Abstract

High volume domestic and international trade and business and their risks, force companies and business people to use financial services such as banks and insurance companies much more than ever. However, heavy competition in this industry impels financial service managers to work hard on their marketing strategies and plans. Promotion and communication tools are one of the most important parts of each marketing campaign but they are usually very costly and marketing managers have to find and use more effective techniques to manage their budget limitation. Today financial service marketing is very important because of the heavy competition in this market so promotion and communication strategies are very important tools for success. The other problem is budget limitation; it forces the marketers to search for more effective promotion tools based on target market and product or service life cycle stage but there is very little research in this area. The purpose of this study is to identify the most important promotional and communication strategies in financial services industry and to investigate their effectiveness for some demographic segments. We started with an exploratory research on financial services marketing to discover promotional strategies adopted by them. The study gradually shifted from exploratory research to quantitative research. The research is applied, and survey method is used for data gathering. In addition to descriptive statistics, Friedman Test is used for finding the order of importance of the identified strategies. After prioritizing promotion and communication tools and strategies we investigated more detailed results by demographic and business type categories and provide the rank orders and introduce the most effective promotion and communication strategies for informing, persuading and reminding financial service customers.

Key words: Promotion, financial service, bank, insurance, marketing communication.