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:
- Getting Started: A young professional in his late twenties to early thirties.
- Making Progress: A successful looking businessman in his late thirties to forties
- Approaching Retirement: A successful looking businesswomen in her late forties to fifties
- Retired: A well groomed man in his sixties looking relaxed and ready to take a long, long vacation
Scrolling your mouse over any one of these characters will open up a dialog box that describes each persona and where they are in life. Chances are if you look similar to any of these characters the descriptions are dead on.
After hitting continue on the box you are brought to a page where you can read related articles or play with tools to help you understand how much you might need in retirement based on your current lifestyle. You can also click on a “Begin” button and a series of questions will come up. Pretty simple questions such as “Do you currently participate in a 401(k) or an IRA?” After you finish answering the questions, which are short, they give you a quick and dirty look at roughly how much you may need in your retirement years. It’s a compelling way to keep the reader around to want to learn more about how to ensure they have this much when it comes time to retire.
But one of the most important aspects of this whole microsite is its ability to make it easy to schedule a call. In the top right of the site remains a static image showing a person and some options for getting started – call, submit a request or send an email. The form itself is short and simple to fill out, not requiring a ton of detail that can often turn customers away.
I myself would try and make this contact process a bit more personal. The image of the women doesn’t seem REAL and gives off a generic vibe. You want the visitors to this section of the site to feel special and by showcasing the actual professionals who they will be talking too goes a long way.
In the end, this is a big bank putting a lot of time and money into constructing an online content microsite. But it doesn’t need to be this flashy. If you position content in a way that compels the visitor to want to read more, then you’ve taken care of half the battle. The next part is putting in place a successful capturing process so the referrals flow in and the dialogues take off.
