Marketing for financial services

Why the approval path drives everything

German financial promotion is governed by rules on performance claims, risk disclosure and advertising identification. In practice this means each piece of content passes at least one review, often two, before publication.

Agencies used to consumer work usually discover this after the first campaign slips. We plan the other way round: the editorial calendar is built with a review window inside it, so campaign dates hold even when legal takes a week.

What we do

• Editorial planning with a built-in review window. Content is produced far enough ahead that compliance and legal can read it without campaign dates collapsing.
• Content for products that need explaining. Funds, pensions, discretionary mandates. Subjects that resist being compressed into a claim and still have to be understood.
• LinkedIn advertising for institutional audiences, targeted by function, sector and company size, where the audience is financial advisers, portfolio managers or CFOs.
• YouTube and video for longer explanatory formats, produced in house by dot-films.
• Meta advertising for reach in the awareness phase and for retargeting along the advisory path.
• Measurement down to a business signal, not reach. Which signal counts is defined at the outset and differs by institution.

Who this is for

We work with banks, insurers, fund companies, asset managers and financial technology firms. The fit is right when there is a compliance function we can agree a review path with, and when marketing is treated as continuous work rather than a series of campaigns.

Where we are the wrong choice. Purely transactional comparison portals, where price is the only argument, gain little from this approach. So do individual intermediaries without their own approval structure, because the process overhead outweighs the budget. And if short-term sales figures are the only objective, performance advertising without brand building is more honest, though it is not what we sell.

How we work

1. Take stock. What runs today, which channels are active, and how the approval path actually behaves. Not as drawn in the org chart, but how long it takes in practice.

2. Decide the channel. Which channel carries which job. This is deliberately the first advisory step rather than a foregone conclusion. Often the answer is one channel, not four.

3. Agree the approval path. Who reviews what, in which order, within which deadline. This step governs speed and cost more than any creative decision.

4. Production, delivery, reporting. Ongoing operation with monthly analysis. After three months there is a reliable answer to whether the chosen channel carries.

Results

We have worked in digital marketing since 2001, with DAX-listed companies, federal ministries and institutional clients. From the financial sector:

Note for approval: please verify these figures against your own reporting before publication.