 My Marketing TrendsKelly Kressner, Marketing Specialist |
With an increasing number of financial institutions trying to find their voice through blogs and social media sites, it’s important to make sure that you don’t lose sight of the purpose behind the initiative.
For example, has your financial institution recently committed to starting a blog? If so, what is the strategy behind it? If you’re not sure, take the time to understand how blogging fits in with your overall goals.
What is it that you hope to achieve?
Expert blogger, Chris Brogan, provides some valuable insights on how to align your blog with corporate goals in his blog entry, “Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It”.
Weaving Brogan’s advice with our own, if your goal is to achieve:
- Customer/Member Loyalty – “Have a ‘customer of the week’ post,” states Brogan. Be sure to include pictures and encourage others to share their story.
- Product/Service Education – Create posts educating customers/members how to best use the financial tools available to them. Blog posts can also include a “Share This” button so that it can be recommended to people in their social network.
- Customer/Member Generation – “Write posts that attempt to move people to a conversion point,” adds Brogan. Have a simple call to action to your upcoming promotion or car sale.
- Brand Awareness – “Write frequent posts that maybe dip into many of these categories, to try and keep people interested,” suggests Brogan. Blogging is a great way to get the word out about your financial institution, so just be sure to provide useful content that will keep people coming back for more!
One of our strategies right now for clients is a combination of Twitter and corporate blog solution for clients that have some big changes in their markets or their credit unions that impact the membership. However, crafting the messages are critical on any social media, so that’s where we come in.
Has this post helped breathe new life into your blog?
Nice article……i found it useful…
Frequently so-called social media experts talk about creating engagement and dialogue. They tell you how important it is to be transparent and authentic. But those aren’t goals in-and-of themselves. Those are merely a means to an end.
The things you’ve outlined above are real, meaningful business objectives. It’s not that you shouldn’t be authentic and transparent while creating dialogue. It’s the difference between “What I Want to Achieve” (business objective) and “How I Will Achieve It” (tactics and style of execution).
I would add “Sell Products & Services” to the list above. Again, some of these Web 2.0 gurus (and Brogan may be among them) will tell you that selling is a no-no in the online social media space, but it can — and has been — done successfully.
Thank you for your comment, Jeffry. I agree that selling products and services is another meaningful business objective that can be added to the list, but I think it needs to be positioned the right way. A blog reader most likely isn’t expecting to be sold to, but if the product or service is integrated properly with relevant content, then it’s definitely possible to be successful selling in the online social media space.