Carpe Diem

Is it possible?  Is there a light at the end of the recession tunnel?  

A slew of economic reports released last week may be hinting at some possible good news.  Out of 12 reports released last week, 7 were better than expected and 2 met expectations.  And investors responded by sending the stock market to a healthy gain last week.

Heck, I watched the news last night and hardly saw anything bad about bankers!!!

The point is that as the economy begins to turn a corner, so will the public eye and focus.  As your community's hometown financial institution, have you done everything you can to capitalize on the mistrust and negative perceptions of the larger banks?

Soon J-Lo or A-Rod or some other far too wealthy person who doesn't use their whole name will do something stupid and, as Americans, we'll focus on the next shiny object that comes along.  People will forget that big banks "are bad," and then the large banks with their enormous marketing budgets will begin to gobble up market share again.

Seize the day, fellow community bankers and credit unioners!  Don't wait.  Get your piece of the market share pie while we still have a competitive advantage!

Happy Trails,

Eric

Is Social Networking A Waste Of Time?

My friend and colleague, copywriting expert, Bob Bly, has an intersting discussion about social media going on on his blog. I chimmed in and it occured to me to comment about this topic on my own blog as well.

To check out the full article and discussion, visit: http://bly.com/blog/

However, in a nutshell, one of the commenters mentioned that "...by a direct response marketer’s metrics, social media is a waste of time..." and "...social networking is simply real world interpersonal networking digitized. You wouldn’t try to apply direct marketing practices to a business networking event, and you wouldn’t expect to launch a marketing campaign with a “Chamber of Commerce Business Mixer Strategy...”

Good, valid points, however, I disagree somewhat. And here's why:

Social media, to me, is a hybrid between relationship/network marketing and direct marketing.

It’s relationship marketing if you know how to be a strategic thinker as well as be creative with your marketing messages. In other words, what to say and where to say it. Targeting is key. You have to look at each social media website to see if it, and it's users, are the right fit for your marketing message and business. Then, you need to craft your message accordignly. And that requires good creative, copywriting skills. (I've had tremendous success with LinkedIn, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon. But not so much with Facebook. For my business, Facebook users are not necessarily the decision makers I want to get in front of to help build my consulting business. However, I still promote my website on Facebook. I get to enjoy ancillary traffic and the backlink (SEO) from a top ranked website. But I don't count on real, solid leads.)

It’s direct response as you can measure results. Granted, it’s not as cut and dry as some other online marketing methods, like email. Where deliverability, clicks, opens, sales, and ROI is concrete. But, for me (and my business), I can specifically track any leads or sales I get back to specific social media platforms. And I can measure traffic to my website via Google Analytics from those same sites. As a core direct marketer, I don't waste my time on something I can't tie a metric to.

What do you think?

FYI, see these other two related articles I wrote on social media:
http://musclemarketing.blogspot.com/2009_03_15_archive.html
http://www.precisionmarketingmedia.com/publishers.html (article in “Online Marketing” section on “Measuring Social Media”).

Video, SEO and the Top Sites to Be On...

Many marketers are uploading video to YouTube, but they reaaaaallllyyy don't know how to exactly leverage this platform.

First, let's reiterate that video is content. And content should be leveraged and syndicated. This will help (as I wrote in my "SONAR" post) with backlinks, SEO, traffic generation, lead generation and monetization, and buzz.

The best video sharing sites to upload your videos to are:
YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, Blip.tv and DailyMotion.

These sites are extremely popular and get the most traffic/visitors.

Also, don't forget you can also syndicate your video content through RSS (if you have RSS on your website).

OK, some quick tips on optimal video for SEO:

1) Clips should be less than 5 minutes (1-3 min.), relevant, benefit oriented and interesting for the users. They could also be teaser snipets that link to a fuller-length video that is housed on your website.

2) Make sure your video has a powerful, eye-catching title. This is where good copywriting skills come in. Think "headline" or "banner ad" -- something that a user will only see for a few seconds then decide if they will click.

3) Make sure your title and description is chock full of your top keywords, keywords that are in your video and that your target audience will search under.

4) Make sure your video is tagged (meta data) properly with your keywords to get picked up by SE Spiders.

5) Make sure your video has either your company logo or URL for branding.

6) If the video is on your website, encourage other users to "republish" by providing the proper code. This will help with viral marketing.

7) Cross-market your video in your eNewsletters, website, and in your social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) to drive traffic and create buzz.

When done right, marketing via video is a cost effective, efficient, and powerful way to get prospects and profits. And best of all...the viral factor could be off the charts!

Financial Literacy and Bankers

Everywhere you look these days there is more evidence of the crisis. But I am not talking about the Wall Street crisis, I am talking about the crisis in our country's financial literacy. Consumer debt levels are astronomical, our country's savings rate has been at 0% for several years, and Suzy Orman and Dave Ramsey can't talk fast enough.
As we look around us, we as Bankers must raise our hands and admit some guilt here. As an industry and as individual banks or credit unions, we have done a lousy job of counseling our customers on basic financial topics.
For example, when a young single who is just starting out on their own comes in to open their new accounts, do we help them in all the right ways? Do we talk to them about saving 10% of their take-home pay? Or advise them on the importance of their credit report and give them some tips on how to protect it? Something as simple as saying, "You know, if you set up your minimum payment for your credit card as an automatic payment online, you will never be late. This not only saves you late fees and interest rates as high as 36%, but protects something even more important.... your credit score." Usually, we just take the credit card application and don't mention anything about using it wisely.
How many times when people say they don't have a savings account do we offer some friendly advice, as their banker and friend, that they really should put away some money every payday... and that we can help them get it set up to come directly out of their paycheck and go into their savings account...? Not to mention how boring most of our savings options are-that's a topic for another day!
These examples are just for the young people who need to get a firm financial foundation started so they can experience financial success throughout their lives. But we don't train our employees to do this. We don't require them to help all of our customers at the level that they really need.
This wouldn't be such a problem if people got financial education elsewhere... but where are they to get it?
Obviously, the parents don't necessarily know it or pass it down. Some high schools teach it; some states require it.... but most states do not. In those states, the kids who take consumer education are few, as resources and teachers are not always available. Even most college graduates have never had a course in financial education.
Isn't it time that as bankers, we start to take some responsibility for teaching our customers some basic financial principles? Do we really just care about "making the sale" or "cross-selling"? At Market Match, we include financial counseling in our cross-sell training series, the Winning Team. But I am curious if any of you out there are using other programs or materials to ensure that your employees are prepared to have deeper conversations with your customers? Please email me at slovejoy@marketmatch.com and let me know if you are a leader in this area of financial literacy.
I believe, as a Banker, that we can do better.

What's It Like To Be Our Customer?

What our customers are thinking, and what we think is on their minds are often times two different things. For your small business customers, before you have a meeting or pick up the phone, you should always review the following questions that may either uncover an opportunity or bring to light a festering issue before it becomes a major problem for the customer.

Think of your customers and ask yourself the following questions:

• Is it easy to do business with us? - Perhaps the process of opening new accounts, etc. was created in a vacuum and is onerous for customers providing an unnecessary pain point.

• How do they perceive our customer service? - Your sales and marketing departments may be doing a great job but other areas of the bank may be creating customer service issues. Most customers won't say anything until they're ready to hit the road.

• Are we taking care of their business and personal needs? - Do you have too many single-service customers? If you never ask a business customer about their personal needs they will only think two things--you aren't interested or you just don't care.

• Are we suggesting better or more innovative ways to meet their present and future needs? - Is your bank truly a trusted advisor to your business customers? That's only possible if you demonstrate a willingness to help the customer to achieve their long-term goals through advisory services. It's sometimes about sacrificing short-term sales goals. The more the customer grows their business the more opportunity the bank will have to develop deeper, more profitable relationships.

• Are we asking the right questions to uncover their concerns? - Effectively profiling business customers to gauge their long-term strategies enables the bank, and the banker, to provide valuable strategic financial advice to become a true partner in the success of the business owner.

• If concern areas are outside your scope responsibility, am I alerting the appropriate people so the problem can be addressed and corrected? - Too many times bankers fail to act on customer cues because "it is someone else's responsibility." This is one of the leading causes of customer attrition. It's the banker's responsibility to uncover concern areas, notify responsible parties, act as the conduit for problem resolution and then close the loop back to the customer.

• Are we employing all of the bank's resources for the benefit of the customer? - Has the business customer been introduced to the cash management expert or wealth management professional at the bank to advise on various business and personal issues?

It's human nature that we tend to think that customers will automatically offer their thoughts to us just because we are sitting across the desk from each other. The lesson here is that if you don't ask the right questions you'll never get the answers necessary to advance a relationship or to stop a valuable customer from leaving.

From now on, before you visit or call a customer, ask yourself these questions and see if you can effectively answer them without the input of your customers. You may find that your conversations with your customers will take on a whole different perspective.

Institutions as Media Outlets

In this moment of substantial change, most companies are looking inward to determine what adjustments need to be made to their business models to flourish in today's new economic climate. Significant shifts need to be made to address the new reality, and that new reality includes taking a hard look at how consumers get information about the arts.

Since the mid-1980s, newspaper circulation has been declining in the United States, but the current economic crisis has thrown gasoline on the fire, causing huge losses for newspapers nationally. Just recently we have seen four major newspapers cease print publication: the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Tucson Citizen and the Christian Science Monitor. Additionally, four newspaper companies including the owners of the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Philadelphia Inquirer, have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Even before the rapid failure of many printed newspapers, arts coverage in many daily newspapers was shrinking, going from 912 column inches on average in 1998 to 702 column inches in 2003 according to Reporting the Arts II, a study conducted by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.

A huge shift in communications is about to occur away from organizations pitching stories to mainstream media for coverage and toward setting up institutional distribution channels to cover stories themselves. We have seen this in the past decade as the ways we communicate with our customers have become cheaper, quicker and more segmented. We now have e-mail lists, websites, direct mail, telemarketing, social networking, online video distribution, podcasts, photo streams, and blogs. Some large organizations can currently reach more than one million people using these distribution channels. Considering the New York Times has a circulation of 1.6 million, these distribution channels which used to be considered on the fringes of communications have become almost as powerful for some companies as their local newspaper.

Barack Obama learned in his presidential campaign that if he invested wisely in cultivating his own method of communicating with his supporters, he would be able to use that method to speak directly to the American people when in office. Now President Obama has an e-mail list of 13 million Americans that he uses to garner support for political initiatives. This list is five time larger that the daily circulation of USA Today, the newspaper with the largest circulation in the United States.

Just as we have invested in media relations over the past decades, we now need to heavily invest in developing our own distribution channels and our own content. This is a two pronged approach--we need to develop the infrastructure to distribute content and the ability to create content that our customers will want to consume. It is a significant change in strategy that is now upon us.

Social Media: Hype or Hidden Treasure?

For those of you that haven’t established a presence on LinkedIn yet, I strongly recommend that you create a profile and linkaway!

LinkedIn is on of the top 5 social networks on the Web and focuses on linking professionals to one another through networking opportunities, business discussions, information exchanges, Q&A’s, industry news, professional Groups, and. more.

It’s easy and free to get started. You simply go to Linkedin.com and create a profile. You can information on your education and career. And through your account settings you can chose what information you’d like private and what you’d liked displayed for others to view.
It’s also helpful to get and give recommendations, as it helps validate your credentials as an expert in whatever field you specialize in.Once you sign up, you can invite colleagues and business partners to join your "network" as well as join various Groups that relates to the industry you’re in. After you join those Groups, you’ll receive weekly messages from the Group leader regarding Group discussion, news, relevant articles and other useful information. You will also be able to view other Group member’s profiles and invite those you feel could be synergistic to your business to join your network.

Joining LinkedIn can help your business…and your website (and company!) in several ways…

• SEO. You can write and upload a useful articles as news or start discussions using with information that will benefit your fellow members. That’s the key, relevant and value-oriented information. When you do this, you also get to upload a URL, which can backlink to your site. Not only will this reinforce you credentials as an expert, but it’s also information that is truly benefiting you’re peers in whatever niche your in.I’ve executed this tactic frequently with the marketing articles I’ve written and those members wanting more of what they read visited the website link I enclosed, increasing traffic, and the opportunity for sales via eCommerce platform. And the traffic was easily identified with website analytics under "top referring sources."
  
• Networking and Advertising. You can easily alert members of your special skills, expertise or services by posing a relevant question and offering a benefit-oriented solution. The opportunity is there to network with responders and gain potential business. Again, the key is to be subtle and relevant. You can, however, post a classified-type ad in the Group’s Job section. And here’s where good copy writing comes into play, as your ad must get people to take action quickly. If done right, I guarantee you will also get a handful of qualified leads that will generate new business and added to revenue growth. In my experience, within 4 hours of my initial posts I received nearly 20 leads for potential clients.
  
• Increased Web Presence. If you’re goal is to improve your website’s presence, then being actively involved in LinkedIn is critical. If you spend an hour or less a day and offer expert solutions to relevant Q&A’s, provide commentary to targeted questions in your Group messages – and include your name and website URL -- your "brand" will be prominent to site users. This will not only establish you as an expert within LinkedIn, but also have the potential to drive ancillary traffic to your website from members and referrals. And the more traffic your site gets, the more it will help your organic search ranking and visibility.

Now, some may argue that social media is just the latest craze,
but it’s not easy to monetize or measure.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

I say, if you’re a creative and strategic thinker, you can not only
measure social media efforts, like those in LinkedIn,
but also increase you’re business’s bottom line.

And isn’t that what direct marketing is all about?