Financial Marketing and Cross Selling Blog
Truebridge Appoints Casey Roberts National Sales Manager
Senior executive will provide solutions to a financial services industry that is searching for new sources of revenue
BOSTON, Mass. (January 11, 2012). Truebridge, Inc. (www.truebridge.com), a leader in marketing for the financial services industry, announces the appointment of Casey Roberts as EVP of National Sales. Truebridge provides innovative marketing services to help financial institutions increase revenue through more effective cross selling.
This addition is a major step in fulfilling the Truebridge goal of adding more value through a consultative approach. Roberts will lead the way in offering marketing solutions that align with client goals and are implemented in a way that show results.
“Casey is well positioned to get under the hood and really understand the issues and also help see and capitalize on the opportunities,” says Stewart Rose, President of Truebridge. “He has had a tremendous amount of experience and success in generating cross sell revenue, having run the investment program at Sovereign Bank where he grew their program tenfold in 10 years. He knows what goes on in the branches and he understands the challenges to cross selling.”
“This has never been more important than it is today,” according to Roberts. “With the new regulations in place and margins squeezed by the low interest rate environment, financial institutions need to generate more sales without adding associated cost. They have made a big investment in their branch network and now they need to leverage it for more than deposit gathering. At the same time, many traditional lead generating techniques are worn out. A new approach is needed to engage customers.”
As a former client of Truebridge, Roberts is very familiar with the set of marketing solutions he will provide. Truebridge has created an educational approach to cross selling that leverages existing communication channels (branches, website, email, and social media) to deliver educational content in a way that generates sales leads. “It’s a turnkey marketing system that helps institutions realize the enormous opportunity they have to leverage frequent contact into stronger and more profitable relationships,” says Roberts. In addition to Sovereign Bank, Robert’s previous experience includes Bank of Boston and Fidelity Investments. He is a graduate of Boston College and lives with his wife and two children in the Boston area.
New Tool Means More Sales in the Branches
BOSTON, Mass. (December 7, 2011). Truebridge, Inc. (www.truebridge.com), a leader in marketing for the financial services industry, announces the launch of a new version of a tool that greatly facilitates the generation of referrals and sales appointments by frontline branch employees, Branch Lead Maker.
Truebridge has created this tool to help banks realize the enormous opportunity they have to leverage frequent customer contact into stronger and more profitable relationships.
The system has been built especially for ease of operation in a retail branch environment. Branch Lead Maker provides frontline branch employees with a fast and easy way to generate sales leads for all of the products and services offered by the bank. For customers, it means easier access to the exact person at the bank that can help them with the financial needs that they face throughout their life, from buying a house to living in retirement. For the bank, it means an increased share of wallet, more profitable customers, and a higher return from their branch system.
Many factors have made it difficult for frontline employees to be an effective conduit between branch visitors and the people at the bank that can help them with more of their financial needs. Some of the challenges include the fast paced transactional environment of a typical branch and, in some cases, high turnover. “Opportunities are missed all the time because frontline employees are so busy and find it difficult to track down the right sales person and their schedule. Many of the lead generating and tracking systems out there today either don’t do enough or are way too complex so they don’t get used,” says Stewart Rose, president of Truebridge. Branch Lead Maker eliminates these barriers, making it much more likely that a branch visit will lead to more sales, including investments and insurance. “Customers may walk into the branch for a typical transaction such as account opening or servicing and walk out with an appointment to see someone who can help them save for retirement, plan their estate, or borrow for their business,” says Rose.
It works because it’s so easy to use
Branch Lead Maker saves time and reduces training requirements. It creates a lead with a minimum number of clicks. A simple form captures only information that is relevant to the referral. A list of sales channels, contact names, and instant access to each sales person’s calendar are readily at hand.
Branch Lead Maker provides important information from multiple vantage points:
• Front line employees: Enter leads, track progress, and receive reports on qualified leads.
• Sales people: Receive leads immediately, keep track of pending leads, and qualify leads.
• Management: Track lead productivity and, in some cases, may base frontline employee compensation on qualified activity.
Branch Lead Maker can be used as a standalone lead tracking system or it can be combined with the Truebridge education based marketing system. This system provides educational content in a way that initiates customer dialogues. By offering a family of educational guides on dozens of financial topics, frontline employees find it easy to uncover customer needs and connect them to the person that can help. Using this feature, frontline employees don’t need to “sell” to make a referral or sales appointment happen. Their role is simply to introduce a new service which helps customers make more informed decisions about financial issues they may face throughout their life. Each guide features the exact person that can help them with that topic. When a guide is requested, the frontline employee asks if they would like to meet with the person featured on the guide.
Branch Lead Maker is one of a series of solutions from Truebridge to make it easier for banks to generate more cross selling. Truebridge also offers online lead generation tools that feature a private branded Financial Answer Center, Edu-Tweets, Edu- Facebook posts and a Facebook app. For more information about the Branch Lead Maker, visit www.truebridge.com or call 800-476-6118.
Laconia Savings Bank Launches Financial Answer Center
New Hampshire – November 21, 2011 – Laconia Savings Bank is pleased to introduce a great new website tool on www.laconiasavings.com. The Financial Answer Center, an education based system, provides customers with immediate answers to hundreds of financial questions and instantly provides contact information for the person at the bank best suited to assist them.
“At Laconia Savings Bank, we strive to be a financial resource for our customers. In addition to providing traditional bank products and services, we now provide them with the information they need to make informed decisions about their personal finances,” said Mark Primeau, President and CEO of Laconia Savings Bank. “Consumers often need financial guidance in their lives. When our customers need assistance or financial expertise, we want them to know they can turn to us.”
Laconia Savings Bank’s new Financial Answer Center is an extension of the commitment to their customers and their communities and provides articles such as buying and selling a home, cash and debt management, running your business, investing, saving for college, understanding estate taxes and much more. Laconia Savings Bank’s new Financial Answer Center is available at http://answers.laconiasavings.com/.
Laconia Savings Bank, founded in 1831, provides deposit, lending and wealth management services to families and businesses throughout New Hampshire. With 19 community offices within the state and assets exceeding $1 billion, Laconia Savings Bank is the largest independent bank in New Hampshire. Because Laconia Savings Bank is a mutual organization, it doesn’t answer to stock holders and can focus on the success of its customers, communities and employees. Throughout its 180 year history, Laconia Savings Bank continues to be a strong and stable financial organization. For more information, call 1-800-832-0912 or visit www.laconiasavings.com.
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New Financial Answers Facebook App for Banks
BOSTON, Mass. (November 16, 2011). Truebridge, Inc. (www.truebridge.com), a leader in education-based marketing for the financial services industry, announces the launch of a new Facebook app for banks, Financial Answers.
The new app enables banks to provide their customers with the information and guidance they urgently seek and, importantly, delivers this information in a way that attracts customers to more bank products and services. The interactive Facebook app allows banks to provide their customers with a simple way to uncover financial needs that may not be apparent to them. “What people don’t realize is that so many of us are blind to the most important financial decisions that we need to make. People get surprised all the time, in many cases after it’s too late,” says Stewart Rose, president of Truebridge. “This app can put banks in a position to help their customers see needs and get answers.”
Inside the bank’s Facebook page, customers simply click on the app titled “What You Should Know” and answer a short list of simple yes/no questions. For example, “Do you have kids at home?” The combined answers reveal likely needs and generate a series of questions that the customer should probably be asking. Under each question are links to the educational content that provides the answers and access to the exact person at the bank who can provide the personal help they are looking for. For one couple, it could mean starting a college saving plan early, for another, it could mean making the right choice with the distribution of their retirement plan.
Truebridge has created the app as a response to the enormous popularity of social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. This app is a value added service that helps build the bank brand as a resource and the place to go to take care of a wide range of financial needs.
“The big question is how to best leverage these new tools-how to develop a social media “voice”, says Rose. With Financial Answers, banks have a platform that uses educational content to develop this “voice” by offering a service that customers will really appreciate. The current economy has increased the demand for educational content. “People are more desperate than ever for easy-to-understand information and guidance. They want information that could help them save money and avoid mistakes, whether it’s buying a house or transitioning into retirement,” Rose continues. “They have made it clear that they will do business with the one who is there to provide that help at the time they need it. With Financial Answers, this can be their bank, not the competition.”
Financial Answers links bank customers into educational content contained in the bank branded online Financial Answer Center, which is integrated seamlessly into the bank website. The online Financial Answer Center provides customers with easy-to-understand information and guidance on hundreds of financial topics. It is also used to generate customer dialogues and sales leads from branch and website visitors. Educational content within the Financial Answer Center is all compliance approved and continually updated by a top international accounting firm. It is also available to customers in a series of downloadable “Quick Guides.” Each guide has the look and feel of what it is: an educational white paper, not sales literature. Each guide has the picture and contact information of the exact person at the bank that can help them with that topic.
Financial Answers is one of a series of Truebridge solutions to make it easier for banks to use social media. A library of readymade Edu-Tweets and Edu-Posts for Facebook covers a wide range of topics and connects customers directly to the appropriate content or downloadable guide. Also, a mobile Financial Answer Center site allows smartphone users easy access to all content.
For more information about the Financial Answers, and to download a copy of the new Truebridge White Paper: Making Social Media Work for Banks, visit www.truebridge.com/sm-banks or call 800-476-6118.
Educational Content As Value Added Service
How Social Media is Changing Bank Marketing
Essentially, “Social Media” is really just a buzz word that has come to be used to describe the ever changing landscape of the internet that we’ve all grown to know so well. The phrase simply refers to all the social networks in existence and the way we, web users, customers, and brands interact with each other online today. Not only can a single social network be used as a marketing tool in itself, but integrating social media channels into your website gives you the power to leverage your website in ways that didn’t exist years ago. The difference between traditional websites and the ones within social media communities is the simple notion that traditional websites speak to a single customer at a time, where as social media sites allow everyone to have a voice. In this sense, social media is the catalyst that makes our everyday web experience so much more dynamic and it has opened the doors for individuals and brands to create their own unique online presence.
How Can Banks Use Social Media to Improve Customer Service?
What does customer service mean to you? Personally when I think of customer service, I can’t help but have my thoughts be overshadowed by frustrating experiences, automated call services and plenty of dead ends. If you provide any product or service, no matter what it may be, you have to be 100% dedicated to assist your customers when something goes wrong. You can’t simply provide a service and then turn a cold shoulder on your customers when something goes wrong. Customer service is a HUGE factor in how your brand is viewed and when your customers need help with your products or services, they should be able to count on you to provide them the information that will help them, which in turn will increase their loyalty to you in the long run. You may be reading this now and thinking that the connotations attached to a brand’s customer service is something that is hard to change. However, I was recently involved in a scenario with a certain internet service provider that left me utterly amazed.
REWORK: Recommended Book For Bank Marketing and Management
How can a business book written by the founders of a small software development company be applicable to bank executive and marketing professionals? I asked myself the same question. REWORK was written by Jason Fried and David Heinemenier Hansson, the founders of 37Signals, a company that has created several products that help teams work together more effectively. For bankers, conventional ideas and methodologies aren’t what separate you from your competitors. Most often it’s your ability to be open-minded to new ways of thinking and putting them to work…or sometimes reworking them entirely.
Prior to reading REWORK, I was somewhat familiar with the company 37signals and the products they developed but never really knew their background. For most that have never heard of 37signals, they are a small software company that have developed a number of web-based apps for collaboration, information sharing and project management which are now used by millions around the world.
REWORK provides the reader with the insight into the attitudes of the founders and a basis for the reasons for their success. As a designer & developer myself, I wasn’t sure how their philosophies and ideas could really be applied to the large scale audience but they certainly managed to do so from my perspective. If you subscribe to conventional wisdom, this book may not be for you because the authors tend go against your experience and what has been instilled into you during your college and post-collegiate years. Nonetheless, this is a worthwhile book, for everyone from the single self-employed individual, the small business owner, all the way up to the larger institution management and marketing professionals.
Make content marketing increase your company’s share of wallet
September 2010 – Truebridge and one of our clients were recently featured in an online article of Target Magazine. The article which was written by Jeff Molander, titled Give Them Value, describes how many marketers want to help customers make better decisions by becoming the source of trusted information and how few are actually turning this practice into leads and increased referrals.
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how our clients are using the Truebridge system to generate referrals, contact Pat Larkin at 800-476-6118 ext. 104 or send in a request to learn more about the EducateFirst Financial Marketing System.
Also try our new “Share of Wallet” Revenue Calculator to help gauge your opportunity for increased revenue by building your share of wallet and earning more revenue from your customers.
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TwinStar Credit Union Announces New Service Featuring Member Education
Olympia, WA, May 18, 2010 — TwinStar Credit Union has announced a new member service featuring an online Financial Answer Center. The education-based service provides members with immediate answers to hundreds of financial questions and instantly connects them to the person at the credit union who can help. Members can access the Financial Answer Center via TwinStar Credit Union’s Web site at http://www.twinstarcu.com/resources.
“We want to give our members the information they need to make more informed decisions,” said Mary Beth Spuck, assistant vice president of TwinStar Credit Union. “People are looking to build their financial knowledge to help with many aspects of their lives. When our members go looking for help, we want to offer them the resources they need.”
According to Spuck, the Financial Answer Center is designed to help people identify and understand financial needs that may not be apparent to them. “One of the problems that many of us face is we don’t recognize what we need until it’s too late,” Spuck said.
“The Financial Answer Center works in two ways,” Spuck said. “First, it is used directly by TwinStar members as a resource to get answers, uncover needs, and find the exact person at TwinStar Credit Union who can provide personal help. Second, our frontline branch employees use it everyday during account opening or servicing to create dialogues with members and set up appointments on the spot.”
“We’re in the service business,” Spuck said. “Our goal is to provide help on our members’ terms. We introduced our new Financial Answer Center as an extension of that commitment. Members can access the Financial Answer Center anytime on our website, and those seeking information in the branches are directed to a specific person at the credit union who can assist them,” she said. “Members who use the Financial Answer Center will appreciate the depth of information we provide.”
Stewart Rose, president of Truebridge Financial Marketing reflected on what TwinStar is seeking: “We know that TwinStar wants to take care of more of their members’ financial needs. That means they need to do a good job at generating dialogues and steering their members in the right direction. TwinStar wants to generate a positive member experience with an approach that strengthens a relationship,” Rose said. “Using a platform that puts member education first will do that.”
“The best part about the Financial Answer Center is its ability to touch all our members, both online and offline, helping them to understand their financial needs and giving them a single source to find answers,” Spuck said.
About TwinStar Credit Union
TwinStar Credit Union serves anyone who lives or works in Washington State. TwinStar has 22 branch locations, 81,000 members and manages $700 million in assets. More information is available at www.TwinStarCU.com
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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.
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