PERSPECTIVES

“Customer journey” has already become one of financial marketing’s most popular buzzwords of the year. It seems you can’t have a conversation about banking, read a marketing strategy document or sit through a marketing presentation for senior management without hearing the term…along with disparate views as to what it means.

But here’s the problem with buzzwords: too many people spend more time bandying about a phrase like “customer journey” than doing the hard but fruitful work of actually deploying end-to-end initiatives to deliver the journey your customers desire. To really demonstrate your understanding of the customer journey, you have to dig in and be prepared to make some significant changes to the way your institution engages customers – across every channel they access.

BKM had a great time exhibiting at NEDMA’s Marketing Technology Summit yesterday at Boston University - especially running our cornhole challenge! If you attended we hope you enjoyed the day-long event that offered insights into the latest techniques and technologies that can be leveraged to create successful marketing initiatives.

Those turning leaves mean it’s planning season

On one hand, 2016 has flown by – early signs of leaves changing colors here in New England coupled with debates on the validity of the Farmer’s Almanac forecast for the upcoming winter. On the other hand, it is hard not to feel like the past 10 months have provided a grueling set of body blows to the industry: CFPB, phantom cross-selling, Fintech, tight margins and risk management. These realities paired with other priorities now need to be gathered and organized to make sense of where we go from here.

Welcome to strategic planning season.

This year's NEDMA Marketing Technology Summit will be at Boston University on Tuesday, November 1st. BKM Marketing will be exhibiting this year, and we invite you to take advantage of our exhibitor discount.  Attend for just $79—that’s $50 off the early bird price.

Why are you still not using video? 

By now you know that including video as part of your content marketing strategy increases customer engagement. There is no shortage of statistics like these that prove video is only going to become a more essential marketing channel, and even our own non-scientific review of bank social and content marketing revealed engagement rates over 10x higher on video posts vs. posts with just text and images alone.

But knowing the statistics – and watching competitors jumping on the trend and gaining traction – is still not enough motivation for many businesses to get moving. We hear a number of excuses from marketers explaining why they aren't including videos in their content marketing plans – anything from budget concerns, timing concerns, subject matter concerns, not knowing how to distribute once they're complete – to just not quite knowing where to start. While these may seem like valid excuses for not moving ahead – are they rooted in reality? We’ve gone ahead and debunked a few of the most common “challenges” we hear below:

BKM is active in many key industry organizations - we are often speakers, sponsors and attendees at many events. See below for a list of upcoming events that we will be involved with - and join us!

Who visits your website (or doesn’t)? What content should you highlight to get the right people there? Do you really know and understand who your buyers are in order to target them effectively?

These questions and many more can be answered when you establish buyer personas for your business. It’s vital to segment your audience and truly understand their needs, challenges, concerns and goals in order to create more powerful marketing initiatives that drive results.

In order to get started, you need to define and understand your company’s value proposition. What do you offer your customers that others can’t? What challenges do you solve for them? While this isn’t always easy, you may end up learning something about your business that you didn’t realize! And don’t worry - we’ll provide you with some tips and ideas on how to get the process started. But first, let’s take a step back and explain what buyer personas are and why they are so important.

What are buyer personas?

Buyer personas are defined as fictional and generalized representations of your ideal potential customers. The strongest buyer personas are based on data and market research, which has been conducted through insights from your customer base.

During a week where the banking news cycle felt an awful lot like the current presidential campaign - with provocative coverage of items like the a cross-sell fiasco, calls for investigation and questions of who knew what and when did they know it - a really interesting, and potentially foreshadowing event took place in the industry.

It isn’t all that surprising that more negative stories commanded the headlines - as with the campaign - but this one caught our attention (and it wasn’t because of a cool Fintech rollout).

When was the last time a bank product flew off the shelf like the Chase Sapphire Reserve card?

We briefly highlighted the story in our most recent post highlighting the content marketing of 15 banks over a one-week period.  The card's popularity alone is newsworthy...but add to that the fact that Chase hasn't spent a dime on marketing the card. This really is a defining, viral 'gotta have one' moment for a bank product.

A one-week snapshot of bank content marketing activity

Last week we posted that we were looking at the actual ‘what’ behind a random sampling of fifteen banks' social marketing efforts, specifically reviewing the industry's top used social media platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

As a refresh, the fifteen banks we observed were evenly divided into three segments:

• Five traditional national and super regional US banks 
• Five traditional community and regional US banks (generally under $10 billion in assets); and
• Five non-traditional banks (virtual banks with no branches)

Again, we know this isn’t a scientific study (by the way, we don’t have dozens of interns around to surf sites and log activity – we did the work ourselves) and that the timing around Labor Day wasn’t picked for its height of social media activity levels. But even so, we found some trends that were at least interesting to us – and hopefully some of you as well.

So what did we observe from the social and content marketing efforts of 15 banks? 

You don't need to spend much time on social media these days to realize just how overwhelming it is to process the constant stream of new content. And with research showing the strong correlation between number of posts per month to increased web traffic, this trend is only continuing to grow.