This post is abridged with the author’s permission from Content Marketing Today.
Content marketing works by providing your best customers vital information that helps them be more successful or to live better lives. As a stand-alone effort, content marketing is powerful. What’s even better is to integrate your online efforts with your team’s one-on-one work with current and future customers. That’s what the banking firm Truebridge does so well.
Truebridge offers a comprehensive solution that begins with in-depth online content that can be fully integrated into a bank’s website. What makes their content solution even more compelling happens at the branch level. They create non-salesy marketing materials for bank branches and conduct extensive training for branch employees. In fact, Truebridge intentionally provides black-and-white, un-marketing like information pieces that they call “quick guides.”
Their goal is to position the bank as a trusted source of financial information that extends beyond basic checking and savings accounts. Thus, their Web content demonstrates a depth of knowledge which online visitors can explore on behalf of each of their bank customers. The subject material covers everything from buying a house to retirement planning.
As one satisfied client explains the challenges they face in making great content a vital component of marketing strategy:
“Our industry faces an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, especially when it comes to sales process,” says Casey Roberts, Senior Vice President and Director of Retail Investments at Sovereign Bank. “We all need to put tremendous focus on regulatory compliance,” says Roberts. “Regulators want to ensure suitability, and they endorse customer education as a way of getting there. We want to be the ones to provide that education under our name, not send our customers to someone else’s website.”
Within the branch, the quick guides build on web content by offering easy to understand information that leads customers to more detailed educational material online. Branch employees are trained to offer bank customers appropriate educational material and to encourage them to check off the financial topics about which those customers might want more information.
The net result is that bank employees and the bank itself easily build the perception that they can help with a wide range of financial services for their existing customers.
The Truebridge solution would be impressive enough as an online only solution. But where it really stands out is by integrating its online content with the off-line, in person experience at each bank branch.
We all know that, in principle, it is easier to generate more business from current customers than to dig up new customers. Truebridge leads the way in demonstrating precisely how a sophisticated online and in person content marketing strategy can deliver measurable results. They make it much easier for current customers to buy more products. And, they make it much easier for employees to help those customers buy those products.
Newt Barrett is president of Content Marketing Strategies and co-author with Joe Pulizzi of Get Content Get Customers, which is sold on Amazon, as is Marketing 2.0.
Integrate Your Online and In-Person Content Efforts
This post is abridged with the author’s permission from Content Marketing Today.
Content marketing works by providing your best customers vital information that helps them be more successful or to live better lives. As a stand-alone effort, content marketing is powerful. What’s even better is to integrate your online efforts with your team’s one-on-one work with current and future customers. That’s what the banking firm Truebridge does so well.
Truebridge offers a comprehensive solution that begins with in-depth online content that can be fully integrated into a bank’s website. What makes their content solution even more compelling happens at the branch level. They create non-salesy marketing materials for bank branches and conduct extensive training for branch employees. In fact, Truebridge intentionally provides black-and-white, un-marketing like information pieces that they call “quick guides.”
Their goal is to position the bank as a trusted source of financial information that extends beyond basic checking and savings accounts. Thus, their Web content demonstrates a depth of knowledge which online visitors can explore on behalf of each of their bank customers. The subject material covers everything from buying a house to retirement planning.
As one satisfied client explains the challenges they face in making great content a vital component of marketing strategy:
“Our industry faces an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, especially when it comes to sales process,” says Casey Roberts, Senior Vice President and Director of Retail Investments at Sovereign Bank. “We all need to put tremendous focus on regulatory compliance,” says Roberts. “Regulators want to ensure suitability, and they endorse customer education as a way of getting there. We want to be the ones to provide that education under our name, not send our customers to someone else’s website.”
Within the branch, the quick guides build on web content by offering easy to understand information that leads customers to more detailed educational material online. Branch employees are trained to offer bank customers appropriate educational material and to encourage them to check off the financial topics about which those customers might want more information.
The net result is that bank employees and the bank itself easily build the perception that they can help with a wide range of financial services for their existing customers.
The Truebridge solution would be impressive enough as an online only solution. But where it really stands out is by integrating its online content with the off-line, in person experience at each bank branch.
We all know that, in principle, it is easier to generate more business from current customers than to dig up new customers. Truebridge leads the way in demonstrating precisely how a sophisticated online and in person content marketing strategy can deliver measurable results. They make it much easier for current customers to buy more products. And, they make it much easier for employees to help those customers buy those products.
Newt Barrett is president of Content Marketing Strategies and co-author with Joe Pulizzi of Get Content Get Customers, which is sold on Amazon, as is Marketing 2.0.