What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
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.
If you didn’t want to believe it before, digital banking is here to stay. While most were on the path toward digital, COVID vastly accelerated digital adoption. That behavior is unlikely to change: 84 percent of banking customers polled said they plan to maintain the same level of digital banking services post-pandemic. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for traditional banks.
The good news is that the key differentiating factor for traditional banks remains the same: human relationships with customers.
The challenge is that maintaining strong relationships in a digital environment can be difficult for traditional banks. And without strong anchoring relationships, banks miss out on valuable cross-selling opportunities and lose customers to competitors that offer better digital services. Customer defection can be costly, as it’s five to 25 times more expensive to acquire than retain customers—but increasing customer retention rates by a mere 5 percent can boost profits by 25 to 95 percent.
Banks that turn their focus toward strengthening digital customer experience can solidify relationships for the long term, secure more business with new and existing customers, and thrive well into the future.
HOW TO CREATE AN EXCEPTIONAL DIGITAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Delivering high-quality digital experiences is two-fold challenge for banks. First, traditional banks tend to struggle to design meaningful and emotional experiences in digital ways. Second, they struggle to deliver those experiences impactfully due to internal and external digital transformation hurdles.
With these two challenges in mind, bank marketers can lead their organizations to success by first focusing on their teams’ willingness to evolve and openness to the larger concepts of digital transformation. Without widespread buy-in, even a million of the fanciest bells and whistles on the market won’t help a bank evolve to meet and exceed consumers’ digital expectations.
Marketers must ensure an overall understanding of these four digital transformation initiatives and how they can help improve digital customer experiences and strengthen human relationships:
1. Continual tool improvement and refinement. Most financial institutions likely accelerated the pace of their digital transformations in recent years and they need to keep up the momentum. In fact, the primary goal behind digital transformation for 79 percent of respondents in one survey was to improve customer experience. You can’t improve experiences without continuous transformation efforts.
Gather data to show how customers are using your digital tools and continually evaluate how to improve your tools to create better and better experiences. Seeking strong and strategic partnerships with fintech vendors is an excellent way to stay on top of the latest innovations in technology and continue providing the best digital services.
2. Optimal onboarding. Your team and fintech partners might put a lot of time, money, and effort into building new and impressive digital widgets—but if your customers don’t know how to use them, they won’t bring any value. That’s why part of any bank’s digital transformation strategy should involve onboarding customers to ensure the adoption and use of new digital services.If new account openers don’t engage within the first month of opening an account, they likely never will. Encourage frequent and continued engagement by clearly demonstrating the value customers can find in your digital services and tools. Provide convenient and accessible customer support to keep the value stream flowing without interruption.
3. Transferring relationships to digital. Preserving human connections in the virtual world can be a challenge for banks accustomed to old ways, but with the right approach, digitization can actually help banks build and maintain stronger relationships. That’s why 72 percent of business leaders who responded to Harvard Business Review Analytics Services researchers said they expected the digital shift to create closer relationships with customers.
Take social media as one example. With an active social media strategy, loan officers can keep up with past customers and even get new prospects’ attention. And with the right social media management tools, marketers can help loan officers pull off social selling campaigns at scale. Ensure that customers also have a direct line to access employees who can facilitate customer service so that they always have a resource to answer questions and guide them along the digital journey without a hitch.
4. Constant value with content and data. The more value a financial institution can offer, the less likely customer defection will be. Provide useful information to customers through frequent social media content, blog posts, landing pages and more. Use targeting strategies such as paid social media advertising and create personalized content based on data. The more relevant the information is to your customers’ specific needs, the more valuable it will be. Personalize landing pages and gate information behind contact submission forms. When visitors exchange their contact information for the content they need, you can reach out directly to primed leads to continue the conversation with human-to-human touchpoints.
No matter the state of digital transformation, strong customer sentiment around digital banking is unlikely to wane. In fact, consumers are likely to expect better and better digital experiences from financial institutions as technology becomes an even bigger part of everyday life. Traditional banks that focus on creating exceptional digital customer experience based on human connection will thrive.
This article was originally published on ABA Bank Marketing.
Denim Social is proud to be featured in the American Banker Association’s 2023 report on The State of Social Media in Banking.
In the report, the American Bankers Association asked over 330 banks what they are doing with social media, where they see challenges and opportunities and what the future is likely to bring.
The report incorporates the survey findings with insight and best practices from other banks from across the U.S. and provides a list of 10 top takeaways to consider.
“Social media is the heart of social selling,” said Doug Wilber, CEO of Denim Social, which offers the only ABA-endorsed social media management platform for financial institutions. Social selling is the process of building relationships and brand awareness through selected social media platforms, with the aim of boosting not just awareness, but the bank’s sales results. It’s a way of connecting directly with prospects, and can be a powerful complement to tried-and-true methods such as cold calling and email marketing.”
Learn more about social media opportunities for banks by downloading the report here.
ST. LOUIS, August 30, 2023 – Capacity, an AI-powered support automation platform, today announced the acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox. Capacity’s support automation platform empowers teams to do their best work and deliver valuable customer experiences across channels. With the addition of Denim Social and LumenVox’s products, the platform is charting a course to provide solutions that define the future of work and omnichannel customer engagement for its 1,900+ customers across numerous industries.
Capacity’s acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox are fueling its transformation from a self-service, single channel tool to an omnichannel support and engagement automation platform. Whether providing customer and employee support, assisting agents or reaching out to customers, the Capacity platform now offers a complete solution across web, voice, SMS, email and social media.
“Customers need support everywhere. Our expanded platform will free up team members to do their best work while also building more meaningful relationships with their customers,” said David Karandish, CEO, Capacity. “Denim Social’s platform will empower brands to more effectively communicate with customers on their social channel of choice and LumenVox’s tools are key in our expansion into voice automation.”
Denim Social, based in St. Louis, is a software provider that elevates the way professionals in the banking, insurance, mortgage and wealth management industries connect and sell on social media. With Denim Social integrated into the platform, Capacity users will be able to launch proactive social media campaigns to reach customers and deepen relationships.
“Social media is a must-have tool for today’s modern seller. Combining Capacity’s AI-powered automations with Denim Social’s campaign tools will enable users across industries to more effectively stay engaged on social media and focus their time on delivering authentic interactions,” said Doug Wilber, CEO, Denim Social. Wilber has assumed the role of Chief Strategy Officer at Capacity, following the acquisition.
LumenVox is a leading global speech and voice technology provider based out of San Diego. LumenVox works with customers to build secure self-service and customer-agent interactions. Its tools will enable Capacity users to transform customer engagement with AI-driven speech recognition and voice authentication technology.
“The right voice technology can save teams countless support hours. Marrying LumenVox’s technology with the Capacity platform ensures voice is a seamless part of the omnichannel experience,” said Nigel Quinnin, CEO, LumenVox. Quinnin will lead Capacity’s voice initiatives.
The acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox significantly expand the capabilities and scale of the Capacity platform. Today, Capacity estimates that every month its platform will:
- Analyze 3,000,000,000 calls
- Send 10,000,000 SMS messages
- Deliver 500,000 social posts
- Execute 386,000 workflows and automations
- Deflect 140,000 tickets and emails
“With these two great additions to the Capacity platform, we’re proudly offering customers an all-in-one solution for support and customer experience,” said Karandish.
Capacity’s acquisitions of Denim Social and LumenVox closely follows a deal with Textel, an enterprise SMS provider, earlier this year. Capacity will maintain its headquarters in St. Louis. With the acquisitions, its headcount is now more than 100 employees. The terms of the transactions are confidential.
For more information on how Capacity helps teams do their best work, please visit capacity.com/omnichannel.
About Capacity
Founded in 2017, Capacity is a support automation platform that uses AI to promote self-service, providing immediate Tier 0 and Tier 1 support for customers and internal teams. Capacity answers over 90% of FAQs and escalates more pressing, nuanced issues to the right person. Capacity works across web, voice, SMS, email and social media to help teams do their best work. For more information, visit Capacity.com.
About Denim Social
Denim Social is a Software As A Service (SaaS) provider that powers social selling programs. The Denim Social platform helps brands empower their producers to compliantly communicate, share, and sell on their social channels of choice. Denim Social partners with forward-thinking marketing teams in regulated industries including banking, mortgage, insurance and wealth management. The social selling platform is used by corporate level admins and local producers to amplify brand messaging and power sales on social media. For more information, visit DenimSocial.com.
About LumenVox
LumenVox is an industry-leading provider of speech-enabling software, bringing the power of voice to customers worldwide and facilitating billions of customer interactions. The LumenVox software portfolio consists of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) with transcription, Call Progress Analysis (CPA), Voice Biometrics, and Text-to-Speech (TTS). Designed to be highly flexible, accurate, and scalable, LumenVox helps some of the world’s largest cloud-first companies reimagine customer engagement by delivering exceptional voice experiences. LumenVox also provides self-service tools that enable customers to easily tune, adjust, and create language models. For more information, visit LumenVox.com.
*This article was originally published in PRNewswire.
Every social circle contains a few people whose ideas seem to carry more weight and gravitas. These people are influencers. They just seem to know what they’re talking about, and others actively seek their thoughts and opinions.
The same goes for digital social circles. If loan officers from your institution can establish themselves as thought leaders—specifically in loan origination—they can become sought-after sources for financial advice. Thought leadership demonstrates to readers that the person is knowledgeable and trustworthy, which will influence current and prospective clients.
When done right, a thought leadership strategy can be incredibly impactful. In a 2021 LinkedIn-Edelman survey, 65 percent of respondents said a piece of thought leadership content changed their perception of a company for the better, and 64 percent said thought leadership is a more trustworthy basis for gauging capabilities and competencies than marketing materials and product sheets. For banks especially, financial services thought leadership is a powerful way to foster trust and rapport with prospective clients.
The combination of thought leadership and social media augments these effects considerably. Unfortunately, banks tend to use social channels solely for marketing purposes and basic customer service.
Social selling is the use of social media to sell a product or service. It leverages social channels to build personal relationships, showcase thought leadership, engage with prospects, interact with existing customers and ultimately build sales-encouraging trust and rapport. It’s not enough to just “be online;” social selling empowers loan officers to become thought leaders, share with their networks and add humanity and authenticity to branded content.
Why should social selling techniques matter to your bank?
There’s a lot of bad financial advice online. Building thought leadership (especially in finance) allows loan officers to demonstrate that they are trusted, credible experts with clients’ best interests at heart. Prospective clients want to know they can trust your loan reps as human beings. Providing helpful, educational content is a great way to show them your business cares about delivering real value and connection. As a marketer for your brand, it’s your job to empower loan officers to start building those relationships through social selling.
Here are three tips for how to leverage social selling in your bank’s thought leadership strategy:
1. Build trust with prospects
Finance is a deeply personal business, and prospects want to know they can trust loan officers before feeling comfortable talking financial situations and goals. Social selling allows the brand’s loan officers to build direct, personal relationships with customers and prospects.
In times of market volatility or transition within a client’s life, the right thought leadership strategy can really connect. For instance, a blog post or LinkedIn video about debt consolidation loans could resonate with prospective clients who need help organizing their expenses. Or a reassuring Instagram reel about taking out a mortgage in a time of rising interest rates could be just what a first-time homebuyer needs to hear. Empowering your officers to start building these relationships via social selling content is one of your most important jobs in marketing for a banking brand.
2. Stay top of mind with clients
Financial services thought leadership helps your bank stay top of mind and engaged with existing clients. While there aren’t enough hours in the day for your brand’s loan officers to check in with every single client, social selling techniques can help them stay connected and deepen relationships without overworking. Social selling content can provide value to customers while loan officers are doing other vital work to close more loans.
Plus, when marketers help loan officers continually demonstrate their expertise online, the chances of gaining client referrals just increases. For example, offering services for business owners might encourage a social seller to post a guidebook about business loans and prompt an existing client to consider a loan to cover expansion. This guidebook can then serve as a handy piece of content for referrals.
3. Help intermediaries build expertise
While it’s not easy to confront, there is significant personnel movement in every industry today. Loan officers are concerned about their long-term career plans, and thought leadership is a great way to build your team’s reputation—regardless of where they work. Thought leadership content retains its value, even if employees move to another bank or financial institution. You might not be able to allow them to take their book of business, but their expertise and social media networks are intangible.
For these reasons (and more), thought leadership is essential to remaining competitive in today’s marketplace and building trust with clients. By leveraging social selling for loan officers, you’ll amplify your brand-building efforts with prospective clients, other industry experts and even potential employees. A solid thought leadership strategy through social selling will help build brand recognition, support lending teams, and establish lending officers as industry experts. Don’t wait to get started.
This article was originally published in ABA Banking Journal.
Personalization isn’t new to marketing. The process of connecting with customers has been moving in that direction for years, and for good reason. One survey found that 80% of respondents would be more likely to do business with companies that offered personalized experiences. But it seems many financial institutions haven’t yet gotten the news.
If you dig through the numbers, you’ll find that personalization applies to the financial industry. In fact, 72% of consumers rate personalization as highly important in finance. They value text alerts, customized tasks and opportunities to transact more efficiently. They also want digitally driven features that save them time with routine tasks and the ability to track multiple accounts using a single dashboard.
Financial marketers’ job is figuring out how to use personalization to gain (and retain) customers — and how to get leadership to buy in. It’s an easy sell: Personalization enhances the customer experience and also helps teams use social media marketing budgets more efficiently.
But financial marketers are often up against a knowledge gap. Senior management doesn’t always understand a digital-first strategy focused on personalization. Financial institutions historically aren’t known to be early adopters or quick to change, which can leave marketers spending years advocating for updates.
The question is, how exactly do you get buy-in from leadership to start personalizing and investing more money for social media marketing. The following strategies can help you get started:
Target the right people: Social media marketing is about identifying target audiences and catering strategies accordingly. The same applies when securing your social media marketing budget. When looking for buy-in, target those on the leadership team who are likely to understand what excellence in personalization looks like.
Great personalization is omnichannel; it engages consumers on the channels of their choice and it’s deeply human. To humanize marketing beyond the brand level, financial institutions need to reach out to leaders who would be open to highly personalized tactics such as social selling, which puts employees and producers on the frontlines to build relationships for the brand.
Craft the right message: Messaging is critical in marketing — and that goes double for selling the idea of a more personalized social strategy. Your message needs to resonate with your audience, even if your audience is one decision-maker. Link everything back to ROI by explaining that customers weigh bank reputation and online presence when deciding among financial institutions.
Be prepared to explain how you’ll track and increase customer conversion metrics through your campaigns. When arguing for more money toward paid social media advertising, for example, you’ll want to explain how it can boost conversion rates, meaning more customers (and revenue) coming in from your ads. Framing your message in business terms will help you advocate for funds to support personalization at scale.
Present the right data: Use compelling data to bring your message home. With 75% of B2B buyers using social media to make buying decisions, social selling is powerful for attracting new customers. But it’s important to understand whether your customers want to talk to your brand. Your audience is likely more comfortable engaging with brand intermediaries instead; people buy from other people.
That’s why so many financial institutions find it valuable to launch social selling programs that position agents, advisors and loan officers to build customer relationships. Social media is thick with prospects, as 54% today use social networks to conduct product research. Your team can capture prospects where they are with the right strategies, processes and technology.
Decide the right timing: The time to start advocating for personalization is now. Approach leadership about earmarking money for personalization in the budget for social media marketing.
Remember that most financial institutions establish their fiscal budgets for the year and often don’t revisit those budgets for another year. 41% of marketing budgets are based on the previous year, with only 10% revisited quarterly, meaning you should plan ahead for social initiatives that might take more money down the line. You likely won’t get another chance to advocate for that money once the budget is set.
Personalized relationships matter, and it’s time to make the case for an expanded marketing budget to support better personalization. With any marketing strategy, you want to approach the right audience with the right message at the right time. Then, with funds secured, your team can get to the exciting part: attracting prospects with education, keeping customers engaged with personalized messaging, and driving bottom-line impacts.
*This article was originally published in BAI.
Connect & Convert on Social
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
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.
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
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.
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
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.
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
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
What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
Banks that do not adapt to the digital world are leaving opportunities on the table. Organic social media is a great way to build a brand and awareness, but that is only a fraction of the potential that lies in fully integrated digital marketing. Banks that utilize omnichannel marketing create a seamless experience regardless of where leads are engaged and wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.
Omnichannel bank marketing is the future—bank marketers meeting people on the channel of their choice, and that means investing in social media. Most customers do not operate off a singular social channel. Rather, financial institutions win when they provide a seamless experience to customers across multiple social platforms in order to maximize their social marketing strategies.
Organic social media is great for creating awareness, but institutions need to be more purposeful in content engagement, consideration, and conversion stages. Rates are not what drive customers to change their financial institution. Emotions are more likely to be the impetus. This is why personalization in digital bank marketing is such a necessity.
There are four crucial steps to take to avoid falling behind the curve while answering the question: What does omnichannel marketing look like for banks?
1. Use paid advertising to engage your audience
Organic content is the foundation of a good social selling marketing strategy, but algorithms will often work against you. Paid social media advertising ensures your content makes it in front of the right eyes.
There is another benefit to going the paid route: Organic reach is often limited to those who are already aware of your institution in some capacity. Paid advertising lets you reach previously untapped audiences and guide them toward the top of your marketing funnel.
To increase your chances of success, use intelligent targeting to focus your ads on the customer’s specific needs. Paid advertising allows for extremely specific targeting, which should be factored into your strategy. Ads for first-time homebuyer mortgages should be in front of those 20- and 30-somethings looking into housing, while retirement ads are better off with the 55+ crowd. The best marketing in the world won’t work if it’s at the wrong time in the wrong place. Identify where in the funnel customers are and target them (on their preferred platform!) with paid advertisements tailor-made to their current need.
2. Guide the audience’s next steps
Social media marketing is just a singular step in a larger walk, so make sure you leave breadcrumbs for leads to follow. Social reach means little if you’re not actually creating conversions. Regardless of whether you use organic posts or paid, don’t forget to include some form of landing page to guide readers back to your brand’s website. There should be no “digital dead ends” in your social strategy. Every piece of the puzzle should connect your audience to another way to engage.
When deciding what landing page to use, curate the page to the post. If your advisor is posting about retirement funds, link to a specific ebook on the subject. Gated content will educate the customer while also providing you with the information needed to start nurturing a lead. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Retarget to convert and retain
Once customers have engaged with your institution, retain that data to inform future interactions, i.e., use retargeting to your advantage by connecting with consumers based on previous engagements. Sometimes, customers may need a nudge to close the conversion. Make sure your marketing allows for that. The right CRM tools will guide retargeting efforts by notifying customers ripe for retargeting. They can also automate messages to send out to your audience, such as email drip campaigns, making sure you reach out at just the right time.
Even after you’ve converted a lead, don’t stop nurturing. The customer journey is cyclical, and new customers will eventually become brand ambassadors in their own right if you give them an experience warranting it. You’ll retain loyal customers and potentially gain references through them.
4. Use technology to scale
Omnichannel marketing addresses the customer’s individual needs during each step of the journey. But undertaking personalization for every customer is a Herculean task, so it needs to be automated and streamlined. This can be more basic, such as setting up newsletters to nurture leads that are automatically sent out at regular intervals, but it doesn’t have to be. The right tools can create connections between your digital marketing strategies and CRM records and automatically keep each other updated.
You also need to consider regulatory compliance with social media posts. A proper social media manager should screen posts for you, flagging any that may contain non-compliant content. Social selling relies on empowering intermediaries to connect with customers directly, so having a good management software in place to oversee all this activity is essential. Technology allows for omnichannel marketing in banks of all sizes. The more tasks you can automate, the more time you allow for higher-level responsibilities.
Omnichannel marketing is a highly effective strategy, but only if it’s implemented wisely. By using technology to their advantage, banks can target a multitude of audiences, allowing for greater reach and more conversions. Effectively utilizing paid ads and understanding how omnichannel allows for more personalized messaging will keep your bank ahead of competitors.
This article was originally published in ABA Bank Marketing.
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.