| By Newt Barrett |
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| December 16, 2009 06:45 AM EST |
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724 |
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.
As with so much of marketing, this is a lot easier to say than to do. In a world of limited resources, generating great content poses challenges, particularly for smaller organizations. Knowing exactly what to say and how to say it rarely comes naturally to the folks who are running small companies.
Within the financial world, marketers have even greater challenges because they must comply with stringent regulations that restrict how and what they communicate to their prospects and customers.
Banks face a related challenge within their branches where they would like to do a lot more cross-selling of services to their current customers. Cross-selling can be difficult because today’s customers do not want to be aggressively sold and because branch employees typically lack sophisticated selling skills.
That’s where Truebridge’s unique approach comes into play.
Combining Online and in Person Content Marketing for a Killer ROI
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.”
Building Business at Bank Branches
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.
Summing up: A broad range of businesses can employ exactly these techniques to strengthen their relationships with existing customers. 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.
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Newt is a leading thinker on the new discipline of content marketing. He urges marketers to think like publishers by delivering essential, relevant, and timely information that makes customers smarter and wiser–and much more likely to become buyers.
Newt is a successful publishing executive with more than 25 years of experience as both a manager and business owner. He has launched profitable publications in the high tech arena for both CMP and Ziff-Davis. He was an early player on the web in 1996 as Publishing Director of an early Yahoo competitor, NetGuideLive.
As an entrepreneur, he launched Southwest Florida Business and BusinessNewsNow.com in the late nineties, later selling them to Gulfshore Media. His publication still thrives under its new name, Gulfshore Business.
In addition to his sales and marketing skills, Newt is a published writer for Business Currents and Gulfshore Business magazines. He writes on topics as diverse as healthcare, education, public policy, growth, business best practices, and technology.
He knows how to build great brands that serve client marketing needs. He is comfortable driving dramatic market-driven changes. Newt is recognized as a leader with the ability to move teams in new, unexplored directions. He is effective in high level sales and marketing conversations with senior executives in client organizations of all sizes. He delivers successful consulting engagements to improve products, people, and processes.
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