Smarketing Blog

For Business Loan Prospects, Change What You Say & Where You Say It

Getting a good pipeline of business loan leads has always been a bit uneven. Generating business loan prospects has consisted of cold calls, networking, and marketing messages distributed via media channels designed to create awareness among a target population of prospects identified by the bank. Yelling to a stadium, as it were.

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Typically, messaging has focused not on the loan itself, but on ancillary bank services. It was a tolerable approach, partly because it was all we had. But, the world has evolved. Dramatically.

Today, given universally available loan-related content online, if you’re marketing business loans and leading with anything other than the loan itself, you’re talking about the wrong things. 

Yet bank marketers, judging by the information presented on many financial websites, appear to widely believe the best promotional approach is to lead with the ancillary products as they've always done: cash management services, merchant services, payroll processing, or remote deposit capture. Yes, these are all valuable services. But, based on information gathered from interviews with business lenders, business owners typically view ancillary services as interchangeable commodities, largely identical from bank to bank.

You're talking about the wrong things, in the wrong places.

If you’re not yet consistently providing easily accessible information where your audience is, about what business lenders are actually searching for, it probably means you’re distributing the wrong messages, and in the wrong places. That’s a big hurdle to overcome.

Here are some of the common issues with how some banks have approached their digital presence.

A focus on bank-centric content

If your site opens with all of the products you'd like people to be looking for, but not the ones people are truly looking for, then you're doing it wrong. 

Think in terms of providing information to help solve a business problem for someone in your ideal buyer profile. Include that content on your site, and make it prominent. Expound upon it by answering top questions throughout your digital content. Yes, it’s true that almost any online content can be boring to someone. But, bank content need not be boring. Some top recommendations to keep it engaging include utilizing video, infographics, story-telling, and more. 

A poorly designed website that hasn't been updated lately

Entire blog posts have been dedicated to bank advertisements: some that are very, very good, and many that are horrid. The same can be said for bank websites. A quick set of things to look for on your site include:

  1. Is your financial site mobile-friendly? That includes all pages, forms, and documents. 
  2. Do you have imagery and video content on your site? These easily-digestible formats receive high engagement from your prospects.
  3. Is the design user-friendly and logical?

If you answered 'no' to any of these questions, it's time to take a look at your bank's digital marketing via your website and adjust for usability. 

A struggle for transparency in the face of the demands of compliance and regulations

Many banking marketers hope their blogs and other social media participation will be opportunities to “get real” with customers - places to speak candidly and explain why they operate the way they do.

However, working toward transparent, clear, and conversational content often runs smack into the complicated regulatory guidelines banks are required to follow. Ask any bank lawyer what they think of social media.  Or, just check out the disclaimers on Citi’s twitter disclosure page. It’s hard not to laugh. 

Wrangling a large, highly regulated organization to embrace social media is full of challenges. It usually involves convincing all levels of the organization (including the lawyers) that there’s a strong case for strategic social media involvement. A few years ago at the BAI Retail Delivery Conference, Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, had already noticed this trend and pleaded with bankers to be more authentic.

Inbound marketing is the better way for bank marketers

One of the emerging solutions to the problem of online content that’s not working as hard for you as it should is inbound marketing. Generally, it’s a way to create and leverage helpful and targeted online content to help solve business problems and to position your bank as a thought leader in the business loan space. 

Want to learn more? You may enjoy spending a few minutes with this customizable spreadsheet. It’ll help you see and calculate returns you could see from a regular program of content-driven inbound marketing for your business banking loans.

Topics: Inbound Marketing Inbound for Financial Institutions