At the time of its launch onto social media (back in 2016), like many banks, Sandusky, Ohio-based Civista Bank wrestled with concerns about policies, procedures, and audits. With the help of a unique content and compliance management platform, the multi-branch community bank with a substantial footprint across Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, set out to build a strong foundation that would set its branches and teams up for success, even beyond social media channels. In fact, the bank’s foresight and strategic planning are paying serious dividends across marketing, communications, business development, employee engagement, and community impact efforts.
Launching a Social Media Presence
Between compliance approvals, compliance management, audits, monitoring, and reputational oversight–social media can be tricky for banks. At the time Civista set out to launch a social presence, it was using Social Assurance’s social media monitoring tool (available through a longstanding partnership between Social Assurance and ICBA (the Independent Community Bankers of America). Adopting the full-service marketing management platform for everyday social media management and workflows just made sense. In fact, it’s designed precisely for this use case with all the features you would expect from a social media management software, plus additional tools for response management, compliant tracking, archival, audits, reporting, and more.
“Having a platform to be able to manage our content efficiently while also giving us everything we need for an audit was important to our overall strategy,” explains Civista Bank’s Autumn Jose, Assistant Vice President/Brand Marketing Coordinator, noting a number of key considerations that went into choosing a platform, process, and strategy.
“We didn’t have a social media presence at the time,” she notes. “The Social Assurance platform was the best fit for Civista to create and schedule content, providing a simplified workflow process for compliance approvals and a way to retain posts for audit reporting purposes.”
Today, Social Assurance’s Marketing Platform is central to the bank’s content workflows, collaboration, and online presence. It’s tied into key areas that generate stories and imagery ideal for social content, like community volunteerism and give-back efforts. It has also served as a centralized system for broader initiatives, like building a robust employee ambassador program (more on that later in this story).
Streamlining Content & Compliance
With its social media pages connected, policies in place, and a comprehensive and compliance-approved platform to manage it all, Autumn and the marketing team aim to put out content on Civista’s social media pages focused on its people and community.
“We create our content a month in advance,” explains Autumn, noting that she and the team lay out broader goals alongside upcoming events, campaigns, and priorities to determine where there are opportunities to be strategic with social media posts. “It’s a balance between our content strategy and anticipating community efforts to post along the way,” she explains, “Then, also being mindful about shifting things around if something comes up and we need to pivot.”
“Having a platform to be able to manage our content efficiently while also giving us everything we need for an audit was important to our overall strategy.”
Some of the bank’s most engaging social media content comes from the widespread community involvement efforts happening across its employees and branches. It’s a deeply rooted commitment, one that Autumn says starts with its leadership team’s heart for service and core focus on community.
“Our employees play an active role in the communities we serve by volunteering, connecting, and becoming deeply involved in meaningful organizations,” she explains. “From supporting financial literacy initiatives and assisting at local food banks to sponsoring various community groups, we are dedicated to making a difference. We’ve worked hard to integrate these volunteer efforts and provide employees with dedicated volunteer hours to support these important causes.”
Using Social Assurance’s Community Spark software alongside its Marketing Platform, employees across Civista’s 40-plus branch locations have a centrally accessible and super streamlined way to track and manage CRA and community involvement. As employees and branches track things like volunteering, board service, and events, they are also prompted to submit photos, stories, quotes, and other pertinent context that can be effectively turned into social media and other forms of content marketing.
In addition to saving time and resources, having a clear and easy way to track and manage these individual efforts across all locations gives Civista Bank’s leadership, community impact, and marketing teams the ability to wrap their arms around the scope and scale of these efforts. Individual experiences employees have at events and fundraisers can be used for regular social media content, while quarterly and annual reports can provide impressive stats and updates. Teams can also look at and report on efforts around a specific impact area (like disaster relief efforts, education and family services, or animal welfare) in press releases, campaigns, and social posts, or even use this information in employee retention and recruiting efforts.
“All those efforts come together and humanize the brand,” explains Autumn, noting a concerted effort to acknowledge community impact work and the values behind it. “It’s really about reinforcing our goals around community and our broader company values through our content, PR, and marketing communications.”
Autumn and the team stay organized, planning and slating content from numerous sources (including volunteerism and give-back efforts tracked in Community Spark, upcoming events, calendars, and ongoing campaigns). From there, content is drafted in the Social Assurance Marketing platform and scheduled across Facebook and LinkedIn. Posts flow from individuals who draft content to managers, compliance officers, and anyone else within the company who needs to approve before something is published to the appropriate channel directly through the platform. The whole process leaves behind a detailed audit trail, including self-service labels for denoting content categories in preparation for future audits. “Whether it’s community-related content, product content, or bank news–we are meticulous about creating and maintaining labels,” notes Autumn, who is then able to pull detailed reports based on those custom-labeled categories as needed.
With strong systems and processes in place for streamlining content and compliance, in the spring of 2023, Autumn set her sights on a new initiative: Social Stars.
Empowering Employees to Become Social Media Stars
Ambassador and engagement programs come in many shapes and sizes, but their common thread is often empowerment. The benefits are numerous: More engaged employees; better retention among customers and employees; more credible touchpoints with customers; more authentic, human content; opportunities for partnerships; a better and more resilient brand reputation; and overall more business. Civista Bank’s Social Stars program is a unique approach to employee engagement that calls on members of the Civista team to become part of a unique cohort of internal employees committed to representing the company through strategic yet authentic social media content posted to their personal channels.
Civista Bank’s Social Stars program is a unique approach to employee engagement and social media strategy that calls on members of the Civista team to become part of a unique cohort of internal employees.
As the architect behind the program, Autumn worked diligently to outline the concept and its advantages, then present them to bank leadership. With approval from the executive team, a game plan in place, and her eye on a few key employees, Autumn made a bank-wide announcement about the internal initiative. In doing so, she invited interested employees to apply to become Social Stars, official content creators representing the bank on social media.
“With the application, I provided the program details and scheduled interviews with each applicant,” explains Autumn, admitting that she had a wish list of ideal employees who were actively involved in posting to LinkedIn. She reached out to extend personal invites to encourage them to apply.
Civista Bank’s Social Stars team works together to collect and curate authentic social media content across the bank’s many departments, branches, and lines of business.
Program guidelines give Civista Bank’s cohort of Social Stars a clear idea of what’s expected and involved. Meanwhile, each internal brand ambassador’s personal LinkedIn pages are integrated into the Social Assurance platform, making collaboration seamless, providing oversight, and ensuring compliance every step of the way. For Autumn, it’s a nice balance of creative freedom and oversight–where Social Stars have the creative freedom to pursue authentic content and ideas, but she can oversee and approve content, provide feedback, and provide overall support for the team. It’s an important balance, not only for employee ambassador programs, but for really any social selling initiative where individuals within the organization (including lenders, business development teams, and executives) need to represent and build their personal brands in conjunction with the organization’s official brand in a way that is effective, congruent, and compliant.
“I incorporate imagery, along with our disclosures and logo, into product- or service-focused content to capture our brand’s essence. When content comes directly from our employees, it feels more authentic, and with compliance already approved, the process flows smoothly,” explains Autumn. “
“Every other month, we gather to brainstorm ideas and plan upcoming community events. I strongly encourage our team to create content that reflects their own authentic voices.”
“Every other month, we gather to brainstorm ideas and plan upcoming community events. I strongly encourage our team to create content that reflects their own authentic voices.”
The Impact of Authentic Content
For Civista Bank, the result of its Social Stars program is a combination of high-impact benefits. Metrics like reach (impressions), engagement, clicks, and page follows have increased–especially when content about Civista’s products, people, and customers is distributed through individuals, instead of the bank’s branded pages. Indeed, market research consistently shows that, while people do engage with brands on social media and expect to see content from them, they are more likely to engage with accounts belonging to other people. At the same time, it’s important to have brand ambassador pages (including employees, lenders, influencers, and even customers) tied into your brand in an organized and clear way so their endorsements feel both authentic and trustworthy. Civista’s approach balances this nuanced but important distinction effectively, while also ensuring compliance.
Lenders who use social media effectively also benefit from being able to activate it as a lead source for lending inquiries, commercial banking products, personal banking, wealth and financial planning inquiries, and other services. A consistent and engaging presence (that isn’t always a direct marketing push, but rather personally relatable content) is especially effective in an industry like banking. Indeed, people aren’t always in need of a loan or banking services–but when they are, they want to connect with someone they feel like they know. Social media, when brands and sales agents execute it in a personal and authentic (but also credible) way, can provide that connection point.
Other benefits abound. At Civista Bank, its team of brand ambassadors–which includes branch staff as well as lenders–are deploying content that helps reach more and more people on social media, where so many existing and potential customers are spending their time. While there is oversight to ensure compliance and audit trails, the bank’s social media presence is driven largely by content that is equal parts authentic and human–making it fundamentally more engaging and credible. At the same time, employees are more engaged and tied to their work. What’s more, with the help of the Social Stars, Autumn is able to cover bank and community happenings across Civista’s broad geographic footprint in a way that is profoundly local and authentic–a key differentiator for community banks like Civista.
Humanizing, Empowering & Amplifying
Over time, the strategy of authentic brand building and reputation management has spread both organically and strategically. “As Civista Bank has grown, we’ve sought out more marketing efficiencies,” explains Autumn, noting that Civista also trusts Social Assurance with the management of its online business listings.
In addition to helping banks wrangle and update all the online listings for their physical branch locations and ATMs, Social Assurance’s full-service approach includes constant monitoring, response management, and periodic updates for changes like holiday hours. It’s a completely hands-off way to ensure accurate and compliant information, but also to maintain credibility and optimized rankings on search engines like Google and even generative AI platforms like ChatGPT. “This has streamlined the process of getting our online listings live and made it much easier to track and respond to reviews across all listing platforms efficiently,” adds Autumn.
Civista Bank is also among the first to test and adopt new solutions from Social Assurance, including feature adds that help content teams optimize post times and scheduling, features that help flag potentially concerning content based on keywords, and its robust new Task & Project Management tools that make it easier to request photos, delegate posts, and automate the planning and assignment of social coverage for events and campaigns.
For Autumn and the team at Civista, it’s part of an ever-evolving approach to marketing that doesn’t just include digital channels like search, social, and web–it leverages them in a way that is truly authentic and effective. “Aside from launching the ambassador program,” she notes, “We are increasingly creating content that highlights our employees, including business spotlights and timely stories about our communities. These efforts align with our broader goal of humanizing the brand across all channels. In today’s digital age, it’s crucial to prioritize this approach, delivering compelling content that resonates with our audience and centers on our people and communities.”
Social Assurance is proud to work with community-focused financial institutions of all types and sizes to help them advance their marketing and communications, break down silos, streamline content and compliance, and evolve community impact. We’re proud to count Civista Bank among those valued customers.
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