Episode 68 - How Lending & Retail Teams Can Work with Marketing to Reach Everyone's Goals!

In this episode, Meredith Olmstead, CEO of FI GROW Solutions, and Nida Ajaz, Senior Vice President of Marketing, discuss strategies for integrating marketing and sales within financial institutions. They highlight the importance of Google reviews for enhancing business reputation and SEO, and share effective methods for deepening customer relationships through automated referrals and targeted marketing, offering practical insights to boost customer engagement and business performance.


Key Takeaways:

Integration of Sales and Marketing: Aligning marketing strategies with sales objectives is crucial for driving tangible business results and enhancing overall performance.

Importance of Google Reviews: Implementing strategies to increase Google reviews can significantly improve SEO and influence customer decisions, thus boosting business reputation.

Cross-Departmental Collaboration: Automating referrals among departments and using targeted onboarding programs are effective in deepening customer relationships and expanding service offerings, which are key to increasing customer retention and upsell opportunities.

Transcription:

Meredith Olmstead:

Hi there. I'm Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions. We are a digital marketing and sales consulting agency working exclusively with banks and credit unions. And I am here with our senior vice president of marketing, Nida Ajaz. Say Hi, Nida.

Nida Ajaz:

Hi everyone.

Meredith Olmstead:

Nida and I were just having a really good conversation about some of the efforts that we've been working on over the last months and really years with clients around trying to achieve goals around marketing and also sales simultaneously. So basically we have sales enablement services that go hand in hand with our marketing services for many of our clients to help connect the dots between marketing leads and sales results.

And so what we're finding is that a lot of our marketing strategists work with our sales coach to bring those marketing team and sales teams together to drive their goals in the right direction. So we were talking about some of the ways that we do that and Nida was like, "Well, I have a couple of things I'd really love to share with our audience." And I was like, "All right, let's hit record and let's talk about it." So the first one really, and we were talking about trying to connect the dots between retail and lending and achieving goals, is we were talking about driving more Google reviews. So Nida, why are Google reviews important in the first place before we talk about how to drive them?

Nida Ajaz:

Yeah, I mean there are a lot of benefits to Google reviews, especially from a digital standpoint. I know it's the number third qualifier when it comes to ratings on SEO. It's pretty highly rated. So from a marketing perspective, it's a very heavy goal. But from sales perspective too, right? I think I was reading a study around 92% of people make a decision based on other people's reviews. So having that from a sales perspective for you to say, "Hey, I have all these reviews about my product, go ahead and check it out online." Definitely helps the sales as well.

Meredith Olmstead:

Yeah, honestly, we've actually stopped trying to even drive Facebook reviews and focused solely on Google reviews because they are so incredibly important when it comes to user experience. It's super, super common for new customers to come in even with banks and say, "Oh, let me just really quickly read these 18 reviews over here that's giving them a 4.6," or whatever it is. And they will check those reviews out. And if you're not handling them, if you're not responding, if they're not mostly positive, it can have a negative impact on people's decisions to go with you or go with a different institution. So if we're trying to drive Google reviews, the first one you were talking about was a really interesting effort you did with one of our smaller bank clients in the Boston area who have a really, really proactive mortgage lending team. And what did you do with them to try to drive Google reviews?

Nida Ajaz:

Yeah. So initially the goal was that we want to get... We're prioritizing working with their loan officers and trying to see what are ways we can build their profiles up. The Google reviews was just one part of the goal. So we decided, I worked with our sales person who works very hands-on with the retail team over there, and I worked with her to set up a sequence of emails that would go out to the contacts of the mortgage loan officers in this organization and just ask for reviews, like drive Google reviews. And it was just one email out and it drove not only good reviews for that bank, but also it got him more leads.

He came front of mind in front of all these contacts that had a great experience with them, might've been a while back year or two back. So just re-engaging those contacts. So there were developers in there, there were realtors in there, there were previous customers in there. So there was a lot of reminder of some of these contacts and getting it front of mind. So I remember him telling us that, "Hey, all of a sudden I have a boost of number of people getting referred to me even though the email just asked for Google reviews."

Meredith Olmstead:

Nice. All right, so sometimes it just pays to ask. It's funny, and I mean that's such a rule of thumb when it comes to social media and really pretty much anything, but if you want somebody to do something, just have to remind them. So in social media marketing, it's like click, click, like, click, share, comment below to win all those kinds of things. You can't assume that people will remember what to do. You have to actually remind them constantly. So that's funny that that works with email and reviews. So the other thing that we have, we have a client who we were talking about this, actually is incentivizing their employees and they're paying their employees $10 for every Google review that that employee can either get mentioned in or be able to show a direct causation for them having an interaction with this customer. And then that person immediately going out to Google and leaving a review for the institution, and you said it's going really well. How are they tracking it though? I mean, it's...

Nida Ajaz:

I mean it's very manual, but there are ways that you could automate it. You could send a form and let your employees go in and say, "Hi, I just serviced this person. They said they're going to leave a review," and then have that form be the tracking system. So there are ways to automate it, but yes, for them it's very manual. But then for another client, we did work it in because our sales enablement leader like Danielle in our team, she works closely with our clients to set up an incentive plan for them. She and I had some goals calls where, "Hey, these are some marketing goals we want to achieve." And she made sure she incorporated some of those as part of the incentive plan for the...

Meredith Olmstead:

For the sales people. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. So honestly too, I mean even if there's a little bit of a manual component to tracking if it means that you end up with 50 other new reviews on Google over the course of six months or something like that, it's worth every penny, really. Absolutely. So the other thing that we talked about was if you have... So Google reviews are funny, right? Because they're attached to a brick and mortar location. So if your bank or credit union has 30 locations, they will have 30 Google My Page or they need to have 30 Google My Business pages, which could lead to 30 different links to leave a Google review, which can be tricky. How do we deal with that? Because you want to be driving reviews and it does help with local search for each of those branches to have some reviews that are positive. But how are you guys doing that? How are we saying, "I know we have some different ways that we do that."

Nida Ajaz:

So I know our team does a really good job in coming up with these solutions. So one of our team members, Kristin had come up with a solution for a client that she works with closely that has 15 different branches. And what we did is we got the custom link for each branch and then put a web page together on the website that has each branch linked. So you can actually select which branch you service, and based on that you'll have a direct link to the Google reviews page without having to search for it. So that link could be used by the staff members very easily.

Meredith Olmstead:

Yeah. And we've also used it in onboarding. So if you know what branch a new customer or a new member came in through, you can customize with Smart Content. If you have a good robust content management system or email system, you can use Smart Content to change the link out to link them directly to the right branch for them to leave their review during their onboarding process. Because we also know that the best time for somebody to ask somebody for a review is right when they have just converted on the new product or service. So the other thing we were talking about with all of this is a lot of times, and I hear this constantly from executives at credit unions and banks, is how do we deepen our relationships with our customers? They come in, maybe you have indirect customers coming in from point of sale, auto loan is a big one.

So that's a lot of indirect, but you're seeing them coming from all different kinds of point of sale opportunities nowadays. Cosmetic loans or hearing aids or all kinds of solar green loans, those kinds of things. But so if you have people coming in indirectly or even directly and they're converting on one product, we really want to figure out how to deepen the relationship with them to get a bigger share of their wallet and place a couple of more products or services with them. So really, it's about getting, again, getting marketing and sales teams across departments to help drive those leads from one department, from say, consumer loans to mortgage or to retail or wherever else they might need to go. What are some of the things we've done to help with clients, with those efforts?

Nida Ajaz:

So one of our clients actually, we've done a very good job setting up where they were facing that the people who were calling in or walking in the branch, and let's say they didn't sign up for a product right away, or they did sign up for one product, how would they upsell, cross-sell? The staff member was struggling. So one of the solutions we came up with is set up a quick internal form for them, where as soon as they're done with the relationship, they can go through and answer what are some products they signed up for? How did they come in?

Did they come in through walking in the branch or through calling in? What did they do at that call or that service time? And then also, what are things that they are interested in? This question is really good because it also gives them a script of what are things that they do need to ask about? Mortgage and things like auto loans and things like that are part of that form so easily when they... As soon as someone identifies that they're interested, this form automatically on the back end informs the mortgage department or the audit department or whichever department that is being referred to.

So it creates the seamless relationship of building on the back end, but then it also makes it more efficient. So now you're not waiting for you to get a hold of a mortgage loan officer, for you to walk them over or tell them about it. It's all happening on the back end and actually leads to a right away follow up and makes it more efficient as a process.

Meredith Olmstead:

And we found too, with the processes like that that we've set up either trying to automate and drive with a form capture and then automating the actual referral across departments, you can randomize it so you can rotate it from one person to another to keep the loans or the leads even so nobody has a really, really heavy workload while somebody else isn't getting getting any. But you can also use that as a way to try to remind your frontline staff who are interacting with clients, what are the other products or services that are available out there? Like a checklist, like you said, to help walk them through the new account opening process and then talk to them about all the other things that they could be thinking about as they're filling that out right in real time.

Nida Ajaz:

Yeah. The other thing we do is a very robust onboarding program and reboarding programs, a lot of this helps with referrals, and sometimes we even use actual retail team members that the emails are coming from, so you have a face attached to it or mortgage loan officers face attached to it, so people can reach out directly. Let's say we target them and they are in the market for getting a house or a car, we have now identified them to directly reach out to an actual person and not just go onto the website and wait, fill out a form and just wait for someone to follow up with...

Meredith Olmstead:

And it's not nameless, faceless, it actually, some of those automated emails will look like they will actually come from the individual's email that's attached with the name and their signature. And so they could even just hit reply. It really looks like an individual's reaching out to them as opposed to just an automated system. Awesome. Well, that's really all we have time for today, but really good stuff, great tips about how to really drive qualified leads and connect the dots between marketing and sales or retail and lending teams to reach goals. So appreciate your time and if you're interested in learning more about digital marketing or sales for banks and credit unions, please visit us at Figrow.com. We have lots of other podcasts, blogs, eBooks, case studies, so we'd love to have you come and check out our content and otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.