Quick Tip: Social Media Measurement Tools

Think you can't measure social media marketing? Think again. Here are some quick ways to keep an eye on your social marketing efforts...

Google Analytics

-Check the "referring sources page" to see how much traffic was generated by the social media sites you've been active in.-Look at overall traffic to website during same time period of your efforts. If you have a sign up/email form, look for lead spikes during time period of your effort.

Google Alerts

-Set alert for your name, your company name, and keywords in your content. You'll get notified via Alert if content/your messagegets picked up and goes viral.

Backlink Checkers

-Google Webmaster Tools: Check back links going to site during same time period of your effort.-Link Popularity Check: Link popularity analysis is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your website's online awareness.

Check out free backlink checker tools from iwebtool.com and backlinkwatch.com.

Reg E Realities

Reg E ... Everyone's in a panic ... it's the End of fee income as we know it ... all Eyes are on Marketing to make it better.

Sounds like the Y2K scare a bit, huh? My bet is it's probably as credible.

The reality is that Reg E will effect less than 50% of your existing NSF income (debit and ATM only). And the 50% that's at stake, is driven by about 12% of your customer-base.

The trick is to target those heavy overdraft users and make sure they opt-in.

From a communication stand-point you need to:

• Educate: Stick to the basics of: what an overdraft is and what will be different on Aug. 15 than today.
• Motivate: The customer can make an informed decision if you provide examples of how fees will apply and when a card will be declined. Do they want the chance to buy a $30 cup of coffee, or do they want their card declined in the busy grocery line?
• Get a Response: Make it easy. Include a form with self-address and indicia in your customer letter. Make sure your front line staff know your heavy users and are pushing for a response in the branch and when the customer calls in. In the last 2 weeks, divide your heavy user list between your personal bankers and have them make outbound calls (provide a script).

The more heavy-users you can get to opt-in during the next 3 months, the less impact this reg. will have on your institutions bottom line. Come January 1, we'll all look back and wonder what the big hoopla was all about.

Has your institution maximized it's investment in an MCIF?

Does your institution have a MCIF?

More importantly, if so, is your institution getting the maximum return from it's investment in an MCIF?

So often, the individual that championed the initiative to select an MCIF vendor and bring the technology in-house moves on to find a "new challenge." When this happens, it is not uncommon for the MCIF to set idle as no one else in the organization "steps up" and assumes responsibility for making the MCIF an integral part of the organizations marketing strategy. Consequently, the data doesn't get refreshed on a timely basis, management forgets why the investment was made in the first place, and finally, the system that houses the MCIF sits off in a corner someplace in the office "collecting dust."

If this has happened in your organization, the organization is missing out on a great opportunity to retain and strengthen existing customer relationships!

Let's assume you have an MCIF and it is being updated in a timely manner and you are using it to retain and strengthen existing relationships.

Have you taken the next step to maximize your investment in an MCIF?

Retaining customers and strengthening relationships is only "half the equation." In order for your organization to grow and prosper, you need to bring in new households.

Appending a segmentation code to every household in your database allows you to better understand the type of customer your institution serves. It allows you to see the types of products that they have a propensity to purchase, the channel they use to purchase those products, balances they are likely to bring when the product is purchased, etc.

Utilizing segmentation also allows your organization to find prospects that look like your most profitable customers, provides information on the best product to offer to initiate the new relationship, tells you the best media to reach out to the prospects, etc.

Bottom line - if you have an MCIF and aren't using it, get started. If you are currently using your MCIF to retain and strengthen relationships, but haven't appended a segmentation scheme, get started.

The April "Brown Bag" webinar was on "Segmenting Your Market." If you were unable to attend this session, contact Bruce Clapp at MarketMatch and he can email you the presentation complete with the Q & A that took place.

Have a great week/weekend!

Mike Witsken

Train Your Bankers to Talk to Gen Yers

Since the financial meltdown on Wall Street began in 2008, I have believed that we all, as bankers, could have done a better job of advising our customers in sound financial principles.
We talk about "selling" to our customers, and we measure our "cross-sell" ratios, and these things can be good objectives. But has your bank intitiated a training program for your front line people about how to advise your customers on basic financial topics? Shouldn't this be part of banking's "customer service" concept?

Today, I would like to talk about the new, young Generation Y group. These may be individuals just starting out on their own, or young married couples just starting a new life together. Their financial needs are different than other generations. Do you train your staff in how to talk to them?

For example, Gen Y looks at the world differently since they have grown up in the information age and are incredibly knowledgable and comfortable with things like the internet, computers, online anything, cell phones with many functions, and instant access to anything they want.

Yet they still need basic financial lessons. How many young people today get good financial literacy at home or at school? Not many. So, a couple of basic lessons we could help them with would be saving and managing their credit score.

I teach lots of bankers about cross-selling, but I always talk about how to really help customers with the financial needs they have based on their life cycle stage. Basic financial needs really are predictable based on where you are in your life stage... For example, these Gen Y'ers could be offered a suggestion like: "We recommend to our customers to save 10% of your take-home pay... is that something that we could help you get started with?"

Or how about "Managing your credit score is really important in today's world... have you established any credit in your name yet? How has that gone? I can share some ideas with you about managing your banking that will help protect a good credit score or help you improve a weaker one. Would you be interested?

In our Winning Team Training program, we then go into detail and examples of how to have these conversations, what options to offer, how to continue to connect with this generation in selling the related products and services, like online banking, mobile banking, and more. There is a "right" way to talk to them that lets them know you "know who you are talking to". It can make a huge difference in their loyalty to you and a huge difference in their financial lives....

After all is said and done, bankers can be the unsung heroes to our customers, if we are well-trained, if we take opportunities to be financial advisors, and if we are alert to each major group of customers and their life cycle financial needs.

I will discuss more about the "Charlie's" next time. Those families with children and how their financial needs are different and how we should be helping them.

Until then, think about your financial institution's sales training programs... are you addressing the real financial issues your customers are concerned about or just training to "sell"?

Email me your concerns or issues at slovejoy@marketmatch.com.
Happy Tuesday!
Sharon

The Basic Idea of Return on Investment

As I wrote earlier, return on investment has become the "gold standard" for measuring the performance of marketing.  Return on investment is now used to measure both the performance of the overall marketing function and the performance of individual marketing activities and programs.

In addition to measuring past performance, marketers are using ROI estimates and forecasts to make decisions about future marketing programs and to allocate marketing budgets.  Therefore, ROI is playing a significant role in determining how marketing wll be done.

The basic idea of ROI is easy to understand.  Investopedia.com defines return on investment as:  "A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of investments.  To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the return is expressed as a percentage or a ratio."

The basic ROI formula is:

ROI = (Gain from Investment-Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment

For example, suppose that you purchase 100 shares of stock for $10 per share.  One year later, you sell the stock for $11 per share.  Your annual ROI for this investment would be 10%, calculated as follows:

ROI = ($1,100 - $1,000) / $1,000
           $100 / $1,000
           10%

ROI has been used to measure the performance of companies and business units for over eighty years.  ROI estimates have also been used to evaluate major capital investments for decades.  More recently, ROI has been used to measure the benefits provided by everything from process improvement projects to employee training programs.  All things considered, ROI (or one of the variations of ROI) has become the most prevalent measure of financial performance used in business today.

It's only natural, therefore, to use ROI to evaluate the performance of marketing activities and programs.  CEO's and CFO's are rightfully demanding proof that their "investments" in marketing are producing real financial benefits, and they view ROI as a proven method for measuring those benefits.

So, if you're a marketer today, you need to be ready to measure and/or estimate the ROI of your activities and programs, or you need to be prepared to show why a different metric should be used in lieu of ROI.

In my next post, I'll take a closer look at the "return" component of the ROI formula and explore some of the issues that arise when ROI is used to measure marketing.

Its May...

Can you believe it? Its May!

May marks the true Spring into Summer connection.  The spring weather is heating up (shout out to our friends in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee to be safe!!) and the weather can be unpredictable.  You know that summer is coming and we just have to be patient and wait for it.

However, you SHOULD NOT be patient and wait for customers to heat up, be predictable, and come to you.  With the Move Your Money action is full force...even it is not visibly active in your market...it IS in your market!  People are reconsidering their relationships and you have to put yourself on the "radar screen" of your marketplace.

Three tactical actions for you to do THIS WEEK:

1. Segment your top customers into three categories (in person, phone, mail) of contact you should implement in May and reach out to each!
2. Provide a list to each banking office of 100 prospective new HHs
3. Review your progress toward your 12/31 organizational goals

Take inventory of your position and make the small changes needed to realign your progress with the goals, in anticipation of your June 30 mid-year review.

The key?  Plan, review, plan, review...and implement in each interim step.  Remember, the key is the alignment between the plan and implementation with the results!

Cheers!

Bruce

The Blurring of the Line between Marketing and Publicity

The global economic crisis has made almost every industry reexamine its business practices in an effort to reduce costs, find efficiencies and tap new sources of revenue. A sector with perhaps some of the most significant changes has been media outlets. Television stations are now requiring reporters to also function as their own cameramen and video editors. Some stations are heavily investing in online media as their revenues from broadcast commercial sales shrink (Pepsi decided not to advertise during the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years). Print media outlets are rapidly shifting content and focus to online domains, and if they already had robust online presences, some like the Washington Post are looking into other sources of advertising revenue, such as developing iPhone applications. Reviewers and culture writers are seemingly a dying breed as news outlets consolidate resources and rerun content from other providers (the Los Angeles Times regularly runs articles from its Tribune sister in Chicago), including more and more from user generated sites.

The new trend seems to be a blurring of the line between publicity and marketing. The longstanding tradition of having an impenetrable fortress between advertising and editorial at major news outlets seems to be waning. It used to be that the most an advertiser could do to help push a story was to ask their ad rep to get a press release on the right desk, however I am starting to see more and more advertising proposals that include guaranteed opportunities for press coverage and interviews. Media outlets are starting to regard press coverage as added value to advertising contracts designed to encourage a higher advertising spend. In the most extreme circumstances, there are now significant media sources that have become exclusively pay to play—meaning that the only way to secure editorial coverage is by signing an advertising contract. A recent article highlighted this trend in Seattle where arts organizations have banded together to purchase editorial time on a television station, however this isn’t an infomercial or advertorial, it simply is editorial coverage that is bought and paid for.

My concerns about this new model:

• Is there a role for an impartial voice? One of the reasons that news outlets are trusted is that they are (mostly) viewed as being impartial. Will editorial features ever have the same power that had in the past if the readership realizes that the coverage has been purchased? How can you have an impartial review if the reviewer works for a publication that is selling editorial opportunities?



• Is there a role for small organizations? Many small organizations live on earned editorial coverage as they do not have an advertising budget. As news outlets start to allow their editorial coverage to be influenced by advertising spends, what happens to the small organizations that have no money to spend?



• Is there a role for a publicist? Many publicists I talk to are enraged about this new trend. Imagine that you are a publicist, and have been pitching an outlet for months and months with no success only to find out that the publication is pay to play. In a manner of minutes, the marketing director places an advertisement and all of a sudden editorial opportunities are available. What then becomes the role of a publicist?