Episode 62 - The Power of User Generated Content for your Bank or Credit Union

Meredith Olmstead, CEO and founder of FI GROW Solutions, and Dean DeCarlo, President of Mission Disrupt, engage in a discussion about the increasing significance of user-generated content (UGC) in the financial sector, specifically focusing on banks and credit unions. This conversation provides a deep dive into the strategic use of UGC as a tool for building trust, enhancing customer engagement, and strengthening the overall marketing efforts of financial institutions.

Key Takeaways:
1. Importance of User-Generated Content in Building Trust: UGC, such as reviews and customer testimonials, is crucial for financial institutions in establishing trust and credibility with their audience. This content, often shared on platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, and Instagram, serves as a third-party endorsement, offering prospective customers genuine insights into the experiences of current customers. 
2. Strategies to Encourage UGC: To increase UGC, financial institutions should implement intentional strategies. This can include automated SMS or email campaigns triggered by specific customer actions like loan funding or account opening. These campaigns should make it easy for customers to leave reviews by providing direct links to review platforms.
3. Influencer Marketing as a Form of UGC: While slightly different from traditional UGC, influencer marketing is a powerful tool for banks and credit unions. Influencers, with their established trust and audience on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, can effectively communicate the value of financial products and services. 

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. We work exclusively with banks and credit unions. I am here with a good friend of mine who also works in the same industry, Dean DeCarlo. Dean is the president, I guess, and owner or founder of Mission Disrupt. Dean, tell everybody a little bit about what you guys do for banks and credit unions.

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Meredith. So like you said, I'm the president of Mission Disrupt, and basically, we're an agency that works with credit unions on their paid media strategy, and we also help them with their user experience and making that more personalized.

Meredith Olmstead:
Awesome. So Dean and I were just having a conversation. We met at a great event for banks and credit unions, for credit unions actually back in Nashville in May. We talked a lot about content marketing in the spring, and we were just revisiting some of that in this conversation.

I said, "Let's hit record, let's share some of this best practice." But really what we were talking about was specifically user generated content, sometimes known as UGC, which I always give. I'm bad at acronyms, but anyway, so it's UGC, or user generated content, and how important it is for financial institutions in marketing and sales, and really just building a solid, trustworthy reputation with your customers and potential new customers, or members as credit unions. So what is user generated content, Dean, for people who maybe aren't familiar with that term?

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah. So basically it is content like reviews or a writeup of what's going on in the service that they got from your customers. Most of the time, hopefully, they're explaining about their positive experience. That can be used in a multitude of... Right away it can be used in your Google Reviews, but it can extend further on social media and it really helps build trust, get people to believe that the products that you're offering is really built for them and that it's going to help solve the problems that they have.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So a lot of times when we think of user generated content, we think of content that gets shared online in some way. So people might be posting a comment about their experience with a product or service on your Facebook page or on your Instagram. A post on Instagram, or they might be on Google My Business, putting in an actual review with four or five stars or whatever.

You could also potentially have opportunities for user generated content when you send out things like surveys internally to existing customers or a new customer potentially. So they might create a review or feedback that you could then make into "user-generated content". So it's really like anything that isn't written by somebody who works for the bank or credit union really. I mean, that's kind of the theory behind what user generated content is. Again, it provides this third party endorsement of products and services. I like to always-

Dean DeCarlo:
Like...

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah, go ahead, Dean.

Dean DeCarlo:
We're very social people. So humans, word of mouth is still the most important way-

Meredith Olmstead:
Exactly what I was going to say.

Dean DeCarlo:
We're going to trust one vendor or one business over another. So user generated content is just a way to one, be able to take that review and be able to then demonstrate what that person said on your marketing material. Or from a marketing standpoint, you mentioned surveys, take your mind out of just the loan products or the credit union products or bank products that you're selling every day. You're in it. So you might lose sight of what makes it so valuable to your customer. So to look at that survey data, not only is it immediately you take a screenshot, put it on email, but then you can actually think about how to reword how you're marketing those products and services, right? Because you can see the context from them.

So beyond just the marketing value of just being able to show it and other people being able to see it, it can completely change strategy in terms of messaging in your content.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yes. We can do a whole podcast on how you take survey data and leverage it to improve products and services and your offerings. Absolutely. It's funny, we work with clients all the times. We create surveys for them and onboarding and email campaigns and that kind of thing and then we'll be like, okay, now what are you going to do with the survey information? Because if you take survey data but you don't do anything with it, you're lost, right?

But back to the user generated content. So really it's about building trust and showcasing why other people, in a word of mouth kind of manner, like doing business with your bank or credit union. So we wanted to figure out, okay, how does your credit union or bank get more of that user generated content? Because it doesn't just magically happen. I mean, sometimes it does. Sometimes somebody has a great experience and they go to your Google My Business page for one of your branch locations and they leave a review. You literally did nothing except give them great customer service or member service when they walked in the door. So sometimes that's almost like best case, it just happens. When that happens, it can be great to take those reviews from a Google My Business page and utilize them on your website, or you maybe put it into an email for marketing whatever product they were talking about that they liked so much.

So generally, to get more user generated content, we do recommend that banks and credit unions, their marketing departments do some very intentional things to drive more testimonials and reviews. So what's one example of how you've worked with a client to drive more testimonials and reviews?

Dean DeCarlo:
Listen, I know that you're into HubSpot and obviously the whole automation program, and I think a lot of credit union banks are, whether it's HubSpot or another automation platform. But SMS automations, as soon as a loan is funded or an account is opened, I think that's really important to do. It's easy to deploy and the best part about it is process driven. Because we all know that the loan specialists are busy people. Especially at small or medium-sized credit unions, they might not have as much support. So yes, they should be reaching out, but as marketers, let's not leave that to chance. Let's deploy those automations to be able to remind a customer, "Hey, we know you had a great experience. Here's how you leave a review."

That's really important too. Make it easy for them. Don't just tell them to leave a review. Give them the link that goes directly to the Google listing. Meredith, I know we were talking about before you're using landing pages for customers that they can select specific locations and when they click the locations, you leave a review. That's really smart marketing because you want to get rid of the friction within the process to make it easy to do so, because our customer's time is really valuable.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. There are lots of paid tools out there that can help drive those. The one that comes off the top of my head is called Podium, but basically where when a loan closes or a new account opens, it kicks off an automated text campaign through the tool that drives them on their smartphone to the Google My Business page for the chosen location. You can leave the review right there. Those are great tools. They definitely come with a price tag on them, but they can drive really, really solid results over time for increasing reviews, especially Google reviews.

We also are really pushing people towards Google reviews over Facebook page reviews. A lot of Facebook reviews are spam now. We're even having institutions that are actually turning them off because of so much fraudulent reviews that are being left. But Google My Business reviews are really, really important. When you have brick and mortar locations, it's really, really essential that you're trying to drive people to those pages for those individual locations to actually drive reviews.

So great stuff. You can also encourage people with a giveaway. We have said to people, and I think you've mentioned that, hey, you could be entered to win a prize if you leave a review. You don't have to tell them what kind of review or what it has to say, but it can provide a little bit of a financial incentive nominally to get them to actually take the action. The key is make it easy and make it timely.

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah. What's interesting about the giveaways that I... There's a giveaway, and then you could also just have a straight up incentive where you're paying somebody $25 gift card to leave a review. I've noticed that when I talk to credit unions and banks that they're very resistant of that idea, but I have clients that are in the service industry where they will do that all day, and it makes a lot of sense for them to do it. I don't know why there's a hesitation there, but I think we need to flip the script and really look at this like, hey, if you spend $100, you get four reviews. Imagine the amount of people that see it and that can convince. I think what you're going to see is one, from what you're saying you want to put on Google, why do you want to put it on Google? Because people are using local search, and the more reviews you get, the higher you're going to show up. Or if there's two credit unions or a bank and a credit union, they're going to go to the one with more reviews.

So right away, to me, it just makes sense to have a budget dedicated to doing reviews, even if you cap it. Where the first 25 reviews are going to get the gift card and after that you close the promotion and the next month you start that up again. I really feel like that that's an underutilized strategy that can really help jumpstart getting reviews in bulk.

Meredith Olmstead:
Nice. I like that idea too. I'm going to definitely bring that to some of our clients who are really trying to push specific branch locations. Especially if you're trying to push out into a new market, or maybe you've opened a new branch and you really want to try to drive more traffic. Walk-in traffic, call in traffic, whatever that would be, even if it was just a temporary three-month promotion for people.

So if we're going to talk about paid, let's talk about influencers, because that's something that you have a ton of experience on. So it is user generated, but it's a little different because influencer content, it can feel like user generated content. But a lot of times you pay for it, which is kind of against the idea of what user-generated content is. So unpack that for me a little bit, Dean.

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah, absolutely. So when we're talking about influencers, we're talking about paying somebody who has expertise in building content for a specific platform. So for instance, that might be TikTok, or it might be YouTube, or it could be Instagram. Those are three very distinct platforms, and there's different styles of building out what that content looks like. TikTok and Instagram is probably the closest, but it's dramatically different from YouTube.

So one, they have the expertise to build content that's engaging within those platforms. So automatically they're going to have a leg up. But the other part is that they have audiences that can be tapped into. So when you are going to find an influencer and somebody who's local, they already have a local following. So yes, you're paying them for the content services, but you're also paying them to reach an audience. Just like you would be paying for Facebook ads or TikTok ads or Instagram ads, whatever your marketing mix looks like, you're already paying for that.

But what we find is though, these are people who have engaged audiences who are typically in market for some type of service you have. Maybe they're not looking for auto loans, but they're looking for a car, which is a byproduct of what you're selling. So they've already forged the relationship. The whole-

Meredith Olmstead:
The trust is there, basically.

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah, the trust is there already. Exactly. So that's what you're paying for and that's why you're going to use them and leverage them.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. So while they're not experts in financial products and services, that's totally fine because what they're experts in is reaching the people that are in the audience that they've built. They've built a bridge with them and they have their trust, have those eyeballs and their attention. So then what you do is you go in and maybe what you do... You hear a lot of this on the radio, but this is really also how it happens on TikTok or Instagram and Reels. You hear radio personalities who go get a car at a local car dealer or go get a loan at a local branch, a bank branch, or go get their carpets cleaned by somebody locally, and then they tell the story on the radio of their experience with that business.

Well, it's exactly the same. So you could basically, you leverage the influencer. Hopefully, maybe they'll do business with you in some way, come in and get a personal loan, consider a low interest credit card, or maybe a new checking account, ask some questions about retirement planning. Whatever it might be, and then maybe they can make some kind of recommendations to their audience and talk about what the value is that they got from doing business with you.

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah, exactly. It's the same exact thing. It's like a classic radio play, except now that these audiences are digital. A lot of the times for credit unions and banks, it might be a way to explore a new audience or a new market. So it's a way that can jumpstart that much quicker than traditional channels.

It could range. So of course, you're going to have an influencer that can reach 18 to 25, but we've worked with Influencer and we have this one woman called Mary, and she's 60 years old, and she's our influencer for doing HELOC loans. So she talks about how she her-

Meredith Olmstead:
I mean, look, I go on TikTok and I'm not 18 to 25. I'm sure the demographics now on some of those networks and those channels are very, very wide.

Dean DeCarlo:
Yeah. That's what I like about it too, because the range of people that you're able to reach, it's much more accessible on these platforms than let's just say radio, where you know typically you're only going to have a certain demographic there. Which could sometimes make the campaign less versatile, a little bit easier to activate on digitally.

Meredith Olmstead:
Yeah. Awesome. Well, so the big takeaway is that you've got to have that user generated content, mainly because people want to hear other people tell them if they like something. They don't always want to hear from the business itself hawking great rates and customer service. They don't believe the business as much as they believe you and I talking about our experience with the business.

So awesome stuff. Thank you so much, Dean. I really appreciate your feedback. We may talk again in the next couple of months about some other areas of content creation and how you're working with credit unions and community banks. So appreciate all of your time and if you all are interested in learning more about content marketing for banks and credit unions, please visit us@Figrow.com. Otherwise, let's just all get out there and make it happen.