The local little league baseball team.
The community cook-out.
The college scholarship contest for students.
No matter the event, your financial brand is active in supporting the community. Your organization steps up and helps where needed – especially during the uncertain times of these past two years.
As we continue through this era of declining profits, lower margins, and increased competition, how well your financial brand communicates its local impact could be critical. It can help you flip the script, engage with your audience, grow revenue, and strengthen your community. Get credit for the activities you’re already doing.
Here’s how:
Integrate Involvement in Your Content Plan
There are several key steps to creating an effective content plan. These can include:
- Setting your campaign objectives
- Determining your target audience
- Choosing your promotion platforms
- Crafting content and scheduling calendars
But underpinning these action steps is one key objective: to provide value. How are your helping your target audience and – most importantly – why should your target audience care? The value you create is the answer to both of these questions. As mentioned earlier, you are already providing value to your community through your local sponsorships, fundraisers, and events. Your target audience will notice the good you create, but only if you tell them about it. There is simply too much competition for your audience’s attention for them to find this out on their own.
Pro Tip:
Your financial brand is active in the community – and so are your employees. A great way to get a content campaign started about community involvement is to showcase the different ways that your employees help.
Cross-Promote with Community Partners
You’ve got followers. The community organization down the street has followers. But one organization’s respective followers may be unaware of the other. Cross-promoting could offer an effective way to tap into a new target market. Moreover, working together with your partners maximizes your digital presence in an authentic way.
Appearing on another organization’s timeline is equivalent to digital word-of-mouth. As in-person, so it is online – word of mouth recommendations sway 88% of consumers and lead to greater trust in a brand. You can convert this trust into business and spur new account openings and loan applications.
Pro Tip:
If you’re just getting started on fostering these relationships, focus on how you can help them first. No one likes to be sold to and coming across this way can stop fruitful partnerships before they begin. Seek to give before you gain.
Archive Content and Plan to Recirculate It
All marketers are guilty of creating great content, scheduling it for promotion, and then forgetting it even exists. That’s a problem, especially when posts about the local community generate some of the best engagement among content topics. That photo of a fundraiser you hosted to support local businesses can be repurposed into a blog, infographic, or email chain. The more creative you can get in redesigning content, the more effective it will be to your organization.
One-and-done content only does so much. As financial marketers, you need to leverage every content opportunity to its fullest extent. Remember, if you forget that you hosted a community event, your followers have as well.
Pro Tip:
Implementing and utilizing the right technology can help make cataloging and rescheduling evergreen content easy, quick, and simple. Look into investing in your marketing technology stack and learn how Social Assurance’s Marketing Platform can help.
Stifling competition and dwindling profits doesn’t have to be the norm for your financial brand. You can generate leads, maximize conversions, and boost your bottom line by leveraging your community impact into your content strategy. For more information on how you can do so effectively, download Social Assurance’s Marketing and Compliance Report.
