BankMarketingCenter

I recently saw some news, pretty good news I believe, concerning financial industry marketing budgets. Now, I can't help but reminisce a bit at the mention of the word “budget.”

Back in my ad agency days, never a day passed without some conversation about budgets. Your survival, of course, depended on it; the client’s budget, that is.  Every one of us in the creative department was either working or worrying; working to grow the brand and the business, or worrying that the client might find a reason to cut their budget. A cut could come for any number of reasons, but more often than not it was a downturn in the economy.

Maybe I’m imagining it, but it seemed easier back then to know when those cuts would come. And maybe that’s because when the economy was good, you knew it was good. Conversely when it was bad you knew it was bad. Not today. There seem to be some very different opinions about the state of things these days… 

I’ll start with the bringers of bad news. According to the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects Report: “Amid the war in Ukraine, surging inflation, and rising interest rates, global economic growth is expected to slump and several years of above-average inflation and below-average growth are now likely. It’s a phenomenon—stagflation—that the world has not seen since the 1970s.”  Doesn’t exactly make your day, does it? 

But then I read this; a July 1 American Banker article entitled “PNC Financial CEO ‘confused’ about market’s recession worries, impact on banks” where PNC Chairman, President and CEO William Demchak stated: “I am personally confused about all the concern that sits out there on banking reserves and the coming recession and the impacts on profitability of banks.” According to the article, many in the financial industry agree with Mr. Demchak. "Little of the data I see tells me the U.S. is on the cusp of a recession," said Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser. "Consumer spending remains well above pre-COVID levels with household savings providing a cushion for future stress and, as any employer will tell you, the job market remains very tight." Robert Bolton, president of the bank investor Iron Bay Capital, shared Fraser’s optimism: “A lot of the bankers I’ve met with are still pretty confident, and that’s based on what they’re seeing with credit quality and hearing from their commercial clients in terms of positive sentiment. Businesses are growing, hiring.” Peter Sefzik, Comerica’s Executive Director of Commercial Banking, agrees: “Overall, we feel like the sentiment of our customers is still pretty good at this time. Our pipeline is strong. Our activity levels are good, so it's hard to see any sort of immediate concerns.”  

Since I would much rather believe good news than bad, I’m going to go with the optimists on this one!

I also read, just recently, that banks are going back to spending on marketing; moving those dollars that were being spent on Mar-Tech over the last year or so back to spending on building  their brand and selling products. comcouncil.org says that “average marketing spending across industries has increased to 9.5% of overall company revenue this year. Financial services firms lead the way with the highest marketing budget at 10.4% of company revenue, up from 7.4% in 2021.”

While this is good news in terms of a bank’s ability to market itself, it can create challenges for community banks with limited resources. With more marketing dollars to spend, but no new hires planned for the immediate future, a community bank’s in-house marketing team can quickly find itself overwhelmed. When the objective is to grow the customer base and share of wallet through digital channels and better digital engagement — in other words, to do more with less — where can bank marketers turn for the marketing communication content they need?

About Bank Marketing Center

This is where bankmarketingcenter.com and our library of professionally designed digital assets can be just what a bank’s in-house marketing team needs. Take, for example, these digital ads we’ve created around fee-free checking.  These layouts can be quickly and easily customized;  select the logo, colors, fonts, and images you need, then simply drag and drop. No design software or skill needed.

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. In short, build your brand. To view our campaigns, both print and digital, visit BankMarketingCenter.com. Or, you can contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Well, over our last few blogs we’ve talked a bit about social media marketing. We’ve talked about the importance of social media marketing in your marketing mix.  We’ve talked about the necessity of having a SMART plan before doing anything. We’ve talked about the various platforms and their unique benefits. Now it’s time to talk about what to post and how to know whether or not your posts are effective.

I do want to start off with the first paragraph in a HootSuite article entitled, 16 Crucial Social Media Metrics to Track in 2022, which I absolutely love: 

“The great thing about social media is that you can track almost every single detail through social media metrics. The tough thing about social media is that… you can track almost every single detail through social media metrics.”

Chances are very good that you already have some presence on social media; most likely pages on Facebook and LinkedIn. But a presence on a few platforms is not enough… in fact, it’s barely even the start of a social media marketing effort. To get the most bang out of your social media buck, you need to have a SMART plan, which we’ve talked about in a previous blog. Once you’ve put a plan in place and developed a strategy to reach your planned objectives, you can begin developing you social content and posting it. What’s next?

Keep a social calendar

No, not the one with the indecipherable notes scribbled in Sharpie® that helps you keep track of birthdays; the one that will help you create (and stick to) a posting plan. To make building your calendar a bit easier, Hootsuite will even provide you with a calendar template!  And while, like everything in life, it’s nice to prepare weeks in advance for something you know is going to happen, well, we know it just doesn’t work that way. If you can plan your posts a couple of months in advance, you’re doing pretty well. With the exception, of course, of unexpected events such as an emergency closing due to inclement weather, most posting is pretty predictable.

Right about now you’re probably wondering how often you should be posting on your social platforms. Again, from Hootsuite: “It’s the question that launched a thousand sleepless nights: “How often should I post to social media?”  Hootsuite answers the question thusly:

“We dug into the research and grilled our own social media team for insights to discover the ideal number of times a day (or week) to post for each platform. Here’s a quick summary of what we found, but read on for more in-depth details:

• On Instagram, post between 3-7 times per week
• On Facebook, post between 1 and 2 times a day
• On Twitter, post between 1 and 5 Tweets a day
• On LinkedIn, post between 1 and 5 times a day”

Posting to a number of platforms several times each day may seem a bit daunting. How exactly does a bank marketing professional come up with enough content to maintain this regular posting schedule? And as we’ve discussed, the secret (no secret, really) to developing marketing messaging is keeping it fresh, relevant, topical, engaging, and personal. Social media messaging is no different. Developing social content takes some effort.

So, where is this engaging, topical information going to come from?  Some will come straight from the old Roman calendar in the way of holidays and from your organization in the form of news; new hires, job postings, employee anniversaries and profiles, new branch openings, branch closings, products and services that you offer... the opportunities are limited only by your imagination. Then there are those external events you’ll want to post about, such as attendance at/sponsorship of community events, announcing significant local activities such as festivals, holiday observances, your charitable giving endeavors, involvement in local educational organizations or programs, etc., etc., etc. A Lucky Strike extra with calendar planning; it can force you to think of ways to fill it.

Now, how will you measure the effectiveness of your efforts?

An important step in your social marketing planning is determining how you’ll measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Without KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you have no way of tracking the response to your posts. Without KPIs, you cannot look at the data gathered, learn from it, and refine your messaging — when and where needed —in order to deliver more desirable outcomes.

On Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, there are a few commonly tracked metrics for social media campaigns, including: reach, impressions, likes, comments, and engagements. Setting benchmarks and monitoring response for these KPIs is crucial to understanding the overall effectiveness of your social media. Every social media platform has its own native analytics for you to dive into. For Facebook, you’ll find them in the Insights tab. In Twitter, you navigate to Twitter Analytics. In Instagram and Pinterest, you’ll need business accounts before you’ll be able to see your data.

Engagement

The engagement metric tells you how actively involved your audience is with your content. Engaged viewers interact with messaging through “likes,” comments, and social sharing and every platform offers some sort of engagement metric. And engagement can be measured by more than one yardstick. On Facebook, for instance, engagement is split between 1) Post Clicks and 2) Reactions, Comments and Shares. While a post click number may be high, that does not necessarily mean that the campaign is successful.  A more telling indicator is the number of reactions, comments, and shares. This number is a reflection of true, active engagement, as opposed to someone simply viewing your post. Sound a bit complex?  That’s because social media metrics certainly can be. Facebook does offer useful, detailed information on their Meta Business Help Center page.

Impressions and Reach

Frequently used but often confused, impressions and reach are each an important metric to track.  Your Reach metric tells you how many unique individuals your post reached, while Impressions tells you how many individuals saw your post times the number of instances each individual viewed your post. Why are reach and impressions important metrics to watch? When impressions are higher than reach, it means your audience is viewing your content multiple times. That is good. Social content that earns high impression numbers can help you better understand what type of content is performing well and what type is not. With Twitter, for example, the platform’s analytics dashboard does not track Reach, but you can track Impressions. Again… a bit complicated?  Twitter can help you out with their Activity Dashboard Help Center.

Page Likes

It’s nice to be liked, isn’t it? Well, you want your posts to enjoy that same feeling.  Put simply, the more your content is liked, the better. When it comes to Facebook, for example, “likes” are fairly simple. When someone likes a page, they're showing support for the page and its content. [Note: Not the same as “following,” which is even better. When someone follows a page, it means they are open to receiving updates about that page in their news feed.] Facebook lets you track page likes easily through their Audience Insights Platform. With Twitter, you can simply click on any Tweet to get a detailed view of the number of retweets, replies, likes, follows, and clicks it receives. Twitter also offers an analytics tool, which you can access simply by logging into your account. Click on “Audiences” and you can view a complete report of your following over the last 28 days.  Instagram, on the other hand, does not make social metrics easy. A third-party tool like Squarelovin can help.

Website visits

Using social to drive traffic to your website.  Well, of course,  you 'll want to know what platform is driving traffic and what messaging is doing it most effectively. A great way to effectively track website visits from your social campaigns across all channels is to develop custom UTMs which can then be tracked using Google Analytics. UTMs, or Urchin Tracking Modules, are a tracking device that can yield specific valuable information regarding site traffic visit sources. Simply put, UTM tracking involves adding unique codes to the URLs to which your posts link with a click through. If you aren’t familiar with UTM codes or aren’t sure how to set them up, you can find detailed guidance on Google’s Analytics Help page.

Ready to get started?

Managing your bank’s social media marketing is not exactly a DIY project and this blog is by no means intended to serve as a comprehensive guide to social marketing analytics. Hopefully, it will get you excited about the possibilities that social media marketing analytics provide, and inspires you to give analytics a try.  If you decide that this is something you’d rather not take on yourself, don’t despair.  There are a number of companies you can engage, such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social, that offer highly sophisticated analytics reporting tools.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging developed by banking industry marketing professionals, well trained in the development of effective marketing communication, that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. And with them, your brand. Like these Fee-free Checking Account ads recently added to our library of content.To view our marketing creative, both print and digital – ranging from product and brand ads to social media and in branch signage – visit bankmarketingcenter.com.  You can also contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or via email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.  As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

No social media marketing strategy is complete without a blogging component. Having a blog not only provides a strong foundation for your marketing, it’s also fun and inspiring—and a great way to personalize your brand, share ideas, generate new ones, and build a community of like-minded and engaged individuals.  Here are just a few of the reasons why blogging is well worth your time and investment.

1. Be both a SME and a friend

Think of your blog as a conversation. It’s an opportunity to speak in detail about your products and services, share content that is relevant at that particular time, and if you’re so inclined, to comment on relevant industry news and trends.  But remember, no matter what tack you decide to take, that a blog is a conversation. While it should educate — you do want to be viewed as that SME (Subject Matter Expert) — it should never read like a product brief or a white paper.  There are lots of opportunities for your target audience to access those types of marketing materials (and if there isn’t, there certainly should be) so use your blog as a means to engage in a way that can personally connect with your reader.

2. Build some traffic while you’re at it

Blogs provide the perfect platform to strengthen your SEO strategy. Start by thinking about the size of your website. How many pages are there? Probably not that many, right? And think about how often you refresh/update the content on those pages. Probably not that often. This is where your blog comes in. Every time you create and publish a blog post, search engines consider that yet another indexed page on your website.  This means that with each blog, you’re creating one more opportunity for your site, through that blog post, to show up on the search engine results page (SERP) and drive traffic to your website in a prospect’s organic search. Simple math:  The more often you blog, the more opportunities you have to elevate your site’s placement on an SERP.

3. Put a likable face on your digital presence

The digital experience is inherently impersonal. While machine learning and AI have certainly contributed to our ability to identify customers and their needs and in so doing, helped us personalize our interactions, the digital experience is still far from an in-branch one. For instance, a website isn’t exactly the most personalized consumer touch point, is it? And we all know how important a personalized experience is to our customers. We hear about it all the time. “Personalize your customer experience!,” the experts are constantly shouting.  Your  blog helps. It  puts a human face on your bank which — while it can’t take the place of a face-to-face in-branch encounter — helps make your bank feel more personal, friendly, trustworthy, and accessible.

 4. Get your readers to comment and share

A solid bank site can be relied upon to answer questions that customers, or potential customers, might have about products and services. This is a different type of interaction than that which a blog provides.  If you end your blog with “I’d love to know your thoughts on the subject,” believe me, you will get thoughts.  This is, of course, just what you’re after.  This is why a blog is so powerful. It can create a two-way conversation with customers, leads, and industry peers. With a more relatable tone and an interactive platform, you can encourage feedback and discussion.

 5. Add to your email database

Email marketing is an important tactic and should certainly be a component of your overall marketing mix. The challenge, of course, with email marketing is building your database. It’s not easy to get people to “opt in,” so you need to take every opportunity (preferably in the least intrusive ways possible) to encourage sign-up.  The way to do this, of course, is to provide value in exchange for the individual’s contact info. Again, not easy. But, this is where a blog can help. Blogs help contribute to your bank staying top of mind and help reinforce your audience’s need to keep updated. If people find your blog content informative, relevant, and engaging, chances are they’ll trust that your email newsletters are as well. Inserting links in your blog that will encourage readers to sign up for additional touchpoints, like emails, is a great way to build that email database.

 6. Re-purpose your blog 

 Obviously, your social media marketing consists of, well, social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Every time you create and post a blog, you’re creating content that 1) you can share across your social platforms and 2) people who see it can share with each other. The content you create can also live, in various part and pieces, across your social media channels, giving you more social bang for you blogging buck. With blogging, you’re not only strengthening your social reach with the blog itself.  You’re also creating a web of engagement points that connect with each other and ultimately lead everyone you’ve engaged right to your website.

7. Drive long-term social marketing results

Hubspot says: “Imagine you sit down for an hour on Sunday to write and publish a blog post. Let’s say that blog post gets 100 views and ten leads on Monday. You get another 50 views and five leads on Tuesday as a few more people find it through social media. But after a couple of days, most of the fanfare from that post dies down, and you've netted 150 views and 15 leads. It's not over.” Since that post is now ranking, it means that for days, weeks, months, and years to come, you can continue to get traffic from that blog post. That’s because a blog post can bring traffic to your site long after it's first posted. In fact, according to Hubspot, “about 90% of the leads we generate every month come from blog posts published in previous months. Sometimes years ago.”

There’s much more to it.

Is this a comprehensive treatise on blog posting? No. There are a number of additional benefits to blogging that we haven’t discussed here. And, there are a number of companies out there that can advise you on how to get the most of your blogging, from software and templates to guidance on creating a blogging editorial calendar. My hope here is that you’ve learned just enough about blogging to be inspired enough to give it a try. It’s a terrific tool for engaging customers and generating leads. 

 About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging developed by banking industry marketing professionals, well trained in the development of effective marketing communication, that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. And with them, your brand. Like the below recruitment ads, for instance, recently added to our library of content.

To view our marketing creative, both print and digital – ranging from product and brand ads to social media and in branch signage – visit bankmarketingcenter.com.  You can also contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or via email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.  

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.

Facebook. Instagram. YouTube. TikTok. Twitter. You've decided that you're going to add social media to your marketing mix. Now, which platform to choose? While you may feel you need to choose one or two, why not take advantage of them all? As you’ll see, each one is unique, offering its own unique opportunities. If you have any preconceived notions about social media, like "it's just for kids," put those notions aside and read on. 

Why social is ideal for community banks 

Why?  Because social media IS community, which is why it aligns perfectly with community banking. Unlike the large, national banks, community banks are in the business of participating in their communities and, importantly, helping people through relationships. It’s about connecting with customers on a personal level.  And that’s what social media is all about.

The most viewed, followed, and shared content on social platforms is the content that is perceived as authentic, the content that shares thoughts and experiences, not information.  Here's a brief overview of the social media channels that you, as a financial institution, really need to incorporate into your marketing plan:

TikTok

It’s been predicted that by the end of this year, TikTok will boast 1.8 billion active users worldwide. While the largest demographic of TikTok users skews younger, at ages 18-29, it’s not just a fad for Millennials and Gen Zers. The 30-39 demo constitutes nearly 20% of the platform’s user base. Check out this success story from earlier this year: “FNB Community Bank is conquering TikTok.” It chronicles the success that a Midwest, OK-based community bank has had with a platform that just a few years ago, wasn’t even on most marketer’s radars.

“These days,” the article says, “Julie (Julie Waddle, Assistant Vice President, Marketing Manager) creates videos about financial advice, the community bank’s high-quality customer service and even its ugly Christmas sweater contest.” Her recordings can sometimes receive up to several thousand views. “A few of FNB Community Bank’s videos, however,” the article goes on to say, “have garnered tens of thousands of views, reaching far beyond the community bank’s footprint.”  To learn more about the benefits that TikTok can help you market your bank, visit TikTok for Business.

Facebook

The oldest and by far the most far-reaching of all social channels, Facebook boasts over 2 billion users around the world.  Over the past few years, Facebook has evolved from a GenX channel to a Boomer channel. This platform has gained popularity among businesses not just for its affluent user base, but also for the variety of options it offers, including professional pages, paid post promotion, and native advertising.  For financial institutions, Facebook is an ideal channel for reaching an older (55+), affluent market with products such as second home mortgages and retirement vehicles. To learn more about the benefits that Facebook can offer your business, visit Facebook for business.

Twitter

For a long time, Twitter had been known as the platform for Millennials. This is, however, no longer the case. Today, world leaders and Fortune 100 CEOs are tweeting away.  For the customers of small businesses, including banks like yours, Twitter is a way to share compliments and complaints (yes, unfortunately!) and for those businesses, an opportunity to quickly respond to customer questions and concerns.  Twitter, then, is a great vehicle for:

• solving customer issues
• building relationships that can lead to greater revenue
• learning about what your market thinks of your products and services, and
• promoting new products with the “breaking news” urgency that is unique to this channel.

To make it even easier for businesses, Twitter now offers a series of features geared toward customer service and support, which as Twitter describes them, will enable businesses to “focus on personalized, customer-focused responses in order to provide winning social customer service.”  To learn more, visit Twitter Business or follow @TwitterBusiness .   

Instagram

Second only to Facebook, Instagram has a relatively large following; approximately one billion users. As illustrated in the chart below, courtesy of Statista, as of April 2022, 17.1 percent of global active Instagram users were men between the ages of 25 and 34 years. More than half of the global Instagram population worldwide is aged 34 years or younger.

Instagram users are largely Millennials, a desirable market for financial institutions, particularly as they are just now taking interest in financial services. This platform relies heavily on images, both still and video. So what can you do with Instagram?

Think fun, informal, entertaining content. Videos and photos generated by customers and employees, for instance: Birthdays, holidays, work anniversaries, community events... these help position your staff as the caring and trusted advisors they are while building your brand as a community institution at the same time. You can even post short (slightly humorous, perhaps) demo videos on how to download your mobile app or pay bills online.  The more imperfect these videos are, the better. The goal here is more about being authentic and engaging and less about being informative. To get started with Instagram, visit Business.Instagram.

YouTube

The second largest social network, and second largest search engine in the world, more than 300 videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day by over 2 billion users. YouTube is an ideal platform for complex products or services such as home mortgages for first-time home buyers, for instance, where you’re perhaps looking to reach a relatively young audience with informational videos that can go in-depth on the benefits of your mortgage products.  YouTube also reaches individuals ages 45-64, making it a good vehicle for retirement products.  To learn more about what YouTube can do for your bank’s marketing, visit YouTube.com. 

All in all, social media channels can be truly effective in growing your financial institution’s revenue. Through these platforms you introduce new products, cross sell, gain valuable insights into customer preferences and market trends, improve your customer service support… the list goes on.  Ready to get started?  Coming soon; a few tips on how to get the most out of these social media channels as you develop your digital marketing campaign.

About Bank Marketing Center

Here at BankMarketingCenter.com, our goal is to help you with that vital, topical, and compelling communication with customers; messaging developed by banking industry marketing professionals, well trained in the development of effective marketing communication, that will help you build trust, relationships, and revenue. And with them, your brand. Like the below recruitment ads, for instance, recently added to our library of content.

To view our marketing creative, both print and digital – ranging from product and brand ads to social media and in branch signage – visit bankmarketingcenter.com.  You can also contact me directly by phone at 678-528-6688 or via email at nreynolds@bankmarketingcenter.com.  As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this subject.