Workflows aren’t the most riveting topic, and it can sometimes be difficult to justify the importance of establishing defined tools, processes, and metrics around them. But doing so is especially important to financial brands. In an increasingly competitive landscape, community banks and credit unions must find ways to optimize time and resources, while building credibility and visibility such that acquiring customers becomes less expensive. Stated another way, better processes help every part of the business—especially financials. Here’s how.
Better Content = Credibility & Visibility
Content seems to be the buzzword of the year. Content is king, and it’s everywhere. But does it really matter? The answer is yes. Content keeps your brand in front of potential and existing customers. And, you don’t have to be using content to sell your products or services all the time. In fact, you shouldn’t.
When your market is local, content becomes even more important because it’s a way to differentiate from bigger, national brands that don’t know and understand your local market and what they care about. Social media in particular, is a powerful way to stay visible and gain credibility.
If you don’t have well-established workflows and tools for collecting, creating, providing feedback on, and curating content across social channels, managing an effective content calendar can be extremely difficult. What’s more, marketing teams and social media managers can’t be everywhere at once. You need tools that make it possible to source content from others, assigning them tasks specific to the events they’ll be attending so you have consistent, usable content that shows your community how involved and engaged you are in its people and success.
Risk Mitigation & Compliance
Workflows are perhaps most important to content approvals, which need to have regularity, transparency, and consistent documentation. What’s more, each piece of content needs to have its own audit trail. Without a good system for this kind of recordkeeping, community banks, credit unions, and financial brands expose their organizations to substantial risk.
Social Assurance’s marketing and compliance software is designed specifically for this use case. It keeps imagery, captions, content, feedback, approvals, scheduling, and published archives in one central location. Unlimited users means you can leverage task and project management tools to assign out content collection (to a lender set to attend an upcoming community event, for example) and request photos. Lenders drop the photos in the task for your content team to seamlessly convert into usable and engaging social content—adding captions, member FDIC branding, and whatever else is needed before moving the post along to compliance for approval. Once approved, posts can be set to publish immediately or on a specified date. Then they’re automatically archived, making audits a breeze.
When it comes to workflows around other aspects of social, including compliance, customer reviews, inbound messages, and comments, the software has that covered too. It provides the ability to seamlessly manage inbound and outbound social media content and interactions in one, centralized place. The result is time savings, seamless alignment between marketing and compliance teams, and an organized system that saves everyone time.
Aligning Sales & Marketing Teams
When workflows are more organized and tools work seamlessly across teams, collaboration is inevitable, and it can lead to substantial business wins. For community banks, credit unions, and financial brands, aligning marketing teams with client-facing folks like lenders and business development teams can be especially challenging. They often work differently, have different skillsets, and don’t always see eye to eye. To align them, you need business development teams to view marketing as an asset–one that helps them reach more prospects, nurture leads into customers, and better serve existing relationships. Business development teams need to view marketing’s work as relevant to their goals and relatable to their clients. Better workflows can help these groups by:
- Saving everyone time.
- Making marketing content more effective.
- Enhancing lenders’ visibility.
- Ensuring lender content is on-brand.
- Providing shareable, relevant content consistently.
- Elevating lenders and lending products.
Time Savings
The reality is that inefficient workflows zap everyone’s time. The right tools make it easy to track and manage content from across the organization, while simultaneously ensuring individual accountability and automating compliance documentation. That means content is consistently being sourced from lenders, community events, financial literacy initiatives, in-branch interactions, commercial teams, community partnerships, board service and volunteerism, and beyond.
The result is that marketing teams are able to plan ahead and adapt more readily. They also spend less time designing images that don’t necessarily land with the community because they don’t tell real stories about real people. Content becomes less about creating and more about curating, pulling together stories from across the organization that show the bank’s community alignment and values in action.
Lenders and business development teams, at the same time, reap the benefits of being the subject of the bank’s content, allowing them to share it in personal yet on-brand ways. Their user generated content often sees more engagement, and new and existing customers feel more closely tied to the brand and the people behind it. The resulting synergy makes it easier (and less costly) to engage existing customers and also acquire new ones leading to key outcomes like deposits, loans, and more active customers.
Streamline Your Content & Compliance Workflows
Whether you’re aiming to improve internal collaboration, boost community engagement, or simplify compliance, having the right workflows and tools in place makes all the difference. Social Assurance’s platform is purpose-built for community banks, credit unions, and financial brands—helping you manage content creation, approval, and publishing all in one place.
Ready to eliminate inefficiencies and tell better community stories while staying compliant? Connect with us today to see how we can support your content strategy, empower your teams, and save you time.
