Social Media Marketing in 2020 | Automated Systems, Inc.

In this day and age, it is critical to have social media accounts to retain and attract customers. It can be exhausting and time-consuming if you aren’t sure what to do. There are many things that go into setting up, planning, and following through with your social media strategies. You want to keep your accounts fun and community-focused while also keeping it informative and informational. Use these tips at your institution to create new plans or strengthen your current ones.

1. GOALS ARE YOUR FRIEND!

Each of these goals should be specific, attainable, and measurable. You want to track meaningful metrics to ensure your working towards these goals and objectives. Tracking should include awareness, engagement, and conversion. Awareness metrics will help to elucidate your current and potential viewers. These measurements should consist of brand awareness – how familiar your customers are with your image, audience growth rate, post reach, and social share of voice – a measurement of how many people are discussing your brand on social media. Engagement will show you the number of people that are interacting with your content, including likes, favorites, shares, and comments. Lastly, keeping tabs on your conversions will illustrate the effectiveness of your content through your conversion rate, click-through rate, and more.

2. AUDIT AWAY.

If you are already using social media, now is an excellent time to go back and review what you have already completed. You can ask yourself questions like, “Was this a good idea, and how did it work?” “Which platforms should we focus on, and why?” How do we compare to our competitors?” and evaluate what changes you would like to make and how you will implement them in the future.

3. WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

Knowing your audience is a critical key to creating content that will have a high engagement and conversion rates. You want to create personas of who you believe will be interacting with your posts on all of your different social media platforms. The audience for Facebook will not be the same as the audience for twitter. You will need to research what generations are utilizing what platforms. Are Millennials still engaging with Facebook? What platforms are most used by Gen X? Determining your audience is critical but relatively easy when it comes to the financial industry. Most financial institutions target anyone who is wanting to open an account, take out a loan, or rent a safe deposit box. If this is your institution, you may find out that you want to create an account on all social media platforms.

4. WHAT PLATFORMS WORK FOR YOU?

When you decide which social media channels to use, you will need to set up or improve your plan for each platform. You may want to use Facebook to target Baby Boomers and Millennials and Instagram to target Gen Z. After you have chosen your platforms, be sure to fill out all of the profile information, use keywords, and use the correct size of images for each platform. Always remember it is better to utilize fewer platforms well.

5. COMPETITORS, OH MY!

It is almost certain that a similar institution is located in the same town as you already, and the odds are that they will have social media accounts on most platforms. This means that you can learn from what they’re already doing. Take a peek at your competitor and see what posts have the highest engagement rates and create something similar but unique to you and your institution.

6. INSPIRATION IS ALL AROUND YOU!

Be sure you check out accounts that have the most engagement to inspire your ideas and posts. Everything you find may not work for your industry, but you can always find trends that you can personalize and make your own. Look at your favorite brands, ask your customers or followers what they would like to see. You can also ask your kids or family what they enjoy interacting with on social media to narrow down the different ideas you want to implement.

7. CONTENT CALENDARS TO THE RESCUE.

It is essential to create and share exceptional content, but it is also important to plan what you are going to share. Make sure your calendar displays your mission and goals to your customers. This allows all of your posts to work together to create one cohesive marketing front. You might want 40% to drive back to a blog, 30% to support the sales of your products, 20% to be about giving back to your community, and 10% curated from other origins. You can also try a 70-30 rule, where 70% of your posts inform, teach, or entertain. While the other 30% directly supports your brand.

8. ANALYZE, ASSESS, AND ADJUST.

As you start to execute your plan and track your results, you may find that some strategies or posts do not drive enough engagement or conversions. It is key to keep track of your social media following and links straight back to your website. You can implement different URLs to breakdown each social media platform. You can easily make a redirect rule to navigate customers from a Facebook URL of www.asiweb.com/facebook to the home page of your website. This allows you to track all of the traffic from Facebook that is directly correlated with your website. You can always re-evaluate, assess, and try it again to ensure that you are doing your best to improve upon all of your social media accounts.

In the end, social media is a worthwhile endeavor to keep and attract customers. It is inexpensive and creates a personable profile for your business that helps relate you to the general public. Everyone wants to know that the financial institution they bank for is not only a reliable institution but also one that takes care of their employees and cares about the community they serve.

About Automated Systems, Inc.
Since 1981, Automated Systems, Inc. has been a leader in providing innovative core banking, digital banking, and data processing solutions to community banks nationwide. An array of integrated applications provide partnered banks with tailored, cost-effective, competitive choices. ASI delivers industry-leading technology backed by unparalleled in-house conversion, training and support teams; paving the way for progressive, top-notch customer service. ASI corporate headquarters are located at 1201 Libra Drive, Lincoln, NE 68512, 1.800.279.7312. For more information about banking solutions from ASI, visit www.asiweb.com.

About Insite Data Services
IDS data application hosting services combines secure and cost-effective core banking applications, enterprise-class servers and storage, and proven virtualization technology. IDS hosts all of the bank’s servers in secure data centers that use state of the art security systems including identity verification and biometric scanning. Insite Data Services also offers IDS On-Time, a full-service solution dedicated to back-office bank processing. These operations experts allow partnered banks to focus on their most important asset, their customers. For more information visit www.insitedataservices.com.