Marketing professionals understand the necessity of numbers. Click-to-open rates, qualified leads, and new customer acquisition are just a few metrics marketers are keen to monitor when launching a new marketing initiative. But measuring the success of any campaign always goes back to one thing: objectives. Your goals should give you a clearer understanding of what you are trying to achieve with a campaign — organic search, paid advertising, or otherwise. And how efficiently you hit your goals directly impacts the scalability of your social media efforts.

Depending on your goals, you’ll be looking at a select few metrics. The most common in marketing for financial institutions is often click-through rates. They almost always top the list because they represent the percentage of consumers who’ve clicked on an ad, opting into a next step. Engagement can also be of interest, as it tracks likes, shares, and comments on a post.

But keeping track of a few metrics doesn’t equate to a sound marketing strategy. In the digital age, financial institutions need to understand how to best use tactics specific to social media marketing. It’s not enough to see what’s working; those data insights must inform new iterations of content to increase reach and nurture leads. This is what creates a successful, scalable social media advertising strategy.

The question then is, which metrics make the most sense to follow for a social media advertising campaign for financial institutions? And how can you best collect data to scale marketing efforts and drive engagement between your financial institution and its customers? Below, we’ll cover how to start choosing the right metrics for your goals and scaling your marketing efforts based on the information available to you.

Choosing the Right Metrics for Your Goals

Your metrics should be your North Star key performance indicators of your goals. Always select these based on what your financial institution wants to achieve. Consider brand awareness: Reach will be a metric to track, as will likes and followers. If you’re running paid ads on social media, you want to capture the number of people who’ve been exposed to your messaging. You also want to track the number of people who’ve engaged with that ad and are looking for updates from your social media page. Make sure to benchmark these metrics regularly, and always consult them prior to running a new campaign.

If customer engagement is the goal for a social media ad campaign, you’ll also be monitoring likes in addition to shares, comments, and messages. Because social media is about being social, these metrics can tell you what resonates with a target audience and can help shape conversations with potential customers going forward.

Should conversion be an overarching goal, your attention would turn to clicks. Clicks show intent on the customer’s part to act. Depending on the content associated with those clicks, you can also understand what products or services are of interest to specific consumers. As with likes, shares, and comments, this information can inform your conversations with these prospects because it tells you what content they might need to receive in order to move further down the sales funnel.

How to Scale Your Marketing With the Right Data

Once you’ve settled on your goals and associated metrics, the task at hand becomes scaling your marketing efforts based on the information available to you. Though tactics will vary from one financial institution to the next, a few strategies almost always prove beneficial:

1. Use social listening to optimize in real time.

With digital interactions growing in importance, financial institutions must take greater care in the messaging and content of each exchange. It’s here where social media can be of real value, and integrating insights gathered from social chatter can help improve the performance of your next paid social media advertising campaign.

Let’s say your institution starts using social listening tools to understand what’s on the mind of prospects. That lets your team get a jump on the competition by posting social media content sooner when a trend emerges — even if it has nothing to do with paid online advertising. Social chatter also can be beneficial for budget planning and allocating spend on specific audiences and marketing activities with the greatest likelihood of engagement. If you were to run a social media ad campaign around 529 planning, for example, it wouldn’t resonate with audiences not intent on going to college.

Capturing and using social media data allows you to target your campaign in those areas of greater interest to consumers. That same information can also help decrease spend in areas where the message isn’t connecting.

2. Use social media data to inform your marketing content.

For many institutions, social media is a marketing dead end because they haven’t considered their audiences’ post-click experience. Your social media should connect to other customer acquisition tools such as landing pages, contact forms, guides, or a recent blog post so these resources can serve as next steps in the customer journey.

Knowing which content is interesting to your audience requires mining your social media data. Specifically, click-through data can tell you more about where to focus future paid advertising campaigns and content development efforts. If customers are spending their time with articles on loan options, down payments, or financial assessments, don’t spend money promoting an e-book on “living well in retirement” to them. Using data will increase the likelihood that your consumers continue through the consumer funnel.

3. Advocate for your paid ad budget with success data.

Justifying a marketing budget, let alone an increase in spend, can leave many marketers in a quandary. Even when you come in with a set of paid social media advertising goals tied to the overarching goals of the institution, buy-in isn’t a guarantee. Without the right metrics, changes to the budget will be difficult to implement.

According to Harvard Business Review, 41% of marketing budgets are based on the previous year, while only 10% are revisited quarterly. Employing the most current information available to shape marketing conversations will allow others in your company to see the value of your proposed ad spend plan, so it’s important to use your social media data judiciously.

4. Invest in marketing tools.

Marketing tools are now becoming a dime a dozen. If you hope to access and use the data available from social media, selection is critical. Choose one designed for your industry, making sure that it can measure organic activities and paid online advertising initiatives.

Denim Social offers a solution. Our platform, services, and analytics features were built specifically with regulated institutions in mind. Real-time analytics are compiled from user data across several social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), offering not only actionable insights on target audiences but a greater understanding of the effectiveness of current social media ad campaigns.

Make messaging or content adjustments immediately if need be — or simply use the analytics to inform the direction of future campaigns. Should the leadership team call for an update, presentation-ready reports are just a few clicks away.

Social media and paid social media advertising campaigns provide an opportunity to get to know potential customers but will be ineffective without the proper strategy. It’s all about capturing and tracking the right data to inform the direction of each interaction along the path to purchase. Your institution will be better off, and so will your customers.

It takes a lot of data to craft a top-tier social media strategy. That’s why Denim Social is here to help. Reach out for your personalized platform demo today.

Before a customer makes a purchase, they go through a decision process called the buying journey. They initially become aware of a brand, learn more about it, evaluate whether it’s an appropriate option for their needs, and finally, make the choice to buy in or not. For marketers in the financial industry, this customer buying journey presents an opportunity to utilize a full-funnel marketing strategy. This approach involves getting the right content and messaging in front of the right customer at the right time, strategically engaging them at each stage of the funnel in the lead up to purchase.

This full-funnel marketing approach is important to the customer buying journey; at each stage, it allows marketers to pique interest, build trust, and encourage action. With customers expecting brands to meet their needs online, this gives financial marketers a unique opportunity to connect with audiences by creating touchpoints along the way. Ultimately, a full-funnel strategy helps financial institutions align marketing efforts with business ROI. Let’s take a look at each stage of the buying process using a full-funnel approach and how social media can help move customers down the funnel.

Create Brand Awareness With Organic Social

The first step of the full-funnel marketing approach is awareness – a customer needs to know a business exists before they can do anything else. Here, customers learn about the brand and what value it provides. Through organic publishing with curated social media content, brands can share targeted messages with wide-reaching audiences.  Creating a robust and interesting content mix that informs, educates, and entertains is the first step in giving a brand a place in a customer’s mind.

Engage Audiences With Paid Advertising

While establishing a consistent organic content routine is the foundation of the full-funnel process, moving customers along the buying journey requires engagement. The best way to make sure that the right customers are viewing content is to target them through paid advertising. Social advertising campaigns allow marketers to multiply their efforts through the power of intelligent targeting and better manage audience behavior. This way, the people that see a paid ad will be the most likely to be interested in it and engage.

Encourage Consideration With Relevant Landing Pages

Any social media post, organic or paid, should lead a customer to a landing page, where they will visit a brand’s website to learn more. For example, a brand can link to a personalized landing page that includes a form to collect customer information in exchange for access to content. It’s mutually beneficial – a customer receives content and a business now has a lead to continue nurturing.

Convert and Retain Customers With Retargeting

Finally, conversion is where the magic happens. At this stage, a customer has the information they need to make a purchase decision. With retargeting, marketers can continue to lead the customer along the buying journey by connecting based on previous engagement. While converting a lead to a customer is an excellent way to track success, the journey doesn’t end there. Conversion is simply another step in the circular journey, as the next step is to grow them into a loyal customer that can then become a valuable resource and reference for the brand.

The overall key to successfully adopting a full-funnel marketing approach is to meet customers where they are, and encourage them to move along the buying process. And that involves addressing them at every stage of the funnel to raise brand awareness, answer questions about the brand, and nurture people through final decision-making. The customer journey and full-funnel approach is ongoing, and can be a great way to better understand how you are meeting business goals and expectations through social media efforts.

Want to be empowered to embrace marketing opportunities at each stage of the customer buying journey? Having the right social media management tools for financial services at your disposal is the first step. Get started with a demo today.

How Denim Social Works With Agency Partners to Create Consistent,Compliant Digital Marketing for Financial Services

Many financial institutions partner with outside agencies to create digital marketing experiences. They hire agencies to do what they do best: build connections to customers in creative ways. Even with this support, however, financial services marketers still have to ensure every piece of digital marketing stays compliant and distribute those pieces to their brand, branch, and employee feeds.

That’s where Denim Social fits into the picture — not as a replacement for agencies you’re already working with, but as a tool to boost their efforts. Financial institutions can turn to Denim Social to work with agency partners to activate more effective, efficient, and compliant social media marketing strategies. When agencies can rely on our compliance and management platform to cover the logistics behind social media marketing, they can focus all of their energy on crafting impactful campaigns. And financial institutions can get more out of their marketing dollars.

Here’s how we can work with agency partners to support financial institutions’ social media strategies and digital marketing efforts:

1. Curated Content for Social Media

So you’ve hired an agency to craft your social media marketing strategy and write attention-grabbing, interest-piquing posts. But not all of your social media posts should be new content. Your brand and employees should also share relevant news or helpful guides from other reliable sources.

You don’t need to task your agency partners with curating existing material Denim Social can free up their time to focus on creating new campaigns with our curated content support.​ Our integration with content curation industry leader UpContent brings relevant, curated articles directly to the Denim Social platform, so marketers or agencies don’t have to be responsible for sourcing every post. That means a lot, especially for financial institutions running social selling campaigns where hundreds or even thousands of employees post brand-related content.

2. Social Media Compliance Tools

The last thing any digital marketing agency wants is to create content that will land your brand in regulatory trouble. But financial institution marketers understand that even one noncompliant post could be a big problem. Denim Social can serve as the compliance checkpoint between the content an agency creates and the public, ensuring no posts go live that shouldn’t.

Our platform offers keyword and phrase filtering to bring any creative copy with potentially noncompliant messaging to your attention — before it goes live. What’s more, automated approval workflows can streamline agencies’ communication with financial institution marketers, compliance teams, and other stakeholders to get the proper sign-off on every post with ease. Marketers also know they must record every social post and interaction in case they get audited by regulatory agencies, but agency partners shouldn’t have to focus their efforts on administrative tasks and record-keeping. That’s where Denim Social can help with automatic archiving tools to get tedious tasks out of the way and let agencies do what they do best. 

3. Paid Social Media Management
Denim Social can work with agencies to deliver the best possible results for paid social media advertising. Our proprietary social media ads manager automatically optimizes ads’ performance and consolidates all social media platforms into one easily accessible dashboard for a one-stop shop.

When agencies can efficiently manage and optimize ads, they can easily scale campaigns at the brand, location, and advisor level. And when agencies can scale further and deliver more results, financial institutions get more bang for their agency buck.

4. Accurate, Data-Driven Results

Financial institution leaders need data to inform the smartest and most impactful decisions when determining where to allocate their marketing budgets. So agencies must provide that data to prove their worth beyond vanity metrics alone. Denim Social can help by clearly connecting social media campaigns to real business results.

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For example, agency partners can easily create landing pages for each campaign using our Landing Page Builder. From there, they can incorporate landing page links into the social media marketing strategy and track analytics to see how many prospects followed the digital journey from social post to landing page to getting in touch to learn more. Essentially, social media can drive conversions — which translates to more profit for your institution. And Denim Social can help provide the analytics agencies need to prove it.

Successful digital marketing for financial services has to cover a lot of bases. It must be relevant, consistent, and compliant. Few financial institutions can do all of that on their own — and even their agency partners can use a hand to create more efficient and effective campaigns. That’s whereDenim Social fits into the mix. We don’t replace agencies: We support them in creating the strongest possible social media marketing strategies for financial institutions.

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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.

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.

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