You're not using a finfluencer every single day out for every piece of content. So there has to be something more foundational in place.

Welcome to the Growth Engine podcast. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Andrew Jenkins from Volterra Digital. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast.

You've built one of Canada's most respected social media agencies and worked with some of the country's biggest financial institutions.

What first pulled you into financial services?

It's it's not very dramatic. I got a referral to the chief brand officer at the bank, and I had a meeting with them. And I had, you know, sort of newly minted expertise in in social, having been commissioned by Nesta in the UK to do research on all the predominant social networks at the time. A few years previous to my introduction to the the bank's CMO or chief brand officer. And anyway, we just hit it off in the first conversation, and they were trying to build their overall strategy and operating model. And I had some thoughts on that that resonated with them, And the chief brand officer brought me in in a consulting capacity and then partnered me with someone who was a ten year veteran of the bank, who knew how to navigate the bank and who need what stakeholders needed to be involved in our our efforts. And we worked as a a tag team navigating the bank and and evangelizing this new strategy.

Tell me about Nesta because Nesta am I right? Nesta's the charitable organization.

It's the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts.

And a connect through a connection I made via social media, in this case, LinkedIn.

Right. Made a connection with someone from Nesta, and then was commissioned by them to do research on all the predominant social networks at the time, and this was two thousand and eight.

And the the lens that through which I was looking at the research was, were social networks the new city?

And because there was a a kind of an initiative happening at Nesta, so I looked at all the prominent social networks from a standpoint of governance, community, culture.

So I was on every social platform exploring them for what they were, even like second life and things like that, and put together a forty page report.

And it doesn't seem that long ago, but in two thousand eight, do you know do you remember what the number one social network was?

I would guess Facebook. Nope. Myspace. Myspace. Wow.

Was it really was Facebook even around then in two thousand Facebook was in the top ten, but Myspace was number one.

Wow. Yeah.

And so what what a change in the world. So anyway, that project changed my life and changed the business that I run.

Amazing. I'm intrigued. Don't wanna get us distracted from this point. We'll have to talk about the rest of that another day. So coming back into the world of financial services, you you landed in the the the bank. And what what was your when you've started to focus in on financial services, was then did anything sort of strike you about how they were currently using Social, or were they gaps, or what was your first impressions?

Well, I use one example. So I I went to work for the Royal Bank of Canada or RBC, and they had, you know, been I'm gonna use one one of their brand pillars, which was Olympics or the Olympics. And they sponsored Olympians that were under contract as well. And what they were doing was they were doing a lot of paid campaigns and activations, but they weren't doing anything organic.

So they were running a campaign going silent. Running a campaign going silent. Running a campaign going silent. This was twenty eleven.

They had done a cross Canada torch relay, and they created a Twitter account when it was called Twitter dedicated to the torch relay. But then when the Olympics were over, they just walked away from that account with, you know, a sizable community that they had built and and fostered.

And so we rebranded it as RBC Olympic, and I I was trying to steer them away from being solely reliant on paid. Is paid necessary? Absolutely. But they weren't building community, they were just doing these sort of flash in the pan. And this is I'm not trying to cast them as, you know, the single guilty party. This is often done by brands, where they just Yeah. Become somewhat complacent, and they just rely on paid.

Because a lot of times feel like, I don't see the the ROI of community management.

They won't put a body or bodies in place and dedicated to engaging a community. And so my argument was paid can can continue, but in between those spikes of campaigns, what are you doing to keep the community you've built engaged? And so we started to steer them away from just being solely campaign oriented to being jointly focused on campaign and community.

So that that's that's interesting. It's interesting that you're you're using the term community there because the world in financial services that I'm often involved in is when they're actually trying to go after acquisition. So acquisition of either prospective investors or new clients or what whatever that may be.

Can social be used as a as can the I'm presuming that the community can be prospective clients, and they'll you're essentially warming people up for for purchase, but it sounds as to what the word community, it sounds much broader than that as well.

Well, if we broaden it a little bit beyond financial institutions to the investor community, and we did some work in financial services specific to the mining industry.

And mining investors pay a tremendous amount of attention to Twitter. And instead of hashtags, they follow cashtags, and that's the stock symbol preceded by the dollar sign.

And you'll see chatter on Twitter about particular investments. And then that extends to discussion boards again about investments, and that extends to Reddit. And whether you call them a community or not, there's like these pockets of conversations that are happening.

And, you know, if you're if financial services companies are like skeptical about social, and whether or not there are people there, they don't even have to they don't have to take any action about campaigns or anything. They just have to spend an afternoon and tap in and saying, like, is my brand being mentioned? Are there, indicators that the kind of conversations that are relevant to us or that our advisers have across the proverbial kitchen table with investors, are those kinds of conversations happening. And so we did work with this publicly traded mining company that specialized in battery metals.

But they had new patent pending technology that they wanted to introduce to the marketplace.

And so we ran a series of eight meta campaigns over six months, and we targeted the traditional mining investor audience, and we targeted a a net new audience that was interested in electric vehicles, clean technology, green technology.

And we had different ad sets for each of the audiences, and we found that, you know, there was a certain baseline performance that was achieved for the traditional mining investor audience. But the cleantech, green tech EV investor audience was the best performing.

Over six months, we saw increase in daily trading volume, an increase in discussion volume on discussion boards, a tripling of their stock price, and two hundred million dollars being added to their market cap.

Wow. What a case study.

Well, now I can't say that, you know, we this add on Tuesday, March, whatever, meant that John Smith bought ten thousand shares. But the correlation over that six month period, those are the thing. And so this goes back to, like, what can you measure and how can you measure it and so on.

Needless to say, they were happy. But Yeah. It it all began with who is the target audience and where are they congregating and does such an audience exist and and where? And we were able to prove those audiences exist. They're having conversations that are relevant, and we were able to tap into them and influence their purchasing.

Amazing. At Hub, we're we're working with lots of and and speaking to lots of clients that are investment trusts or they are asset managers with products and are often going after retail investors in in the UK. I attended a few conferences, and social, there are people dabbling into it, but I don't think that well, there are the firms that are really embracing social as a strategy, I think, from an investment trust point of view, you could probably count on one hand.

And I think that there is a a kind of lack of understanding about how you go in and you actually build out a bonafide social media strategy for for new clients. So are you are you able to talk us through what what you your company does if if a new client came on board like this? How would you go about mapping out a strategy for them?

Well, we work with financial services in two ways. We work with financial services organizations that work through advisers, or if it's insurance through, you know, producers as they're sometimes called. So we're providing, I'll call it resources, supporting material. We're kind of educating the channel so that the channel can educate the the end, retail, client. Then there is working with the organizations to, I do a lot of personal brand and LinkedIn training for salespeople in financial services or in in insurance. So I show them how to elevate their personal brand, how to prospect, and how to get more referrals. And also just, you know, across the board, whether it's organization or the individual adviser or a salesperson, how to use content to influence.

And but there's something fundamental too is that whether it's the individual or the organization, before you take any action is to listen first.

And so we had an engagement really to an insurance company that sold life insurance and dental insurance.

Nobody goes on social media and says, can't hey, guess what I'm doing today? I'm buying insurance. Like, just that doesn't that doesn't happen.

But they do talk about You're not gonna get your lead that way.

No. But they do talk about, oh, I'm getting married this weekend. Oh, we have a a new child on the way.

And all these life events that are triggers for a conversation that has financial implications.

And not to get into the weeds, but we do a lot of social media listing. But just on that one line of thinking around, we're having a baby. Think about all the different ways that people describe having a baby.

We're expecting the family's growing. Somebody puts up a picture of the stickers that go back on the back of the minivan, like the, you know, of the number of kids that they have and that kind of thing. These are all signals, again, that there's an opportunity to have a conversation.

And the shrewd financial services organizations and people are paying attention to those signals and finding an opportunity to engage.

In the US, when someone changes jobs and LinkedIn tells you to change jobs, that means their four zero one k moves from one employer to the next. And they call that money in motion.

And that's a trigger to have a conversation.

And now, I sold cars to pay my way through university. And if I had LinkedIn then to know, oh, my customer who bought a car three years ago has been promoted from director to VP.

Hello.

Would you like to be rolled out of that lease and, you know, upgrade to the the better again, these are all digital breadcrumbs that people are leaving Yeah.

You know, actively or, you know, inadvertently that I can leverage to spark or engage in a conversation.

Part of the of the strategy, any solid strategy for any company is to first understand what are the social signals that they ought to be listening to, and then setting up the mechanics to do the listening for them or work with an agency such as yourselves about in order for the that correct. That's the first part.

It's the same sort of thing that you have to do this, I'll call it reconnaissance Yeah. To know if you show up and, oh, we've decided this is what you should be hearing from us, and, but we've done no, intelligence gathering, then it's going to, you know, fall on deaf ears or you're gonna look tone deaf.

So, if you, you know, even just take a little bit of time and start paying attention to the kind of conversations that are happening, and also recognize, okay, Facebook is skewing forty plus years of age. These are people that are more likely to be homeowners, given their age band. They're more likely to be parents.

Skew perhaps a little more female.

Acts formerly Twitter, skews a little more well, it used to skew more, I'll call it left left leaning, a little more male.

And so each of these social platforms have nuances about them from a socio demographic point of view, and you need to know that. And so are you gonna go on snap? Well, okay. If I'm a bank, there's certain things that happen on snap that feel sort of foreign to a financial advisor. And so you have to look at each platform strengths, weaknesses, and so on. Instagram, high organic engagement, terrible for referral traffic.

Right. Right. It's the link in bio friction.

So you have to go in, you know, with eyes wide open, properly expert have your expectations properly set.

And you don't have to have one hundred percent unique content for every platform. You can have a baseline sort of overarching theme, but there's going to have to be slight changes for each platform because of the nature of the platform and the the people that congregate there.

Do brands tend to try and choose their best couple of platforms and and go after three at once, or would they tend to focus on, right, our our core persona that we're going after sits on this one platform, or does it vary for for different brands?

In this day and age, you don't have to be on ten, but you can no longer just be on one.

Okay.

And so it's figuring out what combination gives us the optimal reach. And it's not just reach for reach sake, because for instance, Facebook has the largest global reach. But if you're starting a Facebook page today and you don't have paid budget to get it off the ground, it is going to be near impossible to build a Facebook page organically.

You're right. Got it.

And in the case of LinkedIn, a LinkedIn company page only reaches about two percent of its followers with content.

And should you have a LinkedIn company page? Absolutely. It's free.

Are there some advantages to upgrading it to a premium page? Yes. Maybe worth considering.

Should you be mobilizing employees and and key client facing or more media facing people from within the organization? Absolutely. Should your executive or a subset of them be a little more social? Absolutely.

But that speaks to culture change and a variety of things. But so again, with every platform, there's a call it a subset of strategies that have to be considered. But if you want, you know, maximum coverage, choose the platforms where your audiences are congregating, and then define the strategy on a a platform by platform basis.

The the balance between the the paid and the and organic, how how does how does that play out?

Well, we use the the Facebook or Meta example. If you're building a Facebook page today, you're going to need paid to get it off the ground.

But if you only do paid, and so you're just constantly sort of You gotta be in that community.

Face, and well, why are you doing it? Is it just to promote the brand, or is it that you're trying to build a community that you can then organically serve content to after the fact? But if you're not back so oh, okay. I I invited everyone to the party, but the party is the most boring party, or actually, is no party.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You've not you haven't built a community that you were just a flash in the pan or this you had their attention for a moment.

Even in b to c, if you're using paid and you can't back it up with, and I call it, you know, for retailers. So you invited them to the store. You got them to the the front door of the store. They came in, they looked around, not their vibe, and they left.

But what so what are you doing to keep them once you've attracted them? And that so you need to have it backed up with resources. If I'm a bank, is there like an investment calculator? Is there a mortgage calculator? Are there tools and resources that were through which I can deliver value to this to this end audience?

After I've Yeah. You know, use paid to get their attention.

Again, I I'm thinking of how how you you you fire these up, and I know that when I speak to clients, I know that the number one concern is all with with social has always been like, okay, we work in a in a world of content where we have compliance departments.

You know, we create articles, videos, animations for our clients, and we sometimes have to go through two, three rounds of compliance. Now World of social is is much more reactive and media.

How in your experience, how do people start building communities for for organic growth

Whilst navigating the the requirements of internal compliance departments?

Well, one of the first places that you're either, you know, building or maintaining a community is around customer service.

And so there's, you know, defining what I call the community rules of engagement. So I'll just use a Facebook page or an ex formally Twitter channel.

If people are reaching out to you with a a concern, like, oh, I'm having trouble logging in, or the my app is freezing, or, like, whatever. But they're using social to to come to you.

And they've chosen that channel to communicate with you, so the onus is on you to respond in the channel that they've elected to because you're established there. But if that that communications is occurring there, then the your customers need to know what you will and, will not allow profanity, hate speech, you know, getting, you know, anger, dealt with and so on. But the there's a benefit potentially to using social as a a customer service channel because there is transparency, there's visibility to other customers of how you treat customers.

And so a great example I've just love this example from an executive from the Four Seasons hotel chain, who said when you have an irate customer in the lobby of your hotel, your first priority is to get them out of the lobby. So if you can move them offline or to move them to the phone to expedite a resolution to their issue, they often will come back to social to praise you for solving their problem.

Right. And so now, the rest of your customer base or prospective customers see that you've resolved, that problem.

And so there's some compounding effect to that. The other thing under that umbrella of compliance is we'll often work with a financial services client to say, what are some frequently asked questions and let for the because we wanna be responsive and quickly, what are some frequently asked questions and let's get some preapproved responses.

And then, so, you know, maybe there's a dozen canned or preapproved answers, and there's an escalation path. So the anything that's inbound from social can be triaged to identify, is this an issue? Does it warrant escalation? And you sort of go through this kind of decision tree on how to deal with it. And we were working with a financial services client that had a online trading app.

Well, they were doing paid campaigns over the every weekend.

And but because they were increasing their visibility, you would come in on a Monday morning and open up the social channels and the comments, and there was a lot of hate.

Not as much of the brand, but this was during the GameStop and the pump and dump.

And so they were being painted with a broad brush by critics of just trading apps and, like, calling them all predators and I mean, it couldn't Scary stuff for a brand.

Yes. But also, here's an often overlooked thing. There are human beings that are having to sift through all that stuff.

Yeah. And so sometimes people forget, oh, oh, like they're forgetful that there are people that are having to face that onslaught every Monday morning.

So they know, oh, come Monday morning, I have to go through and and my the first hour of my day is gonna be knee deep in garbage.

Yeah. And so I'm not and you know, I'm not faulting a financial services brand, but you know, sometimes that is the nature of social. And so Yeah. This goes back to why you want to have rules of engagement for your community about what will be tolerated and what won't.

And also, what is your policy for deleting a comment? Blocking a comment? Because sometimes that incents them even further.

Of course.

Yeah. Can you we'd be preemptive so that we can air on the side of being responsive, putting customer first, and so doing a more forethought?

Yeah. So it's again, that starts to these these are things that you set up at the outset of your strategy. You work out what you are prepared to do as a company, how you're using social in one one aspect, what's the purpose of it.

But if people do respond, I love that idea of having the the the kind of pre prepared responses which you develop with comp and presumably, can do that, keep adding to that over time as you start to spot trends and stuff going It's a living document because you're gonna learn, oh, because you might be running a campaign that wasn't, you know, part of your, you know, initial planning or the FAQ development.

And so you may have to had a kind of an addendum to that FAQ, for this campaign. Like, what are the rules and regs for the campaign? What's the landing page for for the terms and conditions?

You know, whatever. Is it there's is there is the call center ready for this, for the volume? So and if they're not oh, there's gonna be some issues because customer services are ready for the the spike in volume, and that so that's gonna potentially lead to some upset customers.

Yeah. Yeah. If I come back again into my world and think about customer acquisition for investment companies for for retail If if a client wanted to think, okay, I, you know, my my job is to promote my financial investment product. I wanna make people aware of it, and then I want to move them through the funnel. How would you start mapping out a a social strategy from a content point of view?

The is this stuff that you would you would sit to? I know that you have different team members with your your agency that have response. Is this something you can you you have a view on?

So we work with them collaboratively to, like so what are your content pillars?

We also look at what content do you already have, that could be repurposed. What indicators do you already have of some content that performed well?

And I don't wanna sound like, oh, so, like, we're taking the lazy path or the path of least resistance. Often, organizations have a lot of content that has been underutilized.

They wrote a blog k. They posted it on on the com LinkedIn company page once, and they moved on.

But oh, there's, like, six elements from that blog that could be turned into a carousel, or an animation, or and so, you know, can I squeeze more juice out of the content lembo the lemon, and put them into formats that are more conducive to so TikTok, it's gotta be a carousel or a video?

Yeah. And I can't send someone to a link as easily on TikTok or Instagram as I can on LinkedIn or Facebook. So can I bring forward some of the insights from the content so they can basically consume it where they're at on TikTok or Instagram or or threads or what have you? And just reduce that friction and also because a lot of the platforms don't like links or they don't like it as much as native content.

And so Okay. It basically just kind of this methodical checklist of what do you have already in what form, what are your content pillars, do you have defined personas or an ICP?

You know, what has worked in the past versus now, then it's looking at is it paid for awareness? Is it paid for conversion? And then if you're doing paid, you're raising attention, you're driving traffic, what's going to be in place already and what's planned to be in place to continue to foster that community, you know, content that provides the best answer.

You know, being resources, education, and so on. But doesn't hurt to infuse it with a bit of humor every now and again too.

Now, memes, that that's tough in financial services and compliance because by the time you explain the meme and get it approved, like if you're gonna do a variation and get it approved, sometimes that window has passed.

So you probably kind of steer away from stuff that's really trendy.

Yeah. And you don't want to dilute it, because that looks like you're trying too hard.

But there's a way to like to to infuse things with humor and because when you ask someone, like, what was the last piece of content you engaged with or shared? It's usually something that caused an emotional response.

And as saying emotion at financial services may seem counterintuitive or an oxymoron. But like I said, there are life events that people are experiencing that have an emotional component that usually is tied to some sort of financial implication too.

I think it's amusing that people think about how can you bring emotional into financial services where people get probably the most emotional about money as they do in anything in life. So I think there's it's a rich subject if you scratch a little little further Oh, shall we say.

Yeah. It couldn't be more to the point.

You know, your first job, first car, first house, first child, know, birth, death, divorce, marriage Yeah. Graduating from college, like, whatever these are all, like, life milestones, good, bad, or indifferent, and, you know, can cause some reflection. And you don't wanna look, you know, predatory, but, you know, you're sitting across the table from someone helping them make financial decisions. How do you build trust and rapport as a person and through content as an organization as well?

In the UK, a lot of brands now are exploring their first foray into into social, but they they many of them are starting to think actually a safer way for us to do this is through Finfluencers. What's your what's your view on this?

If you're going to tie your brand to an influencer of any kind, I my first advice is make sure you do your due diligence.

I'm not saying this happens with every influencer, but I've there's a lot of people who've risen in I I spent a lot of time on TikTok, which I enjoy thoroughly.

And not necessarily finfluencers, but just influencers in general. There are many influencers that rise and fall.

And then inevitably, there's a controversy that surfaces that poses a problem, Or in a sense, they over time, they revealed themselves. It may not have been, you know, something you would have picked up earlier, but over time, they make a misstep or whatever. And given how valuable our financial services brand is, I'm not saying don't use a finfluencer, but do so cautiously.

Yeah. And also, like, this is just a trend.

And can you find a a viable finfluencer?

Yeah. Probably you could probably find multiple. But, you know, it's figuring out the parameters in which you're going to engage them. And for what purpose? Is it to educate? Are you gonna use them as the educator, like sharing their own personal, you know, financials investor journey or whatever?

Like, how are you gonna use them? And what credibility do they have? And so, you know, can you use influencers? Yes. I would on the side of using micro influencers that have smaller audience, but they're more engaged. You can pay a ridiculous amount of money to Kim Kardashian.

But just because she has millions of followers doesn't mean those are followers that do what she tells them to do or influences them to do. Many people follow them just for the drama and the controversy versus a micro influencer is, you know, more likely trying to deliver value to to their following. But again, it still comes down to how are you going to collaborate, the rules of engagement, how much of their history can you vet, and also, like, how quickly can you decouple from them if they over time they're true True colors, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. True they're true colors. Yeah.

So so just thinking of the you've the the conversation and tying different parts together

It sounds to me like it would it would almost be sensible to think of him in in of influence in terms of, a a paid activation boost, but not a not a expense of building out your own organic social strategy first and foremost. Would would that be right?

So, again, it goes back to it's like doing paid without organic. So you're you're having these flash in the pan moments, or you're leveraging an influencer over, you know, a few days, or, you know, an influencer, okay, for, you know, x amount of dollars, I'll do two reels and one video, or, like or, oh, maybe you go so bold as that, oh, we'll let them do an Instagram takeover for a day.

Yeah.

I don't know a a bank or an insurance company that would like let go of a social channel to to that extent.

That half bit.

Yeah. You're not using a Finfluencer every single day on for every piece of content.

There has to be something more foundational in place. But even going back to my time at RBC, they had Olympians that were, you know, sponsored.

And so, we didn't use them as Finfluencers, but there was an audience that loved the Olympics and it you know, we were in between the Winter Olympics and the Summer Olympics. So as the ramp up to the Summer Olympics, we were asking the Olympians, what are some of your superstitions? What's your favorite, meal pre competition?

What rituals do you have? What what's your cheat meal? What post competition, you know, like, what's the first thing you wanna do kind of thing? And so it wasn't had nothing to do with investments or my savings account or whatever, but it was engaging content. And sometimes, this goes back to, like, there's a reason big brands sponsor things outside of their industry.

F one, in the Olympics, whatever, because they want the visibility.

What can you do within those channels for activations, just the halo effect, and it's a great sort of source of content. And you kind of earn the right if you if we use the old rule of eighty ten ten, eighty percent of your content should be helpful, educational, and, you know, serve your audience.

Ten is about you, then ten's promotional. So Right. That gives you a lot of latitude for doing content that isn't even about a insurance policy or a savings account, but figuring out what again, with compliance, what are the the guardrails that I have to stay within and how free or or innovative can I be within those guardrails?

Yeah. That's great. And I've I've got a question which I reckon must be the most common question that you get asked all the time, so I'm gonna place a Bring on. Subtle apology before it.

How how often does a firm need to post to be credible? You must get this all the time.

You if you're posting once every other month, nobody's seeing you.

And and I'll use LinkedIn as an example. They've changed their algorithm yet again, and they're focused on relevancy, not recency.

And so, the the the the broad, overarching covers it all answer is post consistently.

Decent quality, you know, content and you'll be fine. And what do I mean by consistently?

Probably a minimum of two times a week, three to five is better.

Some platforms will allow for multiple posts per day.

LinkedIn, probably not more than once in a twenty four hour period.

Now, you know, with a big or a big enterprise, you've got different stakeholders. Oh, HR wants to do a job post.

Then you've got, you know, brand partnerships. Oh, they want you know, they've got an activation of it. So there are people are competing for that one window per day kind of thing. And we've we've faced that at the bank as well.

So figuring that out too.

But again, every platform has their kind of optimal publishing volume or cadence. You this is where it's so important to use your analytics. Look at what are the best days, what are the best times, experiment.

You know, sometimes there's Monday, Wednesday, Thursday seem to be the better days on LinkedIn, or Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. But there's a secondary spike sometimes on Sunday, because people are at home Right. Sitting on the couch.

And, like, even when LinkedIn introduced their iPad app, the most high traffic time of the day was seven AM to nine AM. And then they saw a secondary spike at seven PM, because people are at home after dinner, sitting on the couch, and they're, like, reading LinkedIn like a magazine, but on their iPad. And so sometimes you're seeing the secondary spike on a Sunday.

There was a time when I was publishing ten to twenty times a day on Twitter because you could, because the shelf life of a tweet was ten minutes.

Yeah. And it and feeling like, that's a that's a lot.

At the time it wasn't, and my engagement didn't go down, it went up. And I doubled my not not that followers are everything, but I doubled my following in a year, and then I kept going, and I doubled it again in six months.

So but it's not about the volume, it also had to do with the kind of content I was sharing, which was of high quality and helpful to my I knew my audience and I knew what they wanted. Because it again, I paid attention to my analytics and saw what content was performing.

Yeah. Yeah. What I'm wondering about there, that's that's good to know. What I'm wondering about, how does an organization go from from a standing start and saying, right, we want to we want to put in place our social strategy.

How do they what team do they need in place? Do they need someone that is if there if there's multiple departments that have that work, is that something that they would would build internally, or would they out do they outsource all of that to an agency like yourself? How does that work?

It comes down to, like, what resources do they have? So when I was at the bank, we were the enterprise social media team. And so we sat inside the enterprise branding communications. We had all the brand pillars, like, the we were connected with or tied to. They didn't handle social, but they were stakeholders that we were, you know, looking to to get content about Olympics or the arts or hockey or whatever it might have been. But then there was an entirely different division called retail banking.

The largest single division, then there was insurance as well.

And they were a different stakeholder group.

What content did they want or need?

And this is where you can kinda get in the weeds because what it is, it's not so much about the strategy, it's about what is the organization look like and what sort of social media team structure should you have?

Should if it's a big enterprise, should there be a steering committee? And if so, who needs a seat at the table? And we often argue for social needs a seat at the table for the overarching marketing decisions. Social media is not the only marketing effort that should be occurring. I sometimes refer to it as the the pointy end of the the we're the front of the spear.

Got email newsletters. You've got paid search. You've got just, you know, content on the the corporate website. There's a variety of things that are happening at any given time where you wanna have a seat at the table so you can identify where and how social can complement, amplify, extend what's happening in the other realms. And also be sort of reciprocal that social can lead to more people on your newsletter, can lead to more bookings on or registrations for webinars, or, like, attending, you know, activation events or whatever it might be.

And to to more fundamental, did you conduct a content audit? What content does each line of business or division have that can be repurposed, reused, that is evergreen?

In Canada, February is our the registered retirement savings plan. It's the last month before tax season for you to make that investment that reduces your taxable income.

Well, that happens every year. So every financial services company has content that they pull out of the dryer and and now, yes, they they they refresh it and so on. So you if you look at your calendar year, are there awareness months that we always do something about? Is there are there, things that happen, like, you know, the towards tax season or whatever it is.

What are the knowns in any given calendar year that have that are influence or guide us in our overall content planning, and start putting placeholders in a calendar in loose terms.

And then, again, it's just kind of adding it's like a layer cake. What's the foundation? What's campaign? What's time bound to particular period of the year?

That what like I said, auditing, what do we already have? What do we wanna create this net new? Oh, we're gonna have we're gonna incorporate some influencers. Okay.

Like What's their angle? Do they serve one particular audience versus another? So in Canada, in June, it's pride month. So are there any LGBTQ plus influencers that speak to that community?

Whatever it is.

So Yeah.

And gradually, basically, you're taking this jigsaw puzzle and gradually the picture starts to form.

When a company or or an individual is starting to put together their social media plan, then Invariably, they're gonna have to almost create a mini business plan to for one of a better word and say, right, this is what we're hoping to achieve.

When it starts to think about what's possible, what is this gonna achieve, almost like the the metrics for success. How how do you advise people to kind of not not overpromise and under deliver, but, you know, what what's what's your what would your your advice be here?

The snarky response can be when people say, well, what's the ROI of social? I'll say, well, let's put social aside for the moment. Talk to me about how you measure what you're doing now.

And you can sort of see them.

Because oftentimes, and I'm not trying to be snarkier and smart ass, it's just that sometimes reporting is a little shallow, a little thin, maybe absent. Yeah. And Yeah. I'm not trying to call them out. It's just like and I'm not saying, oh, that we're not gonna have accountability. Absolutely, we will. We report monthly and quarterly on what's happening.

And we organize it into what I refer to as the three c's of ROI. The first c is community.

Did we grow your community over time, which means extended reach, you know, engagement, etcetera. Did we improve your content and its performance in terms of like, did we improve the cadence frequency, but also the quality of the content and that results in hopefully higher engagement.

And the third c is conversion, and that can run the gamut. That can be just increased referral traffic to your website from social. If we're writing blogs for you on a monthly basis, did we increase blog traffic?

Is there a landing page for webinar registrations? Did we see a spike there if it was tied to a campaign or an event?

If it's offline and activations, is there a way where I can link the two? We did this in social, and this correlated to some act action that occurred offline.

Downloading an ebook.

Did we increase traffic to the tools or resource page, you know, for calculators for mortgage or investment or whatever? And again, this go this is about being collaborative, figuring out what if kinda say, what are your business objectives for the next six to twelve months? And let's layer on social towards that to serve those objectives versus we're not here for the likes. That's that's secondary.

I mean, is it is it a metric that's worth paying attention to? Yes. Is it the only metric? No.

Yeah. Because a like is I can't tell you what it's a like is worth monetarily, but I can, you know Yep. Have a better idea if someone signs up for a webinar. Oh, well, that's someone I can, you know, refer to an adviser in a branch or whatever it might be.

Yep. Yep. Excellent. So just to start wrapping this this all all all in into one thing. If if, again, the world's I move in UK investing companies If they're listening to us and want to get started, what's the what's the one thing that they ought to do this week?

Listen.

Yeah. Identify the kinds of things, you know, one of their advisers is at a networking event. Like, what are they what is a trigger in a conversation that says, know, I could help you. Or, not that you're always on the pitch, but this idea of, like, you know, we should have a follow-up conversation. Or even more subtle or more helpful is, oh, that's interesting. Actually, I've got some material that I think you would enjoy reading.

And you're leading with education, you're leading with being helpful, you're not going for the close. But there was something that individual said that triggered that. So to look at the where like, identify where these conversations are are happening, and to look for these social signals. And then, you know, what does that mean to, you know, kind of responses directly or through your content. And then, you know, as well to do a content audit and identify what content we have that's still evergreen could be repurposed, could be refreshed, or just, you know, wasn't shared enough that, you know, again, what you shared last Tuesday on at nine AM on on LinkedIn, probably go out again this week at Thursday at four PM. And it's not necessarily gonna be seen by the same people.

And but also, not just I don't wanna make this sound self serving is what resources do you have? So often organizations call it, like, we're doing this off the corner of our desk.

And so and meaning social sort of secondary. Oh, we'll we're gonna put all of our energy into paid search. Nothing wrong with that. But then you if you want social to compliment it, it can't be just this afterthought. You want all of your marketing efforts to be working in a coordinated way, which is why you need the seat at the table.

But one of the reasons we exist is we are additional bench strength to existing resources within an organization that may be resource constrained.

We work with an HR benefits company, four thousand employees. There's only two people in digital for the area that we support. And so they don't have the bandwidth, but, you know, they've got a whole bunch of things that they that's on their, you know, part of their mandate. And so, you know, we can assist.

And again, that's not a commercial, but this is goes back to more something more fundamental. What resources do you have in place? Whether what's their skill set? And where are their gaps?

Because that goes back to the more fundamental thing is your overarching marketing plan. Are you properly resourced for your entire marketing effort, not just social?

Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant.

Thank you, Andrew. That's that's a really good overview of of social and how how we can start and give gives clients a route in to think about it.

I I'm gonna come to this last question. I don't know how we're gonna do this, and then we may Okay. And we we simply can't. This may well be the answer. I'm game.

Have a we have a a bookcase here, which I don't know if you can see or not No. Because of but it's it's where our guests on the podcast leave a memento behind so that future future listeners to podcast can think, oh, what's that? And think I wanna go and do that. Is is there a memento or something you could send me virtually which sums up, the conversation we've had today that springs to mind?

I can I can send you, an e ebook copy of my book that can go on the shelf?

Because it's it's not meant to be self promotional, but it speaks to everything we talked about today. Because one of the reasons I wrote the book that I did four years ago was to address many of the issues we discussed. There's a lot of social media books out there that just talk about social media, but a lot of the things we touched on speak to the way things are happening inside an organization. What it's what what is it like to work with compliance, legal, HR, other stakeholders as you are trying to define and execute a marketing strategy.

Fantastic. That would be great if you could send us send us that. And what we'll also do is we'll make sure that the that the image is is on screen so that any listeners can go and come. But where can they buy that book should they want to?

They can buy it from Amazon or given that you're in the UK, because my publisher is in the UK, from Kogan Page dot com.

Fantastic. Great publisher. Very good.

Andrew, thank you so much for your time. That's I've I've really enjoyed our conversation today, and I look forward to to to future ones as well.

Thank you. I enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening today to the growth engine. If you enjoyed this episode and like to hear more, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from, and follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates or on hub agency dot co dot u k.

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