Liberty Marketing has unveiled Balance, a new marketing consultancy and agency dedicated exclusively to helping financial brands grow their online presence.
The company – the first of its kind in the UK – will aim to help businesses hit their online growth goals and better serve prospective clients.
Balance will become the newest agency in the Liberty Marketing Group and will boast a joint resource pool of more than 40 specialist marketers who offer services including SEO, paid media, content creation, social media management, digital PR and digital strategy.
The agency will be led by Alex Murphy who has over 20 years of financial services marketing experience with brands such as Admiral, The Royal Mint, and GoCompare.
“I absolutely loved my marketing leadership roles in financial services, but it’s undeniable that it’s a very tough sector to market in,” Murphy said. “Marketing teams tend to be relatively under-resourced and under-budgeted in relation to the size of the business. They often have grand transformative multi-year goals, but zero-compromise short-term targets, and the strict regulation, whilst very important, can make it challenging to navigate while pursuing growth.”
Murphy will join forces with co-founder Gareth Morgan who also works as CEO of the wider Liberty Marketing Group, who has collaborated with dozens of finance clients such as Admiral, Target, Aviva, and MotoNovo.
Morgan added: “15 years ago, when managing digital marketing for a firm in the mortgage sector, I was getting frustrated with agencies that either didn’t understand compliance and the massive difference this makes to how finance brands market themselves, or they were too scared of regulations to suggest work that would cut-through such a competitive space and gain attention.
“Chatting to Alex last summer, I realised this is still a huge issue for in-house marketers. He agreed that there was a big gap in the market, and he’d been feeling the same way for years as well. That’s why we’ve launched Balance – an agency that is both creative and compliant.”
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Balance’s launch coincides with the release of the FCA Consumer Duty later this year which will put the spotlight on the communications that all financial services brands have with customers. As part of its launch, the new firm has conducted research into 50 household-name finance brands and scored them against the measurements that both the FCA and Google judge them on, finding that many are failing best practice guidelines on how to communicate online.
Murphy has affirmed that Balance will help businesses “fix these issues and make sure all future content and campaigns please the regulator, the search engines, and most importantly, their customers at the same time.”
