This morning, I was on a Social Media panel at the NJ Bankers Directors & Managing Officers Conference,  moderated by Frank Sorrentino III.  Frank did a great job of leading the panel in providing relevant information to the 200+ people audience today.

A few of the take a ways I had gotten from this event was.  1) A bank should view social media communications as they would any and all communication out of the bank.  (Including email and regular mail) And put policies in place as they would for traditional mediums.  2) Banks need foundational training and education on the capabilities of social media and web marketing.   Banks know they need to build and implement their eBrand, they just don’t know where to start.  So why not choose to learn and be trained by the association they belong too?   NJ Bankers Seminars, CFT Social Media Bootcamp, NJ Bank Marketing Association May 3rd seminar.

I believe the banking senior managers that attending and interacted received a lot of valuable information and I am looking forward to the next events we have coming up.

As a final point.   it looks like the banking industry is starting to open up to the idea of growing on the web.  I look forward to taking that journey with my fellow bankers.

Yes.  For anyone who doesn’t know this; those results that come up in Google whether paid or organic, are strategically placed there.  With Pay Per Click, the advertisee bids on keywords relevant to their landing page/ad content to get to the top of the paid advertisement areas.  Organically, the site has been Search Engine Optimized.  The link that is organically ranked is owned by a company that most likely hired an SEO company like our company to get ranked as close to the top of page 1 as possible.  So how does this work for my bank?  I mean, how to I actually make money selling loan products?

Selling loan products online is probably one of the best investments of time and money that a consumer lending bank can make.  In your personal life, chances are you purchase different products and services every day, and either search online for information on that product or service or ultimately buy online.   Blogs and social media are great ways to engage with clients, but when it comes down to your consumers making an ultimate decision, Search Engines will influence that process the most.   By organically ranking on keywords relevant to the need of your product or service and matched with the most relevant consumer, you will start to receive a constant flow of new applicants without paying any advertising costs.  (It will cost you to rank organically and consistent, but the cost is less compared to PPC).

A great PPC campaign for a loan program will have your loan product advertisement show up consistently when that product or service is search through a search engine. Search Engine Marketing (or pull marketing)  is unlike any traditional marketing, so it is important to understand a few points.

1st) Keyword relevance is king.  Whether it’s a PPC, SEO, or integrated campaign.  If your keyword ad placement is not relevant to the keyword being searched, then your just push marketing.  (forcing someone to see an ad they are not looking for)  Which doesn’t work in a pull marketing environment.  Search engines do all the work of qualifying leads, and even show you the amount of searches performed on any given keyword.  All you have to do is be relevant.   The cost of not being relevant is higher cost per click, worst placements, and higher bounce rates on your site or landing page.  All of which kill your campaign

2nd)  Optimization is Queen.  So what happens when you have plenty of leads coming in, but nothing is happening.   Nice site, but what does it do?  I can tell you what it should be doing.  It should be selling and closing, always.  I’ll leave this to Alec Baldwin to say.   Most websites are more like a semi retired salesperson, or pretty boy that never does any work, and hides when a customer walks in the door.   If your site is not optimized to close traffic, than you are definitely wasting money on attracting traffic.  Please let me hit you with some facts to show you what I mean.

• 83% of Internet users are likely to leave a web site if it takes too many clicks to find what they’re looking for.  According to Arthur Anderson
• 58% of visitors experiencing usability problems on a web site don’t return According to Forrester Research
• $25 billion is lost every year due to web site usability issues According to Zona Research
• The average e-commerce site could increase its sales by 79% with a usability redesign According Nielsen.com

So if you are trying to attract 15,000 loan customers to your site, increasing your conversation rate by 1 or 2% will make a big difference on your bottom line.  If you currently get enough traffic, but not enough conversions, then you may want to spend some money on Optimizing Your Website 

3rd) Consistency saves and makes money.  If your ad shows up once a day/week/month/year/decade, then your ad isn’t doing much.  If you rank on page one on Google, then decide to let it coast and stop optimizing,  then your site will slip backwards on ranking.  If your conversion rate starts to drop every month, then something is wrong with your site.  It is important to stay consistent and improve.

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Nobody loves to measure anything.  It’s time-consuming, can be difficult, frustrating, and if done incorrectly can be a complete waste of time.  Just imagine a world without measuring?   Imagine what buildings and structures would look like if we just put any old piece together regardless of size and shape.  Or, imagine the mess that mass transportation would be in if nothing was calculated and measured.  ”Don’t worry George, the wings are close enough, I’m sure it’ll fly”

Isn’t it fun to just do any marketing program that you used before, and not have anyone look at the effectiveness or how many leads it generated?   I love those marketing reports that are obviously creatively engineered to look good, yet do nothing.   The trends for marketing and the ways of measuring effectiveness  have changed forever.    It’s a fact, marketing budgets are substantially lower than ever before, and marketers are forced to do much more, with much less.  So what do we do?

I say, measure it and try different avenues.   Is traffic down in branches?  Why is that?  Loan product sales down?  Why is that?  Core deposits up?  Why is that?  Ask yourself, what did we do marketing and sales wise that produced the outcomes we achieved or didn’t achieve?   Although the economic climate affects results, your marketing and sales to that market place affects your outcome more than the climate itself.    It’s not your fault that people are visiting and applying less and less, but it is your responsibility to understand why and fix the problem.   Why not try search engine marketing to grow your bank in 2011?

The great thing about search engine marketing is that there are short-term and long-term measurable strategies that if done right can be highly profitable.    PPC/SEO campaigns (see my previous blog posting) have different benefits to different departments.   Why not pull market, rather than push.  Search Engine Marketing is one of the rare and effective pull marketing strategies, that  get’s your bank in the face of your prospective customers when they want you to be in their face, and for what they want you to be in their face with.

Start targeting, start engaging, have fun.

twitter.com/johnsiracusa

As they chanted ”No More Billboards!  No More Billboards!”  someone on stage struggled to rip through the sounds of the angry crowd as she said “you wanna give us something?   Give us marketing we can measure!”  The crowd roared as they would in a Roman times gladiator match.    With billboards and mailers burning, the chaos and reliance on these old unmeasurable efforts was relieving.

If these fictitious people in this fictitious story feel this way.  Why can’t you?  With so many measurable marketing avenues, why doesn’t every bank burn their billboards and mailers?

In the not so distant future, every bank, in every state, and at every size will eventually come to the conclusion that many old marketing efforts no longer work as well as they once did, and are more expensive than when the were actually effective.

Many banks are marketing full-fledged online, and are loving it.    You will too.   See you soon.

The first thing to ask yourself; is your bank engaging?  In most cases if you’ve been at it for a while and still have little followers you are probably in one of three stages.

Problem #1:  Your bank has a social media presence, but won’t follow other Tweeters or allow postings on your Facebook page.  In most cases your bank just Tweets/Posts rates, Tweets/Posts some charity stuff your bank does and/or Tweets/Posts anything and all about (only) your bank.  <——————————– much-o boring to consumers.

For banks that can’t change this habit, you would probably be better off closing your social media accounts and go back to doing only billboards and mailers which is just as interesting. <——– (billboards) Increases car accidents inAmerica, (thick paper mailers) are great poop scooper’s.

Problem #2:  Testing the waters, dipping your toe in, getting a feel for the temperature before diving in.  Your bank has a social media presence and you try to engage, but in the world of social media your engagement or presences is about the size of a baby pool.   You allow people to follow and post, but on a very limited basis and to a tiny following (most of which are employees of your bank) (or employees of another bank trying to learn from you)<—— which explains why most banks have a boring social media presence.  You can’t drown in a baby pool, but you can’t really swim either (disclaimer: unless of course you are a baby) (disclaimer continued: but then of course you can possibly drown, and should not swim without adult supervision)

Jumping in a pool or the ocean is not as scary once you’re in the water, so jump in and leave your chum suit home.   A little help; try to engage a little more with followers as you would if you where in an interesting conversation about information that benefits them.   You can discuss banking stuff, just discuss it as a human without an MBA would like to discuss.  For instance.  3 Steps on how to engage with friends on Facebook without compromising online banking security.  or Re-tweet/Mention a Tweeter who mentions you in a good light, and handle the problems for the Tweeters who mention some concerns about your bank.  Or, 3 important factors to consider when applying for a mortgage for your first home.  So on and so forth.

Problem #3 Trying to do anything possible to gain Followers and Fans.  Your Tweeting and Posting topics to gain engagement, and asking people to Like and Follow your bank, yet, you’re stuck at 50 to 500 followers and can’t get above that.   Please understand that organic growth is the most sustainable types of growth in the world of social media and may take time.    You may be doing things right, it just takes time.  You may want to Re-tweet more often, follow people who discuss banking needs, then you can mention something about how you can help when the time is right.  You can also do a gentle Facebook promotion like “once we hit 10,000 Liker’s we will donate $1,000 to xyz charity.  If that charity has thousands of followers/fans, you can rest assured those followers will become yours.  There are hundreds and hundreds of these strategies.

Have fun and engage.
WWW.TWITTER.COM/JOHNSIRACUSA
WWW.JOHNSIRACUSA.WORDPRESS.COM

Twitter, a very simple online communication tool used by millions. Easy, yet not utilized by most banks, underutilized by the ones who do have an account.  If your a bank is struggling to figure Twitter out, here are 3 easy pointers to get started.

Tip #1 What to Tweet about
If your like most people, you might question what interest anyone would have regarding your hourly habits.  Or why would anyone care about me, I’m not Lady Gaga for god sakes.  Ok, true enough. Don’t let your personality be the driving force, let your content be what brings people to read and follow you. You can salt and pepper your personality into your content driven Tweets as you start to feel more comfortable.
Banks can easily find content relevant to their consumers by setting up a Google reader account, you can subscribe to an almost unlimited amount of news articles and RSS feeds in which you can Tweet about. To get started just Tweet about articles you read that enforce your message to your clients, pull articles from sources your customers are familiar with like the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Start to make comments on those articles as you become more comfortable with your Twitter strategy.

Tip #2 Be Consistent
Nothing says ignore, than having a stale post from 2 months ago being your most current Tweet. It is a surefire way to get ignored, and un-followed. Instead, take 5 to 10 minutes daily to review your news feeds on your Google Reader account and Tweet at least 1 or 2 client relevant stories in that day. If you cannot find enough info to Tweet about, simply find and add more subscriptions to your Google Reader account. I get about 2,000 news fed stories a day sent to me, and Tweet only 3 to 6. I don’t read all 2,000, I just browse the headlines or do a key word search, and read the 10 or so articles that are client relevant or funny to me, and Tweet from there.

Tip #3 Engage, Engage, Engage
Make sure to follow your followers if you are a consumer bank, and thank them for following you. Re-Tweet other post, and send direct messages to anyone who Tweets about you. Set up polls through Facebook, Invite business consumers to connect via Linkedin , setup a group there for businesses to meet and share ideas, then Tweet about it. There are literally a 1,000 things you can do to engage with your consumers, the trick is to get started, then build upon your strategies daily.

So your bank has decided to focus it’s resources to start an online growth strategy. Great! The question I have heard from many banks is; where should we start? I hope that the this article will give you some direction.

In order to implement any strategy, you first have to identify the tactics to use in order to have the highest success rate and most sustainable growth.

It’s important to understand that the web can provide very quick and exaggerated results. Unless your a new startup web service, these types of quick hit strategies are rarely sustainable. For instance, offering a free gadget to “like” your bank on Facebook may cause a lot of quick traffic. But consequently, will cause a just as quickly “unlike” when the contest is over. Instead, Try to focus on organic growth. Give your customers a place to go that is informative, interesting and consistent.

Tactic #1. Connect
“Build it, and they will come”. I’m not sure I agree with this statement. I believe It’s more likely “build it, and get lost in the endless universe online”. There are billions of pages online that get lost in the mix of billions of other pages, that get lost in the dead space of the web universe. If there is no plan in place to funnel traffic to your social media or website presence, the traffic will most certainly be misguided, lost, or worse non existent.
Asking consumers on a one-to-one basis to go online check out your website, become a fan of your Facebook page is quaint and nice, but greatly undermines the actual point of building an online growth strategy. Your website, social media presence, and any and all other online presences should be an effective representative of your bank, should look presentable, and be selling 24/7. In order for any representative to sell, they need to look like they know their product and service well, they need to look presentable, and they need to be in front of as many qualified prospects as possible. For instance If your business development person looks great, but spends most of his time drinking coffee with other banking employees, or knows his stuff, but doesn’t present well, is a recipe for nothing happening. Keep that in mind when building your web presence. Built it well, make it engage well, get in front of as many qualified prospects as possible, and sell, this is what your online presence should be doing 24 hours a day 7 days a week. If it’s not, than you are missing out on some great opportunities?

Tactic #2 Penetrate & Retain
Any good online growth strategy will not just drive traffic, it will also capture, retain, and penetrate the traffic that is driven. When traffic is captured correctly, that traffic stops at a super information highway rest stop to get food and fuel. Unfortunatly, most banks web presence is the equviliant of a rest stop being out of food and fuel, so the traffic leaves and goes elsewhere. Or worse, your rest stop is right off the highway, without anyone knowing that you are there, letting millions of travelers pass by. An effective penetration and retention campaign receives the qualified traffic driven, sells, cross sells, and keeps the traffic there for as long as possible. If the website or social media avenue was informative, valuable, and easy to navigate and use, they will “like” you “follow you” and “RSS”, giving you permission to continually communicate with them, to eventually selling them something.

Tactic #3 Integrate & Improve
Every single one of your online tactics should be in some way connected to each other, Traffic should flow well from acquisition to capture. A well thought out strategy, built well, should take very little of your day to maintain and have the highest effect to grow your bank online. It is important to never rely on online avenues as they are today. The web changes so quickly that what works today will indefinitely not work in it’s current form tomorrow. It is important to have a well designed strategy that integrates well, and easily accepts new online growth avenues as they become available.

Here is the age old question. Should we outsource it, or hire and create it? In this blog I would like to provide 3 ways that I feel outsourcing your online marketing efforts will cost less, be more effective, and accomplish results and wins far beyond what a bank can expect if done on their own.

1st: Banks are banks, not expert web marketers.

Banks outsource so many other types of services, including other forms of marketing and advertising. The banking model is mostly based on outsourcing what ever it can, as long as it makes cost sense. Online marketing if planned and implemented correctly, can have by far the highest possible return per marketing/advertising dollar spent. I say the following sentence all the time when I meet with people at our events. “It’s what you don’t know about marketing online that costs you the most”. I promise, unless you have a 35 person staff dedicated to just creating online marketing strategies, your probably costing yourself a pretty penny.

2nd: Online marketing is a constant evolution, not a means to an end.

Every day new online marketing avenues arrive or become available. It would be a daunting task to keep up with changes and stay par or ahead of them, if done so with your own resources.   Our company continually dedicates daily resources on R&D, to keep ahead of trends, and consistently utilize new avenues. It would be very difficult to accomplish this if we didn’t have the resources we have available. Next, there is no “set it and forget” marketing strategy for the web. What works today, will not work tomorrow in the same form, and to the same capacity. So inevitably, any online marketing tactics created yesterday and implemented today, is already losing energy and efficiency and must be supplemented, changed, or removed.  So why take the risk to do it on your own.

3rd: Come up with message, and allow the experts to convey it.

Just imagine delivering our own packages across the country. FedEx or UPS can have a package to the west coast overnight for less than $100. If we had to deliver it ourselves, it would cost substantially more. Now eventually I’m sure we can figure out how they “do it”, regardless, we would never be able to duplicate the process consistently to the same effectiveness.
Alternatively, FedEx or UPS cannot create the content that is in the packages they are delivering for us. In the world of social media marketing alone, there are hundreds if not thousands of avenues that can be utilized in order to convey a consistent effective message. Can you name 10 without doing any research? But, I’m sure if I asked you to tell me your banks story, you could talk for hours without a break.

The internet and the avenues availible within it, can be a very effective growth tool if properly harnessed.  Ask yourself how much is your ROI with your Newspaper ad?  How about your billboard?  Are your mailers blowing the doors down at your branches.   How much cold hard monthly cash is spent on these efforts?  $5,000, $10,000,  $20,000?  emarketer wrote an article on the cost of online marketing, compared to traditional or push marketing.  Not surprising, it cost more than 2 times to push market your clients.  Pull marketing also has many other benefits like relevance and a higher conversion rate.   That same article states about 40% of leads that come from inbound channels convert to customers.   So do the math.  Even if your push marketing efforts equaled the conversion rate of your pull marketing (which it doesn’t), it would still cost $2 to $1, or $20,000 compared to $10,000 to acquire the same amount of qualified leads.   Figuring out what % to budget, seems to be the tricky part.  To figure out what type of budget percentages should be allocated to your online marketing, we first have to determine at what level you are at in your online marketing quest.   Let’s call them the H.I.D.E levels.

H

Stands for hobby.  A hobby in online marketing could be something as simple as setting up a Facebook page and getting 50 to 700 fans for yourself or company.   It could also be bidding on 2 keywords on Google for a 3 to 4 hour window, and sending that traffic to a general website or basic landing page.   Having a twitter account where the last Tweet was 1 week ago, and that Tweet starts with, trying to…, currently at…, going to…., and focused around what you are doing.  (this tactic works only if your twitter name is @charliesheen).

I

Stands for interested.  An interest in online marketing unfortunatly doesn’t do anything.  It’s someone who understands clearly that they have to do something online since the world around them is accomplishing great things within it, yet the interested person has an egg or an nonprofessional picture on their Twitter profile, has a stagnent Facebook page, (if any) and is not really sure how to use Google for his or her company.  The interested person gets involved with any discussion regarding this topic and always asks how people are using it, or how is it working for their companies.    Yet,does nothing with that information.

For(HI) you need only time capital.  So your budget can be as low as $0.

D

Stands for desire.  A desire for online marketing is a person who is heavily interested plus has a strong knowledge in the ROI of whats possible when an online campaign is planned, designed, and implemented correctly.  They also understand that they have limited knowledge in this arena since this is not their area of expertise anyway, but understand clearly that partnering with a knowledgeable and evolving firm can help them accomplish far more than limiting success to only themselves.   For this person, experts say that a 15% to 20% budget should be allocated, and an adjustment of 5% to 10% based on monthly successes or failures.

E

Stands for expert.  Regardless of what anyone says about themselves, there are only about 50 real experts in the USA that are Google Ad-words certified, and a Microsoft certified partner.   An expert doesn’t just understand social media or Google, they also understand the frame work and project management resources needed in order to have a truly effective and sustainable campaign month in and month out.    D and E work very well with each other, and if both parties are experts at what they do, magic happens.  Experts guide people on how to properly spend thier budgets to get the best ROI and highest effect per project.

If you are responsible for marketing efforts at your bank and you have a desire but have no support, don’t fret, many people are in your same position.  Just don’t give up.  Contact an expert and let them do the talking and presentation to your directors and management.

There are at least three banks I personally know of that do this daily.  Surprisingly, they do most of it with online marketing and social media engagement marketing.  I recently attended a banking symposium in Miami Florida and had the opportunity to attend a panel on online marketing.  Two banks that heavily marketed online and utilize engagement marketed through social media sat on the panel, which was moderated by Google.  During that presentation, some interesting facts regarding online search marketing where presented.

For instance.  In a report through a collaborative effort between Compete Inc, and Google,

Resources Used by Online Shoppers

42% of financial product shoppers researched exclusively online.

28% more online searchers will convert to customers over non-searchers

70% more searchers over non-searchers will maintain a deposit balance of $10,000 or more.

Searchers were 1.6 times more likely to spend $3,500 using credit cards

All of these facts were confirmed to be conservative by the panelist actual results.

Does your bank market well online?  If so, do your efforts garner these results?  After attending dozens of banking shows, and speaking with hundreds if not thousands of bankers, I understand that there are many challenges bankers face in order to start or improve an online marketing campaign.  Please understand one fact though, regardless of whether you grow or not in 2011, your compliance cost will rise, your infrastructure costs will rise, and many other operational costs will rise as well.  How are you going to satisfy the growth required by your board members?  Your Shareholders?

Three questions.

Do you think your board members or shareholders want to lose in 2011?  Break even in 2011?  Or win 2011?

One thing is a fact, if you’re not growing, you’re losing in 2011.  Your bank needs to grow just to break even in order to overcome these costs, and needs to grow exponentially in order to win.   So why not play and invest to win?    Here are three ideas in order to do just that, and do it effectively.

1^st Get your website ready to capture and convert leads.  The traffic to your site must be easily captured, regardless of what product or service they are looking for.  If possible, they should be able to apply for a loan online as well.   This will give you the foundational access to a market share in which you currently do not have access too.

2^nd Get the right SEO and PPC campaign in place for your bank.  Get the right buying keywords, landing pages, and integrated plan in place.  Do it consistently, do it everyday, every week, and every month.  Doing so will help you penetrate clients better.  In a study performed by Deloitte Center for Financial Services “not all consumers wishing to obtain a loan product in the next two years expect to use their primary bank”.  If this is so, where do you think they are searching first? In a different report created by Deloitte Center for Financial Services states, the most influential sources in selecting banking services by Gen Y, X, Boomers, and Veterans combined overwhelmingly prefer their own research to any other source of information gathering.  In which they overwhelmingly prefer to research through online research tools for financial products and services.   This leaves your online search marketing campaign as table stakes.   There is literally millions of dollars floating around, waiting to be captured.

3^rd Setup the right social media campaign to engage with the clients on a daily basis.  This will enable deeper penetration and create a referral machine from other social media users.  Take a look at my blog about Twitter for your bank if you want a quick idea on how to start a Twitter strategy.   Remember though, social media is more than just Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Foursquare.  It’s a combined effort to engage and influence.  This type of strategy will inevitably help you keep, penetrate, and receive referrals.

If you partner with the right company, your cost of acquisition goes down, effectiveness goes up, and integration becomes seamless.  Should you

Online marketing is a marketing channel that has seen the most explosive growth over the past few years, and the biggest growth spurt for the banking industry early in 2011.   Before we can get started identifying the steps needed in order to get started, lets first define what online marketing is.

As I write this blog; online marketing in a nutshell is a combination of SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), and a term I dub SMEM (social media engagement marketing).  The current avenues of popularity are, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Blogging.   Essentially the most effective online marketing campaign is an integrated approach that captures, engages, and funnels leads from one source to another converting those leads into paying customers, in a reasonable amount of time.    The effectiveness of your online marketing campaign will be limited to how seamless your avenue integration is, keyword effectiveness, content relevance, and how well your bank engages with consumers.  So to get started, try following the next few steps.

1^st) You will need experts to manage your SEO/PPC/SMEM campaign.  You can both hire and train people, or retain an online marketing firm that has an expertise in the banking industry.  Either choice, the annual cost will be about the same.  I wrote a blog on this Should Your Bank Partner Or Produce Your Online Marketing Efforts?

2^nd) Build a plan.  Decide what place you will drive traffic too, what keywords and message you will use to drive that traffic, and what you will do with that traffic to convert them to paying customers.  This can be easily accomplished if you decide what products or services your bank would like more movement on, then buying keywords associated with those products.

For instance.  You decide you want to sell more home equity loans.  Devise a keyword/content plan to drive traffic through social media and search engines.  Then build a hub for that traffic to be captured and converted to a home equity loan customer.  This is oversimplified, yet hits the major points.

3^rd) Create your long term and short term strategy, and formulate the proper budget and time allocated for each strategy.  Some forms of online marketing can be very quick to capture qualified leads, and others take 6 months to 1 year.    It is important to comprehend what time frames each strategy needs in order to convert qualified leads to qualified customers.  Doing so will ensure that your bank doesn’t end up spending to many short term resources on a specific avenue that may take a year to blossom.   Instead, focus those resources to accomplish quick wins, which will end up building momentum and buy-in.   Buy-in increases resources, which will feed your long term strategy. Timing and resource utilization is key to a successful campaign.

4^th) Believe in the channel of online marketing.  There is no other time in the history of banking where the playing field is more even than right now.  A one-branch community bank in South Jersey can now locally compete with the big bank around the corner which is headquartered somewhere far away.  The web is severely under banked by regional and community banks.   A Google campaign done right can allow any bank to be deemed more targeted and relevant to a searching consumer for specific products and services provided by that bank.  In the world of Search Engine Marketing, the more targeted and relevant an advertisement or a link is, the more relevant the traffic in which that link or site will receive.      Can you imagine receiving 50, 100, 200, 1,000 mortgage applications by qualified people within 50 miles of your branches?   All this within a month, how about a week, how about a day?   It’s not a dream.  Right now from the time you’ve started till the time you finish this blog, there are at least 4 banks that have already received 5 mortgage applications each through a Google campaign.     Online marketing isn’t a nice to do.  It’s a table stakes game changer.

• Can be an effective way to sell products and services.
• Can target by geography
• Can target your customers by product and service interests
• Can be consistently profitable
• Can be a fraction of traditional marketing costs
• Easier to maintain compliance
• Leads are funneled to your compliant and secure website

• Can sometimes provide too many leads
• If done in house, can be overwhelming and less effective
• Click costs can be more expensive if set up incorrectly
• Can be difficult to learn and implement buying keywords

• Can become a referral super engine
• Can be very consistent
• Can be fun
• New social media sites arrive quickly giving an edge to whomever stays ahead
• Great way to do market research
• Most of your target customers are on some sort of web social
  community
• Very cost effective means of communication and engagement

• Always changes, not easy to keep up with
• Requires a lot of people time
• Compliance concerns
• Banks have to change the way they understand it
• Ineffective if used as a Billboard
• Soft selling, no instant gratification

The Financial Brand said it best in a tweet.  ”If you live your life online, you’d swear Ally and ING Direct are the only two banks on earth.”   Sad but true.  The good news is that this is changing in the positive for the banks.

Online marketing can be the fraction of the cost compared to traditional marketing, if managed well, can garner amazing growth results.   Although this is blatantly obvious, many banks are struggling to either get started or implement an effective online marketing strategy.     If your bank is still toiling away figuring out why they should implement an online strategy try changing your question to “how to implement”.  There are many good reasons for doing this and when changed, can open the door for many profitable opportunities for your bank.  For example:

1^st) A good 80% of your banking customers are online looking for your products and services.  See figure below:

Preferences When Conducting Research On Banking Products And Services

The survey above was created by The Deloitte Center For Financial Services which shows that regardless of the generation in which they were born, consumers overwhelmingly use online research tools when choosing banking products and services.

2^nd) Although your customer service may be excellent, it’s only excellent inside your branch and stinks on the web.  Yes, if you have no customer service presence on the web, then your customer service is lacking to say the least.

3^rd) If your not available where your consumers are searching, then you don’t exist.  Your customers are now less likely to visit your branch to research banking products and services, and are more likely to do a search online for mortgage rates, credit cards, and other profitable banking products.

4^th) Why not live a little.  The new regulations may obliterate fee based income, so why not go after income that provides a service to your clients, and makes you money at the same time?  I see signs in banks stating WE ARE LENDING.  While online consumers are saying WE ARE BORROWING, and consumers are looking for money, but bankers aren’t online to listen and oblige.  This is the classic example of a lemonade stand in the middle of the Mohave Desert, greatly needed, but nobodies coming.

5^th) Compliance people are there to ensure compliance with the marketing endeavors chosen to grow your bank, not ensure compliance by stopping your bank from growing.  Directors, COOs, CEOs, CTOs, CIOs don’t make money without growth.   So they all have a vested interests in growing and providing loans.  If online marketing is done right, can prove to be very profitable, low cost, and low risk.

Enjoy, and get started! See my other post “4 Steps Your Bank Should Implement To Get Started Growing Your Bank With Online Marketing”.
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There are at least a dozen banks who state that their Search Engine Marketing (SEM) channel is by far their most profitable marketing channel.  I will share with you at least 5  ways that banks are benefiting from their SEM strategies.

If you’re not sure what an SEM strategy is, please take a minute to read Search Engine Marketing before moving on.

One thing I noticed with bankers not utilizing a SEM campaign is that they are afraid of attracting customers from out of their market area.  The great thing with SEO and PPC is that you can target market and target keyword search.  In many ways you can target where you show up by zip code by Geo-Targeting, or choose keywords that would only be searched locally to your branches.

Here are five examples of using (SEO) or (PPC) to grow your bank online.

#1 Loan Department using  (SEO)

A great SEO campaign will get your bank to page one of a Google/Bing/Yahoo search, and get you there on the key words that you choose to rank on, with the information that you wish to show the searcher.  If organically ranked, SEO for a loan department can have many benefits.  A loan department can capture leads through a search engine by ranking on page 1 of an effective loan related keywords that has the right amount of searchers, with the right amount of opportunity to reach, attract, and convert them. If your site is web sales optimized, you can efficiently convert traffic into loan customers.

#2 Loan Department using (PPC)

A great PPC campaign will get your bank in front of searchers consistently when the optimal keywords are searched.  It’s important that your PPC campaign is consistent and relevant.   The proper keywords, with the proper consistency, with a sales optimized landing page will get your loan department qualified leads that turn into real dollars quickly and consistently.

#3 Bank Branch Search using (SEO)

Are your bank branches showing up in search engines when a specific town is searched that is near or directly located in one of your branch towns?  If so, what shows up in the search engine as results?

Does it say:

XYZ Community Bank

Mar 22, 2011 … The contents of this website are the sole property of xyz community Bank and related subsidiaries. Any unauthorized access or alterations to …
https://www.xyzcommunitybank.com/home/personal - Cached - Similar  <—- Not very interesting to a searcher.  

Or:

XYZ Community Bank

Jul 6, 2009 … The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced the execution of a Written Agreement by and among XYZ  Bancorporation, a registered bank …  https://www.xyzcommunitybank.com/home/personal - Cached - Similar  <—- Not a positive vibe to the consumer.  

When your consumers are trying to find a local bank or branch by searching for one in Google, Bing, or Yahoo, search results similar to the above will never gain you new business but will definitely hurt.

#4 Bank’s Web Presence

How professional and search optimized is your Google Places/Maps?  How about your banks images?  How about directory listings, blogs, and videos?  these are all things that help with (SEO) and makes your bank look interesting and important to a searcher.    How user friendly is your website?   Is it web sales optimized?  Usability issues will cause people to leave your site very quickly so it’s important to design them out.

#5 Product And Services Sold using (PPC)

Do you have great CD rates?  How about other wealth services?  CD Rates  Was searched over 301,000 times locally last month, and many other banking products and services see the same high volume search amounts.  Why not capitalize on them.  Setup properly, your (PPC) campaign can see excellent local only results.

Banks can definitely benefit from an integrated online marketing campaign, and can do so for around 1/5 the cost of traditional marketing cost with about 2 to 4 times the benefit of traditional marketing effort.  You may want to take a look at your current marketing strategies and consider moving some online to test the waters.

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Social Media is said best this way.  If you’re in a relationship business, than social media is for you.  You should treat your social media endeavours as you would treat a networking party.  The conversations are happening with or without you and it’s up to you to get engaged in the conversation.  If your Facebook page has advertisements but no way for people to engage, it would be like going to a cocktail party and briefly walking in and out of different unrelated conversations saying “did you guys know that our rates are great, and we have the best customer service”.    On the other hand, if you are sitting in the corner by yourself, and walk away when someone comes up to you, you won’t accomplish much either.  The best way is to engage, be interesting, and don’t hard sell.

If you are using Facebook for PR, don’t sell either.  Social media is not the same media as we are use too.  It’s not TV or newspaper where our eyes are fixated on a single media content display apparatus with zero engagement.  :) Social media is social.

So how can we use it for our banks?  One way to start would be to choose one social media avenue to start, like Twitter or Facebook.  Then invite everyone to engage, get involved in every conversation about your industry and about your bank, answer question about financial services that can benefit the asking party, and do it till you have at least 1,000 fans, followers, or viewers.

People will look at what your bank has to offer regardless of whether you tell them to or not.  Have you ever gone to a networking event, and without provoking someone asks you “what do you do”?  The same rules apply.  You just have to engage in the conversations that are available to engage in, and the rest will happen within the conversation.