Deepening relationships with your members or customers doesn't have to be complicated. Build a catalog of quality content to set your financial institution up as an authority and trusted resource for your members or customers.
A content campaign is different from a marketing campaign. While a marketing campaign seeks to put a specific message in front of a specific audience, a content campaign is evergreen and ready for individuals when the timing is right for them.
Content campaigns are SEO optimized to help potential members and customers find your bank or credit union when they search online. When they have a problem and need a solution, the goal is for your institution to provide the answer through content on your website.
For banks and credit unions, the main piece of a content campaign is a comprehensive eBook, checklist, or other offer that helps answer financial questions or solve problems. This downloadable content must be desirable enough to motivate your audience to provide a first name, last name, and email address to access. By enticing prospective credit union members or bank customers to provide a name and email, you have captured them as a lead that you can now nurture, offering them more content surrounding their questions and getting them closer to potential solutions.
Additionally, a content campaign needs smaller pieces of content like blogs that dive deeper into the main topic and support your audience with the problem they are trying to solve. The key to a successful content campaign is connecting every piece of content back to the main downloadable. Having multiple points of entry into your main piece of content helps capture a larger audience and build your lead list.
Community banks and credit unions should always be educating their communities by providing financial content. Building an online catalog of financial literacy content helps your audience find your institution and find solutions to the problems they are experiencing.
When someone searches "credit card" or "how to get out of debt", having SEO-optimized content answering their precise question will help both them and your institution. It’s about setting your bank or credit union up as a thought leader while also having the audience’s best interest at heart.
Trust begins to build as you answer their questions in a format that doesn't just focus on making a sale or focus on your organization. Your content should seek to answer questions, provide solutions, and help break down complicated financial information into bite-sized pieces.
The idea behind inbound marketing, which is what content campaigns are, is to show the right message to the right people at the right time. So the first way to improve your content campaigns is to have a tool that allows you to personalize your messages. If someone is in the market for an auto loan, your messaging should be focused on auto loans. Make sure you are featuring your auto loan content campaign on your auto loan website page so that curious buyers can learn not just about auto loans, but the entire car-buying journey.
Once someone downloads your main content piece, and you’ve captured them as a lead, you need to nurture that lead into a conversion. With marketing automation, you can start sending these leads a series of emails, texts, or even prompt your teams to call them. The automation piece ensures the timing piece of “right message, right person, right time”. By automating this process, your marketing team can focus on other initiatives while this continues to run behind the scences without your supervision.
When you have a new content campaign, and you want to get some eyes on it right away, you should be marketing it. Don’t be afraid to send a few marketing emails around the product or service that is the solution for your content campaign. These marketing emails are less targeted, but you will still get some immediate attention and traffic to your fresh content, which will help give it a boost in the search rankings.
And don’t be afraid to resend marketing emails after some time has passed. The average email open rates for banks and credit unions on marketing emails is around 20 - 25%, so only a quarter of your audience absorbed that message when you sent it the first time. You can resend that same email to only the audience who didn’t open it or you can rework the content a bit to send out to everyone at a later date. Don't forget to mark your calendar! Once you have put the effort into this evergreen campaign, it should be run at least annually.
The more points of entry into your content campaign, the better. So just because your content is out in the world, doesn’t mean you’re done. Keep adding blogs and other content pieces to the campaign over time. This will help more people find your institution over time. Targeting additional keywords and maintaining content recency will help move you up in the search rankings and provide a boost to your content campaign.
We find that around 6 months after the initial launch of a content campaign, search ranking improvement hits a peak and dwindles from there. This is the perfect time to start adding additional content and boosting your campaign’s performance. If budget and time allow, every content campaign could benefit from having 20, 30, 40 pieces of content supporting and directing your audience to that main downloadable eBook or checklist.
Sales is tricky, because many times when people download an eBook, white paper, or checklist around solving a pain point, they're not ready for a salesperson to pick up the phone and call them. That’s why we recommend an automated series of nurture emails that take your lead from dipping their toe in the water to a hot lead ready to convert.
Once someone shows interest in a topic and has downloaded your eBook, then maybe reads a supporting blog or two, and finally clicks a nurture email to visit your product page…now you have a really hot lead. They've shown interest through multiple touchpoints, and a phone call or email from your lending team might be just the push they need to apply for a loan.
You can automatically place these leads on a separate list to receive emails that are a bit more salesy. Start sending them messages on how to apply, or an email from a lender offering help to walk them through the process, or even shoot an internal message to your lenders so someone can pick up the phone and call the lead.
As you can see, using content campaigns is a smart way to boost your sales, promote products and services to your members through automation, and most importantly, help answer financial questions with rich content helping readers build trust and confidence in your financial institution.
Contact us today for more information about how we can help you get more qualified leads and deepen existing relationships through inbound marketing.