How Oktopost and Beyond Bank Put Customers at the Heart of its Social Strategy

Beyond Bank is one of Australia's largest customer-owned banks, with a renowned reputation for relationships and supporting local communities. With a metropolitan and regional branch network across Australia, Beyond Bank has over 270,000 customers and more than $7.8 billion in assets.

Recognized by internationally-renowned Forbes magazine as Australia's Best Bank in 2022, Beyond Bank is constantly highly rated in customer satisfaction.

Indeed, its commitment to putting their customers at the very heart of everything it does - extends to its dynamic and innovative social media strategy.

Beyond Bank was already creating a dedicated community with its customers on social media, but it wanted to look towards a future that went beyond simply publishing and customer support.

Partnering with a vendor that shared its beliefs around customer-centricity was critically important, as was finding a platform that already integrated with the MarTech stack it was already using.

Most importantly, it wanted to scale social efforts and increase presence across social networks.

With those needs in mind, Beyond Bank turned to Oktopost.

The Challenge: Transforming from Reactive to Proactive Social Relationship Building

Beyond Bank's slogan is "for and with you" and as one of Australia's largest customer-owned banks, Beyond Bank's top priority is customer satisfaction.

Prior to Oktopost, Beyond Bank's social strategy and capability was largely a service approach. While delivering service through social media was important, it felt it lacked a holistic approach to social media that would go beyond current efforts.

Instead, it needed a proactive strategy to social media - one that was going to drive real engagement and foster better relationships with existing customers.

However, there was no one person owning social media at Beyond Bank. The entire marketing team shared social responsibility, meaning they needed a better platform to create and manage social media across several people.

The team needed streamlined processes, and a platform that was going to fulfill the needs they have right now, and the future needs they'll have as they scale social efforts.

• Social listening was an important part of their strategy, as Beyond Bank wanted to maintain their customer service and keep on top of conversations on social media.
• Marketing automation through integration: Marketo was needed to better personalize customer communication. Beyond Bank wanted to move away from siloed MarTech tools and towards a holistic social strategy that helped improve message relevance.
• A data-driven approach was what Beyond Bank needed to scale. Being able to see how posts were performing with deep social metrics that brought their data onto one platform was critical to needs.
• Going beyond publishing: Beyond Bank wanted a social media management platform that wasn't just great right now - it wanted a platform that would take it further into the future.

"We were looking for better capability on the publishing and reporting of what we're doing, and we were looking for a more integrated platform with Marketo. We wanted the ability to link what's happening on social to what is happening in our customer database.

We wanted to use that data to trigger personalized communication and follow up with customers as needed, and put them into particular audiences to make sure they're getting what they needed.

"We wanted to solve our publishing problems - but we were also looking to the future in terms of our MarTech stack. We needed to save time and bring all the tools together, making sure we're looking for the long term and have connectedness in the platform. We just wanted **better overall value from a platform that's not just delivering in one area of social, but across a few.

Mathan Allington, Marketing Manager, Beyond Bank

The Oktopost Solution: Employee Advocacy, Advanced Social Metrics, and MarTech Integration

With no one person dedicated to social media, Beyond Bank needed a platform that was comprehensive enough to handle needs, while being user-friendly enough to be put down and picked up by various hands across the organization.

Measuring the real impact of social media is a challenge for any team - but using Oktopost and its deep integration with Marketo, Mathan's team was able to clearly see exactly how social was impacting relationships with Beyond Bank's customers.

Joining Oktopost in the summer of 2021, Beyond Bank maintained its social presence and stabilized their efforts, through which it grew follower count by 4% organically.

In February 2022, Beyond Bank launched its first employee advocacy pilot program - seeing nearly immediate results in terms of engagement and follower growth on its corporate LinkedIn profile.

By September of this year, employee advocacy and Beyond Bank's social marketing efforts had improved their follower count by 11.6% over February, when it started its advocacy pilot - a 17% overall lift from where they were when they joined Oktopost in mid-2021.

"We've got automation specialists in the team and currently social media is actually a shared responsibility. We don't have a single person that's responsible for it. We've been able to maintain our presence, but then through advocacy, we're able to accelerate certain aspects of social even without a dedicated person to manage it all." said Mathan.

Follower count wasn't the only boost that Beyond Bank enjoyed with Oktopost. Over the nine months following initial advocacy pilot launch, Beyond Bank earned 271% higher engagement over the previous period.

"We took a look at our growth pre- and post-advocacy, and it's higher across pretty much all networks in the previous six months in terms of follower growth. It's supported and accelerated the kind of explosive growth we see on LinkedIn in particular.

LinkedIn is an increasingly important part of our social strategy at Beyond Bank. Where some other networks might have slowed in their growth rate, our LinkedIn audience has grown at increasing rates since the introduction of Oktopost.

LinkedIn represents a great opportunity for us to engage with audiences in key strategic segments including community and not-for-profit organisations, broker networks and small to medium business, while also building our employer brand for prospective talent in a very competitive market.

Shown by their usage, our advocates also love LinkedIn, and it is the centrepiece of our advocacy strategy. The majority of posts shared by advocates are on LinkedIn, with community stories and partnerships being among the most popular content shared to professional networks, as well as business news and job opportunities," said Mathan.

Shared Ethics: The Importance of Partnering with Vendors who Share a Customer-Centric Approach

Being a bank that was centered around relationship-building, it was important for Mathan and the Beyond Bank team to partner with a social media platform that was just as customer-focused.

Another thing that exceeded expectations was the engagement we have with the Oktopost team. There's a few bits of feedback or feature requests that we've put in that have been implemented. So that's kind of satisfying, that the customer was seen as valuable enough for others to put time into.

One of the key parts of why we were looking for a new platform is that we didn't have the relationship. There's the features, of course, but then to know that it's backed up and we have a relationship with the team that's highly capable? That's key."

Mathan Allington, Marketing Manager, Beyond Bank

Oktopost is a company that values transparency and feedback. Customers that work with us are considered partners, and we're just as invested in our mutual success as they are.

What's Next for Beyond Bank's Social Strategy

From Mathan's perspective, equipped with a sophisticated social media management platform, it's time to scale Beyond Bank's efforts.

We haven't had that social leader or primary person. We've been able to maintain our presence, but then through advocacy we've been able to accelerate certain aspects of social even without that resource. *But we see, as a team, there's great opportunity for more. I think there are some gains for us to make in terms of the content and creative of what we're delivering on social, but I feel like our foundational elements and the Oktopost platform are really strong."

Mathan Allington, Marketing Manager, Beyond Bank

While Beyond Bank is already able to get significant results across social media, we're confident that they'll only continue to do great things in the future.

Luckily, with Oktopost, they'll be able to scale their social media strategy without worrying about whether their social media platform will scale alongside them.