In this post I'm going to teach you some simple techniques about Facebook marketing that'll attract more customer to your bank. Here's what you'll learn in this post:
- Why Facebook is still an effective place to attract potential bank customers.
- Basic tips and tricks to Facebook marketing.
- And what actionable steps can you take today that'll attract more customers to your bank.
Let's dive right in!
Is Marketing On Facebook Still Relevant Today?
The short answer is yes.
Over two-thirds of adults in the United States have used Facebook, according to a Brandwatch report on Pew Research surveys. Even more surprising, over half of them typically log in at least daily and often, several times a day.
Besides a huge and active reach, Facebook gives financial institutions a chance to filter advertising campaigns for locations, age ranges, interests, and many other relevant criteria. In addition to typical advertising, the largest social site can also help develop organic, personal connections with an interested audience. Even better, paid and organic messaging can work together to truly help you develop connections with your audience.
So is Facebook still a relevant place to be and advertise on? You bet!
Using Facebook Effectively to Grow Your Financial Institution
Your presence on Facebook begins with your business page's profile. Besides your posts, your business page can be the first introduction to your organization for potential customers. You might take a look at the profiles of some competitors to make certain yours measures up.
These basic tips will help you turn your profile into an effective tool for marketing and customer service:
- Graphics: Upload your business logo as your profile picture and include a professionally designed cover.
- Information: Add as much information as possible to your profile, including compelling messages in your About Me and Our Story sections.
- Call to action: Be sure to take advantage of the call-to-action button located on the right side just below your banner image. This will help those who visit your page more easily learn about your business or get in contact with you. Just make sure your call to action matches your buyer’s intent. You can also include other actions in your page menu.
Tips to Make Organic Connections on Facebook
You don't have to pay to create a business page, and you can also make posts to your page for free. Make sure you actively post and monitor post activity. Once you create a post, Facebook will offer you the opportunity to pay for more visibility.
However, before you decide what to post, make sure you have thought about the kind of message you want to send. When you're starting out, you may just hope to grow your audience. Of course, your eventual goal will include increasing your customer base by turning your fans into customers and keeping customers you already have. Either way, clear goals will help you decide which kind of content to produce and use.
Beyond that, these are things to consider when you plan your posts:
- Mix up post types: Adding graphics and even videos will help you grab attention faster. Try a mix of content types, including photos, animation, videos, text, and even live webinars, to test them with your audience.
- Strategize content: Instead of posting just advertisements, consider using relevant informational and educational content to highlight your products. For instance, you might develop content about the importance of having an emergency fund to highlight features of your savings accounts. If you offer automatic transfers to savings, you can mention that as a good way to build savings.
- Mention community involvement: If your financial institution participates in community projects, you have great content for your business page. You can use these opportunities to tag other local organizations and prominent community members to gain more attention. You can also position yourself as the helpful and caring kind of company that people would like to do business with. You might also highlight employees to help keep them and their own social networks engaged.
- Consider contests and games: You can also promote games and contests on Facebook to help increase brand engagement. You could have trivia games that motivate people to participate for recognitions or sweepstakes that award prizes.
- Always include a call to action: Again, you should know what you want your content to achieve. Don't make people guess what to do next. Have the content lead viewers into taking an action, and then be sure to tell them what that action is and how to do it. For instance, you might start a call to action with Enroll Now, Learn More, Visit Today, and so on.
Grow Your Financial Institution's Audience Faster with Facebook Ads
Typically, paying for exposure can help you grow your audience and make conversions faster. Boosting your regular posts is one of the most common kinds of Facebook ads. That's a good place to start, particularly if you want to begin by simply growing your Facebook audience, testing your messaging, and getting more people to visit your business website.
Besides boosting posts, Facebook offers a few different kinds of paid ads that you might test. Before you begin spending money on ads, it's important to develop a strategy to test your results. Few companies develop the perfect social ads on their first try. Instead, they keep testing and tuning to see which kinds of ads result in the most engagement and, of course, conversions to customers. You can set budgets so you don't invest too much in paid advertising before you've had a chance to tune it.
These are some concepts you should know about in order to test and maximize your efforts:
- A/B tests: Sometimes marketers also refer to A/B tests as split tests. In these tests, you run two or more competing versions of your ads to learn which one performs better. Then once you’ve gathered enough data, you can simply turn off the ad that isn’t performing the best.
- Facebook pixel: This is code that you can put on your own website that will help you track the activity generated from Facebook. You will learn more about your active audience, and you can also use this code to retarget people who have responded to you in the past.
- Retargeting: Sometimes called remarketing, this feature lets you show targeted ads to people who have already taken action. For example, a prospect may have responded to an advertisement for a money market account but not yet enrolled. Only a small percentage of people convert on the first visit, so you can take this chance to keep your products and brand fresh in an interested viewer's mind.
- Buyer personas: You'll do a better job of converting and maintaining relevance if you target specific products to the right people. Facebook allows you to choose who you want to show your paid advertising to by choosing age ranges, interests, and so on. To create buyer personas, develop semi-fictional profiles of typical customers for different products. For example, you might want to focus on younger adults or parents when you promote more basic checking and savings accounts. Show somewhat older people information about retirement and investment accounts.
Responding on Facebook and Other Social Media
People may message you on Facebook and other social sites, so it's important to have a representative responsible for monitoring messages. Your current and potential customers won't be happy if they’re ignored. Even if the response is simply to call the customer service number, that's better than not responding at all. You don't need to reply within seconds, but you really shouldn't let more than a day go by without a reply.
Of course, some Facebook members may respond publicly to your social posts and ads. It's easy to respond to a pleasant post by simply saying thanks and liking the comment.
In the course of running any business, you're bound to get a few disgruntled comments. If you decide to respond, it's typically best to simply say that you're sorry for their disappointment and then offer them a chance to call your customer service number or message you privately. You never want to start a public argument, so if the customer persists, sometimes the best thing you can do is to let it go.
Consistency Is Key to Facebook Success
Posting consistently will keep your brand in your audience's mind. Even though it's intuitively obvious, numerous studies have backed up the assertion that marketers who publish on social sites more often tend to do much better. In addition, your history of interacting with Facebook will give you more information to test and tune your efforts. In addition to using social networks to help consumers learn about your organization, you can also use your connections to learn more about them.