Is Your Financial Institution Missing These Engagement Opportunities?
Financial institutions have a unique opportunity to build lasting relationships with their customers by engaging them during significant life milestones. However, many banks and credit unions are missing out on these crucial touch points, leaving customers feeling unsupported during pivotal moments in their financial journeys. Here’s how financial institutions can connect with their customers and meet them where they are in their financial journey.
Life Milestone: Graduating College
The transition from college to the professional world marks the beginning of a new chapter in a young adult’s life. Financial institutions can seize this opportunity to engage with recent graduates by offering products and services that cater to their unique needs. This includes student loan refinancing options and budgeting tools. By helping graduates manage their finances effectively, banks can establish themselves as trusted partners in their customers’ financial journeys.
Life Milestone: Home Buying
One of the most significant financial decisions a person can make is buying a home. Many financial institutions fail to provide personalized guidance and support during this process. By offering tailored mortgage advice and debt repayment tools, banks can help customers navigate the complexities of home buying. This is also an ideal time to assist customers in creating emergency savings for unforeseen home repairs or job loss, ensuring they are financially prepared for any situation.
Life Milestone: Small Business Ownership
Entrepreneurs and small business owners face numerous challenges, from securing funding to managing cash flow. Financial institutions can support these customers by offering specialized business accounts and advisory services. Providing resources such as business planning workshops, networking events, and access to industry experts can empower small business owners to succeed. Additionally, banks can help these customers learn how to invest their profits wisely and create emergency savings for unexpected business expenses.
Life Milestone: Starting a Family
Welcoming a new family member is another significant milestone that comes with its own set of financial challenges and opportunities. Financial institutions can engage with customers by offering tailored financial planning services, such as budgeting for childcare expenses, saving for education, and managing household finances. By providing support and resources during this life stage, banks can help families build a secure financial foundation and foster long-term loyalty.
By proactively engaging customers during key milestones and addressing their ongoing financial needs, financial institutions can foster deeper connections and enhance customer loyalty. To help financial institutions better serve their customers, everfi Achieve offers a comprehensive suite of financial education resources. From personalized learning modules to interactive financial planning tools, banks and credit unions can empower customers to take control of their financial futures.
For example, by sharing live webinars on debt consolidation and savings, banks can offer value to customers at only a minor cost to themselves, while driving customer loyalty and retention. Similarly, by responding to social media chat as customer service, with employees available to answer questions during business hours, banks can facilitate banking through social media and can cultivate stronger relationships at a decreased cost. Social media marketing for banks moves the primary focus to the consumer, not your product, giving you the opportunity to see who they are and why they interact with you before a need arises, which will help you to improve relationships and future targeting.
2. Generating Leads With Social Media Marketing
In his book, “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk recommends that less than ¼ of all content posted on social media be promotional. But, at least a small portion of your efforts should be dedicated to self-promotion, including building awareness for products, offers, and selling value. The trick is that because it is social media, your post has to offer direct value to the reader. 63% of mass affluent consumers are actively looking at financial solutions (not necessarily banks) on social media and failing to take the opportunity to make a pitch is a missed opportunity.
How can you connect social media and banking? Use tools like limited-time offers, financial education, special rates, introductions, and personalized solutions through chatbots to create a sense of exclusivity and personalization – which will help you market without tarnishing your relationship with the consumer.
3. Sharing Data and Value
While social media marketing for banks often involves using rather than sharing data, social media gives you new data sources, new insights, and new ways to connect with consumers. One of those ways is to offer industry insights and valuable information in a way that helps you to build trust. Integrate social media into your bank’s marketing strategy by breaking basic finance tips into palatable and shareable Facebook videos or Instagram photos, creating overviews of market shifts, creating helpful content delineating loan options, or otherwise adding value to the customer’s experience to help you to grow while building trust.
More importantly, while these tools help you to build customer loyalty, sound social media marketing strategies for banks can also help you to increase product awareness and drive sales A series of live videos combined with a web page and article content on building a savings account with a savings challenge will drive increased savings accounts at your bank, providing your social media engagement is good.
4. Using Emotional Targeting
One of the most common reasons customers switch banks isn’t rates, it’s emotions. While that’s often anger or irritation regarding customer service, being able to connect with consumer’s emotions gives you an advantage over your competitors. Connect with consumers and driving home the fact that you are there for them when things go right and when they go wrong will build trust.
Creating emotional connections to finance through social media marketing is simple, mostly because there are often emotional reasons behind financial decisions. For example, you can connect loans and mortgages to positive events like buying a new car or home, and savings accounts to family and children, retirement, or college.
Social media also allows you to target your ads and posts more specifically. For example, Facebook and Instagram ads allow you to target based on location, age, gender, career, education, and interests, allowing you to greatly fine-tune what you are saying to the audience who most needs to hear it. How can social media marketing strategies for banks make the most of this? By highlighting periods when products are most popular (tuition loans in August-September, new car loans in January-April), you can create specific campaigns targeted at the people most likely to need them, leveraging the emotional aspects of the product rather than the product itself.
5. Don’t Forget Omnichannel
Most customers interact with your bank through multiple channels, social network banking is one out of many channels. Customers should have the same experience, level of customer service, and even customer service representatives across channels. If you link a product to an offer on Facebook, it should go to precisely that product, not a landing page. By ensuring a consistent, professional, and relevant experience across every channel, you ensure that your customer sees your brand as a personality and one that they can rely on.
Social media is a valuable marketing tool for banks, who can use it to drive customer relationships, building tangible and intangible value. Social media marketing for banks is still evolving, but it is helping banks to be more personal, to build closer relationships with customers, and to offer more targeted products and services than ever before.