Teamspirit have written a blogpost challenging the FSA to create an innovative campaign to make saving cool.
We keep hearing about the pensions time bomb that's about to go off - so I don't think we should leave this to the FSA. All savings marketers should be trying to find innovative ways to encourage people to save throughout the economic cycle. With the savings ratio as high as it is at the moment, now is the time for us to start creating some innovative campaigns to embed the habit so that people continue saving even when the recovery begins.
I'd love to see a bank or building society - maybe one of the smaller ones that is less tied up dealing with the fallout from the credit crisis - make a real play to own savings. There's a great opportunity to run a relatively inexpensive campaign using social media, YouTube and blogs that could increase the savings ratio for good. The organisation that sets the agenda will be the winner.
Showing posts with label social marketing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social marketing. Show all posts
Saturday, 31 October 2009
Friday, 30 October 2009
HSBC uses Facebook to market new Financial Planning site
This week, ads for HSBC's Financial Planning site have been popping up on my Facebook pages fairly regularly - the first time I've noticed a financial services brand advertising there and great to see.
Although the site is content rich, well laid out and interesting, sadly it's not brought many of the characteristics of Facebook with it - characteristics that would have made it really stand out and help HSBC develop their relationship with customers and prospects.
The only options to actively engage with the site are to use a tool to create a personal plan, start a web chat (which didn't work when I tried it) or move offline and call their call centre or make an appointment with a branch-based adviser.
It would have been great to see HSBC set up some discussion forums or blogs on specific aspects of financial planning - they would have encouraged repeat visits too. There isn't even a link to share the page on Facebook - or Digg, Twitter or anything else.
Interestingly, when I did a Google search to find out when the site had launched and what other comments people had made about it, all I could find were pages about a Facebook campaign a couple of years ago about overdrafts on student accounts.
All in all, it feels like HSBC is dipping its toe in the water with Facebook but sees it as a source of audience for its content, rather than allowing users to engage with it on their own terms. It will be interesting to see how they develop the tool and if they bring in more interactivity over time.
Although the site is content rich, well laid out and interesting, sadly it's not brought many of the characteristics of Facebook with it - characteristics that would have made it really stand out and help HSBC develop their relationship with customers and prospects.
The only options to actively engage with the site are to use a tool to create a personal plan, start a web chat (which didn't work when I tried it) or move offline and call their call centre or make an appointment with a branch-based adviser.
It would have been great to see HSBC set up some discussion forums or blogs on specific aspects of financial planning - they would have encouraged repeat visits too. There isn't even a link to share the page on Facebook - or Digg, Twitter or anything else.
Interestingly, when I did a Google search to find out when the site had launched and what other comments people had made about it, all I could find were pages about a Facebook campaign a couple of years ago about overdrafts on student accounts.
All in all, it feels like HSBC is dipping its toe in the water with Facebook but sees it as a source of audience for its content, rather than allowing users to engage with it on their own terms. It will be interesting to see how they develop the tool and if they bring in more interactivity over time.
Thursday, 1 October 2009
What kind of relationship do you have with your customers?
As marketers, we are always looking for ways to build the relationship between our brand and our customers. It's more profitable to maintain a relationship with an existing customer than to recruit a new one and our loyal customers are the ones that can tell us what we are doing well - and badly.
That's why it's important to understand what kind of relationship we have with our customers and segment our customer base accordingly.
According to Ehrenberg et al, most customers exhibit 'polygamous loyalty' - in other words, they have a shortlist of trusted brands they do business with. Donaldson and O'Toole have suggested that there are four types of relationship we can have with our customers:
Close relationships are most likely in corporate or private banking, where the proposition is bespoke to each individual customer and switching costs are high. These days, we should probably add those customers most keen to interact with our brand: the ones that write to us with suggestions, set up fan pages, blog and tweet about our brands. These customers can become 'lighthouse customers' (Prokesch 1993) who are willing to be actively involved in focus groups, new product development and so on.
Dominant partner relationships are those where one party has (or perhaps is perceived to have) all the power - these relationships have low levels of trust and the subordinate party is probably keen to find a better relationship with another partner.
Recurrent relationships are those where the customer tends to choose the same brand but would find it easy to change to another - for example instant access savings account customers.
Discrete relationships are those where the customer makes each purchase decision individually and won't favour the existing provider - for example 'rate tarts'.
We can move customers from one category to another and increase their loyalty by increasing their trust in our brand - according to Sako, we do this by keeping our promises, performing competently, and exceeding expectations through 'goodwill' actions - the warm and fuzzy stuff that makes customers likeand identify with your brand as opposed to seeing their product as a commodity.
I think it is this final element that is most important - keeping promises and being competent are, surely, hygiene factors - it's expected and therefore will go unnoticed and unrewarded.
However, demonstrating a willingness to treat our customers as people will encourage customers to invest in a relationship with us that moves beyond the products they hold now. The better we do this, the more likely we are to be prioritised among the brands to which our customers are 'polygamously loyal'.
That's why it's important to understand what kind of relationship we have with our customers and segment our customer base accordingly.
According to Ehrenberg et al, most customers exhibit 'polygamous loyalty' - in other words, they have a shortlist of trusted brands they do business with. Donaldson and O'Toole have suggested that there are four types of relationship we can have with our customers:
| ACTION COMPONENT | |||
| High | Low | ||
| BELIEF COMPONENT | High | Close | Recurrent |
| Low | Dominant partner (hierarchical) | Discrete | |
Close relationships are most likely in corporate or private banking, where the proposition is bespoke to each individual customer and switching costs are high. These days, we should probably add those customers most keen to interact with our brand: the ones that write to us with suggestions, set up fan pages, blog and tweet about our brands. These customers can become 'lighthouse customers' (Prokesch 1993) who are willing to be actively involved in focus groups, new product development and so on.
Dominant partner relationships are those where one party has (or perhaps is perceived to have) all the power - these relationships have low levels of trust and the subordinate party is probably keen to find a better relationship with another partner.
Recurrent relationships are those where the customer tends to choose the same brand but would find it easy to change to another - for example instant access savings account customers.
Discrete relationships are those where the customer makes each purchase decision individually and won't favour the existing provider - for example 'rate tarts'.
We can move customers from one category to another and increase their loyalty by increasing their trust in our brand - according to Sako, we do this by keeping our promises, performing competently, and exceeding expectations through 'goodwill' actions - the warm and fuzzy stuff that makes customers likeand identify with your brand as opposed to seeing their product as a commodity.
I think it is this final element that is most important - keeping promises and being competent are, surely, hygiene factors - it's expected and therefore will go unnoticed and unrewarded.
However, demonstrating a willingness to treat our customers as people will encourage customers to invest in a relationship with us that moves beyond the products they hold now. The better we do this, the more likely we are to be prioritised among the brands to which our customers are 'polygamously loyal'.
Friday, 11 September 2009
Measuring reputation
Following yesterday's post on the importance of a strong brand and trusted corporate reputation to help customers feel comfortable developing a relationship with your brand, I thought a post on measuring reputation would be helpful.
This article from the Reputation Institute (a slightly dodgy scanned pdf) looks at the dimensions of corporate reputation and describes a method for measuring the Reputation Quotient (SM) for your brand. It suggests that the main elements of brand reputation are: emotional appeal; products and services; vision and leadership; workplace environment; social and environmental responsibility; and financial performance.
It then recommends surveying the widest possible cohort to gain a balanced view of your corporate reputation across all socio-economic groups, geographies etc.
While this is demonstrably statistically sound, this is a rather static measure and will only enable you to measure your reputation at a point in time and not, for example, measure the impact of a particular product launch or news story.
This post covers the ten most useful tools to measure your online reputation. These allow you to measure the visibility and buzz about your brand in real time - although the nature of the tools skews the results towards those cohorts that are actively engaged with Web 2.0 and the internet:
1) Addict-O-Matic - instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic
2) Boardtracker - track the buzz on any keywords within popular forums
3) Google Alerts - daily or real-time alerts delivered via email for your chosen keywords
4) HowSociable? - measure your brand's visability across the main social platforms
5) Social Mention - another multi-platform visability checker, including alerts
6) Twitter Search - Twitter's only search is great for tracking real-time conversations
7) Wiki Alarm - monitors Wikipedia and notifies when pages are edited
8) Yahoo! Sideline - A desktop application that monitors Twitter in real-time for your brand/keywords (Mark: I personally use this app and highly recommend it)
If we have learned anything from the financial crisis, it must be that the single biggest risk to a bank is a loss of reputation - and that reputation is alive and constantly shifting.
This article from the Reputation Institute (a slightly dodgy scanned pdf) looks at the dimensions of corporate reputation and describes a method for measuring the Reputation Quotient (SM) for your brand. It suggests that the main elements of brand reputation are: emotional appeal; products and services; vision and leadership; workplace environment; social and environmental responsibility; and financial performance.
It then recommends surveying the widest possible cohort to gain a balanced view of your corporate reputation across all socio-economic groups, geographies etc.
While this is demonstrably statistically sound, this is a rather static measure and will only enable you to measure your reputation at a point in time and not, for example, measure the impact of a particular product launch or news story.
This post covers the ten most useful tools to measure your online reputation. These allow you to measure the visibility and buzz about your brand in real time - although the nature of the tools skews the results towards those cohorts that are actively engaged with Web 2.0 and the internet:
1) Addict-O-Matic - instantly create a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic
2) Boardtracker - track the buzz on any keywords within popular forums
3) Google Alerts - daily or real-time alerts delivered via email for your chosen keywords
4) HowSociable? - measure your brand's visability across the main social platforms
5) Social Mention - another multi-platform visability checker, including alerts
6) Twitter Search - Twitter's only search is great for tracking real-time conversations
7) Wiki Alarm - monitors Wikipedia and notifies when pages are edited
8) Yahoo! Sideline - A desktop application that monitors Twitter in real-time for your brand/keywords (Mark: I personally use this app and highly recommend it)
If we have learned anything from the financial crisis, it must be that the single biggest risk to a bank is a loss of reputation - and that reputation is alive and constantly shifting.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
When should you post on Facebook?
Social marketing is a great way to get your messages out to a receptive, opted in audience. But when's the best day to post to get the best results? This blog has data to show that posts are read more if shared early in the week - helpfully also giving you the rest of the week to deal with the traffic they generate.
Saturday, 5 September 2009
How a meerkat became a social media hero
Whatever you think of the new puppet adverts, Compare the Meerkat has certainly been a category-busting campaign that has succeeded in taking a frankly dull subject and creating an instantly recognisable brand identity.
You can read more about how they did it 'How a meerkat became a social media hero, creating a cult brand' in the World Advertising Research Council's Admap magazine this month.
You can read more about how they did it 'How a meerkat became a social media hero, creating a cult brand' in the World Advertising Research Council's Admap magazine this month.
Not using social media? Don't think you have no brand presence
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a happy customer tells one friend and an unhappy customer tells 10. Social networking sites make that disparity even more acute as every posting is instantly visible throughout the poster's whole network - which averages 120 people.
So what are financial services marketers currently doing to manage their brand reputations on social networking sites? A quick check of Facebook found the following:
HSBC
Lloyds TSB
Social networks are a highly targeted way for engaged people to share trusted information, as this article from the FT shows. More and more people are spending more and more time on Facebook - and that's time they aren't spending watching your TV ads, looking at your posters and print ads and reading your marcomms.
So - just exactly what messages are your customers and prospects sharing about you?
So what are financial services marketers currently doing to manage their brand reputations on social networking sites? A quick check of Facebook found the following:
HSBC
- 4 pages, the most popular of which has over 6,000 fans
- 2,000 groups.
Lloyds TSB
- No pages
- 277 groups
- 37 pages, the most popular of which has 261 fans
- 1900 groups
- 1 page with 123 fans
- 351 groups
- 0 pages
- 157 groups
Social networks are a highly targeted way for engaged people to share trusted information, as this article from the FT shows. More and more people are spending more and more time on Facebook - and that's time they aren't spending watching your TV ads, looking at your posters and print ads and reading your marcomms.
So - just exactly what messages are your customers and prospects sharing about you?
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