No, this isn’t a pandemic-related question; however, the current climate has underscored the importance of social media marketing for retail banks. When it comes to social media marketing, inactive or non-existent social media accounts are synonymous with boarded up windows on a brand that is actually open for business.
Now more than ever, as virtual exchanges become increasingly important, a bank’s online presence is crucial. Placing a premium on social media management is a strategy that will help banks not only survive the challenges presented by COVID-19, but actually thrive in spite of them. Read: banks cannot afford not to prioritize social media management. As Lynn Saladini, our Chief Relationship Officer, explains, active social media channels are as important to retail banks now as a website was in 1998.
The trick is understanding why and how social media management can support your business and represent the best of your brand.
Did You Google It?
How many times have you asked or been asked this question?
Google is the deciding factor of whether consumers choose a product or service over another. Of course, when we say Google, what we really mean are Google reviews. Every day, real people take to the internet to give their two cents (or more) about a company’s product or service.
Keep in mind Mark Zuckerberg’s advice: “People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.”
Although a retail bank cannot control what a customer says about it online, if its team is savvy about social media marketing they can take back a considerable amount of control.
Prioritizing online reputation management is the best way to make an impact, convert more customers and establish your brand as a trustworthy industry authority.
Box Out Your Competitors
By box out, we mean stock your toolbox with the essentials of social media marketing to ensure your success. You’ll need the right tools, to manage the following:
- Social media listening — offers valuable consumer insights into your brand, revealing how customers feel when doing business with you. Pro-tip: tune in to Passion Intensity, the sliding scale of consumer response, ranging from like or love, indifference to hate.
- Social media monitoring — this is the continued consideration of your brand’s social media presence, which establishes the baseline of your social media strategy. Essentially, this informs the story consumers tell about your brand.
- Social media intelligence — represents an analysis of your competitors and the actions they take, which should give you greater insight into the market and what your audience really wants. The real value of social media intelligence comes from parsing facts from fiction. By way of illustration…
… when most people think of the most popular or “best” credit card companies, they tend to associate American Express, Visa or Mastercard as top of the class. However, recent research shows that Discover is the competitor to emulate, in part, because of its very human and approachable (non-product pushing) response to COVID-19.
You can discover more about your own brand from a consumer perspective by doing a Google search on yourself. From there, you’ll want to tackle both active and passive opportunities to better craft your brand’s narrative.
An active opportunity is represented by what you intentionally publish on your digital presence. Passive opportunities invite your response to what’s being said about your brand. Responding to both positive and negative reviews is important and requires the above-listed tools to do so in a polished and productive manner.
Should you find yourself confronted by someone on your team who continues to doubt the importance of social media marketing, remind them that your brand is not your logo or colors. Your brand is what your customer says it is.
Our team at ath Power Consulting can support your social media marketing with our solutions custom tailored to your unique needs and goals. Get special access to Lynn Saladini’s social media monitoring presentation here.