I love county fairs and state fairs. I think I set a record for state fair attendance at the 1998 Indiana State Fair. I probably set another record for the most corn dogs consumed in one week.
Thinking about that got me thinking about social media marketing for banks. Actually it was the other way around.
You see, I think that a lot of banks (and marketers in general) are curious about how to use social media for marketing purposes. I think they’re also confused by it all.
I think key is knowing what to to talk about in social media as a marketer. Because if you do that right, you can take advantage of the powerful digital word-of-mouth factor that happens with social media.
Here’s where I think the confusion happens. From what I hear, marketers first tend to start looking at the feeds in sites such as Twitter and Facebook and see people posting such thoughtful messages as, “Just ate a corn dog at the Rutherford County fair.”
So it’s only logical that you’d wonder how in the world you’re going to sell people on a CD account in the midst of such trivial conversation.
But is it any less logical for your bank to be participating in that environment than it is to set up a booth at a community event such as a county fair? People go to county fairs to ride the rides and eat greasy food. They’re not there to open up a CD account. But I hardly ever go to such an event where I don’t at least see some kind of community bank presence.
Setting up a booth that’s simply there to get customers to open accounts isn’t likely to draw a lot of interest. You want to be relevant to the environment. So perhaps your bank gives away corn dogs and in the process offers a reminder, “Oh, and here’s something to go with your hot dog–a big fat, juicy CD rate.” Or whatever.
Same thing with social media, at least as a simple metaphor.
So I suggest start with asking what it is your audience wants to talk about that’s relevant to what you can help them with. Because that’s what social media is, it’s about conversations. And while a lot of that conversation is trivial, there is still a lot of conversation that’s related to helping others.
How do you find out what your bank should be talking about? Listen to what your audience is talking about online. Specifically listen for conversations related to banking as well as your community. But also you can listen to what people are saying offline as well. You can start with Twitter and Facebook.
I offer more advanced ways to do this in The Social Media Road Trip Workshop online edition.
In the example above, I illustrated how by simply listening to your audience you can learn from them. And then apply that learning to your marketing.
But I think the best part of social media is that it is digital word-of-mouth. So if you help one person, that one person can share that information with their friends with a few clicks of the mouse. As we all know, there’s no marketing better than word-of-mouth.
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