3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
The effects of economic disruption and uncertainty have many families facing tough financial questions they are not sure how to answer.
Unfortunately, financial literacy rates remain startlingly low. A recent study showed three quarters of Americans say they do not feel confident about their personal finances. When a another survey asked over 1,000 American adults who they turn to for trusted financial advice, almost 25 percent said they had no one to turn to. Providing financial education has always been a core purpose of banks, but the financial turmoil of recent years has made financial literacy even more important.
Financial professionals have an obligation to educate their customers, and today, social media is one of the most effective ways to do so. Luckily, social media-driven education already aligns with consumer preferences: Pew Research Center reports that more than half of U.S. adults get their news from social media, and 79% Millennials or Gen Zers have gotten financial advice from social media.
Many financial institutions are already capitalizing on this by using social media to connect with their customers and communities, but there’s still ample opportunity to provide financial education to current and prospective customers. Here are three tips:
1. CURATE RELEVANT AND TRUSTWORTHY NEWS
Social media is flooded with misinformation and misleading data, and your audience members know this. To become a trusted source, be highly selective in choosing accurate, useful and relevant news to post on your branded social media pages. You can take several steps to ensure that the information you share comes from trusted sources before distributing it to your followers.
Established news organizations, such as CNBC and ABC News, seem easy enough to identify, but be wary of illegitimate sites trying to mimic them. The source’s domain and URL will help you identify whether the reference is credible. For instance, sites with URLs that end in “.com.co” might be cause for concern. If you’re still unsure, investigate the site further for more information. The “About” page should provide plenty of verifiable information about the organization’s staff and leadership team. If you’re still unsure, choose another source.
It’s also important to be aware of news bias and how it impacts your ability to build a healthy news diet that protects your brand reputation. Seek out resources (like this one) that help visualize where certain media outlets fall on the political spectrum. Armed with this information, you can help your institution’s brand avoid bias. You can also be sure you’re not resharing information that’s deceiving, one-sided, or untrustworthy.
2. EMPHASIZE YOUR TEAM’S THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Credible news updates draw in social media users searching for financial news, but rather than simply sharing links, weave in original insights to make the information more digestible and jargon-free. Remember: Your employees are financial experts, so empower them to share their knowledge through a strong social selling strategy.
In doing so, you’ll not only educate your followers, but also humanize your brand and build trust with your audience. After all, people trust people more than brands, and research bears this out: Nearly three-fourths of social media users say they are more heavily persuaded by posts shared from employees rather than brand pages. Engage team members to share their knowledge in original content like blog posts, social media posts and short videos.
3. BE ENGAGED
Social media is a two-way communication channel. A survey by The Manifest revealed that 74 percent of consumers follow brands on social media, and of that group, 96 percent said they directly interact with those brands. To make the most of your social media presence, your team needs to be engaged and respond to questions, comments and concerns in a timely manner. Stay connected with your followers and you’ll build stronger, more meaningful relationships within your community in the long term.
Financial literacy is an acute need. By using social media to educate current and prospective customers, banks can improve financial literacy, be a good steward for their customers and serve as a trusted source of information.
Whether you love or loathe social media's infiltration into every element of our personal and professional lives, there's no denying that this powerful medium is never going away. Social networks are growing bigger and stronger by the day. Forward-thinking achievers in every industry understand this and have responded by leaning all the way into social selling.
For the unaware, social selling is using social media to sell a product or service by showcasing authenticity, strengthening relationships with clients and prospects, and building thought leadership. In social selling, advisors use their own social pages to promote content about their brand and services, but with a personal spin.
Everyone from dog groomers to financial advisors are utilizing multiple social networks to build a following and bolster their personal brands, and those who fully embrace social media's ubiquity outperform their competitors and win more business. It's as simple as that.
The key, though, is finding a way to stand out from the competition online. There's a big difference between "doing social media" and doing it well.
The difficulty with differentiation
As we all know, the internet is more than likely the first place individuals go to get advice these days — financial, familial, and absolutely everything in between. So when people go online to search for guidance on money matters, they won't find you if you aren't there, actively promoting your expertise and services.
There's no stronger business case for social media (and social selling) than that: It's where your potential customers are. Meet them there and give them what they need. If you don't, someone else will.
To set yourself apart as a financial advisor, you need to be able to sell yourself — not just your firm. Sure, many financial advisors are intermediated and you likely don't have free rein to post everything you might want to on social channels, but that shouldn't be a deal-breaker. There's still plenty to say without risking any backlash or drawing the ire of regulators.
Put your fears aside
Though some in the financial industry might feel wary or daunted by interacting directly with clients or prospects, online exchanges matter in today’s market. Brands that use a more generic social-media strategy can end up sounding too promotional, focused more on boosting the brand to a broad audience instead of forging real connections. Rather than creating original content that speaks to their particular audience, financial institutions treat these social channels as glorified billboards instead of networking opportunities for each individual advisor.
That’s too bad because there’s real power behind social selling today. When comparing the social media potential of brands vs. individuals, one study found that employees have 10 times the reach and double the engagement of the brands they speak for. The best sellers in large companies, meanwhile, were the ones who regularly used technology to foster connections with new prospects or existing clients. Building genuine relationships pays off for both advisors and brands.
So, how does someone improve their social-selling efforts? How can financial advisors use the power of their individuality to differentiate themselves from their peers? Here are five tips to help you better accomplish social selling on your personal pages:
1. Ask an expert
Even if you’re on board with tapping into the potential of authentic relationship-building through social selling, you still need the right tools and training for the job. After all, your area of expertise is in the valuable services you provide to your clients, not online marketing.
An excellent move for advisors is to seek advice from your firms’s marketing or branding team. Not only can they help you develop an effective social-selling strategy, but they can also provide you with the resources and tools you need to more effectively and efficiently create, plan, and schedule your posts. Compliance experts can also educate you on the rules that govern social media in the financial services industry. Ideally, your firm provides continuous training and tools to ensure you stay on the right side of regulations.
2. Be real
The type of posts that most people see on their social-media feeds are at least partially determined by an algorithm. These algorithms are generally designed to serve up content that users are most likely to engage with in one way or another. This can be a huge advantage, but it also means that you can’t expect to stay on people’s minds if you deliver bland, uninteresting content that isn't relevant to your audience.
That doesn’t mean you should go posting clickbait or try to shock people (there’s definitely such a thing as bad engagement). Instead, the best way to get and keep people’s attention is to be your real self. Post about what matters to you and do it in your own voice, not just copying/pasting brand posts. Post about local happenings that people in your area might care about. Speak to the challenges you hear clients ask about most. In social selling, authenticity is the fastest way to start building deeper and more lasting relationships.
3. Consistency is key
How much engagement your posts garner will often depend on when and how often you post. Not only does each channel (like Facebook or LinkedIn) tend to have different times when engagement is at its peak, but your specific audience may also have their own preferences. A little research here can go a long way.
Build a sustainable cadence and stay the course. Consistency is crucial. If you post more than once a day, make sure that each has a few hours to shine on its own. And if a post is getting a particularly high response rate, wait a while before potentially drowning it out with something new. Remember: Algorithms are looking for engagement, not frequency.
4. Mix it up
Another way to ensure better engagement (and a better response from the algorithm!) is to mix up the type of content you share. Your online presence should be a healthy medley of brand, industry, and personal and community content.
You will need to figure out what the right balance for your own audience is. Think about what they care about, the questions they ask when you work together, or specific local concerns. The bottom line in every case is to make sure you’re maintaining a variety of relevant content in your social selling strategy.
5. Give and take
Approach social media as a conversation, not a bullhorn. Social selling is about more than just getting engagement — it’s also about engaging with your audience in return. This give and take is how relationships are made and strengthened, whether they be prospects or clients you know and love.
Don’t just be reactive by responding only to comments or likes on your posts. Take time to respond to others’ posts as well, whether they’re customers or other thought leaders in the industry. This doesn’t always have to be through comments, either; a simple like can let people know you’re paying attention to what they have to say.
Social selling is a powerful tool that can help financial advisors bring in new prospects and keep old clients coming back for more advice through the power of relationship and trust building. However, in order to rise above the noise, you can’t lean on your — or your firm’s — reputation. Instead, you need to establish an authentic presence for yourself that showcases exactly what makes you the right person for the job.
Learn more by downloading our Social Selling Guidebook for Financial Institutions.
Digital transformation means that social media has become an integral part of everyday life. It has changed the way we communicate and connect with others, and it has also transformed the way financial professionals operate. Loan officers, insurance agents, and financial advisors will find that social media networks like LinkedIn have immense potential in terms of building connections, establishing thought leadership in the industry, and supporting their business.
LinkedIn has quickly become a need for financial professionals: in fact, 9 out of 10 financial advisors are currently using LinkedIn for their business, and other industries can show similar numbers, too. To leverage the full potential of LinkedIn, intermediaries should create a strong social media content and post strategy. Here’s how to get started:
Define Your Target Audience
Before creating any content or posting anything on LinkedIn, it is essential to define the right target audience. By knowing this audience, it’s easier and more effective to craft content that resonates with them, and to also tailor any message to their needs and preferences. For the financial services industry, understanding clients and prospective clients is crucial to growing connections on social media.
Develop a Content Strategy
Once the target audience is identified, the next step is to develop a content strategy that aligns with business objectives. The content strategy should focus on creating value for the audience and positioning oneself as an expert in the financial industry, be it insurance, mortgage, banking, or wealth. It’s always helpful to create a mix of content, including articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, and podcasts, depending on current events and what the target audience would prefer.
Some themes to consider using in the content strategy are:
- Industry news and trends
- Tips and advice for financial planning and investments
- Case studies and success stories
- How-to guides and tutorials
- Thought leadership pieces on industry-specific topics
Optimize The LinkedIn Profile
A LinkedIn profile is the first thing that potential connections will see. Therefore, it is essential to optimize the profile to make a good impression and establish credibility. Some tips for making a LinkedIn profile stand out are:
- Use a professional headshot
- Write a compelling headline that reflects expertise
- Craft a well-written summary that highlights skills and experience
- Add relevant keywords to the profile to make it easier for people to find in search results
- Include media such as videos, infographics, and presentations to showcase work
Engage With Connections
LinkedIn is a social media platform, and like any other social network, engagement is key. Engaging with connections demonstrates real interest in building important relationships and sharing valuable insights. Some meaningful ways to engage with connections might include:
- React to and comment on posts
- Share posts with existing network
- Send personalized messages to build rapport and establish connections
- Participate in LinkedIn groups relevant to industry
Measure and Refine Your Strategy
Finally, it is crucial to measure any LinkedIn strategy's effectiveness and refine it over time. Using social media analytics is a smart way to track an audience's engagement with posted content, such as views, likes, shares, and comments. Based on this data, it’s simple to refine an existing strategy, identify what works and what doesn't, and adjust the tactics accordingly.
In conclusion, creating a social media content and post strategy for LinkedIn can help financial professionals build connections, establish thought leadership, and support their business. By defining the right target audience, developing a content strategy, optimizing the profile, engaging with connections, and measuring and refining the approach, anyone can leverage the full potential of LinkedIn and make social media a priority.
Ready to start building your social selling game plan? Check out this Social Selling Playbook for Financial Institutions.
The world of social media marketing can be complex. While social media marketing isn’t new, many company leaders in regulated industries are still getting up to speed on best practices and even vocabulary. This can pose issues. When you confuse important terms, for instance, you jeopardize your goal of deploying marketing messages that will truly resonate with your customers and prospects.
Such is the case with social sellers and social influencers. Though they’re two distinct strategies in marketing, they’re often misconstrued. So let’s clear up the confusion once and for all so you can choose the best strategy for your financial institution as you head into 2024.
Social selling is a savvy marketing strategy where brand intermediaries post authentic content on their social media accounts. Social selling lets you leverage associates’ networks to showcase thought leadership, engage with clients and build trusting relationships. These authentic touchpoints increase the chances of lead conversion by making the most of associates’ relationship-building skills online.
Social influencers, on the other hand, are outside personalities who are paid by a company to represent the brand on social media. Social influencers are often appealing because consumers have perceived them as trustworthy advocates, but increasingly, brands are realizing that consumer trust is waning and that influencer marketing isn’t a viable long-term strategy.
An Obvious Choice
It’s tough for financial institutions to hitch their wagons to social influencers. Influencers might work well for fashion or other retail brands, but most don’t have the intimate industry knowledge necessary to be a resource to clients. Furthermore, the financial services industry is especially vulnerable to consumer mistrust. To use social media to its full potential, you need to use it as an educational, connective tool, rather than a commercial canvas.
Social selling, on the other hand, is the difference between thought leadership and promotion, content and commerce. By amplifying your financial institution’s message through your own employees, organic reach increases and your team’s representatives become trustworthy figures.
Maximize Your Social Selling Strategy
In order to set your social sellers up for success, it’s important to take a few key steps — not the least of which is offering a library of approved content. Due to regulations surrounding financial instutions, approaching social media with an “anything goes” attitude is not wise. In fact, it can result in devastating fines from Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Everything your army of social sellers posts must be grounded in compliance. This is where having a library full of approved, relevant content is super important.
It’s also critical to match personal posts with an effective cadence by establishing a social media workflow. This means plotting the ideal journey from idea to post and making clear to each member of your team his or her role in that journey. This should also protect you from compliance issues while making everyone feel engaged and involved.
If social selling still sounds daunting, it might be time to seek help of a social media management platform like Denim Social. Our solution can schedule, monitor, and organize your team’s social posts — and it can deliver data to help you make sense of how it’s all working together.
With inflation still looming, clients and prospects remain cautious about spending and investments. This is especially evident in how today’s investors choose which financial advisors to work with (and how your brand acquires new prospects). As clients’ financials become even more vulnerable during market volatility, they need to know that their financial advisors are ready to build plans to help them meet their financial goals.
Current and potential investors are looking for trustworthy advice—and building strong relationships is key to that. To truly cultivate financial advisor and client relationships that will lead to client acquisition and retention, bank financial advisors can be very effective through social selling.
The importance of social selling for financial advisors
Social selling is precisely what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing clients and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to more accounts opened.
It’s understandable that people might feel afraid and confused during market volatility, which is what makes social selling a critical trust-building opportunity. With social selling, financial advisors meet investors online in meaningful ways.
Marketers now recognize the modern power of social media, and in today’s market your financial advisors can use social to reassure clients. When 73 percent of clients who work with financial advisors feel more prepared for a recession, it’s essential that financial brands proactively discuss the value of advice. But to do that successfully, advisors need to be at the center of the conversation.
However, a social media brand presence does not equal a solid social selling strategy. You need your advisors to meet prospects throughout the buying journey, which requires investing in comprehensive social selling campaigns to connect with investors and build trust. When deciding who handles their investments, people don’t choose institutions; they choose people. So, help your advisors build those relationships online.
How to build trust with potential clients using social selling
This should go without saying, but prospective clients are already getting financial advice on social media. In fact, Gen Z is five times more likely to get financial advice on social media channels than people age 41 and over.
To stay visible and competitive, your brand’s financial advisors can use social selling to become financial micro-influencers in their local communities. At its core, social selling is about the human element of one person’s relationship with another. Not just client to bank.
Here are four ways to empower financial advisors to build impactful relationships with clients and new prospects:
1. Post consistently
If an advisor is new to using social selling, don’t worry. The first key to using social media to build trust and relationships is simple: consistency. Advisors should post often to stay top-of-mind with investors and build algorithmic preference. Consistency ensures that advisors are providing value to clients and prospects on a regular basis.
And remember, every post counts. Not every post will get the engagement marketers hope for (or even the same amount), but each post should feel intentional and authentic to the advisors publishing it. Also, when your advisors post, they need to make sure there is a goal and specific audience for each one.
2. Upload quality content to favor the algorithm
Consistent posts are crucial, but you also have to ensure that advisors are posting high-quality content. One hot tip is to include a video or image (social media posts with images tend to garner more engagement). Also schedule posts for the ideal time for target audiences. After all, it doesn’t matter how great a post looks if no one sees it.
Marketing teams can also help intermediaries craft copy that opens the door to conversations with their audiences, such as asking open-ended questions, soliciting responses, or featuring polls that can be answered on the spot. Social posts are at the top of any new client’s journey, so helping your social sellers craft posts with interactive elements will lead to more engagement and conversions.
3. Source content from trusted third parties
To facilitate advisors’ trust-building with clients and prospects, it is critical to ensure they only share information from credible third-party sources. There’s a lot of bad financial advice and misinformation out there. If the audience suspects that an advisor is full of baloney, the brand risks losing a lot of trust.
Social content libraries can help ensure social sellers have access to trustworthy, fact-checked third-party content. It’s essential that financial advisors add personal commentary to make third-party content more authentic and personable.
4. Encourage authenticity
It seems simple to say, but trust hinges on authentic relationships. Today’s investors want to work with real people who connect with them on a human level. That’s why it’s so important to instruct and encourage advisors to be themselves when social selling. Suggest that they put some of their personality into their social selling posts, talk about things that are important to them, or ask their networks questions. (If this keeps you up at night from a risk perspective, know that approval tools can help ensure compliance.)
When people interact with your advisors through social selling, they’ll see how much reliable value those advisors provide to their lives and will be more likely to trust your brand with their livelihoods. Authenticity is even more crucial when it comes to attracting prospects at the top of the funnel who haven’t gotten the chance to meet (and befriend) advisors yet.
While the current economic climate poses many potential challenges, remember that gaining and keeping investors’ trust is the key to acquiring and retaining clients (even in tough times). Lean on social selling to tell the bank brand’s story, build thought leadership online for intermediaries, and gain more followers who convert into new clients. Let them get to know your institution and your intermediaries, and they’ll want to work with you, too.
*This article was originally published in ABA Banking Journal.
People buy from people. It’s an old adage in business that still holds true today: Trust and relationships are the bedrock of insurance. A deeper agent-customer relationship means more products sold over a longer period. It’s crucial to understand that trust extends to the world of digital, especially social media.
In today’s environment, it’s not enough to release content from your carrier’s social accounts and hope that consumers will connect with it. Your strategy needs to include agents, the advisors building customer relationships in their communities. Enabling agents to leverage social media to engage and form bonds with existing and potential customers opens the door to agent-centered digital sales. As part of a bigger digital strategy, a social selling program for intermediaries helps establish their presence within the digital landscape, showcasing thought leadership, building relationships, and ultimately growing business.
Why Is Social Selling Important for Building Trust in Insurance?
As digitization continues to be a hot topic, one thing has remained steady: the agent’s role. Although many customers are accustomed to buying auto coverage online, for example, that isn’t the case as their needs mature. Just because a customer is digital-first doesn’t mean they don’t want human guidance, especially when protecting their futures.
Social selling is a powerful addition to an agent’s toolbox (and your marketing toolbox!). After all, most consumers spend roughly two and a half hours online daily. So, agents who engage their online networks through social media are more likely to expand their prospect and customer relationships.
However, it’s not enough to show up in digital spaces. “Being there” is a great first step but doesn’t ramp up trust-building in a systematic, measurable way. Instead, you need to establish digital marketing strategies that lean on social media and social selling as powerful sales tools (which they are!).
Here are some key steps:
1. Identify your agents’ social maturity.
There will always be varying levels of social media experience from the agent perspective. From naysayers to dabblers to experts, evaluating and segmenting your agent group is critical before constructing a social selling program.
The agents most comfortable and active on social media often become early adopters and champions of internal social selling programs and digital marketing strategies. With some education and profile optimization, this elite team is an incredible tool for securing more buy-in. Getting them started on social selling before their peers allows them to gain experience with the process, build interest, and better advocate for the strategy.
2. Educate agents on the value of social media as a sales tool.
Agents might assume that because they have social accounts for their business, they must be social selling. They’re not. Social selling is much more than “keeping up” a social media account. It’s consistently posting organic content, strategically weaving in paid advertising, and engaging with an audience. Just like in-person relationship building, the value comes in the conversations and connections. Agents should continually engage and turn those conversations into digital-first relationships to grow their business.
It’s worth the effort to teach your agents about the unique benefits social selling can bring to their roles. Patience and demonstrating value are key. One way to demonstrate that value is by sharing a striking social selling statistic: 80% of salespeople who hit at least 150% of their goals say they’ve leveraged technology consistently to connect with consumers. That statistic is hard for ambitious, high-performing agents to ignore. More agents will be willing to get on board with social selling when they believe it can directly affect their paycheck, promotions, and commissions. (And it can!)
3. Invest in a comprehensive social selling platform.
Social selling at scale can seem overwhelming for even the most seasoned leaders. Understanding that not all social media management tools are created equal is the best place to start. Finding a platform dedicated to social selling, especially one that’s industry-specific, is key.
A solid social selling tool should do several things. It should enable a small and mighty team of marketers to manage a robust content library, analyze the broader story of the value of agent social selling, and monitor and archive from a compliance and regulatory perspective. Most of all, it needs to be easy for agents to use.
After choosing a social selling platform that does all these things, it’s good to run some test drives with your expert social media users (the agents who were first identified as being active on social media). Beginning with a concentrated group of agents allows everyone involved to learn the social selling tool’s nuances before scaling. After the initial user group is up and running, it’s easy to fold more agents into the process.
4. Collect data and optimize over time.
Getting your agents to believe in social media as a powerful relationship-building tool is the foundation of any successful social selling program. Building a content library to help position them as thought leaders within their social networks is the next layer. Once agents have adopted the concept of social selling and are posting regularly, you can establish benchmarks for what social selling means for your organization.
It’s important to track social selling like any other marketing or sales program. You can set general KPIs to start, such as agent adoption, basic content usage, and engagement. More KPIs can be added to the mix later, such as return on ad spend and leads generated.
Finally, it’s essential to make sure agents know social selling is a slow-and-steady process. The power of social selling grows over time — the way trust and good relationships do. When done correctly and patiently, it can move the sales needle in trackable ways.
Whether in person or online, consumers will always value the guidance of a trusted advisor. Building that trust and providing value through an effective social selling strategy with the above steps is crucial to establishing your agents’ positions within the digital landscape. Some things change in business, but others never do: “People buy from people” will always be true.
*This article was originally published in Digital Insurance.
Connect & Convert on Social
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
Read this guide if you’re asking yourself:
- Is my social media policy current and comprehensive?
- How do I ensure social media compliance during M&A?
- What do I need to consider for direct messaging compliance?
In this guide we will help you think about your all important social media policy and thoughtfully consider how changes in social media tech and even your bank’s structure may impact compliance.
Which roles do you fill when building your bank's marketing dream team? This guide will show you the following:
- Who does what
- The right structure to execute strategy
- How compliance software can help
Enjoy!
It’s no surprise that social media can help drive results for your mortgage business. In fact, the question for most marketers at mortgage lending institutions isn’t IF they should be doing more social media marketing - it’s HOW. Download to learn how to:
- Scale your social selling program
- Plan your content strategy
- Train your loan officers
Like many community banks, Dart Bank wanted to keep customer relationships a top priority. This meant being more available to customers and meeting them where they are. In modern terms, that means on social media.
When Dart Bank learned about how Denim Social supports social selling for loan officers, they knew it was the perfect fit to keep their team engaged at every step of the journey. They wanted to empower their loan officers to create and grow authentic relationships online, never missing an opportunity to connect.
Shelter Insurance® sought to launch a social selling program that would not only create posting efficiency, but also make it easy for agents to establish subject matter expertise via high quality social media content. They also saw an opportunity to empower digitally savvy agents to cultivate leads online to drive business results in a compliant social selling program.
Before launching the program, it was essential that agents understood the pillars of social selling. Together with the Denim Social team, Shelter Insurance® developed a best-in-class program communication, onboarding and training process for agents.
Social selling is just what it sounds like: using social media to sell a product or service. It’s leveraging social to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers, and ultimately build trust and rapport that will eventually lead to sales.
It enables intermediaries – like insurance agents – to add value to the customer journey where there wouldn’t otherwise be an opportunity.
This guide will help financial services marketers understand why social media should be a core component of their marketing strategy and showcase how the collective reach of their intermediaries’ social media presence can be harnessed to more deeply connect with prospective clients, position producers as thought leaders in their communities, and, ultimately, build trust with clients that translates to positive business results.
It’s called social selling and it works.
The spring 2023 buying season has arrived and with it – you guessed – uncertainty. Spring has long been make-it or break-it season for lenders and loan officers, and despite present conditions, the same holds true this year. But 2023 holds unique challenges and opportunities.
As the season opens, there are a few key considerations the Denim Social team sees as critical for mortgage marketers.
Paid social is one of the most effective ways to introduce people who aren’t yet following your producers, agents, loan officers, or advisors to your financial institution at the right place and the right time.
Paid social is complementary to organic. While organic social builds first-degree connections and facilitates awareness, engagement, and branding, paid social allows you to reach larger, more tailored audiences.
BOK Financial is a financial services partner for consumers, businesses and wealth clients with more than 150 users on the Denim Social platform.
In addition to building brand credibility and establishing loan officer expertise, Denim Social enables their mortgage loan officers to cultivate relationships in social media and organically source leads.
As financial marketers look to the coming year, most are wondering, “what’s next?” While no one can say for sure, our team of experts here at Denim Social are keeping a pulse on what’s new in digital marketing for financial institutions on social media. This guide will not only educate you on the latest trends, but help you make the case for increased investment in social selling and digital marketing strategies at your institution.
Evolve Bank & Trust (“Evolve”) is an $700M+ asset institution with nearly 40 Home Loan Centers (HLC) and nearly 500 employees nationwide. See how Denim Social helped Evolve activate Home Loan Center Facebook pages over the course of just a few months.
Whether you’re in banking, wealth management, insurance or mortgage, relationships are the bedrock of your business.
Considering clients in these industries are handing over the keys to their personal kingdoms, it’s no surprise that trust and connection matter. That’s why successful sales strategies for these industries are focused on building long-term, trusted relationships.
To truly unleash the potential of social, financial institutions need to use social media as a sales tool. It’s called social selling and it works.
The power of social media is undeniable. The ability of banks to engage with and influence customers and prospects via interactive digital channels is an essential tool and a cornerstone of marketing. Gone are the days when it was “nice to have” a presence on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Today, these pathways are helping banks to build relationships that were historically cultivated by tirelessly walking up and down Main Street, shaking hands and leaving behind business cards.
In this case study by Denim Social and American Bankers Association, we take a look at how banks are using social media to ramp up digital engagement and build sales.
As any marketer worth their salt will tell you, analytics should drive your social strategy. The key to success is understanding how to link social media efforts to ROI metrics. Read this guide to learn how to gain insights that matter, optimize your strategy and prove your social success.
AnnieMac is one of the fastest-growing mortgage loan providers in the U.S., serving clients in 42 states. Learn how Denim Social helped their team to streamline its brand’s social media strategy and activate social selling for hundreds of loan officers in just four months.
As mortgage demand surges to historic highs, home purchase and refinance markets remain hot. This is excellent news for loan officers, but it also means the environment is more competitive than ever.
So how can marketers ensure that their loan officers stand out? The answer is social media.
Read this guidebook from Denim Social to learn how you can help your loan officers build strong relationships, stand out from the crowd and win more business using social media.
Every Mortgage Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Every Financial Services Marketer Should Ask Themselves
Compliance is complicated, but don’t let it stop your lending team from making the most of social media. Think you’re ready to start social selling? Ask yourself these five questions!
Stronger Customer Relationships on Instagram
Financial Services companies should be marketing and advertising on Instagram. We break down why, and help you create a strategy to reach new customers- while continuing to build trust in your brand.
How 6 Financial Marketers Are Creating Value in Social Media
Ever wonder what everyone else is doing in social media? We talked to six leading financial marketers about how they’re succeeding today and planning for the next big thing.
Get their insights on strengthening your social strategies, unlocking the power of employee networks and creating next-level content that drives engagement.
Download this guidebook to learn how 3 mortgage lenders are using social media to:
- Position themselves in a place the community is already looking ... their social media
- Empower loan officers to engage in local conversations
- Turn their institution's loan officers into the voice of their brand
- Build trust within the community
ABA Study: The Current State of Social Media
See what nearly 430 bank marketers had to say when asked questions such as:
COVID-19 & Bank Social Media
Times are different and how you connect with customers and potential customers has changed drastically. In a socially distant world, learn to still build lasting relationships.
Download and learn the guiding principles for using social media to serve both your customers and communities in the midst of a pandemic.
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
Retail banks in the U.S. are facing a major customer attrition challenges. According to a recent Bain report, customers make as many as 55 percent of financial-related purchases from their primary bank’s competitors. While primary banks may be able to retain customers’ savings and checking accounts, the report suggests that they’re likely losing out on lucrative sales when it comes to loans, credit cards and investments.
Considering that almost one-third of those who defected from their primary bank did so in response to a direct offer from a competitor, wise marketers will up their customer engagement and outreach efforts to retain more customers. Affordability of products is the top reason for customer defection, which marketers may not have much say in, but it isn’t the only contributing factor. Digitization has also been a major catalyst. Namely, the strong digital products and experiences that some banks offer—and others do not.
Bank marketers who can jump onboard the digitization train to meet customers where they are with engaging, valuable messaging will be much more likely to keep customers coming back again and again for each of their financial needs. The following strategies can help:
1. Put the human element front and center
Traditional banks have an innate advantage over digital direct banks: The human touch. Leveraging this benefit, especially when it comes to increasingly digital customer interactions, can lead to measurable improvements in customer retention.
One way to ensure the human touch remains part of every customer touchpoint is to focus on personalization. A February Insurance Thought Leadership piece revealed that 72 percent of people ignore marketing that’s not highly personalized. So targeting relevant content to the right recipients is essential, especially when digitization can easily strip the human element out of an interaction. Personalizing messaging and services to be relevant and valuable to the specific needs of each customer can bring the human element into focus even in a digital world.
One way to create more relevant, personalized outreach is to practice social selling, or leveraging a bank’s employees on social media. People can relate more to other people than they can to big brand names. When your employees are the ones getting in front of customers virtually, it humanizes the digital customer experience and sets the stage for trusting and loyal relationships to come. What’s more, employees also tend to have further reach and engagement on brand-related social posts than brand pages alone, so they can expand the impact of your messaging exponentially.
2. Create digital pathways to human interactions
When considering how to anchor all digital marketing for financial services around the human element, keep in mind that every pathway should connect prospects and customers directly to a human.
For example, a social media post from an employee could include a link to a landing page on your website where visitors can learn more valuable information on the topic of the post. On that landing page, you can include valuable content, such as a guidebook, behind an information request form. When users submit their names and email addresses, they will receive the content and your sales team members can reach out to them directly with a human-centric, personalized outreach approach.
When prospects and customers know they’re just an email or phone call away from a real person at your organization, they’re likely to turn to you instead of an impersonal digital direct bank for their next financial need.
3. Focus on customer retention just as much as acquisition
Bringing in new prospects gets a lot of attention from financial services marketers, sometimes at the expense of retaining current ones. But focusing on customer retention and continuously improving the digital customer experience will help secure more revenue when it comes to additional services such as loans and credit cards.
Listen to the needs of customers and keep refining your personalization tactics to meet their needs. Every time you get in front of a current customer with relevant, valuable messaging or content, you help build trust in that relationship and increase the chances of that customer coming to you for whatever service they need next.
It’s true that people will always be drawn to brands that offer more affordable products and services. But money isn’t the only reason people look outside of their primary bank to fulfill their financial needs. Banks that differentiate by focusing on digitization alongside the human element will find that it’s easier to keep current customers from looking for greener pastures.
This was originally published on ABA Bank Marketing.
Connecting with customers and prospects on social media is a natural extension of the financial services industry becoming more digital. Consumers expect the businesses they patronize to be on the same social platforms they use — and they expect those brands to be ready to interact with them. Case in point: A survey of over 500 social media users found that nearly three-quarters follow organizations on social platforms, and the vast majority of them interact with those brands on social.
Social media is the perfect tool for financial institutions to build brand awareness, meet the demand for greater digital engagement, recruit prospective customers, and drive referrals.
While social media is a great way to connect with customers and prospects, it’s not without its risk. It’s essential to use social media tools that will keep your team in compliance.
1. START WITH A SOCIAL SELLING STRATEGY.
There are few limits to how you can connect with customers and prospects on social media, but it needs to be about more than posts from a brand page. Direct messaging is always an option for private communication, but to reach more people at scale, social sellers (i.e., agents, loan officers, financial advisors, intermediaries, etc.) should also be posting original content, resharing educational articles, responding to comments and questions, and liking others’ posts. With so many options, it’s important for marketers to craft a social selling strategy that guides social sellers in their social interactions on behalf of the institution.
A well-thought-out strategy can ensure effective social selling. For instance, rather than posting on channels at random and hoping for the best, social sellers can determine which social media platforms suit them best based on audience engagement and follower counts; then they can focus their efforts there. Consider also equipping intermediaries with a library of branded content they can mix in with their personal posts. This strategy will inform your all-important social media policy moving forward.
2. TURN YOUR STRATEGY INTO A DETAILED POLICY.
In a heavily regulated industry, it’s essential for firms to have a comprehensive social media policy. This is a package of brand messaging in a detailed policy to help ensure consistency when social sellers post on your behalf.
Take the plan you mapped out in your strategy and turn it into a documented policy that intermediaries can access easily. Social media and the way people use it continues to evolve, which is why your social media policy should always be a work in progress. Make updates periodically to account for shifts in your approval workflow, changes in messaging, and general social media best practices. As social sellers become savvier, your policy will grow more detailed.
3. MAKE TRAINING AN ONGOING EFFORT.
Intermediaries who are new to social media will require initial training — but it shouldn’t be a one-and-done initiative. Hold regular social selling workshops to keep all social sellers up to date on your social media policy and messaging.
You can also use workshop time to walk your team through any tools you invest in to fuel social media efforts. Denim Social, for example, offers live product demos you can share to show them how to use the technology and get the most benefit.
Demonstrate how the software streamlines the approval process for posts and automatically archives them for future reference. The more they know, the more comfortable they’ll be using such tools to facilitate social selling efforts. The great news is, our customer success team is here to help get your team trained and ready.
Social media opens up a world of opportunity for financial institutions to reach and engage customers and prospects, but that doesn’t mean you should set your team free to do as they please. The right strategy and social media management software can make it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and create a successful social selling strategy. Want to see how Denim Social can help your team up their social media game? Schedule a demo today!
Instagram stands out as the shining star of social media platforms. While Facebook still reigns supreme and TikTok grows, Instagram is quickly catching up fast with more than 2 billion users worldwide.
With users under age 34 making up nearly 60 percent of this user population, financial services marketers looking to reach younger generations should take note. And with an estimated sum of $68 trillion in wealth expected to transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials in the next couple of decades, Millennials are a worthwhile target.
Studies predict that, after inheriting wealth, 80% or more young heirs will seek out a new financial advisor. Considering that 9 in 10 accounts follow at least one business on Instagram and 8 in 10 users find new products and services in the app, it’s a safe bet that Instagram will be a place to influence many Millennials. Wise financial services marketers will meet them where they are with strong Instagram marketing strategies, and the following tips can help:
1. Focus on paid ads
Instagram is a visual platform for sharing photos and videos, so it’s important for brand pages to populate their profiles with organic posts. While this presence is important, organic content isn’t what will move the needle on business goals. Financial services aren’t exactly visually interesting, and organic posts tend to have low reach as they only show up in the feeds of a brand’s current followers. Without the ability to include hyperlinks in captions, they also won’t drive any traffic back to your site. If you want to build the type of following needed to generate new business, including paid advertising in your Instagram marketing strategy is your ticket.
With Instagram advertising, institutions and advisors can target ads to land with exactly the right audience — even outside their follower base — and include links in posts to drive more traffic to the brand. With a specific call to action that directs consumers to learn more about a topic, Instagram ads offer a straight-line path to giving customers the valuable information they desire — in their own time and at their own place. What’s more, Instagram advertising is seamlessly integrated directly into Instagram feeds and stories, creating a smoother user experience all around.
2. Connect with consumers on a local level
Instagram marketing on the corporate brand level is a great starting point, but advertising on behalf of your individual advisors can take your strategy to the next level. Think of it this way: If a consumer sees a well-known brand on social media, they might recognize the name, but they won’t feel an intrinsic connection beyond initial familiarity. In contrast, they’ll feel familiarity and an immediate connection when they see a post from an advisor in their own community. Consumers want to build relationships with brands, and a shared community is a great starting point.
Of course, most advisors and other financial services employees are not experts on how to market the business on Instagram. And marketers know they must keep all social media marketing for their financial institutions compliant to avoid heavy regulatory reprimands. To keep posts compliant, save employees time, and help them build relationships with consumers in their physical communities, financial services marketers can set up and run ads on their behalf.
3. Micro-target content to your audience
As big-name brands like Amazon continue to elevate the digital customer experience with seamless customer service, purchasing, and delivery, customer expectations are higher than ever before. When customers evaluate a financial institution, they compare it not only to other organizations in the industry, but also to tech giants in any industry that give them exactly what they need when they need it.
They expect a high level of personalization and convenience, and Instagram marketing with paid advertising can help you give it to them. Match basic behavioral and geographic data to potential customers on Instagram to target ads, and then track clicks, engagements, and post-click actions. These data points don’t indicate much on their own, but together they offer a rich story about what consumers want. Continually refine your strategy with these data points in mind to deliver the kind of highly personalized experiences your audiences want on Instagram.
With a large Millennial user base that engages actively with brands online and the ability to target highly personalized ads to exactly the right audiences, Instagram is a must-have in any financial services marketing strategy. To learn more about how Instagram marketing can work to drive your business forward, download our guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram for free today.
So you've invested the time, energy, and money into building a website that details all of your financial products and services, and you have a solid social media strategy in place — but do you have any means of connecting the two? A full digital marketing strategy requires a connection point to lead prospects along the digital journey and toward conversion. Landing pages can serve as the bridges you need.
These pages live on your website and hold information geared toward specific audience segments. For example, if an insurance agent is interested in helping first-time homebuyers with homeowners insurance, a social media post on the subject could include a link to a landing page on your website with even more resources for new buyers.
Landing pages are important because no matter how well-built your website homepage is, it simply can’t serve the needs of every consumer — not conveniently, at least. Without landing pages, site visitors arrive on the homepage and are left to dig through the site for specific information on their own. Landing pages, on the other hand, allow visitors to arrive at your site in the exact place they want to be. It’s the best way for financial institution marketers to quickly and easily offer content that meets the specific needs of various target audiences.
Customers want this level of personalization, and they're open to the idea of trading their information for it. In fact, more than three-quarters of consumers in one study said they would be willing to give more personal data in return for more tailored services. When customers submit their contact information through a form to download the content on your landing page, not only are they getting tailored content, but you're getting data that can fuel more personalized outreach directly to primed prospects. And that leads to higher conversion rates.
Start creating landing pages by planning a page for each promotion in your overall marketing campaign or for each of your target audiences. Then, we recommend the following steps to drive conversion:
1. Keep it simple and direct.
Ultimately, the goal of a landing page for financial institutions is to learn more about prospects by gathering their information in the form field. For visitors, the clearer the path to the field, the likelier they will be to share their data. Don’t fill a page with too many images, multiple offers, and other clutter — you’ll just increase the chances of visitors bouncing off the page before taking action. Instead, stick with concise, clear messaging, easy-to-follow directives, strong calls to action, and impactful design elements.
2. Leverage pre-built, fully customizable templates.
Few marketing professionals have the bandwidth or experience to build a whole webpage on their own. Fortunately, software like Denim Social with landing page functionality will offer pre-built, customizable templates that allow you to start with a page already optimized for conversion.
From there, you can easily customize the content, form fields, colors, images, and video on each page to fit your campaign goals. The key here is to keep a consistent style across pages so each one fits under your overall brand umbrella.
3. Scale, scale, scale!
The real beauty of using pre-built, customizable templates is the ability to design, build, and launch landing pages at scale. Denim Social’s code-free interface makes it easy for anyone to populate many templates with customized elements — no web design expertise required. Just personalize, publish, then easily iterate and adjust based on conversion data.
In practice, this looks like building hundreds or even thousands of highly professional landing pages in just minutes. That’s a lot more opportunity for targeted messaging than one broad website homepage on its own.
Landing pages are one of the most effective tools at your disposal to create tailored experiences, capture valuable information, and generate high-quality leads. With the right platform, any marketer can build landing pages at scale and propel more prospects toward conversion.
The effects of economic disruption and uncertainty have many families facing tough financial questions they are not sure how to answer.
Unfortunately, financial literacy rates remain startlingly low. A recent study showed three quarters of Americans say they do not feel confident about their personal finances. When a another survey asked over 1,000 American adults who they turn to for trusted financial advice, almost 25 percent said they had no one to turn to. Providing financial education has always been a core purpose of banks, but the financial turmoil of recent years has made financial literacy even more important.
Financial professionals have an obligation to educate their customers, and today, social media is one of the most effective ways to do so. Luckily, social media-driven education already aligns with consumer preferences: Pew Research Center reports that more than half of U.S. adults get their news from social media, and 79% Millennials or Gen Zers have gotten financial advice from social media.
Many financial institutions are already capitalizing on this by using social media to connect with their customers and communities, but there’s still ample opportunity to provide financial education to current and prospective customers. Here are three tips:
1. CURATE RELEVANT AND TRUSTWORTHY NEWS
Social media is flooded with misinformation and misleading data, and your audience members know this. To become a trusted source, be highly selective in choosing accurate, useful and relevant news to post on your branded social media pages. You can take several steps to ensure that the information you share comes from trusted sources before distributing it to your followers.
Established news organizations, such as CNBC and ABC News, seem easy enough to identify, but be wary of illegitimate sites trying to mimic them. The source’s domain and URL will help you identify whether the reference is credible. For instance, sites with URLs that end in “.com.co” might be cause for concern. If you’re still unsure, investigate the site further for more information. The “About” page should provide plenty of verifiable information about the organization’s staff and leadership team. If you’re still unsure, choose another source.
It’s also important to be aware of news bias and how it impacts your ability to build a healthy news diet that protects your brand reputation. Seek out resources (like this one) that help visualize where certain media outlets fall on the political spectrum. Armed with this information, you can help your institution’s brand avoid bias. You can also be sure you’re not resharing information that’s deceiving, one-sided, or untrustworthy.
2. EMPHASIZE YOUR TEAM’S THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Credible news updates draw in social media users searching for financial news, but rather than simply sharing links, weave in original insights to make the information more digestible and jargon-free. Remember: Your employees are financial experts, so empower them to share their knowledge through a strong social selling strategy.
In doing so, you’ll not only educate your followers, but also humanize your brand and build trust with your audience. After all, people trust people more than brands, and research bears this out: Nearly three-fourths of social media users say they are more heavily persuaded by posts shared from employees rather than brand pages. Engage team members to share their knowledge in original content like blog posts, social media posts and short videos.
3. BE ENGAGED
Social media is a two-way communication channel. A survey by The Manifest revealed that 74 percent of consumers follow brands on social media, and of that group, 96 percent said they directly interact with those brands. To make the most of your social media presence, your team needs to be engaged and respond to questions, comments and concerns in a timely manner. Stay connected with your followers and you’ll build stronger, more meaningful relationships within your community in the long term.
Financial literacy is an acute need. By using social media to educate current and prospective customers, banks can improve financial literacy, be a good steward for their customers and serve as a trusted source of information.
Financial services customers were leaning heavily into digital experiences long before COVID-19. In fact, 80% of all customer touchpoints already occurred through digital channels in 2017. The past year has placed an even bolder emphasis on the growing importance of digital transformation for financial services. The pandemic accelerated customers’ already quick-moving adoption of digital tools as they sought new ways to connect outside of face-to-face interactions.
The year 2020 turned the need for digitization from a push to a shove, and the shift has fundamentally changed the very nature of financial services marketing. Consumer preferences won’t revert to pre-COVID ways even as vaccinations continue to roll out and the end of this crisis is in sight. In fact, up to 20% of bank customers expect their use of digital channels to increase after the pandemic.
Financial services was once a business driven largely by face-to-face relationship-building, but it has been tasked with shifting rapidly to digitize and align with consumer preferences. To make these changes sustainable for the long haul, you must build strong connections in today’s virtual world. Start by covering these digital channels where your customers are looking to connect:
1. Mobile banking apps
Mobile banking has become table stakes for financial services marketing, so if you don’t already have an easily accessible, user-friendly mobile application, the time to get one is now. A study from Insider Intelligence revealed that 89% of survey respondents are using mobile banking apps. And it’s not just younger consumers: Though 97% of Millennials did say they used mobile banking, so did 91% of Gen Xers and 79% of Baby Boomers. Financial institutions today simply can’t compete without offering customers convenient ways to do their banking from anywhere.
So we know that mobile apps are already a requirement. What financial institutions might not have considered, however, is how to elevate the experience of mobile banking apps with a human touch. Even as financial services go digital, it’s still an industry based primarily in relationships, and you need to foster real connections no matter how your customers are doing business with you. To maintain a high level of personal connection as digitization continues to accelerate, look to social media, direct messaging, and your employees.
2. Social media
In the digital age, think of social media as your brand’s welcome mat. For prospects looking to learn more about what you do and current customers with questions or concerns, social media is often the first place they’ll go. You need to have an active and engaging social media presence to meet them where they are.
A company profile on its own, however, is no longer enough. Social media platforms have updated their algorithms to decrease visibility on branded content. Financial institutions today have a tough time breaking through with their owned channels alone. Instead, they should lean into their employees as the key to unlocking reach and engagement. According to one LinkedIn study, an employee social post can garner twice the engagement of the same post from a brand account.
The bottom line is that consumers don’t want to hear from brands on social media. They don’t want to see advertisements, and they don’t trust big company names and promotional content. What they will trust, however, is an individual employee who shares an article that provides a lot of value.
3. Direct messaging
You can take that trust-building strategy up another level by leaning into the power of one-on-one communication. Direct message marketing is all about listening to customers and communicating with them on their own terms.
Direct messaging was already on the rise before the pandemic. This has only accelerated over the past year as consumers have been relying even more on messaging platforms to interact as COVID-19 has hindered their ability to connect with others in person. If your customers and prospects are already hearing from friends and family through direct messaging platforms, it’s only convenient for them to hear from your employees that way, too.
It is important to consider, however, that a direct message marketing strategy requires more compliance oversight than other digital channels. It falls under the umbrella of electronic communications, which FINRA regulates closely. But ensuring compliance doesn’t have to be a hassle: Digital tools exist to help streamline approval processes and make oversight easier. With the right tools and proper steps to keep direct message marketing within regulatory bounds, the effort will be well worth the reward.
Finding the digital channels where your customers already are and figuring out how to meet them there is the foundation of any successful digital marketing strategy for financial services. These channels are also quick to activate and flexible, so marketers can be agile and shift their approach just as fast as consumers change their preferences.
Connect & Convert on Social
3 Tools Financial Marketers Can Use to Strengthen Digital Experience
The concept of “infrastructure” goes beyond its hotly debated political meanings. It applies to organizations as much as municipal structures and facilities. In fact, it’s a quite relevant subject for financial marketers to consider.
That’s because the basic organizational structures needed to keep a financial institution competitive are rapidly transitioning from physical to digital. It’s a change accelerated by the pandemic, as has been well documented.
What this means for financial marketers is that digital infrastructure demands more attention — and investment, and Marketing plays an essential role in this. If your customers are in the virtual world, you need the right tools and strategies to reach them there.
Building Digital Marketing Infrastructure
If your institution’s marketing efforts are pieced together with standalone technologies, you’re likely to need an upgrade. Marketers need to build strategies and digital business infrastructures that can speak to one another. Otherwise, digital marketing for financial institutions can become overly cumbersome and negatively impact both brand reach and interactions with the target audience.
Look for technology solutions that integrate across social media management software, marketing automation tools, CRM, and even reviews and reputation management platforms. This will lead to systems that can help map and meet the needs of prospects across all stages of the customer acquisition journey — rather than simply buying tools for various purposes or touchpoints.
Different World:
Digital technology has made it much simpler to switch financial institutions than in the past. The barriers are almost nonexistent.
Digital marketing in financial services is an essential element of digital business infrastructure. If your organization doesn’t reach consumers virtually and provide a strong digital customer experience, consumers are likely to turn to a provider that will. To ensure your organization has the digital infrastructure capable of building customer relationships and growing revenue, focus on the three investments in particular.
Social Selling Strategy
Most bank marketers recognize that an active social media presence is no longer optional, but posting from brand pages alone won’t entice many consumers to engage. With 69% of consumers today actively avoiding advertisements, according to Edelman, brands must rethink social media messaging with the human element in mind.
A social selling strategy, when branded messaging comes from an organization’s individual employees, is the most effective form of social media marketing because people relate to other people more than to big brand names.
Individual employees posting brand-related content on their own pages, however, can increase the risk of compliance missteps without the proper tools. Social media management software that allows marketers to have a holistic view of employee activity on social media can safeguard your brand reputation.
Such tools can house digital libraries of preapproved content so employees can share ready-to-go posts with ease. Software can also automate the approvals process on new employee posts to ensure that no content ever goes live without proper review.
Landing Page Builder
Think of landing pages as your website’s personalized welcome mats. Rather than landing on the homepage and having to stumble around looking for the information they need (and people have little patience for this), prospects and customers can land right where the information is. For example, if a social media post or digital ad offers tips for first-time mortgage seekers, the message can include a link to a landing page on your website that houses more information about mortgages.
You can gate guidebooks and other downloadable resources behind an information capture form on the landing page, prompting consumers to insert their name and email to receive the download. Considering that more than three-quarters of consumers are willing to provide their personal information in return for more personalized services, according to Accenture, landing pages are an excellent tool to provide relevant, valuable content to consumers while capturing data that can help you target outreach efforts to those who are most likely to convert.
Few institutions have the resources available to create landing pages for each promotion, however. And most financial services marketers don’t have the coding or website design expertise to build whole web pages from scratch. That’s where “landing page builders” come in. Such platforms provide prebuilt, customizable templates that allow marketers to quickly and easily build landing pages at scale to capture valuable data while providing customers with more value.
Onboarding Engagement Platform
So you’ve created a suite of digital customer experiences and infrastructures to serve customers and capture prospects in a virtual world. Your tools offer remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, rewards programs, financial education, and more. But what if people don’t use them?
Sometimes, simply putting the options in front of them isn’t enough. Digital banking, though on the rise for some time, can still be a new concept for many. Even if someone is a regular user of mobile check capture, they may not grasp the concept of a digital wallet.
You need to engage customers in an educational way to help them see the value in these tools and understand how to make the most of digital experiences. Onboarding engagement platforms can help your customers adapt to new products and allow you to get more from your digital investments.
When someone opens a new account at your institution, for example, an onboarding engagement platform can walk them through the mobile app the first time they sign on, showing them where and how to deposit checks, transfer funds, redeem rewards, contact customer service, and more. Doing this strengthens the digital customer experience and builds trust along the way.
This article was originally posted on The Financial Brand.
Retail banks in the U.S. are facing a major customer attrition challenges. According to a recent Bain report, customers make as many as 55 percent of financial-related purchases from their primary bank’s competitors. While primary banks may be able to retain customers’ savings and checking accounts, the report suggests that they’re likely losing out on lucrative sales when it comes to loans, credit cards and investments.
Considering that almost one-third of those who defected from their primary bank did so in response to a direct offer from a competitor, wise marketers will up their customer engagement and outreach efforts to retain more customers. Affordability of products is the top reason for customer defection, which marketers may not have much say in, but it isn’t the only contributing factor. Digitization has also been a major catalyst. Namely, the strong digital products and experiences that some banks offer—and others do not.
Bank marketers who can jump onboard the digitization train to meet customers where they are with engaging, valuable messaging will be much more likely to keep customers coming back again and again for each of their financial needs. The following strategies can help:
1. Put the human element front and center
Traditional banks have an innate advantage over digital direct banks: The human touch. Leveraging this benefit, especially when it comes to increasingly digital customer interactions, can lead to measurable improvements in customer retention.
One way to ensure the human touch remains part of every customer touchpoint is to focus on personalization. A February Insurance Thought Leadership piece revealed that 72 percent of people ignore marketing that’s not highly personalized. So targeting relevant content to the right recipients is essential, especially when digitization can easily strip the human element out of an interaction. Personalizing messaging and services to be relevant and valuable to the specific needs of each customer can bring the human element into focus even in a digital world.
One way to create more relevant, personalized outreach is to practice social selling, or leveraging a bank’s employees on social media. People can relate more to other people than they can to big brand names. When your employees are the ones getting in front of customers virtually, it humanizes the digital customer experience and sets the stage for trusting and loyal relationships to come. What’s more, employees also tend to have further reach and engagement on brand-related social posts than brand pages alone, so they can expand the impact of your messaging exponentially.
2. Create digital pathways to human interactions
When considering how to anchor all digital marketing for financial services around the human element, keep in mind that every pathway should connect prospects and customers directly to a human.
For example, a social media post from an employee could include a link to a landing page on your website where visitors can learn more valuable information on the topic of the post. On that landing page, you can include valuable content, such as a guidebook, behind an information request form. When users submit their names and email addresses, they will receive the content and your sales team members can reach out to them directly with a human-centric, personalized outreach approach.
When prospects and customers know they’re just an email or phone call away from a real person at your organization, they’re likely to turn to you instead of an impersonal digital direct bank for their next financial need.
3. Focus on customer retention just as much as acquisition
Bringing in new prospects gets a lot of attention from financial services marketers, sometimes at the expense of retaining current ones. But focusing on customer retention and continuously improving the digital customer experience will help secure more revenue when it comes to additional services such as loans and credit cards.
Listen to the needs of customers and keep refining your personalization tactics to meet their needs. Every time you get in front of a current customer with relevant, valuable messaging or content, you help build trust in that relationship and increase the chances of that customer coming to you for whatever service they need next.
It’s true that people will always be drawn to brands that offer more affordable products and services. But money isn’t the only reason people look outside of their primary bank to fulfill their financial needs. Banks that differentiate by focusing on digitization alongside the human element will find that it’s easier to keep current customers from looking for greener pastures.
This was originally published on ABA Bank Marketing.
In today's digital age, social media platforms have become essential tools for professionals in various industries to connect with clients, share valuable insights, and build their brand. Instagram, with its visual appeal and highly-engaged user base, is no exception. For financial professionals, leveraging Instagram can be a powerful way to showcase expertise, establish credibility, and build stronger relationships. In this blog post, we will discuss the best practices for building your Instagram business profile as a financial professional that will give your social selling a boost.
Choose a Professional Username and Profile Picture
Start by selecting a username that reflects your name or your financial business's name. Keep it simple and easy to remember. Use a high-quality profile picture, such as a professional headshot or your company logo. This picture will be the first impression potential followers have of you.
Optimize Your Bio
Craft a concise and informative bio that clearly defines your role and expertise. Use relevant keywords, such as "Financial Advisor," "Mortgage Loan Officer,” or "Insurance Agent." Include a brief but captivating description of the value you provide to your customers. Highlight any unique selling points or specializations.
Content Strategy
Determine your content niche. Share content that aligns with your expertise, such as investment tips, financial planning advice, or market insights. Develop a content calendar to ensure consistency. Aim for a mix of educational, inspirational, and personal posts. Use high-quality images and graphics to enhance your posts. Visual appeal is essential on Instagram!
Engage Your Audience
Respond promptly to comments and direct messages. Engaging with your followers builds a sense of trust and connection. You want your followers to engage with your posts, so do the same for them! Like, comment, and share to help increase visibility.
Use Hashtags Wisely
Research and use relevant hashtags to increase the discoverability of your posts. Utilize both industry-specific and popular hashtags. Best practice is to use 5-10 hashtags per post as they relate to the content.
Collaborate and Network
Collaborate with influencers or other professionals in your industry. Guest posts or shoutouts can expand your reach. Attend industry events and share your experiences on Instagram. It’s all about taking those in-person relationships online, too.
Educate and Inform
Share informative and educational content that empowers your audience. Explainer videos, infographics, and step-by-step guides can be especially valuable. Stay up-to-date with the latest financial news and trends, and share your unique insights with your followers. Always provide value!
Analytics and Optimization
Regularly analyze your Instagram Insights to understand which content performs best and when your audience is most active. Use this data to refine your content strategy and posting schedule for optimal engagement.
Promote Your Services
While Instagram is a platform for sharing valuable content, don't forget to promote your services subtly. Share client success stories or case studies to showcase your expertise in action.
Stay Compliant
Ensure that your posts comply with industry regulations and guidelines. Be transparent about any potential conflicts of interest. Luckily, platforms like Denim Social that are built for the financial services industry can help with that!
In conclusion, Instagram can be a valuable tool for financial professionals to connect with clients and prospects. By following these best practices, you can build a strong and trustworthy online presence that sets you apart in the competitive world of finance. Remember that consistency and authenticity are key to establishing a successful Instagram business profile for financial professionals. See our Denim Social guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram here!
Connecting with customers and prospects on social media is a natural extension of the financial services industry becoming more digital. Consumers expect the businesses they patronize to be on the same social platforms they use — and they expect those brands to be ready to interact with them. Case in point: A survey of over 500 social media users found that nearly three-quarters follow organizations on social platforms, and the vast majority of them interact with those brands on social.
Social media is the perfect tool for financial institutions to build brand awareness, meet the demand for greater digital engagement, recruit prospective customers, and drive referrals.
While social media is a great way to connect with customers and prospects, it’s not without its risk. It’s essential to use social media tools that will keep your team in compliance.
1. START WITH A SOCIAL SELLING STRATEGY.
There are few limits to how you can connect with customers and prospects on social media, but it needs to be about more than posts from a brand page. Direct messaging is always an option for private communication, but to reach more people at scale, social sellers (i.e., agents, loan officers, financial advisors, intermediaries, etc.) should also be posting original content, resharing educational articles, responding to comments and questions, and liking others’ posts. With so many options, it’s important for marketers to craft a social selling strategy that guides social sellers in their social interactions on behalf of the institution.
A well-thought-out strategy can ensure effective social selling. For instance, rather than posting on channels at random and hoping for the best, social sellers can determine which social media platforms suit them best based on audience engagement and follower counts; then they can focus their efforts there. Consider also equipping intermediaries with a library of branded content they can mix in with their personal posts. This strategy will inform your all-important social media policy moving forward.
2. TURN YOUR STRATEGY INTO A DETAILED POLICY.
In a heavily regulated industry, it’s essential for firms to have a comprehensive social media policy. This is a package of brand messaging in a detailed policy to help ensure consistency when social sellers post on your behalf.
Take the plan you mapped out in your strategy and turn it into a documented policy that intermediaries can access easily. Social media and the way people use it continues to evolve, which is why your social media policy should always be a work in progress. Make updates periodically to account for shifts in your approval workflow, changes in messaging, and general social media best practices. As social sellers become savvier, your policy will grow more detailed.
3. MAKE TRAINING AN ONGOING EFFORT.
Intermediaries who are new to social media will require initial training — but it shouldn’t be a one-and-done initiative. Hold regular social selling workshops to keep all social sellers up to date on your social media policy and messaging.
You can also use workshop time to walk your team through any tools you invest in to fuel social media efforts. Denim Social, for example, offers live product demos you can share to show them how to use the technology and get the most benefit.
Demonstrate how the software streamlines the approval process for posts and automatically archives them for future reference. The more they know, the more comfortable they’ll be using such tools to facilitate social selling efforts. The great news is, our customer success team is here to help get your team trained and ready.
Social media opens up a world of opportunity for financial institutions to reach and engage customers and prospects, but that doesn’t mean you should set your team free to do as they please. The right strategy and social media management software can make it a lot easier to avoid mistakes and create a successful social selling strategy. Want to see how Denim Social can help your team up their social media game? Schedule a demo today!
Instagram stands out as the shining star of social media platforms. While Facebook still reigns supreme and TikTok grows, Instagram is quickly catching up fast with more than 2 billion users worldwide.
With users under age 34 making up nearly 60 percent of this user population, financial services marketers looking to reach younger generations should take note. And with an estimated sum of $68 trillion in wealth expected to transfer from Baby Boomers to Millennials in the next couple of decades, Millennials are a worthwhile target.
Studies predict that, after inheriting wealth, 80% or more young heirs will seek out a new financial advisor. Considering that 9 in 10 accounts follow at least one business on Instagram and 8 in 10 users find new products and services in the app, it’s a safe bet that Instagram will be a place to influence many Millennials. Wise financial services marketers will meet them where they are with strong Instagram marketing strategies, and the following tips can help:
1. Focus on paid ads
Instagram is a visual platform for sharing photos and videos, so it’s important for brand pages to populate their profiles with organic posts. While this presence is important, organic content isn’t what will move the needle on business goals. Financial services aren’t exactly visually interesting, and organic posts tend to have low reach as they only show up in the feeds of a brand’s current followers. Without the ability to include hyperlinks in captions, they also won’t drive any traffic back to your site. If you want to build the type of following needed to generate new business, including paid advertising in your Instagram marketing strategy is your ticket.
With Instagram advertising, institutions and advisors can target ads to land with exactly the right audience — even outside their follower base — and include links in posts to drive more traffic to the brand. With a specific call to action that directs consumers to learn more about a topic, Instagram ads offer a straight-line path to giving customers the valuable information they desire — in their own time and at their own place. What’s more, Instagram advertising is seamlessly integrated directly into Instagram feeds and stories, creating a smoother user experience all around.
2. Connect with consumers on a local level
Instagram marketing on the corporate brand level is a great starting point, but advertising on behalf of your individual advisors can take your strategy to the next level. Think of it this way: If a consumer sees a well-known brand on social media, they might recognize the name, but they won’t feel an intrinsic connection beyond initial familiarity. In contrast, they’ll feel familiarity and an immediate connection when they see a post from an advisor in their own community. Consumers want to build relationships with brands, and a shared community is a great starting point.
Of course, most advisors and other financial services employees are not experts on how to market the business on Instagram. And marketers know they must keep all social media marketing for their financial institutions compliant to avoid heavy regulatory reprimands. To keep posts compliant, save employees time, and help them build relationships with consumers in their physical communities, financial services marketers can set up and run ads on their behalf.
3. Micro-target content to your audience
As big-name brands like Amazon continue to elevate the digital customer experience with seamless customer service, purchasing, and delivery, customer expectations are higher than ever before. When customers evaluate a financial institution, they compare it not only to other organizations in the industry, but also to tech giants in any industry that give them exactly what they need when they need it.
They expect a high level of personalization and convenience, and Instagram marketing with paid advertising can help you give it to them. Match basic behavioral and geographic data to potential customers on Instagram to target ads, and then track clicks, engagements, and post-click actions. These data points don’t indicate much on their own, but together they offer a rich story about what consumers want. Continually refine your strategy with these data points in mind to deliver the kind of highly personalized experiences your audiences want on Instagram.
With a large Millennial user base that engages actively with brands online and the ability to target highly personalized ads to exactly the right audiences, Instagram is a must-have in any financial services marketing strategy. To learn more about how Instagram marketing can work to drive your business forward, download our guide to building stronger customer relationships on Instagram for free today.
Make the most of your social media pages and posts by optimizing your images and including essential information about your business on each platform. By giving customers an optimal digital experience, you can broaden reach and provide better customer service through your digital platforms.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 176 x 176px (desktop), 196x 196px (smartphones)
Cover photo: 820 x 312px (desktop), 640 x 360px (smartphones)
Keep the main content of your image centered. On a desktop the photo will display as 840x312px, but on mobile will size down to 640x360px.
Facebook post image: 1200 x 630px
The ideal width for a Facebook post image is 1200px, but height can vary based on what type of device the image display is optimized for. We recommend keeping it at the recommended size to keep consistency on all devices.
When creating a Facebook Ad graphic, any text should not take up more than 20% of the photo. You can find a cheat sheet here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/tools/text_overlay.
Facebook Video: 1280 x 720px
The optimal length for a short-form video on Facebook is 15 seconds to 1 minute; for a long-form video, it is 3 minutes. The maximum file size is 10GB.
Facebook Link Image: 1200 x 630px
Make sure to claim ownership of your links for the ability to change the link preview photo. You can find more info on that here: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/528858287471922?id=708699556338610.
Carousel Post: 1080 x 1080px
Carousel posts are a great way to display multiple services or features that you offer to your customers. When placing a Facebook ad you can link each carousel photo to a different link, making it easy for people to navigate to your specific products.
Facebook Story: 1080 x 1920px
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION:
Page name:
This is where you can name your Facebook Page, but be sure to keep it shorter than 75 characters.
Page username:
Customize your page URL by adding a username, making it easier for people to locate and navigate people from other digital platforms. Your Facebook URL can include up to 50 characters.
Page call to action:
Facebook gives you a variety of choices on calls to action. For example, if you’d like customers to contact you by email, you can set up a “Send Email” button with your email address connected and ready to go.
IMAGE SIZING:
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo here to personalize your profile. If this page is for an individual, this is where you will upload their headshot.
Cover Photo: 1584 x 396px
Having a personalized business cover photo will make your profile look more professional and give you the opportunity to provide page visitors with more of the look and feel of your business. This can include an image related to your business or a graphic with information on services you provide or your business slogan.
LinkedIn post photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
When targeting an audience on both desktop and mobile, make sure that you optimize for mobile to give people the best experience.
LinkedIn Link Photo: 1200 x 628px (mobile), 1200 x 1200px (desktop)
Providing an image with your link preview can help give viewers a better idea of article content and improve your click thru rates.
LinkedIn Link Video: 4096 x 2304px maximum, 256 x 144 pixels minimum
The optimal video length for LinkedIn is 30-90 seconds and the maximum file size is 5GB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Page name:
This is where your business name is located, as well as your company industry, location, and number of followers.
Page description:
Add your business slogan, mission, or a short description that tells people what your company, products, and services can do for them.
X (Formerly Known as Twitter)
IMAGE SIZING
Profile picture: 400 x 400px
Upload your business logo or headshot to personalize your profile.
Cover photo: 1500 x 500px
Be sure to center your content to give your followers an optimized experience on mobile.
Twitter post photo: 1600 x 900px
Allow your followers to see the entirety of the photo in their feed by adhering to this sizing guideline. The maximum file size is 5MB.
X video: 1280 x 720px (desktop, recommended), 720 x 720px (mobile)
The optimal video length for Twitter is 20-45 seconds and the maximum file size is 512MB.
IMPORTANT PAGE INFORMATION
Underneath your profile photo, your company name and username will be displayed.
Write a short bio to tell people more about your business.
IMAGE SIZING
Profile photo: 110 x 110px
Your profile picture will be small, so be sure your image is sized correctly and centered. This is a great place for your company logo.
Profile thumbnail: Displays as 161 x 161px
This is a preview of your large image post, but looks best when the photo posted is square.
Highlight Cover: 1080 x 1920px
Your cover photos should have centered images to give your highlight reel a balanced look. You can also name your highlights, but be concise as they can only be 15 characters long.
Instagram Feed Photo: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The recommended width for all Instagram feed photos is 1080px, but the height can vary. To optimize for your feed display within your profile, we recommend using the sizing listed above to keep your image square.
Instagram Feed Video: 1080 x 1080px (square), 1080 x 1350 (portrait), 1080 x 566 (landscape)
The optimal length for an Instagram video is 30-60 seconds and the max file size is 650MB.
Instagram Feed Ad Photo: 1080 x 1080px
Your ad photo will display the same as a normal feed photo, but with a link attached. When creating an ad in Ads Manager, you’ll be able to upload a separate photo for Instagram to keep your photos optimized for the user experience.
Instagram Story: 1080 x 1920px (portrait), 1080 x 601 (landscape)
Make the most of your stories by using all of your space and creating a fullscreen experience. The maximum length of the story is 60 seconds.
Instagram Reels & Live: 1080 x 1920px
Reels can be used to offer tutorials, demos, or service features. These will be saved under your profile page for viewers to go back and watch at their leisure. The maximum length for Reels is 90 seconds. For Live, this can be used for announcements, events, or other Q&A sessions. These can also be saved for later viewing, and can last up to 4 hours.
So you've invested the time, energy, and money into building a website that details all of your financial products and services, and you have a solid social media strategy in place — but do you have any means of connecting the two? A full digital marketing strategy requires a connection point to lead prospects along the digital journey and toward conversion. Landing pages can serve as the bridges you need.
These pages live on your website and hold information geared toward specific audience segments. For example, if an insurance agent is interested in helping first-time homebuyers with homeowners insurance, a social media post on the subject could include a link to a landing page on your website with even more resources for new buyers.
Landing pages are important because no matter how well-built your website homepage is, it simply can’t serve the needs of every consumer — not conveniently, at least. Without landing pages, site visitors arrive on the homepage and are left to dig through the site for specific information on their own. Landing pages, on the other hand, allow visitors to arrive at your site in the exact place they want to be. It’s the best way for financial institution marketers to quickly and easily offer content that meets the specific needs of various target audiences.
Customers want this level of personalization, and they're open to the idea of trading their information for it. In fact, more than three-quarters of consumers in one study said they would be willing to give more personal data in return for more tailored services. When customers submit their contact information through a form to download the content on your landing page, not only are they getting tailored content, but you're getting data that can fuel more personalized outreach directly to primed prospects. And that leads to higher conversion rates.
Start creating landing pages by planning a page for each promotion in your overall marketing campaign or for each of your target audiences. Then, we recommend the following steps to drive conversion:
1. Keep it simple and direct.
Ultimately, the goal of a landing page for financial institutions is to learn more about prospects by gathering their information in the form field. For visitors, the clearer the path to the field, the likelier they will be to share their data. Don’t fill a page with too many images, multiple offers, and other clutter — you’ll just increase the chances of visitors bouncing off the page before taking action. Instead, stick with concise, clear messaging, easy-to-follow directives, strong calls to action, and impactful design elements.
2. Leverage pre-built, fully customizable templates.
Few marketing professionals have the bandwidth or experience to build a whole webpage on their own. Fortunately, software like Denim Social with landing page functionality will offer pre-built, customizable templates that allow you to start with a page already optimized for conversion.
From there, you can easily customize the content, form fields, colors, images, and video on each page to fit your campaign goals. The key here is to keep a consistent style across pages so each one fits under your overall brand umbrella.
3. Scale, scale, scale!
The real beauty of using pre-built, customizable templates is the ability to design, build, and launch landing pages at scale. Denim Social’s code-free interface makes it easy for anyone to populate many templates with customized elements — no web design expertise required. Just personalize, publish, then easily iterate and adjust based on conversion data.
In practice, this looks like building hundreds or even thousands of highly professional landing pages in just minutes. That’s a lot more opportunity for targeted messaging than one broad website homepage on its own.
Landing pages are one of the most effective tools at your disposal to create tailored experiences, capture valuable information, and generate high-quality leads. With the right platform, any marketer can build landing pages at scale and propel more prospects toward conversion.