Common Questions about Financial Social Media
April 19th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Here are four common questions that financial marketers ask about social media.
1. Which social sites should we participate in?
Every financial marketer should have a blog or online newsletter that interested clients and prospects can subscribe to. This should highlight areas of expertise within your organization or information of interest to your target markets. It should offer, at a minimum, an RSS option, as well as a link to your Facebook and Twitter sites.
There are many specialized social groups both within larger sites (such as LinkedIn groups) and standalone sites, such as comments sections of blogs or other publications. Depending on your target market and your objectives, you will want to subscribe and become active participants on these sites.
2. How do we keep up with new sites and technologies for managing our social presence?
Every day seems to bring news of new mobile apps, widgets and social groups that early adapters have discovered. Keeping up feels like a full-time job and no one person can manage it all. One suggestion is to form a tech council, made up of employees, vendors, even clients if appropriate. This group can call the moderator’s attention to the latest “must have” technologies and can be a sounding board for any tech innovations your company is planning. If you don’t have tech savvy people on your team, subscribe to updates from the appropriate LinkedIn and Facebook groups for the latest in what’s out in the mediasphere.
3. We’d like to participate more on social platforms but our compliance department won’t allow us to. What should we do?
Compliance and marketing are like cats and dogs. Every cool thing you want to do seems to set the compliance department’s teeth on edge. Compliance, of course, is just doing their job. Regulators have created rules on use of social media (such as FINRA’s requirement that all communications be saved) and many compliance departments err on the side of caution by not allowing any social commenting.
Meet with your compliance officers to see if there is room for compromise. Highly regulated firms, such as RIAs, are using social media successfully, so show your compliance team examples of who’s doing what and come up with guidelines that will allow you to take advantage of social tools without crossing the line.
4. Blogging, tweeting, participating in social sites take a lot of time. How do we measure what we are getting in return?
Measuring social media effectiveness is, in some ways, easier than measuring other marketing tactics, since it is relatively easy to gather statistics on usage. But determining success is a question of what you measure rather than raw numbers. If your goal is brand awareness, then Facebook friends or Twitter followers may be the number you’re most interested in. For building sales, watch your web site statistics to see where new visitors are coming from. If there is a sudden uptick in visitors from a particular site, you can safely assume that there is interest in your promotion and can further develop it with an offer, seminars and other tactics.
How does Goldman Sachs do it?
April 8th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Goldman Sachs may be the most talked about brand in the financial space. See for example, the cartoon in the New Yorker for April 9 Goldman cartoon showing the employee lounge at Goldman Sachs as a swimming pool filled with money.
The cartoon demonstrates the double nature of popular attitudes toward Goldman: disapproving of its methods but envious of its results. Goldman in fact succeeds by having a reputation for swinging the biggest dick in investment banking. Far from being put off, clients actually are proud to have Goldman on their side. But one wonders how Goldman’s reputation will affect its recruiting and stock price over the long term.
Here is an excerpt from The Financial Services Marketing Handbook that discusses the double nature of Goldman’s brand image:
Can A “Giant Vampire Squid” Have a Positive Brand Image?
Brand image may differ by market segments. In recent years, Goldman Sachs has become the personification of the evil bank to the broad public. After the market crash of 2008, Goldman Sachs was at the center of public and regulatory outrage—one common epithet for the firm was “giant vampire squid”– and paid a fine to the SEC for failing to disclose to clients material information about collateralized debt obligations. Yet, to its core constituency—institutional investors—Goldman remains the gold standard. Based on many years of experience, Goldman Sachs is viewed by most institutional investors as “the smartest guys in the room.” The strength of Goldman’s brand image—and its policy of not commenting on and settling disputes out of court–carried it through the crisis with its core client base. It was ranked #1 among the most admired megabanks by Fortune magazine in 2010. “The public at large may still see Goldman as the poster child for the greed that sparked the financial crisis, but its reputation in the business world is stronger than ever.” Its stock has continued to rise and Goldman remains one of the top dealmakers, ranking #1 globally and domestically in 2010.
Source: World’s Most Admired Companies. Goldman also ranked number 1 among megabanks in 2011 . See also the Wall Street Journal online, March 8, 2011.
Using Facebook for Brand Campaigns
March 14th, 2012 § 1 Comment
The new issue of Financial Marketing Intelligence has a great article titled “Six Truths about Social Media in Financial Services.” I particularly like the writer’s take on integrated brand campaigns.
“When a financial institution pours significant time and money into a comprehensive brand repositioning, as MetLife has in its new 2012 campaign, “I can do this,” why not just extend its reach into social channels? There’s no need to recreate the wheel. MetLife has done this masterfully with a Facebook presence that includes cartoon-populated advertising, a game, a variety of quizzes, tips, and instant quotes. Content is accessible, fun, and designed to inspire confidence. Plus, Met is adding new interactive bells and whistles like a Pandora station filled with songs that subscribers find “motivational.” The payoff? Friended by 206,000 folks in a few weeks’ time. The E*Trade baby has his own page, in a similar gambit, although it doesn’t have much content that’s strategic or interactive.“
The article also discusses Facebook campaigns for Chase Community Giving, State Farm Nation, Fidelity, The Hartford’s Achieve Without Limits, and Northwestern Mutual.
interesting data on mobile banking
January 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
One of our clients, ath Power Consulting recently conducted a survey of user satisfaction among mobile banking customers. One of the data points that struck me as interesting was that mobile users do not seem to be especially concerned about security issues. According to The Financial Brand ”33% of those who don’t use mobile banking cited security as a reason for not doing so.” But the ath Power survey shows that 94% of users consider their bank’s mobile offering to be secure.
So the question is: are mobile users so addicted to their phones that security is no longer an issue?
New contents section
November 10th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
We just received the copy-edited ms. from Wiley and we have a new table of contents. It can be found on the Contents page of this blog.
Measuring ROI for Interactive Campaigns
November 4th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Book excerpt:
Return on investment (ROI) is the key metric and not always easy to determine. It would seem a simple matter to measurethe sales generated through the current promotion divided by its cost. But for many direct marketing efforts, full value is not realized until well after the promotion ends. Credit card issuers, for example, may not realize profitability on any one mailing for years. They have developed metrics to enable them to estimate what percentage of new cardholders will remain, for how long, and how much profit they’ll bring. Using this estimate of lifetime value enables the issuers to include future returns in their profitability analyses.
Other ways of measuring return on a promotion include the value of referrals to the sales force. Keeping the sales channel filled with quality new leads is an important aspect of many financial service promotions on both the consumer and institutional side. Although it may take months or even years to convert a lead into a sale, the profitability analysis of the campaign needs to account for expected future sales. Some metrics commonly used by marketers for e-mail performance can be found in Chief Marketer’s Annual Interactive Marketing Survey .
Natural communities
October 21st, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Steve Cooperstein got back to me on Linked In groups ”Thanks for the thoughts (and mention), especially about natural communities – strikes a bell with what I’ve observed. Of course the objective is to identify your natural community. If it is strong enough, doesn’t it lend itself to being promoted by tweeting and other social media mechanisms?”
So the question in my mind is what constitutes a natural community around a brand? USAA, which is aimed at military service personnel, clearly offers a site for its customers to talk about financial topics of interest (such as a forum for military spouses). AmEx has an active small business forum, although I doubt it is the first place a small business owner would go to get information. And in either case, would the forum members necessarily follow these brands on Twitter or Facebook? The usefulness of the natural community is communicating with other members of the community–not with the brand.
Please add your comments/thoughts.
Cover art
October 19th, 2011 § 2 Comments
We’ve just gotten the new cover art for our second edition and it looks terrific. Have a look.
Are the techiest tactics least effective?
October 12th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Received a comment on the figure below last week from Steve Cooperstein via LinkedIn Retirement Income Industry Association group. Steve observed that “Interesting that your least effective seem to be the techiest.” I’ve been thinking about Steve’s comment and I’m wondering if the chart is skewed by my own biases. I’m not particularly techy and I don’t spend much time on social media, so I’m always looking for ways to leverage the power of the crowd without doing a lot of work. I haven’t seen any evidence that Twitter has been particularly effective as a marketing tactic. It has been used effectively for customer service (Wells Fargo has had good results) but overall The Financial Brand estimates that banks and credit unions can expect 1 follower for every $1 million to $200 million in asset size. Hardly worth the 5 hours per week that The Financial Brand suggests as a minimum for maintaining a Twitter presence.
Branded social communities, such as the community sites maintained by American Express or USAA have shown enormous payback in incremental ROI, but they’re a bear to maintain. And they will only work if there is a natural community around the product or brand. I don’t imagine too many people hang out at their retirement provider’s site and the risks of negative comments are pretty high if they do.
Financial Marketing and social media
October 3rd, 2011 § 4 Comments
Many financial marketers who are starting out in the social media space are overwhelmed by the choices–and the time required to maintain a social media presence. This chart is our attempt to help marketers prioritize the various social media.
The x-axis shows our estimate of how effective a given tactic is, in terms of marketing ROI. That is, how much additional revenue is likely to be generated by the tactic. The y axis shows shows difficulty–which basically means, how much time and money are required to apply this tactic successfully. In future posts, we will discuss each of these tactics individually. For now, take the bottom left corner as a way of understanding this chart. Adding share buttons to your content (web site, blog, whatever) takes almost no time and is a one-shot deal–i.e., virtually no difficulty nor expense. It is not likely to result in much revenue, but who knows? Someone could pass your information along to someone else who is interested in your product or service who could then become a customer. So low on effort and low on potential, and probably worth doing. This chart is meant to be a way for new users to prioritize their social marketing efforts. Please let us know if you agree or disagree–the book is in production and we would love your feedback before it goes to press.