Financial Marketing and Cross Selling Blog
Cross Selling In Banking Starts With Education
If your consumers don’t know all the products & services your institution offers, how are they supposed to ask about them?…or better yet, buy them!
Education will create value if you provide it in such a way that it is useful and timely. There is a lot of ‘financial information’ available in the market, mostly designed to tease you with bits of good information then go for the kill – the sell. Education is not a priority in these cases and cross selling is not a priority.
Institutions have the ability to create one of two experiences for their banking consumers: A Selling experience or an Educational experience. It is understood that consumers will be significantly more likely to purchase a product or service from an entity that provides them with good information when they are in the ‘evaluation’ process than just trying to sell them the sizzle. It is especially true when it comes to financially oriented products and services where there needs to be a level of trust before they purchase. Read more >>
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.
A Lesson in Sales for Banks – Education Works Wonders
This story goes back to the mid 90’s but I will never forget it. It was a Saturday morning and I was standing in the kitchen when the phone rang. (This was before the “do not call” lists that we have today.) My young daughter answered and said, “Daddy, it’s for you.” As she handed me the phone, a pleasant... Read More >>
Can a Bank’s Brand Image be a Trap?
Research will tell you that a bank brand attribute as a trusted institution is worth millions of dollars and the envy of so many other types of financial institutions (see recent article from The Financial Brand.)
The problem is breadth. Banks are seen too narrowly, as the place to go for deposits and loans; a place to go to transact. That’s fine if a bank is comfortable with a small share of their customer’s wallet (2 of 10) and are willing to watch other financial institutions earn more and more money by selling other products to their customers; products and services that can help people with other needs as they save for college tuition bills, save for retirement, and move into retirement and old age.
Is a bank’s brand image cast in stone? For the most part, the answer is “yes”. Think of this for a minute. You walk into your dentist’s office. This is the dentist that you have been seeing for several years. He suddenly says, “Take off your shoes and I’ll take a look at your feet, I’m also a podiatrist.” What do you think? “Oh no you’re not, you’re my dentist.” It doesn’t matter if a degree in podiatry hangs on the wall – you are in your dentist’s office and he is your dentist. An image cast in stone. If he really wanted to practice podiatry, he would be better off if you had no preconceived image of him as a dentist.
Banks are in the same trap. They want to take care of more of the needs of their customers but they are tapped by their image – a trusted place to go for deposits and loans.
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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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How Problems Can Help Build Your Brand
It isn’t really the problems that build your brand but how you address them. For years banks have done research to find out what brand attributes are most compelling to customers. And year after year, they got the same answers – customers value good service. So banks built their ad campaigns around the promise that they provide excellent service.
But most of the time, the promise fell flat. Why? Because people perceived good service in many different ways. That all changed when those messages evolved from a simple claim “We have good service”, and started to show a particular problem being solved. Demonstrating a problem being fixed defined service in terms customers could understand. The power of the message was not in the claim of providing good service but in the demonstration of providing good service.
Then marketers went to work to find problems and show how the bank worked diligently to solve them. And guess what they found? Customers that had experienced a problem that was fixed had stronger relationships than those that had never experienced a problem.
A credit union connects with the local biking community
When it comes to content marketing techniques, one of the golden rules is to provide content that isn’t always tied to one of your products and services. You have to know when providing content for the pure sense of being informational to the end user is the right thing to do. For example, many banks and credit unions don’t... Read More >>
Lost – A lesson in what NOT to do in customer service
The show Lost, which had its finale last night, provides us with some important lessons to be learned. Some scientific, some religious but for the purposes of this post, the lessons are about what NOT to do when approaching customer service at your bank or credit union.
There’s no denying that Lost was a successful show. With the first three seasons reaching an average of 15 million viewers per... Read More >>
Book Review: The Referral Engine – Take aways for financial marketers
John Jantsch is the perfect example of someone who practices what he preaches. About a month ago I stumbled upon an offer to receive a free copy of his new book, The... Read More >>
The path to more fee income for financial institutions
It’s been discussed time and time again – banks need more fee income to remain stable in this volatile market. For the past few years this type of revenue has been mainly based on fees from debit card use and overdraft protection. According to a recent Gonzobanker article, 80% of fee income comes from these two... Read More >>
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