Financial Marketing and Cross Selling Blog
Helpful content marketing techniques from SunTrust’s retirement section
I was reminded of the LiveSolid.com website during a recent conversations with Jeff Pilcher of The Financial Brand. The site was built by SunTrust Bank in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s a big blue site that unless you look carefully you’d never know it was created by SunTrust. Why a bank wouldn’t want to make it clear that they were associated with such helpful content is beyond me.
But then I took a further look at their own website at www.suntrust.com. As I dug into the retirement section I stumbled upon their retirement microsite. This site is very well put together and is a great lesson in how to create compelling online content that pulls your audience in and eventually can lead them to wanting to meet with one of your professionals.
Lets take a look at what happens when we first enter the site. At first we are met with four personas:
Whose content are you using in your social media initiatives?
Imagine you went to your doctor one day and he/she diagnosed you with a minor sickness but one that required a set of treatments to help cure. Instead of your primary doctor detailing the steps you should take a new person walks into the office and begins to tell you what you should be doing. Now, how would that make you feel about your primary doctor?
Change up this story and instead replace “doctor” with your primary “bank”. With social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook gaining popularity among bank marketers, those in charge have been forced to come up with creative ways to find content that will keep their audiences entertained. And often times this means looking outside the institution to build up a healthy library of content. Now, think back to our doctor story at the beginning and you’ll start to understand where I’m going with this post.
Does this mean that you should never refer people to someone elses site? Of course not. In fact, this helps to show that you don’t just think about “YOU” all the time. A key factor in winning more business from clients. But the more I monitor bank and credit union messages through these social media tools, the more I realize that they almost never link to their own site unless it’s to a micro-site that was setup for a specific campaign. Or they may steer you to branch location pages, contact pages or other service related pages.
A key advantage to linking to your own content is the control you have. For example, you could link to a page of content that talks about how in 2010 clients can convert their traditional IRA to a Roth IRA and then have action steps in the article such as “talk to our financial advisor today” or “download a free guide on this topic”. This opens up the opportunity to generate referrals from your content strategies.
I often hear bankers say how they’re the “trusted financial advisors” for their communities. Wouldn’t it seem counterintutive then to always steer clients to someone else who happened to write an intriguing article around a timely financial topic? If this was under your brand it would have more of an impact on the client and he or she would see you not just as a place to do transactions but also as a place to get answers to all their financial questions.
Yes, there are compliance hurdles for putting financial content under your own brand. But in the long run, it’s worth the time and money to ensure this is in place otherwise you’ll be seen as just the messenger and not the solution.
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