0:00
Nina Zoukelman
Hi everyone and thank you for joining us for today's webinar Breaking the how financial services are taking social media to the next level. I'm Nina, the content marketing manager here at Oktopost and in case this is your first time joining us, Oktopost is a social media management and employee advocacy platform for mid market and enterprise B2B companies. Now allow me to introduce my guests two leading finance marketing experts. Colin Day, former VP of global marketing operations at FIS Global and currently a Martech advisor for global financial service companies. It's a pleasure to have you with us Colin.
0:43
Colin Day
Thanks Nina and thank you for the introduction. Just to add a little bit of colour to that introduction, I've been in the marketplace for about the last 31 years. I know that photograph probably doesn't make me look that old. You'll just have to trust me and believe me that I actually am. But over the last 31 years I've been in and around the financial services space working in product management organizations, working on business strategy, working in operations and marketing. Over the last five years I've really focused my career on on helping marketing organizations execute transformation programs. For me it's truly an exciting time to be a B2B marketer and our buyers behaviors changing and continues to change especially given new channels for engagement and new channels for education opening up. In my book it's really important and in order to play in that space that you have a social strategy in order to engage the market and engage your customer base. So over the course of this session I'm looking forward to sharing some of my experiences and some of the challenges that I've seen and the obstacles that we've had to overcome in order to drive that change successfully through an organization. So thanks for having me Nina.
2:12
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks for joining us Colin. And another finance marketing expert is Zibi Hussain. Zib senior account executive at Vested, a US based financial communications agency. Ibi, thank you for joining us.
2:25
Ibby Hussain
Thank you Nina. I'm very excited to be here everyone. So quick intro on me. I'm Ibi Hussain and I sit at the intersection of social, digital and creative Invested, an integrated PR and marketing agency focused exclusively in finance. In the last five years I've helped build social processes and led campaigns for banks, group asset wealth managers, B2B and B2C fintech firms to really leverage social media to both help with brand awareness and lead generation. So I'm really excited to talk about my experience and some challenges that I've seen and I'm sure you have seen when tackling finance and social media.
3:00
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, A.B. and before we get started, please note that this webinar is being recorded and will be sent to you within the next few days. If you have any questions, feel free to use the chat box on your right and we'll answer them during our final Q and A. So to make all the finance marketers feel at home, let's start with some numbers. This probably comes as no surprise. 49 of the top 50 financial services are at least one social network. So we can clearly see that a social media presence is no longer nice to have, but rather table stakes. So clearly many of you already have a social presence and today we will provide you with some practical tips on how to take it to the next level. You will learn how to stay compliant on social media, build audience trust, engage in social conversations, humanize your corporate voice, prevent and prepare for social crisis, and finally, measure and understand the impact of social media. So let's get started with some challenges we hear a lot about from finance marketers. We call our first challenge Everyone is on your case and you know the scenario. Legal wants to approve every piece of content you share, which makes the approval process that much time consuming. And it are concerned that implementing new social media technologies will cause security breaches, which obviously makes it impossible to move forward. So how do you deal with those concerns? Colin, what are your thoughts?
4:43
Colin Day
Yeah, great, thanks Nina. So from my perspective, what we're going through here is a transformation. And with any transformation program, it's about ensuring three things. We got the right skill set, the right mindset, and the right tool set in order to transact the business that we're looking to transact. So if we break those three parts down from a skill set and a mindset perspective, it's all about the individual, right? So do we have the right people in the right seats with inside the organization and they aligned correctly. So for that, I mean, do we have a social media manager, a number of clients that I've worked with over the years? It's not a role that is commonplace. So the first thing is defining the role and responsibility of that job. Then it's about using external consultants and external agencies to strengthen the bench to bring in those best practices in order to allow the organization to upskill, take that information on board and move forward at their own pace. And so that really brings in a training angle. And it's about ensuring that the employees are trained on social media disciplines, best practices, the do's and the don'ts. And that's how you win alignment and Sometimes the argument with the compliance team and then the last thing is about having the right technology to support the marketing function. Be that tools such as Oktopost, be that how those tools align with the marketing automation platform or the CRM system and how you get an overall view and visibility into the social activity. So those three things, skill set, mindset, tool set.
6:40
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Colin, great insights. And ibi, what's your take on this?
6:45
Ibby Hussain
Yeah, great points Colin. I think it's all about processes as well. One of the first things that I do when I start a social media program with a new client or a new brand is to build a process with your compliance team. So work with your social media manager, your agency, to understand what works for your compliance and legal team so they're not always on your case. Discuss time turnarounds, learn what works for them. Is it three days? Is it two days? Do you have to use a platform to submit your approvals? Learn what are red flags for them, do's and don'ts and then also adopt advanced technologies to really overcome the barrier, SEC compliance and requirements. There are many tools out there that are specifically designed so compliance and social media managers can interact appropriately. And then lastly is really help your employees know exactly what type of content they can post. So by creating a social media policy like Colin mentioned, as well as having a pre approved library of messages and images. So when it comes down to processes, I break it down to three things. Building a process with your compliance team. Adopt advanced technologies to overcome that barrier and then finally help your employees by building a social media policy and having a pre approved library of images and messages.
8:00
Nina Zoukelman
Valuable insights. Thank you both. So moving forward, our second challenge is that your audience does not trust you. We all know that the B2B sales cycle is long and complex. Buyers do very extensive research and get to know the company before making the purchasing decision. The problem is you're pitching a product well before the buyer had a chance to get to know you and this makes them unresponsive. Ibi, how would you build a relationship with your buyers?
8:31
Ibby Hussain
Building a relationship with your buyers are probably the best way to tackle thought leadership. So use social media to establish credibility, providing value that your users want and that's really by producing high quality thought leadership. So to do this I think you have to answer a few questions. First, what do you want your brand to be an expert on? What is your corporate expertise? What topic and themes do you want to be constantly talking about? So when your users go onto your social media channels, you see them, you see yourself as a leader. Next is who are your internal influencers to promote this? Whether it's your CEO, CMO or an equity analyst, train them to be an excellent social investor. And finally showcase the content that your users want to read. Some examples of these are how to blogs, reports and white papers and interviews. Webinars. I love AMA webinars. Ask me anything Webinars. That's the best way to really showcase an industry internal influencer. And finally, video.
9:34
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks ibi. You can't overstate the value of thought leadership. Colin, what's your advice to marketers looking to build relationship with their buyers?
9:45
Colin Day
Yeah, some great points there by EB as well. The counsel I'd give is don't toot your own horn. And by that I mean don't always talk about your products, your solutions, your organization, right? Make it thought provoking. Take it up to the industry level, not always down at the company or product level. We're talking about yourselves. It really is about establishing that thought leadership position that IBI spoke about earlier. It's about creating a tribe of followers, a community as you will. And the way to do that is really look at curated material or PR pieces that have come from credible news outlets. So as I say, just don't always think about your organization and your products. Think about the bigger picture in order to establish that thought leadership position.
10:46
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks guys. So moving on, another common challenge we've encountered is that audience are frustrated from one way interactions. Let's face it, we've taken a channel that's perfect for engagement and turned it into a broadcast channel like an ad or an email. The problem is your prospects and customers are turning to social for quick answers or support. But your marketing team is either ignoring them or taking days to reply. Colin, how can a company start a dialogue with its audience?
11:21
Colin Day
Yeah, I mean look, we were given two things on the side of our heads, right?
11:25
Ibby Hussain
Ears.
11:26
Colin Day
And one of my bosses in a former life told me, Colin, you were given those ears to do a certain job. And he used to call them elephant ears, right? Not that my ears are that big. But what he was really meaning was to sit back and listen, right? Adopt a social listening position, right? So listen to what the industry commentators, your clients, your prospects, your competition are actually talking about out in the social land. And then look to analyze audience sentiment and intent through what you're hearing and what you're seeing. And then leverage that in the material that you're putting out yourself. So leverage those new insights to improve your own marketing activity. So listen, analyze and leverage Social listening
12:23
Nina Zoukelman
is definitely key when it comes to social media. So thanks, Colin. And Ibi, what's your take on this?
12:29
Ibby Hussain
Yeah, excellent points, Colin. I think those are really the foundation of joining a conversation. So now you have a social listening tool. You're able to analyze audience sentiment by leveraging, right technology, but you have to still follow and join the conversation that are happening, see what people are talking about and reply to feedback and speak to your customers. You have a process that you've built with your compliance. You probably now have a social media agency. So leverage that to uncover trends and content ideas and listen to your peers and influencers. This is a really important part to doing social right.
13:05
Nina Zoukelman
Thank you, gentlemen. Moving forward. So when people think about finance, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Probably something corporate, something cold. So the challenge here is that your brand is perceived as unfriendly and unapproachable, which limits your content reach, your engagement and your conversions. Colin, I'm sure you can agree that being perceived as unfriendly is a common problem. So what would you do about tackling this negative reputation?
13:34
Colin Day
Are you trying to say I'm unfriendly, Nina?
13:36
Nina Zoukelman
Oh, God forbid, no.
13:38
Colin Day
Okay, all right, cool. Just wanted to clear that one up. As we think about that, right, the most important or most valuable asset to any organization, be it in financial services or anyone else, is our people, right? It's the biggest investment that we make. It's the biggest asset that we have. Why not enable them, incentivize them, provide gamification capabilities to allow them to humanize the corporate image, allow them to establish and build upon their own brand by empowering those associates, those employees. What we're actually able to do is to amplify our social reach. We're able to leverage their own networks in order to establish brand credibility and as I say, humanize that image. It also boosts our content engagement. So being able to have a social advocacy or employee advocacy program has benefits to the brand. It has benefits to the content that we're putting out there. Using tools such as Oktopost also allows us to have compliance around our content. A number of financial services firms that I've worked with in the past have had internal policies and procedures that have precluded employees accessing social media channels whilst inside the firewalls of the organization. Yet using tools such as Oktopost, you're able to not only put established and pre approved content onto an advocacy board like Ibi spoke about earlier on, but Oktopost then manages the connectivity out to the social channel. So what you're able to do is to stay compliant with internal policies and regulations as laid down by the infosec team or the compliance team, but still allow those employees to yet to humanize that corporate image through social media channels.
16:00
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Colin. So we can clearly see the multiple benefits of employee advocacy. Ibi, once a company decides to embark on an employee advocacy program, who would you onboard first and how would you measure its performance?
16:15
Ibby Hussain
Yeah, thank you. Honestly Nina, this is a really great challenge to tackle and Colin made some great points about really humanizing the brand and leveraging employee advocacy and start by, you know, talking to your CEO and executives. But I have seen brands that I've worked on. I'm sure Colin has seen the second you start doing this, executives get excited. They see their social brand start being elevated and this starts helping the company as well as themselves. But now that you've done this, I think it's important to start measuring and test and learn. So week to week you should always make sure to see what's driving engagement. Are you actually humanizing your brand? Are you actually being warm to your clients? And so once you see like engagement going up, you can see like you must do more of this. And when engagement going down is going down, that's when you can see like, maybe I should tweak this a little bit.
17:04
Nina Zoukelman
Great insights. Thank you both. So we mentioned engagement on social, but what happens when this engagement turns into a double edged sword? Imagine there's a problem with your product and multiple customers are taking to social to complain. This creates a social media crisis. Social media crises usually involve strong negative emotions that can easily get audiences riled up and spark viral behavior. As we like to say here. Dr. Post, it's not a question of if something is going to happen, it's a question of when and being prepared for it. Ibi, let's start with you. How would you recommend companies to prepare before a social media crisis?
17:46
Ibby Hussain
Thanks. Like I said before, I'm a process guy and I believe in process with social media and every aspect, especially crisis. Before you even get to building a process for crisis, it's important to actually define what is crisis to you and what do you do when you escalate. So establish and train a social crisis management team with that escalation process, saying these are the things that are bad, these are things that we call crisis and then constantly use the tools that we talked about. Oktopost. Leverage your compliance team to really monitor social media or crisis signs. So when you see something soon that's about to happen. You can tackle it early on.
18:29
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Ibi. And Colin, what would you do during a crisis and after?
18:37
Colin Day
Yeah, the one thing not to do is to stick your head in the sand and think it's just going to go away and forget about it. Right. It's not a case of if it will happen, it's a case of when it will happen. So the very first thing I'd do, Nina, is pause all of the social publishing activities that are taking place. It's then about being transparent. Transparent with inside the organization as well as externally. So first of all inform the entire company, inform them what's happening, inform them that you've suspended all social publishing at this point in time and give them clear instructions on what you would like them to do. But also on the transparency side of things, be transparent and respectful out to the social audience themselves. But after the crisis it's about lessons learned and it's about evaluating the impact and optimizing any crisis management processes that Ibi spoke about so that you're better prepared for the next time it will happen because it will happen again.
19:51
Nina Zoukelman
Great advice. Thank you both. So our last challenge for today is one that we hear often about from finance marketers, the inability to measure the impact of social so on one hand, marketing teams lack the tools to measure the KPIs necessary for driving business impact. And even when do have those tools, they use them to measure the wrong metrics such as likes or shares. But this can be used to attribute revenue. As a result, executives fail to see the true value of social media and how it impacts the company's bottom line, which leads to marketing being seen solely as a cost center. So Colin, how would you advise finance marketers to demonstrate the impact of social media?
20:37
Colin Day
Yeah, I'd encourage everyone not to just think about it as social media and don't think about it as one channel versus another channel. In today's marketing world, it's really about creating an integrated campaign strategy of which sure, social media is a very important part of it. It's how do we break down the silos across those disparate channels, how do we bring all of that information to one point and put a pane of glass over it so that we can see how a social media tactic caused a lead to convert or not as the case may be how the interplay between social, between email, between inbound versus outbound, how that all comes together. So it's really about breaking down the silos of social data and being able to incorporate it with the masses of other marketing data that we have at our fingertips, then it's really about being able to demonstrate the market potential of social. Right? So as I say, it's like from a tactic attribution perspective, where did social play? And for me it's not about measuring vanity metrics, it's about really showing and demonstrating the contribution to Sal's pipeline of marketing source leads and the contribution to close one business of those leads as well. That's how you demonstrate the value of marketing in my mind.
22:14
Ibby Hussain
Nina.
22:15
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks Colin. And Ibi, how would you tackle the challenge of demonstrating social media roi?
22:23
Ibby Hussain
Colin, great points. That's something we really believe in here. I believe investor believes in that. Social by the way is a part of a larger integrated marketing communication machine. And so for you to really tackle that, you need to really understand what is it driving. And so like we mentioned, you have to follow ROI positive metrics, right? Link conversions and clicks, not likes or shares. Really leverage the tools you have such as marketing automation. Many of us have marketing automation tools like Marketo or Pardot and tools like Oktopost that talk to each other. So leverage those tools to see what's bringing in leads and what's bringing in the traffic that you want and that's really what I believe is going to demonstrate value. And then lastly is just to really, you know, constantly being leverage your social data to see like what's working on engagement, right? What are people talking about? What are people, what's leading to website traffic and form fill outs.
23:21
Nina Zoukelman
Thank you gentleman. So these were some insightful ideas and now we'd like to hear about your challenges, our listeners. We've been getting a lot of questions so we're going to try and address some of them. Let me see. So our first question from Anna is did you experience any major challenges with implementing a social advocacy program? If so, what were they? Colin, would you like to take this one?
23:54
Colin Day
Yeah, thanks Nina. And a great question. From my perspective, what I've seen and what I've experienced, the number one challenge with deploying any new technology is adoption. How do you get people to take on board the new technology? For me it's a case of start small. IBI said earlier on start with the CEO, start with the C suite. For me it would be start there and then move out to any client facing staff, any sellers, any quota, carrying people and then moving out to marketing and the wider organization. It's how do we empower the employees to become advocates. And part of that is demonstrating the impact on their own personal Brand. So start small, start with the C suite and move out from there. Nina.
24:54
Nina Zoukelman
Thank you, Colin. And another question we received is which executives should be on social, which shouldn't? Ibi, what are your thoughts on this?
25:06
Ibby Hussain
Yeah, this is actually a great follow up to Colin's question. Right. So I think it's important to start with the C suite as well. Right. To see where they go. And social in a brand is definitely bottom down. And so start with them. CEOs, CMOs, COOs, but also the people that are really the face of your brand. Maybe sometimes CEOs aren't really the people talking to your customers every day or the person that's writing the news stories or in the news being quoted, start with them as well. So take a look at your organization and see who's at the top and who can be a great brand ambassador for you.
25:41
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Ibi. And one more question we received is where do you see social fitting within the overall campaign strategy? Colin, would you like to answer that?
25:55
Colin Day
Yeah, sure. I mean, the way that I view it is it's an integral part. It's not the only part. I think E.B. and myself both agree on that one and have said it several times over the last 25 minutes. In today's world, it's really about having an integrated strategy that allows the buyer to really engage along the entire lead lifecycle. And is it part of the education phase? Is it part of the solution in phase? Is it part of post implementation? It's all of that. It's any and the above. It's wherever the client. Yeah. Is looking to engage with us through whatever channel. And that channel may well be social.
26:51
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Colin. So one more interesting question we received is which channels should my company be on? Ibi, what's your take on this?
27:04
Ibby Hussain
So I think this kind of also goes back to understanding your brand and knowing your brand. So when you start social, you don't just go ahead and go, I'm gonna go with LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram. Right. It's first, you know, start with the accounts that really matter and the channels that your customers are on. I think for financial services, LinkedIn is a must to have. Right. There's no excuse for your brand not to be on LinkedIn. And as well as Twitter, Twitter is, you know, quickly and for many years now the place for financial services. There are many thought leaders out there. There are many customers looking to Twitter for research. So those are the first two that I would definitely start to think about. And then the other channels, it's all about your brand, right? Are you a B2B brand? Are you a B2C brand? And are your clients on Instagram or Facebook or Snapchat or other channels as well? But it really comes down to where are your clients? Where are your.
28:03
Nina Zoukelman
Thanks, Evie and our last question is social isn't currently part of our lead scoring model, as we didn't realize the tools are available to empower that. But from what I've learned today, they are. So can you provide some thoughts on how we should be thinking about social and its impact on lead scoring? Colin what would you say to that?
28:27
Colin Day
First of all, I'd say that's a very lengthy question, but let me break it down into its component parts, I think. Nina Right. So social and lead scoring is the key topic, right? And a number of organizations that I've worked with have marketing automation platforms. Those marketing automation platforms have hooked into social tools such as Oktopost. So if you were able to take a piece of content that you were putting up onto an advocacy board and whatever the CTA the call to action was with inside that piece of content, if that is a URL, and let's just say it's a URL that takes you to a landing page or to a piece of content somewhere, what you can do in this day and age is actually put some code on the end of that called UTM code that would allow you to track back into the map into the marketing automation platform every time someone clicks on that URL or on that string. So therefore there's no reason why I couldn't actually factor those activities back into my lead scoring model as an activity or an attribute of someone going through and engagement journey. So a very long answer to a long question. Hopefully that resonates.
30:08
Nina Zoukelman
Nina yeah, definitely. Colin so that's all the time we have for questions. Unfortunately, if we didn't get to your question, we will get back to you via email. Thank you to all the marketers who tuned in and we hope we made your lives a bit easier. A big thank you to Colin and AB for sharing their amazing insights with us. If you have any questions or if you'd like to hear more about how Oktopost can help you with your social media challenges, feel free to contact us. Hope to see you next time.
