You've heard the expression "work smarter, not harder," right? Well much of the application of this idiom to the finance marketing world can be found in the way you approach your technology. It's about developing out savvy methods by which you can bolster strategic growth without having to sacrifice endless human hours (and thusly, dollars) in the process. So how can you approach your strategy to accomplish long-term growth with modern sensibility?

There are a whole lot of ways, but here are a few to kickstart your process.

Easy Mobile Wins

So what about your mobile app and your mobile browsing experience? Here are a few long-hanging-fruit ideas to start...

Chattiness

The inherent value in a mobile experience is the speed by which you can take action—not to mention your ability to accomplish multiple desired actions at simultaneously. Customer service isn't immune to this desire—in fact, the way you approach mobile experience with your service team is critical to strategic growth, particularly with existing customers and members. Forgo relying too heavily on phone lines to problem-solve for consumers—offer chat in a sticky spot that's easily identifiable, rather than burying it like it's an undesirable action. Make sure you're ready and willing to message with your end consumer.

Upselling

Account-opening capability has become another basically expected experience in your mobile app. Beyond simply the 101 features, such as submitting a loan application or becoming a member, consider implementing similar functionality across all of your product lines—or, at the very least, the ones you most hope to grow in the near-term. Beyond this online, immediate capability, consider adding user-friendly method by which account management can occur. This may take the form of mimicking what budgeting apps such as Mint are popularizing, such as dividing savings accounts into individual funds with various purposes, or the ability to name and segment your money across your accounts based on your goals.

Enhancements

What about existing functionality that could use a little sprucing up? For one, your mobile remote deposit capture capability might meet basic standards, but what are your consumers experiencing from the national competition? How much work is dropped onto the consumer's lap? For instance, many popular deposit account apps are now simplifying the photographing of a check to the point that it's click-less—it's captured automatically when centered on the screen. This level of attention to detail may seem minimal, but with more than half of banking customers citing mobile deposit as their most-desired feature, enhancing its attractiveness and usability could make a huge difference with a small tweak.

Second-Tier Mobile Wins

Say you're ready to dive into some slightly more complex investments in your mobile experience—you might try investing a bit more time and budget into these potential growth propellants...

VIDEO CHATtiness

So a text-based customer service platform built into your mobile experience might be the low-hanging-fruit version of enhancing your availability, but what about video chat? In a world in which this form of communication is so ubiquitous, your bank or credit union would do well to make this commonplace mechanism available at the click of a button. The beauty of this format is that it also allows your customer service team the ability to function inside and outside of the office setting, thus opening up your hours to more flexibility to the 8-to-5 working set. The more availability you offer, the more likely you'll have the face-to-face virtual conversation that closes a sale or increases share of wallet.

Robust Search

There's nothing more frustrating in a mobile experience than the struggle to find what you're looking for—often due to poor organization or under-planned page infrastructure. So instead of forcing your end consumer to dig through a confusing hamburger menu in hopes of finding the answer, build out a robust internal search engine to make finding relevant resources, applications, forms and portals even easier. (This also means your mobile app could stand to have some built-in educational resources—sure, they don't need to take up valuable front-and-center real estate, but they should be reachable behind your search function.)

Targeted Messaging

Consider this quandary—would you be more likely to take action on a suggested product if it called out a benefit or feature specifically important to your lifestyle or if it was tagged with generic messaging for a bulk audience? (Yes, it's a leading question—obviously the former.) A lot of your messaging opportunities lie in how you learn about your customers and members. A lot can be gleaned from spending habits, but perhaps even more can be learned from smartphone location data. Though the data is largely anonymous, it can give you broad strokes of information about your consumer that can play into how you talk about your products, from where they shop, eat and play, to the industries they work in and the travel destinations they prize.