hesitate to work with a financial service market research company or pro. Here at Drive Research, we’re pros at financial market research and have been for nearly a decade.
There’s a reason 100+ brands trust us with their financial market research and it’s because we believe in quality and data-driven decision making. We always make sure our clients get the highest quality possible along with an amazing project experience.
Want to see how we can help with your financial service research project? Contact us below for a free quote today.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040
Austin Parker
Austin has an extensive background in SEO as he's been blogging since 16 years old back when the internet was in its infancy. As fitting, he holds a Bachelor's degree in English with a concentration in creative writing.
Learn more about Austin, here.
