Beyond Content: Creating an Amplification Strategy for Business Impact

Transcription:

 Nick Miller (00:10):

Okay, welcome. Good morning. I'm Nick Miller with Clarity. It's my pleasure to introduce to you this morning a panel focused on called Beyond Content, creating an Amplification Strategy for Business Impact. And what that really means is that it's about creating more leads faster. So over the last several years, the basic game in sales has changed from chase to attract. So one of the questions that bank marketers face is how do you become more attractive? How do you extend the Salesforce's reach so that you are attractive to people who might consider you? How do you increase the consideration rate? How do you become relevant and valuable and interesting in a world where people have so many choices? So I'm happy to introduce Larissa and Glen. Larissa is Vice President of Advertising and Content at draws a blank First Commonwealth Bank. And Glen is the President of the Small Business Company.

(01:11):

And so Larissa is going to share what she and her team have done to extend content and increase lead flow there. And the statistics that go with this, generally speaking, are quite amazing. So if you look down to the bottom of this slide, a 228% increase in lead form submissions and a 21% month on month increase in unique visitors. Those aren't Larissa's numbers specifically, but they are representative of clients that Glen has worked with to increase lead flow. So the idea here is how do you extend the Salesforce, how do you become relevant and interesting? How do you amplify to get that effect? So it's my pleasure to introduce Larissa from First Commonwealth Bank.

Larissa Murphy (01:58):

Good morning and thanks Nick for the intro. So I am glad to be here and I love to start any conversation with who I am as a human because as a digital marketer, I don't actually get to see humans that often. These are my kids. I'm a mom and I live in Indiana, PA. Not to be confused with the state of Indiana. Is anyone familiar with Jimmy Stewart? Any fans? Okay, so Jimmy Stewart's birthplace is in Indiana. We have a Jimmy Stewart Museum and actually all of the red lights and the voice that comes on when you can walk is the Jimmy Stewart impersonator, which is pretty fun. So I'm just going to talk a few minutes today about how B2B content can be leveraged. And I've tried to tailor it knowing there aren't a ton of marketers in the room, but knowing from a product and sales perspective, basically what can you marketing communications teams be doing to make it easier for your sales team once they have the opportunity?

(02:53):

It's been so obvious throughout the conversations the past two days that the relationships are what really matters matter and the opportunity to establish trust. And so we've been using Glen's platform and content to create a halo effect of that so that our bankers have an easier job when it comes time for the conversation. So just a little bit about First Commonwealth. I think we're one of the smaller guys in the room. We just last year crossed the 10 billion mark, which has been super duper fun, lots of new auditing and all that fun stuff. But we're in the three Cs in Ohio, so we're Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. And the two Ps in Pennsylvania, Philly and Pittsburgh, we have 126 branches and really complex. We go from Cincinnati to a county in Pennsylvania called Elk County when we truly are more elk than people. So we have to be able to have a mechanism that supports the differences in those business owners too, because we're very metro and we're very rural.

(03:57):

So strategically I'm focused on getting our brand into people's minds. So I'm responsible for marketing and advertising and for current customers, deepening those existing relationships through marketing as well. So I've been with the bank for 14 years and I am not a banker. My family members think I am. I'm just a marketer who works at a bank and I want to always maintain the mindset of a customer and not a banker. That's been my goal and I'm really an extension of the sales and product team. So if I'm doing my job correctly, it should be easier for your bankers to win an appointment because they would've already heard our name. They would have a positive brand awareness perception of our bank. So when we first started working with Glen, we really knew there was a ton of opportunity to leverage our business bankers in using the content, but it's hard to control the humans, so it's hard to control the bankers activating on all these resources we have for them. So I started focusing on what I can do for them on their behalf, and that's what I want to focus on today.

(05:09):

I've been at the bank through significant growth. So we had five acquisitions in five years and we have to be scalable. And so when I think about all the ways that we're leveraging content, it has to be scalable and it is, and that's been a topic throughout the past day too. And so we also have relationships with Vertical iq. We're starting a relationship with repro. And so all of these tools are going to ladder up to make our bankers smarter like we heard earlier. I'm going to continue to do more to create that umbrella effect. So I just want to talk about our resource center. So all of Glen's content that we use, we centralize in a resource center on our marketing website. And this is a quick view of our ecosystem. So these are all areas that we're using to amplify the content and some of them we try and then we stop using them because they're not super effective and we just have to be okay with that.

(06:07):

So we went through a season of hosting webinars and we use a lot of the resource center content. However, our sales team wasn't being super duper great at following up and connecting with the attendees. And so we just stopped doing it because it wasn't an effective use of everybody's time. So we've had lots of learnings throughout the use of the resource center. It's great to be able to customize our content to whatever our specific business needs are. And so I love voice of the customer data that I hear from our bankers on what our customers are struggling with. And so as everyone knows, fraud is a tremendous area of concern. And so we've been able to develop a lot of fraud content, fraud prevention content from Glen's team and be able to distribute that. So I really can also only do my job when my bankers are telling me what really matters to their customers.

(07:03):

So some fascinating things we've learned through voice of the Customer in addition to fraud is always an issue. We've supported our bankers through small business week and small business Saturday and just tried to elevate our banker's visibility during those weeks. And for small business week, we were targeting very, very, very micro businesses. And we asked a question on a survey, what's the number one thing that keeps you awake at night about your business? And shockingly, almost all of them said they didn't understand how to use social media. And so as a bank, that's not our area of expertise, but we had the resource center that had content specific to effectively using social media for small business, and I was able to start dripping that content to those small business week attendees. So it's been really, really helpful to help us extend our content areas. So the ecosystem that's essentially everywhere I can force a message and it lives on our website.

(08:01):

I'm sure none of you have your websites stats memorized. So this number might not mean much, but every quarter we have about one and a half million site visitors to FC banking. Our website, 70% of those are coming to log into online banking. And so they're not even scrolling past that login bar. So it's hard to get their attention when they're on our website. Battling for that mind share is pretty hard. So with Glen's guidance though, we've positioned our resource center into categories that are attached to the stages of a lifecycle for a business and much like was shared in the last session, voice of customer serving our bank customers. The number one area of opportunity for us identified by our customers is showing them that we understand their business and their challenges. And so my whole time at this conference has been very affirming of we're all dealing with the same challenges because we're all dealing with small businesses.

(08:57):

But that was a great opportunity for us to encourage use of tools like this because it's directly answering a need that was based on the clients. So we have some native advertising called out just highlighting a couple of the things on the slide here. Again, we've tried native advertising with resource center content. The clicks were much lower than when we led with a customer story. And so we stopped leveraging the resource center content in marketing and advertising and instead put on the landing page. And so those are things that your marketing team will be doing is doing again to make sure they're testing performance and using the content where it's going to have the most effect. And so I need to be focused on those clicks, and if I don't get the click, I'm not going to get the lead form filled out to send to the sales team.

(09:51):

So those are a lot of the micro things we get to think about as marketers. So one of our primary strategies, and this might get a little bit technical, but hopefully I can make it connect if you're not in a marketing space, but essentially web traffic and Google's favorability on your website matters a ridiculous amount. And so anyone in the room who is dealing with Google, it's a terrible part of my job. They control everything, but we work really hard to have content that Google will classify as relevant and important and then serve us in search results. So one of the strategies we have is called backlinks. So on the screen are two places where other third party websites have chosen to backlink to our resource center. And so that's what the search engines want to see. So they're not going to link to my product pages, they're going to link to long form educational content where their site visitors will learn something. The resource center has been a huge part of that backlink strategy. It's earned us the most out of all of the content, all the content we try to get other sites to link to, we have the most links pointing to our resource center.

(11:13):

There's a stat of a domain rating. So again, basically it is Google, like your URL or not is a really important number. And so our ad agency works hard to find other sites that have really high domain ratings and then essentially pitch our content to them and try to get them to backlink to us. And the resource center content is winning those opportunities far more than any of our product pages. We talk a lot about trust over the past few days and being able to appear higher in Google searches does help to establish your trust and your credibility. And just to help you connect this as a sales leader or a product manager, if your brand isn't visible online, it's going to make it harder for your bankers to win opportunities. So we come up against a battle specifically in Columbus where we recently had a really nice win and the business owner said to our commercial banker, you're the best bank I've never heard of.

(12:14):

And as a marketer, I died inside quite a bit, but we've only been in Columbus for five years, so we have time. But things like these micro strategies of building your online presence with Google that just helps to kind of chip away at your brand awareness and visibility. So for every vendor who's talked the past couple of days, I've just had my laptop pulled up and Googled their name and I make a whole lot of assumptions on how soon the vendors came up on Google, and that's how consumers think too. So our resource center has really helped us to earn credibility with Google.

(12:53):

So we also use the resource center to push our content to our current customers to help deepen relationships. So two of those mechanisms are email marketing on the screen are examples of email marketing that we've deployed to our current customers. So the first is an internal tool our bankers can use. So I make templates, they're all compliant. The banker can go in and send them to people, they're not used very much. And so we just are doing it automatically. And so through our email marketing platform, we're able to send on behalf of our bankers. So they give me their COI list, we ingest that into our marketing platform, and then I'm taking the resource center content, leveraging that and sending on behalf of our banker again to help establish and build that credibility with their audience. It's really a tool that can help to fill that gap that we identified in the survey of us really needing to understand our banker's challenges.

(13:52):

Our small business book of business is loaded into our email platform too. And so that's additional work that a marketing team can be doing on your behalf to be pushing that content in front of the existing business customers. I work really closely with our head of commercial banking and every month I say, what do you need this content to be? What are people talking about? What topics do we need to raise? And then we deploy that on their behalf. It's just a really nice way again, to maintain within the marketing control. And all of this should make the banker's jobs easier because they'll have some brand recognition when they're talking to people and it's removing something off of their plate when really we know their sweet spot is winning the relationship and closing the deals. And so one thing I want to show, let's see, I might be on the next slide, is samples of how we have used this in digital advertising like I mentioned before. So again, fraud is such a good thing to lead within marketing because everyone needs to learn something about it. And again, it's making some really nice opportunities for us to earn our clicks and we need to make sure that we're just continuing to deliver relevant content. And so when we're delivering things in the paid space, we can learn a whole lot about whether or not it's relevant or not. And so if people are clicking on it or not, and then we can tailor content based on that.

(15:24):

So social media, which is a little bit of a monster on its own. I think we all know there's a ton of opportunity with social media and just depending on your bankers, some are super comfortable with it, some are not comfortable with it at all. But the resource center has really allowed us to deploy content on the bank owned social media channels and then that's easier for the bankers to share that information because it's already compliant. And I'm sure everyone's social media policies at your company is vary, but bankers are very cautious. They know they can't put a business guarantee in writing. And so by sharing our educational content, it's not really opening them up to any risk, but it's a way that they can be establishing themselves on their social channels as experts in their area and again, show the breadth of information that they have at their fingertips as someone's business banker.

(16:18):

So we've leveraged the content in both organic and paid social media and yeah, it's just been a great opportunity for bankers to be able to share. So the content, as you can see on the screen, it's not just about banking and that's what we've been hearing our whole conference. They need consultation, they need help just understanding whether it's their industry or social media. We also can, we have some tools that allow us to post on behalf of the bankers. And so if that's something you would want to talk to your marketing team about, just don't tell them I said that because they'll probably hate me for it. But there are opportunities for the marketing teams to use platforms that allow me to post on behalf of business bankers. And so again, it's me doing something once that is then going out to 30 different bankers and it really helps with scalability and again, takes it off of their plate because their plate is super full.

(17:16):

We also take the opportunity biweekly. I present to new managers and just tell them how we're using social media. I walk them through the resource center because ideally we do want them to know the resource center exists. We want them to be using it along with the tools and vertical IQ to be able to share with prospects and current customers. But again, as much as we can be doing to automatically force a lot of that content is just going to make their jobs a lot easier. So the last thing I wanted to show is really kind of like a micro campaign. So maybe all of your marketing teams are working on this, but October is cybersecurity awareness month. And so this is just a sampling of the content we've developed for the month to be delivering on social through email marketing and on our website using the resource center articles as the heart of that content.

(18:14):

It's allowed us to have a multichannel approach. And one of the first things I'm going to do when I get back to my office tomorrow is send that email in the middle to our small business book of business and just continue to show what we're doing to help them protect their business from fraud. So we really want to have some practical takeaways before I turn it over to Glen for a few minutes. And whether these are applicable to you or other members on your team, just focusing on practical business content. So the fraud is a great example. Everyone needs to be educated on that because all being exposed to fraudsters, they're kind of the worst. And so making sure that that's type of content you have available, identifying those high traffic partners and so anything to get your marketing website more visible with the search engines and then amplifying the content in business as usual. So your marketing team is already doing all of these things. They're already working on the search engine optimization, they're doing digital ads, but use the resource center content to feature in that usual course of business that they're focused on. That's all I had and I want to turn it over to Glen for a few more minutes.

Glen Senior (19:43):

Thank you. So Larissa shared some photos of her kids. Her kids are quite cute. This is my family. I've got four daughters and they're scary, which is why I'm here. And they're in New Zealand. And yes, Phoebe is due today. So I'm in real trouble. Just to let you know, I wanted to share today some things that other banks are doing in other countries, and it kind of ties in with what Larissa was saying around how you get bankers to engage and how do you scale and how do you get self-served content. It links in with what Amy was saying from td businesses are under stress and pressure with a whole bunch of topics. And so I think it's interesting just to see what some other organizations are doing from other parts of the world. So the first one is a New Zealand bank. This is ASB.

(20:43):

So every month we create a two page doc and we go through everything that's happened in the last month from the economy, interest rates changed, is our reserve bank or your federal bank going to change? We actually also track American data in case that impacts our economy. We look at any campaigns coming up. So weirdly we have cybersecurity week in October as well, must be a thing, any product updates. And then we also at the end link to content that we have inside the ASB site. So it makes the bankers really smart with in a minute or two they can read all this information that we've summarized and they can start to talk to their customers about things they may not A know, or B, they'll have to scroll through hours and hours of the internet to find.

(21:35):

Second example is this is HSBC, this is in Canada, although they're being bought out by RBC. So they wanted their bankers to actually have one-on-one conversations with their customers. And we identified two parts. So if a banker has a hundred customers, pretty much guess that the top 10 are the growth, the looking to either expand their business, they need capital and they're the nice people to talk to. And then there'll be 10 at the bottom who are going vast under financial stress and they are also a potential issue or risk. And the 80 in the middle, they tend to think, well as long as they pay their fees and fine. So we created a seminar program and this is around surviving a cash shortage PowerPoint script, workbook and tools. And the bankers delivered these workshops, one-on-one to the customers that they identified while they're at risk or they wanted or through a growth phase, a really interesting way of using content. And that's a turnkey situation.

(22:47):

Then we fly over to England. And so NatWest, they are one of the major banks in the uk. They have an accelerator program. It's a 19 regions around the uk and they pick a topic and weirdly, they'd never done finance and funding, which sounds strange to me, but so we created this workshop which they deliver through their facilitators, and it's on one day, so it's announced the media picks it up, it's a huge campaign for the bank, and they run these physical workshops throughout the country on a particular topic. And then each person that comes, each customer that comes to that workshop gets one-on-one advice from that advisor, there's a massive big campaign and they punch out. Again, another way of amplifying content. And another really interesting way of amplifying content is through a vertical. Amy, again, TD talked about healthcare as a vertical. This is Princess Kate or Catherine.

(23:48):

She's the patron of healthcare or childcare, sorry, in the uk. And after COVID, people started working from home and the childcare industry knew all the nurseries and kindergartens. They started going broke because people started looking after their kids at home rather than putting 'em into nurseries. And the government had a major problem with funding. So they announced in the budget they're going to increase the funding for childcare support for families. You get the hero or the champion, which was Kate, and she launched this program with government. And then NatWest is the third part of the triangle, came in and actually we created this toolkit for childcare center owners to run. So you've got government champion and then the bank coming in with this content piece. It's a really powerful way of amplifying that content.

(24:40):

I'm not sure if you should use Meghan Markle though. I wonder if you've married the wrong guy. But anyway, the royal family name is Windsor and they made that up because their real name is s Coberg and Goer because Victoria married a German, but in World War I, the bombers were bombing Germany and they used the Gothe plane, not a good look. So some bright guy thought Windsor's a lovely place, they've got a castle. So they changed the name to Windsor. There you go. If you're in a quiz, it's a bit of a quiz tip. The next example is RBC.

(25:22):

They've actually created a separate brand called Owner. And with owner you can register a company, you can incorporate, there's business planning tools. There's a whole bunch of information around starting and running your business. And so they've kind of kept it at arms length. But if you go to the owner site and scroll right down the bottom, owned by RBC. So their amplification strategy is to use a different brand. Again, a really interesting take on how you can scale the content that actually comes from RBC, but it looks like it's from a different organization. Just a couple of things to finish. So a couple of slides. One that Nick and one that Larissa showed. So with the stats, you do need to track, as Larissa mentioned, if it doesn't work, try something else. If it doesn't work, then you need to rejig it, but you don't want to track everything.

(26:17):

So my advice would be to pick two or three of these things, whether it's lead generation, whether it's sales team, getting actual work, whether it's traffic, and make sure you measure them, everything you do, and then you can kind of justify the investment in content and justify the time because it's not as easy as Larissa made out. That is. It takes, you can't just throw the content up and then go to the next task. You do need to work it. The last, I've just changed the slide around. So if you remember the first slide had the small business resource center in the middle and all the arrows went out. So using content through your ecosystem. So what should happen is that once that works and you've got a spinning, then the leads and the queries actually come back into your bank or credit union. So you spread the content out through your ecosystem and then you tag it and then you have calls to action and then they should then obviously come back into you as leads. And that's the content strategy that we work with.

(27:26):

Quick thing to finish, we're also in the exhibition area, but this is a little checklist that we said we'd have for this workshop. David Copperfield, the magician, he's 68. There's some magic on his face I can tell. But just like David Copperfield, if you do come and see us, some of these have actually got a $25 trip inside them. It's magic. I dunno how they happened, but please, if you would like, it's a genuine offer for me to sit down virtually and talk about how to combine or how to construct a content strategy with your particular needs, come and see me. I'm more than happy to help. It won't cost you anything. Thanks for your time. Thanks Linda. Speak. Thanks Nick.

 Nick Miller (28:13):

Thank you Glen. We have a couple of minutes for questions. I'll just summarize by saying that the main points from this were that there's a digital play, which is what Larissa described that she does at First Commonwealth. She's pushing content out strategically. And then what Glen really focused on was how do you use content through your banker channel? How do you make them look smart? How do you put them in a position to provide guidance? How do you put them in a position to be really helpful and valuable to a client? So two elements here. One, to create leads and then the second to provide value when you get that opportunity. So we have a minute and 27 seconds left at this point. Does anybody have any questions or want to discuss anything that we've discussed so far? Roger.

Audience Member 1 (28:57):

How do you measure the success of your marketing? Sorry? How do you measure the success of your marketing at the bank?

 Nick Miller (29:05):

I like the deep voice for the second version. That was much better.

Larissa Murphy (29:11):

Yeah, so anytime we use the content resource center, do you mean or dis? Yeah, so a lot of our key performance indicator, KPI or the majority of our digital media, which would include when we drive to the resource center. At this stage in our business, it's primarily web visits. So we don't have online origination yet for businesses, for deposits or loans. And so that B2B journey and how we measure the success is very different than the consumer side. Consumer I could track, they clicked on this ad and then they lead an application for a checking account. I don't have that journey yet. And so we're measuring based on driving traffic to the website. And then it's still secondary at this point is filling out the lead forms. We are continuing to mature that and then eventually and as we launch some things in 2025, we'll be measured on driving actual account openings online.

 Nick Miller (30:12):

Any other questions? Silence came. The stern reply. Alright, well thank you very much. It's been enjoyed to present. Thank you.