Wealth Management Marketing | DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Social media’s original purpose was for friends and family to stay connected with one another. Since its birth, it has evolved into more than just a way of communicating. It’s an effective medium to get in front of your customers. Often, banks, wealth management firms, and insurance companies skip out on this marketing opportunity because of the fear of breaking regulations with compliance. Do not fear compliance. With your own policy and social media strategy, you’ll soon be adding another powerful marketing asset, connecting with new potential customers, and having more people walk through you door.

Is it actually worth the risk?

Yes. The average person maintains more than 5 social media platforms. Millennials specifically use it when they wake up, multiple times throughout the day, during their downtime, and right up to the moment they fall asleep. If they’re using it, you need to use it, too. This group is quickly gaining purchasing power. Get in front of them before they make the final decision on opening a checking/saving account or gaining financial advice from one of your competitors. Yahoo! states, “50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on a recommendation through a social media network.” Your presence on social is critical to staying relevant in today’s digital world.

How to Start

Many banks and firms have had many mergers and acquisitions. So, there may be social media accounts associated with previous company names that lead to your current website, address, or phone number. Gain access, merge your pages, or delete old accounts that have nothing to do with your current brand. Not only do you need to think about the business’ accounts, but some employees may be marketing themselves through social media. If you do not have someone monitoring, you have no insight into what your employees are saying (social’s not just about your customers).

Once you have the appropriate channels, you’ll need to decide what you’re goal is for them. Obviously, gaining more customers for your business is one of them. But, this may not be the true purpose of your pages. Goals may include to quantify content to a dollar amount, to educate your followers, to recruit, or to provide faster customer service. Defining this will help you get started on the type of content you will be providing and give you a clear vision of where you are heading.

Posting Without Fear of Compliance

The FINRA, the SEC, FFIEC, and the FDA will need to know about your social media channels and you know they will be auditing your content. Creating a standard strategy for you and your employees to abide by will help you to avoid violating any regulatory guidelines while maintaining full control on all content disseminated online. Setting these standards on what you expect to see will leave anyone with admin access in a comfortable position for posting onto social media. Avoid the madness, completely, and never have an issue with compliance.

Get to Know Your Customers

Monitor the conversations that are happening about your brand. The first place people go to complain, to brag, and to share their opinions is a social media account. You’re leaving your reputation in the hands of others without any say. Be a part of the conversation. If a negative comment occurs, be the first to respond. Having a social voice will not only help your credibility; you’ll soon truly get to know your customers. What are their interests, hobbies, locations, and languages? What do they like or not like about you? Where did they come from or go after interacting with your brand? Answering these questions will eventually help you in all areas of marketing for your company. If you want customers to invest their time and resources into you, you need to invest in them.

Working With a Social Media Marketer

We’ll do what we need to in order for you to have peace of mind about your new venture. We’ll help you educate your employees – what they’ll need to look out for, how to build those relationships, themselves, on their own channels, and the appropriate language and wording. We’ll thoroughly explain the strategy to leave no one questioning any part of it. We’ll help you gain access to all of your previous channels and secure each page. Our social media management tools have built-in compliance features that will help us all avoid disasters. Most importantly, we will create a crisis management procedure if a problem were to occur. The combination of a social media marketing team and a compliance officer will allow your content to be accurate and entertaining for your followers. (Yes, entertaining. Your boring content won’t get you anywhere. We’ll give you a personality compared to your standard legal jargon.)

Example of Financial Companies Utilizing Social Right

We understand the uncertainty you may feel about utilizing social media marketing. There’s the pressure of legal limitations and costly violations if an error occurs; but, you must soon realize the pressure is even greater to be active on social media. You’ll soon be a forgotten face in a crowd of your competitors without it.

Learn what is being said and what needs to be said. Let’s build our relationship so we can help you build one with your customers. We know you have questions, so ask away in the comments below!

A recent American Banker article discussed opening up the opportunities for employees to engage with customers. I was surprised that this was the position of the article because financial institutions, in general, tend to be very risk adverse. I understand utilizing social media to communicate with customers, but I think there need to be some controls. With that said, I give you my 7 deadly sins of social media for banks.

Lusting for “Likes” without the Bank’s Strategy

Before opening communication on social media for bank employees and customers, it’s important to recognize the need for a social media strategy and why social media matters. Profitability is a major concern in this competitive market, and social media can help financial service institutions differentiate themselves and communicate with customers on a level they’re accustomed to. For a bank to allow employees and customers to interact via social media, there needs to be a clear strategy and metrics to determine whether or not it’s having an impact on deposit accounts, loan applications, improving customer service, and generating revenues.

Failing to Acknowledge Competition (Pride)

With all the potential mergers and acquisitions banks go through, the market has become increasingly competitive. Not looking into the competitive landscape of how to effectively use social media can lead to disaster. There are a few financial services institutions (Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and US Bank) that banks can take a note from on how to implement social media best practices and still remain compliant. Leverage the learning from local credit unions to connect with the local markets is a good place to start.

Not Preparing for the Rage of Employees & Customers

Not all employees or customers will remain happy with the bank so failing to prepare for the wrath of an unhappy employee or an unsatisfied customer may lead to unwanted national media attention. I would highly recommend that banks develop social media policies and procedures to manage employees social media engagement on behalf of the institution. It is also wise to clearly communicate what customers should expect and not expect via social media from the bank. A good example of this is Bank of America which offers guidelines and terms of use specifically for their social media community. These social media guides should help you to limit the risk and plan accordingly for the wrath of unhappy individuals or sensitive information.

Starting with More than Banks can Handle (Gluttony)

With all the social media networks out there, which one makes sense for the business? Opening up every social media platform to employees and customers is simply not a good idea. I would highly recommend that you start with one platform at a time and prioritize which social media platforms make sense based on your strategy. Each social media platform has unique aspects and as an industry that is generally slow to implement change getting a handle on each platform and understanding how customers engage will be critically important, so don’t bite off more than you can chew at one time!

Excessive Promotion of Your Bank and Financial Services

Contrary to popular belief your social media accounts should promote more than your bank, credit union, wealth management, and products or services. I would recommend the social media rule of thirds. ne-third of the social media content should promote the bank, one-third should share industry information and one-third should be based upon interactions and socializing with customers or potential customers. If you’re not following the rule of thirds or something similar you’re simply being greedy and tantalizing your community which will end with customers disengaging.

Being Lazy on the Measurement

The real question is how do you plan to measure the effectiveness that social media is having on growing deposit accounts, loan applications, and improving customer service? For years, I’ve witnessed banks and credit unions being really lazy on measuring the return on investment for their marketing dollars, especially dollars spent on social media marketing! There is a cost associated with having employees engage in this process and there should be a return on that investment. For full visibility into the return on investment, banks need to implement web analytics solutions and track across mobile banking apps, loan or member application process, and customer support tickets. Without doing so, there will be limited visibility into the overall impact that social media is having on the deposit accounts and lending.

Envy of the Competitor’s Social Community without Context

So the competitor has 1 billion likes and a trillion followers but how many members of their social media community interact with the brand, share information, use the specific social network, and are advocates for the company or product/service offerings? Don’t be jealous of the number of metrics without understanding the context of how they were acquired or the level of interaction. You can purchase Twitter followers but are they real followers? For example, you can have 300 followers for with a 50% interaction rate or you can have 1000 with just a 10% interaction rate.

Conclusion

It’s important to the financial service industry to embrace the idea that social media to communicate with customers, members, or investors but it should be aligned with the strategy and add value to the potential customers as well as the organization. The social media strategy and value of social media must be clearly established prior to opening social media communications. The expectations should be clearly defined for customers and employees to put things into perspective and avoid the 7 deadly sins of social media for financial services organizations.