We love to focus on local small businesses in our area, as 60% or so of our business comes from this group. To accomplish this objective, every month or two we select one of our favorites to write about. We describe all the things we like about the business and select several things we might change if we were the owners. We hope the owners consider these new social media ideas on which to build their improvements. Today our selection is the KeyBank new social media marketing case study.
Related: Is Employee Engagement the Backbone of the Publix Culture?
First, a word about Key Bank, for those of you not in the Key Bank market area.
Key’s Corporate Bank includes business units that operate from offices within and outside of Key’s 15-state branch network. Its reach extends across the U.S. and to more than 30 countries.
Key Corporate Bank includes
KeyBank Real Estate Capital: Provides commercial real estate finance, interim finance, permanent mortgages, commercial real estate loan servicing and cash management services
Corporate Banking Services: Provides treasury management, interest rate, and commodity derivatives, and international and foreign exchange services
KeyBanc Capital Markets: Provides a complete suite of corporate and investment banking services, including mergers and acquisition advisory, equity and debt underwriting, syndicated finance products, research and trading
Key Equipment Finance: Provides tailored equipment lease and finance solutions for small-to-large commercial and government clients
Institutional Asset Services: Provides trust, custody and administrative services for individuals, companies, organized labor, government agencies and nonprofit organizations
KeyBank has been recognized by Points of Light, the world’s largest organization dedicated to volunteer service, as one of the most community-minded companies in the United States.
In addition to honoring KeyBank on the 2017 Civic 50 list, Points of Light also designated Key a 2017 Sector Leader in Financials. The Civic 50 provides a national standard for superior corporate citizenship and showcases how companies can use their time, skills and other resources to improve the quality of life in the communities where they do business.
The Civic 50 winners were announced on June 20, 2017, at the Points of Light Conference on Volunteering and Service in Seattle, where leaders in volunteerism and civic engagement gathered to discuss social innovation, cross-
Let me point out that Key Bank is not a client of ours. We are simply taking a look at their online social media marketing and using it to recommend ideas for continuous improvement.
It is such a pertinent topic for many businesses, isn’t it? I will do this task by simply studying their online presence, with no discussion with them.
If you examine their current state of social media marketing and compare it to their competitors, you will probably conclude like we did, that they are doing a good job.
But the point is about how to achieve continuous improvement, which is very critical in this type of ever-changing marketing.
So let’s examine some ideas for Key Bank to consider:
There are several ideas on the top of our creative ideas list. The first one we suggest is for Key Bank to go local with their social media marketing. Not every store mind you, but certainly several stores from a local area going together in the effort.
In this way, they can do a much better job of personalizing customer engagement.
The second idea for consideration is to pick an issue to stand for. For example, we have all read about the issue of business diversity and inclusion. Valuing diversity and fostering inclusion are part of their corporate fabric.
Their leadership and every Key employee contributions to our mission of authentically engaging our workforce, our workplace, and our marketplace.
Picking several employee examples for publicizing would be a good place to start. Certainly, but there is a chance they can create a local or maybe even a national movement.
Educating customers
Key Bank is doing a very good job in this area already. But they can do more with special topics such as online apps, security, and be pointing out future banking trends, just to name three examples.
Customer engagement
Customer engagement is an area where most businesses could always use fresh ideas. One suggestion we have used with other clients is to have employees doing other jobs give an hour or two a day to participate in social media.
Let customers know who they are and that way customers can engage with people they recognize from the store. Remember the recommendation to go local with their effort? Here is a great place for it to come in very handy.
New social media … lots of experimentation
Most businesses take the conservative route on experimenting with new ideas. Not a good idea if you are looking to get ahead with customers.
The best innovative companies know that to do new things well, they must be good at trying new ideas in many areas as experiments. These experiments, they realize, will not all work as planned, and a high percentage will fail.
They know and accept this without worry. But they know that they learn a great deal from failures and small successes. And this often leads to great successes down the line.
A business can never be done by finding ways to discriminate themselves with their customers. This is an area that absolutely must be done well.
A great way to find discriminating ideas, both big and small, is to pay attention to what customers are telling you. And remember, not all customer insights come from verbal inputs.
Get all employees involved in closely observing what customers are doing. What can you learn about improving your operations from these observations?
Customer service and experience
One of the most rapidly growing areas of marketing these days is coming from customer service and strong customer experience. By going the extra mile in these two areas, customers take notice.
The more little things you can do, the stronger the customer advocacy becomes.
For example, when you save your customer time, deliver quality service, stand tall on customer issues, and always show your value, you build trust. And trust is the basis of great customer relationships and follow-on business.
A definite win-win. Lots of additional ways the KeyBank could improve their performance in this critical area.
New channels
KeyBank has a very well designed website and participates on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter social media platforms.
Well represented on these most important channels. Our recommendation is they add Youtube to their list of social media sites. This is a very fast growing social media channel that attracts shoppers looking for education on the many new Apps associated with online shopping and banking.
The bottom line
There can never be enough focus on continuous improvement in social media marketing, independent of how well the business is doing. If you are looking to take your success to a new level, this continuous improvement is required.
This is an excellent time to make a statement about social media marketing. Changing before you have to is always a good idea.
Would you like to participate in a free evaluation of your business marketing where our output is published on our blog like this KeyBank article? If you are interested, please send us an email to Mike@digitalsparkmarketing.com.
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More reading on marketing strategy from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts
How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
Jaw Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of a small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
