Financial Marketing and Cross Selling Blog
Improving Your Bank’s Website By Adding Content Marketing
Web sites are not created in stone. There will come a time when “the old look” doesn’t work anymore or that your site isn’t effectively meeting its overall objectives. If your site looks outdated, you’re not communicating a clear message to potential customers and consequently your company’s value is diminished in their minds. Similarly, you’re not exemplifying a strong web presence if your website lacks the type of information that your customers are looking to you to provide. By implementing a content marketing strategy into your next redesign, the outcome can prove to be very rewarding and effective for your company’s growth.
What is Content Marketing?
You may be familiar with the phrase “content is king.” Without content and clear information, a website will lack an essential element of online marketing regardless of how nice or elegant the design of the site is. For instance, online customers are increasingly utilizing online content to make financial decisions. In a recent Forrester Research report entitled “Online-Influenced Sales Exceed Direct Sales In Financial Services“, it was found that “63% of US online adults who researched financial services products did so online.” Another study sponsored by Powered, found that online consumer education produces ROI nearly 300% higher than traditional campaigns. Can you really expect to attract customers to your site when the information they were hoping to read simply doesn’t exist?
Since a considerable portion of your online brand image and web presence are a direct reflection of your business’s website, the site design becomes crucial – a website might be the face of your brand online but it is also the marketing engine. Many bank websites are still built around the traditional marketing style which generally consists of your company’s background information, brief summaries of the products they offer, current rates, etc. Unfortunately this philosophy is no longer as effective as it used to be.
Content marketing represents a paradigm shift in bank marketing methods in the sense that the center of your attention should begin to focus more on what the customer wants and helping them get it. As social media expert Chris Brogan asserts in a recent comment, “Let’s say your goal is lead generation. A good chunk of marketing effort and attention seems to be shifting in this direction (content marketing), especially for products and services with a complex sell.”
For a bank that offers so many different financial products and services, it’s important that a portion of their marketing efforts revolve around distribution of suitable relevant information. If you know what your customers or prospective customers are interested in learning about and you give them focused and useful information, you are building trust for your brand and all the products and services you offer. By empowering your customers with the knowledge and freedom to make their own decisions, you are creating the foundation for your future business relationships and positioning your institution as a trusted resource.
Why is content marketing important for your website?
In respect to your website design, your site should adhere to a consistent means of facilitating content distribution that is relevant and valuable to your customers. The more complex the products or services are, the more important it becomes to break down and simplify relevant information effectively. Instead of bombarding your customers with the usual marketing information about your products or services, present them with the information that is useful to them and invite them to explore more. Content marketing is still marketing, but is far more subtle and less direct than the traditional ways of the past.
There are many types of content distribution that you can choose to incorporate into your bank’s marketing strategy. Besides actual product pages, there are blogs, forums, newsletters, ebooks, white papers, podcasts and videos. These are just some of the many ways you can enhance your online footprint. Think of some ways you could change your customers experience to make it more interesting or helpful to the point that others would want to link to your website or share it within their networks.
- Does your current website provide enough content to educate your customers about all the financial questions they may have?
- How might you change your current website to be more customer-centric?
- Are you doing your best to leverage your content by offering it to your customers in creative and interesting ways?
Technological developments have enabled banks to market themselves in ways that didn’t exist a few years ago. Mashable.com, a popular website for social media related news featured an article not too long ago titled “5 Ways Banks Are Using Social Media“. The article highlights five institutions that had begun to use social networking and social media to promote their products, enhance their web presence and show brand loyalty using the right content. Being that it is a fairly new trend, very few financial institutions have begun to tap into a resource that is becoming more and more commonplace in the bank marketing world. At the same time these online communities also provide another venue to reach your customers and provide them with useful content that’s educational in nature.
Updating your website can be a daunting task. Whether you’re simply looking for some ways to enhance your current website or your institution is considering doing a complete overhaul of your current website, content marketing should seriously be considered to compliment your current bank marketing strategy. An enhanced web presence, increased brand loyalty, more efficient lead generation, and improved customer retention are just a few of the rewards that will come from simply adding helpful and informational content to your website.
Can Foursquare be the saving grace for a banks fading branch traffic?
If you follow social media news then you’re most likely aware of Foursquare, the latest location-based service that rewards you for frequent visits to near by retail shops, restaurants, churches, night clubs and most recently, banks. Like Twitter, I was a little hesitant about Foursquare when I first started “checking-in”. I didn’t quite understand the badges or why I would want to take my phone out every time I was at a bar or restaurant to check in. Then my colleague shared an article from TechCrunch that discussed the way Foursquare is rewarding users directly through retailers that are on the site and I’ve been intrigued ever since.
An introduction to Foursquare
To have your business show up within Foursquare, users can enter your location in manually if it’s not already listed (take a minute to enter your location). There is no charge for having your business on the site. To “check-in” at your location, users simply open the application through their smart phone and all locations within a certain radius pop up. When you check in you can add personal messages such as “hanging with friends and having cocktails on this beautiful spring day”. Most users connect their activity to their Twitter and Facebook accounts. You can also add tips to the location you’re at so that other users can see your advice when they check in at the location – “Try the house martini with blue cheese stuffed olives. It’s to die for”.
So, what’s all the hype about?
For some, they just like the idea of letting people know how cool they are for going to lots of different places throughout their city. If they’re really active, they’ll get the “adventurer” badge. There are tons of badges that you can win but the most sought after reward of all is being tagged as a “mayor”. You receive this reward by being the top visitor to a certain location on a consistent basis. If you stop going for more then a few days, someone can claim your mayor position. Up until I read the article sent from my colleague, I still didn’t have any clue why this type of service would catch on to a larger audience beyond the self-indulgent.
As I see it now, the true nature of Foursquare is the ability for retailers to connect with their customers on a more personal level. By tapping into this online social world, Foursquare can be the ultimate “word of mouth” tool in an online marketers bag of tricks. And with the addition of offering mayors and other badge winners with coupons and discounts (i.e. a free beer at The Middle East in Cambridge, MA if you show them that you’re the current mayor) then the possibilities are endless for creating loyal customers.
How North Shore Bank is making use of Foursquare
I recently spoke to Tim Gluth and Kate Knox, marketing managers for North Shore Bank, who mentioned that unlike other retailers, banks are not currently able to offer coupons or discounts directly through Foursquare. The company is only exploring relationships with retailers at this time that are your typical social hangouts (bars, coffee shops, nightclubs) and banks, unfortunately, didn’t make this cut.
This didn’t stop North Shore Bank, headquartered in Brookfield, WI from rewarding those who checked in to Foursquare at one of their branches. In a recent Twitter message, they rewarded someone who became a mayor at a branch with a gift card to Subway. After receiving the individuals mailing address, they shipped out the card along with a certificate (see picture on the right). They’ve been using Foursquare in this capacity for a little over a month. The promotion of Foursquare is currently limited to their online activities (Twitter, Facebook, Bank website). “It has been difficult to manage and track the activity,” said Tim Gluth. “This is one feature we feel Foursquare has yet to develop.” And while they currently can’t determine if the people checking in are existing customers or just people stopping by their ATMs, they see every opportunity to connect with people who frequent their locations as a huge advantage.
They mentioned one success story from this campaign, “Someone that we reached out to through Twitter who had checked-in at a branch replied back that they were interested in speaking with a loan officer and was wondering who they should speak to”, explained Kate. It’s this level of connection that makes it worth exploring tools like Foursquare, even if it’s fairly limited to a small group of consumers at this point in time.
Another Way to Build Relationships With Help from Foursquare
After you establish contact, whether it’s by sending them gift cards or certificates, you determine first if they’re an existing customer and if so, note their Foursquare account information in your CRM system (if you have one). Depending on whether they are an existing customer or not, include in the mailed certificate some messages about where they can get helpful financial information on topics - not products – that may be top of mind. Knowing that this individual is online savvy, steer them to an online site where this helpful information can be found – preferably under your banks brand. Make sure you don’t push any specific products. As we’ve said many times on this blog, people today are not interested in being sold. Within this site, embed links to contacts at your institution so that when this individual is ready to start talking, they have an easy way of finding the right professional who can help.
With the industry up in arms about the future of branches, Foursquare brings a very compelling rewards program opportunity that could help banks make the case for in-branch activity. What are your throughts about the service? Do you think Foursquare could play a role in steering more traffic back to branches? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
We plan on following up with North Shore Bank (6 months or so) to see if they’ve continued on with their Foursquare activities. Make sure to keep track of our posts. You can easily do so through our RSS feed or by simply signing up to receive email notifications in the right hand side bar of this blog.
The difference between financial literacy and education-based marketing
The NFCC has announced that April is Financial Literacy month. They’re pulling out all the stops by making trips to Capital Hill and launching two new websites, one in Spanish – www.termineconsudeuda.org – the other a blog providing debt advice – www.debtadvice.org. Many banks and credit unions should join in with NFCC in supporting this cause.
I’ve had many people ask me, “Luke, you guys talk alot about using education as part of your marketing initatives. How is that any different then the financial literacy campaigns that banks and credit unions conduct throughout the year?” For starters, one of the main reasons we stopped using the term “education-based marketing” was because of this close relation in semantics to financial literacy. As you may know from reading our company blog, we’ve been using the term Content Marketing to better explain how the process works.
I think the best way to look at it is to think about your days in school. You may have been a go getter and strived to learn but lets face it, the majority of our peers are not all that excited to get up in the morning and take that yellow bus into the morning classroom. No one wants to be forced to learn and terms like “literacy” and “education” bring back those memories.
Don’t get us wrong, people are interested in learning. As the old saying goes, “you learn something new every day”. And it’s this simple yet unassuming process of learning that is essential to an effective content marketing strategy. Instead of encouraging customers to sign up for classes or to read books on financial literacy, your job is to make them WANT to learn about their financial lives. I always say that education or rather content alone is boring. People need a reason to walk into a library, open a book or enter their name into a form to download a helpful guide.
Marketers have been doing this for years only the focus has been on products. Now that the times have changed and the masses no longer want to be sold on products you must refocus your marketing expertise on the content you have stored in your library (that is, if you have a library).
(Picture Source: Wiki Commons)
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