Delivering Advice at Scale

Transcription:

Nick Miller (00:08):

The point is, in the small business space, very difficult to do advice. There are two reasons for that. One is the number of clients, so it's hard to get around everybody. And the second reason is the expertise is spotty. So there are some branch managers and small business bankers who are very strong in giving advice, but there are many who aren't. And so the idea of advice at scale, which is what we're here to talk about, came out of that idea. How do we as a bank project the image or the actuality that we are able to provide advice, but do it at scale? And that means first having a resource center of some kind where the good ideas live. And then secondly, having a way to project those ideas at scale, at low cost to the types of audiences you want to reach so that they perceive you as offering advice. So today we're very lucky to have Gianna Porter from Machi Savings Bank and Claire White from Sound Credit Union. They have made the path from sort of early stage to having launched and moved it along. And so their perspective of how to do that is going to be valuable. And Glen Senior from the small business company, has been working behind the scenes with them on the content and the strategy to do that. So my first question for you is why did you go down the path of setting up a business resource center on your website as a basis for your advice at scale efforts? Claire?

Claire White (01:32):

Yeah. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. So I started in the industry about 20 years ago, and I've been in my current role at Sound for two years. And when I came in and pitched myself, I had to present my business plan. And what I noticed was that gap of our ability at the credit union to really demonstrate that we were serious about business. We had all the products and services, but we couldn't demonstrate our knowledge and that we knew how to work with small businesses and could help them on their journey to grow their business. So I started small thinking, well, we'll just start with a newsletter, maybe a blog. I didn't know what that was going to look like. This was pitched for year two or three down the road. But I definitely just knew that we could differentiate ourselves from our competitors if we had more advice, if we did more than just send them to the SBA or things like that. And if we were able to offer a resource center, it would also keep them in our channels and bring them into our credit union.

Nick Miller (02:43):

And Gianna, what was your thought about that? Why was the resource center the first step for you.

Gianna Porter (02:47):

From HIA's. establishing a business resource center on our website really served dual purpose. We required both digital and human touchpoint in order to support this initiative. And just for some additional context about Maine's business landscape or predominantly small business and really micro businesses compared to the US as a whole. So as you can see, having these self-service resources on our website would be a huge value add to our customer base. Another thing that I wanted to touch on is that most banks like to pride themselves in providing great customer service, but how do you really differentiate yourself from those other banks because almost in an echo chamber. So at HIAs, we really aim to go beyond the transaction and getting this resource center up on our website can really help us in achieving and supporting this initiative by equipping our sales team members with the right resources at the right time so they can be seen as business advisors as well as establishing themselves as industry experts and also increasing their own brand presence online and just really helping to develop that. So that's really the main reasons for why at HIA's we decided to add a resource center to our website.

Glen Senior (04:14):

Nick, sorry, I've got one thing to add. This morning, Ben Walker talked about how businesses are lonely, and that really resonated with me how if you have self-serve information around financial literacy, whether it's cashflow or managing your finances, and they can look at that content in their own time and content online will actually help them support not only in their business management, but actually somebody else is on their side and they may not have time to talk to someone, but if they can consume the content, then it helps with that strategy.

Nick Miller (04:55):

So how hard was it to get the content up? Gianna, I'll come to you first on that.

Gianna Porter (05:00):

Sure. It actually wasn't as bad as what I thought it was going to be. It was a much easier lift. The small business codes content that we subscribed to really helped with the speed of deployment. And I will say all content is built with bank compliance in mind, which is huge. We all know how that can be a little bit tricky. So it definitely helped to streamline our internal approval process. And like most banks, our marketing department is pretty teeny tiny. So it was really great that Glen's team agreed to act as an extension of our team and help us with things like branding materials. And really, he was there to support us in any way that we needed, but we were actually able to get 57 new pieces of content, including interactive tools and calculators all approved through compliance branded ready to go to be deployed in as little as a month, which is really huge for us to be able to do that. So for us, subscribing to his content was a huge game changer, and it allowed us to get where we wanted to be in the business space with offering advice to where customers at a much faster rate rather than having to develop all that content all ourselves. As you can imagine, that would take quite a long time. And his content library just has a variety of different topics. I mean, there's really something there for everyone.

Nick Miller (06:31):

And Claire, you had a similar experience?

Claire White (06:33):

I did. So as I mentioned, this was on my roadmap for year two or year three, and I've been just now at sound for two years. And I didn't know how I was actually going to do this. I pitched it, it was accepted as a great idea that it was something we needed to do, but I had no idea where the content was going to come from and that was daunting. But I met Glen a year ago here, and it just seemed like a no brainer. So we had strategy sessions, he came prepared looking at our website and gave us great insight on how we could reorganize it, where we could add content into different areas, things like that. We're still not exactly where I want our website and our actual resource center to be, but we are using that content and they're very easy to work with when we say we need something new or have an idea for something that's not in their library already, they will work with us and they'll send me a draft to look at. They brand it for us. So it's really been an extension of our marketing team.

Nick Miller (07:47):

So when we started, I made the thought that there's two parts to advice at scale. One is the content, the actual content of the advice that you're going to provide. And the second part is really how do you scale that? So I'm guessing a lot of people in the room may have content or blogs on their websites and so on, but I'm curious, Claire, maybe coming back to you on this first is what are the main ways you're scaling this to reach the people who would want the advice?

Claire White (08:14):

Yeah, so like I said, our website is not as organized as I would like it to be, but we do have all that content there. And like Giannaa said, there's interactive tools, blog articles. We started when we rolled that out, we timed it with Small business week back in April or May. And so we started immediately with just a five part email campaign to our business members using a different piece of content each day. And since then, like I said, we've been using it in our monthly e-newsletter. Typically it's something educational for them as in our digital channels.

Nick Miller (08:58):

And Gianna, you've taken a slightly different approach, I think as terms of scaling and pushing the content out to people.

Gianna Porter (09:06):

So for HIA's, we're mostly using our sales teams and marketing channels. So what we'll be doing with our sales teams would be banker trainings, adding tools and templates to our relationship banking page, which is on our internal employee internet. Also on that page, we will be adding a marketing calendar so our bankers can stay in the know of when we're launching what pieces of content on what channels, so they can be ready to further amplify that, share it on their social media, or send to an email to a customer or prospect that they feel that will really benefit from that content.

(09:51):

And another thing that we did that you don't want to miss, which it could be an easy, it's just a small detail, but on all of our pieces of content, we've added social sharing buttons to make it that much easier for bankers to share that content across multiple channels. So a reoccurring theme that you can find from my answer is that it's so important to store these resources in a centralized location like your employee intranet, and to make things as easy as possible to access and share across multiple platforms. You don't want people hunting and it all being disjointed and unorganized. You want to make this as easy as possible for your sales team members to access. And for our marketing efforts, we're mostly using digital in some traditional, that's the approach we're taking. And like I've said before, that would mostly be social media, website, e-news, email, digital display, and we're even going to use promoting this resource center in an upcoming PPC campaign, which I'm super excited about and I really look forward to seeing the results from that. So those are mostly the ways that we're scaling the content.

Nick Miller (11:09):

So Glen, a question for you. You've worked with tech organizations, you've worked with financial institutions, you've worked with accountants. Are there some other ways that you've seen that people have successfully scaled the content to reach the broader audience and position whoever was sending it as an advisor?

Glen Senior (11:28):

It's a good question. I think one of the key points from what you were talking about Gianna and Claire is you create the content once and then you use it multiple times. So if it's one tool, one template, you can sprinkle it around your ecosystem. You can put in lots and lots of places. One thing I have seen particularly around the accounting sector, so accountants also under threat like bankers because software has taken over their jobs and they too have to have or want to be advisory. But accountants don't know everything around business either. So a big opportunity we're seeing is can you syndicate your content outside your own ecosystem? So for example, an accountant will have maybe a hundred clients.

(12:15):

If you bank a hundred accountants, that's 10,000 small business customers of touch points. So why not go to your accountant say, right, we've got this cashflow template when we co-brand it, you put your brand, I'll put my brand on it, there'll be a link of course, back to the resource center, which is your payment that you ask for. And then they distribute that cashflow template through their channels on their website, their webinars, their discussions with their customers. So it's not just accountants. There's score, there's the S BTCs, there's associations, there's lots and lots of organizations that are also trying to touch point and trying to talk to their customers. Well, you could be joining forces with them. And the best thing, actually, Nick, it's a zero sum game. So there's no dollars. You give them the piece of content, they take it, they put into their channels, and it's like a zero budget swap.

Claire White (13:08):

We're actually getting ready to do that this year, both. I've had meetings with the Washington Retail Association, and so we've got some specific content for retailers that we're going to be doing this with. They've never done a partnership like that either, so it'll be a new thing for us. Also, I've got one of my business bankers who had a prospect who is a brand new, she's not a brand new, she's been not an attorney, an accountant for a long time, but she's actually going out on her own and starting her own practice. So we've reached out to her and given her that opportunity to co-brand that with us, and then we're planning internally to do some more planning around that to pick certain pieces of the content that we would just have ready to go to co-brand.

Glen Senior (13:57):

Is it clear, did Amy get that checklist from Bruce?

Claire White (14:00):

Yes.

Glen Senior (14:01):

Right.

Claire White (14:03):

That's what I said, they're very easy to work with. We said, you've got a retail checklist. We were talking to retailers that was not something we had originally chosen to just have in our library. And so they turned that around within two weeks for us.

Glen Senior (14:18):

That's where you get the synergy between content and we create content straight away, but it was because of the retail association link. And now you've got something else to talk to the retail association about apart from product.

Nick Miller (14:30):

So you've both mentioned the bankers as part of the distribution channel for the content, and how do you get the bankers to connect with and use the advice content in the resource center to support their own abilities to give advice and ideas and so on to clients? So Gianna, maybe I'll start with you with that.

Gianna Porter (14:51):

Yeah, I think for our bankers, it's so important for them to understand how sharing these resources fits within their everyday work life and just how easy it is. So for instance, our bankers are required to do customer check-ins and calls. So they can utilize our resource center to go beyond just saying like, Hey, how are you doing? And instead they can say like, Hey, remember that conversation we had and that problem that you were having? Well, I have a really great piece of content that I can send your way, and you just send them the relevant piece of content. And I think that really serves to deepen the relationship and to go beyond those surface level conversations. And another thing that I wanted to talk about is just, we haven't done this yet, but it's an idea I've kind of been thinking about. I think it'd be really great to select just a very small team of business bankers to be brand ambassadors for the bank who are already showing a lot of thought leadership on their LinkedIn pages to really be your biggest cheerleaders for this initiative. And hopefully through this we could collect some really great customer testimonials and success stories and share those world wide to hopefully get other bankers to follow suit and to really see the value in this initiative and how they can be seen as a business's advisor.

Nick Miller (16:22):

And Claire, how do you handle that?

Claire White (16:25):

So it's been a learning curve. We're getting more familiar with it. Gianna mentioned her intranet and we've done the same thing. We went through an intranet conversion earlier this summer, and so we've got a place on our intranet for the content. We've got industry guides, and it's not just my team that's using this, but we're also rolling it out to our business lenders. That's a whole long story on why we're totally separate and it's not the same thing, but I'll save that for another day. We'll just chalk that up to credit unions. But we also rely a lot on our branch managers, and they have new goals as well to do more community outreach with businesses around their branches. They're very nervous. A lot of our branch managers have come up through the credit union space, so they don't have as much experience working with small businesses. We're changing that slowly by hiring from banks and bringing them over to our side. But in the meantime, they need training and I can't work with them all One-on-one and our training department has also come up through credit unions. They just don't have a lot of experience. So having these tools available to them and it gives them something to look at and go in and be able to have a conversation or follow up that conversation so they can do their research ahead of time and go, I'm going in to a vet.

(17:57):

We've got a piece of content that tells them some of the things that are relevant to that industry that they can do their research on, and then they can follow up with that later with a different piece of content.

Nick Miller (18:08):

So Gianna, I want to come back to one of the points you made about your bankers. I imagine it's actually not as easy as it sounds to get them to do what you've described. I've often found that it's hard to get them to do not anything new, but to get, sorry, I am old. The truth comes out. How have you done that? How have you made that happen?

Gianna Porter (18:36):

Like I said before, just showing them that the content's relevant and that it's very easy to use and that through using this content, they can go beyond the transaction and to really help educate the customer about a particular pain point that they're having or whatever it might be. A lot of small businesses, they don't want the conversation to just be one-sided, really looking to have a two-way conversation and just to really build upon that relationship. So I think a lot of it with working with sales teams, it's so important for them to understand the why. And rather than just throwing it at them and be like, oh, this is another thing marketing's having us do or whatever, and really trying to involve them in the conversation. Something that we did was we pulled our business bankers to make sure we were getting the right content on the right site. Sorry, we were getting the right content on the resource center site. So we pulled them, we picked up on a lot of reoccurring themes, and we also work directly with a business banker to help us curate the content, and we'll be doing that on an ongoing basis. So I think just really partnering with them, we'll help them with understanding the importance of this and to really be that trusted advisor.

Nick Miller (20:05):

So just to put some context around it, we've been focused on advice at scale, and so choosing content that responds to the issues that your target members or clients are worried about and promoting that internally and externally, that's the scale part. Hopefully they see a source of advice and they'll come to your website first to raise your consideration rate. I suspect that you also want to generate incremental revenue. So Claire, maybe I can start with you. How do you link what you've described, the content and the advice and so on to lead generation and generating incremental revenue?

Claire White (20:39):

Yeah, so one of our main ways of doing that is through our e-newsletter. We pair a piece of content or an article with a product. Most recently we did a brief article on our business growth guide, and then they could click on that and get the whole guide, as well as knowing that those type of businesses that are in a growth mode probably have more cash to invest. And we rolled out our brand new high yield savings account. At the same time, we have found we've got a lot more engagement with our business members through these different channels, whereas the normal click rate on our retail newsletter is in the single digits. We have upwards of 25 to 30% click rate with our business members opening the newsletter and over 65% reading the entire thing. So it's been very beneficial. We're really noticing the increase there.

Nick Miller (21:45):

Thank you. Gianna, how do you connect what you're doing to revenue or opportunity creation?

Gianna Porter (21:50):

Currently what we're working on is a website module to pull in resource center content onto product pages. It's really our philosophy to always help for sell second. And so through that, by pulling in these resources onto product pages, we want to make sure we're equipping our business owners with the right information to make informed financial decisions for their business. So that's something that we're working on. And another thing that we've done, the really great thing about Glen's content that he has is that you can use it in whatever way you want. You can really tailor it to fit your needs. So for us, we've added in product backlinks. We've cross-sell different services. If there's a particular content topic that a banker is an expert in, we have a shout out to them within that resource. And lastly, we always have a lead gen form at the bottom of each content type. So if there's a product or service or a content topic that a customer or prospect wants to learn more about, they can always fill out the form and they can schedule an appointment with a banker to further discuss.

Nick Miller (23:06):

So AI and Chat GPT are pretty hot topics at this point. I'm curious whether either of you, how either of you have thought about using that sort of technology. Have you considered it?

Claire White (23:20):

Not seriously. I mean, I joke like had I not met Glen, yeah, I might've had to start Chat GPT yet.

Nick Miller (23:27):

But unfortunately they would put me a job, by the way.

Claire White (23:29):

Fortunately that has not been necessary. And realistically, no, we wouldn't have done that. It just would've taken a much longer time to come to market if we were doing this on our own.

Nick Miller (23:42):

And I really liked your answer in rehearsal better.

Claire White (23:44):

No, very succinct.

Gianna Porter (23:52):

For us, no as well, we did not consider AI for this type of project. There would really need to be more regulatory clarity in the banking space before we would consider using something like this. But if you are going to use chat GPT, I could see a lot of use cases. Currently right now, if you're trying to write an email or you're struggling with a sentence or you need to reduce character count or whatever that might be for you, it can definitely help alleviate some of those time consuming tasks. But for something like this, we definitely would not consider it at this time. No. Yeah, no, no.

Glen Senior (24:40):

I think chat, I mean, AI does have a use and it'll get better and better, but somebody still needs to actually look at the content. You still need a subject matter expert and either internally or externally and also chat GPT or AI doesn't, it's hard for them to talk about your brand and tone and also interactive tools. At the moment, it's still doing mainly text.

Nick Miller (25:06):

So Glen has a final slide to share to pull some things together. Do you want to do that now or take questions?

Glen Senior (25:12):

I'm going to do my final slide and that's the only slide. So just very briefly, we've talked about these four steps, internal resource center, amplify inside your own channels first, which you probably have already got. Thirdly is making sure you arm bankers. And fourthly is how can you syndicate or amplify the content externally? The good news is that I've got a copy of this slide, the handout at the end that didn't get off, Kate at the back.

Nick Miller (25:41):

So questions or share your own stories. What would be helpful?

Audience Member 1 (25:46):

How are you using this content? How are you using them.

(25:53):

Okay. The content to in an email rhythm drip campaign, regular touch as opposed to just having it on your website.

Claire White (26:05):

Yeah, we have a monthly e-newsletter that gets emailed out. And then throughout the year we've done other emailing campaigns. So I mentioned during small business week, we sent five emails one a day with a different topic or tool, either a calculator or a template that the businesses could use. We'll be doing more of that in the coming year. This month or last month. I can't believe we're already in the middle of November, but October was cybersecurity month. So we did something similar there both through email and through our social media channels.

Nick Miller (26:45):

I think one of the challenges to overcome here is that content, it's like talk is cheap, content is easy. The trick really is do you have a strategy and are you positioning it in a way that gives the impression of advice as opposed to just pushing content. And I think there are a number of banks and other organizations that are just pushing content. I mean, I receive a lot of it and I just delete it. So the question is how are you matching it up with product offers? How are you matching it up with something that's happening in the community? What is it that's the hook that's going to get somebody to open and say, that was really relevant. I'm glad they sent that to me. And then start to look to you. And the whole idea is to get them to come to your website to look at other stuff. That's how you get the consideration rate up. That's when they look at other things. So it is really not so much about pushing content out as it is positioning in a way or connecting it to things that get has them respond. And that I think is the mistake that I see most organizations make. It's a lot about push, but it doesn't get the kind of response that you've heard from Sound Credit Union, Claire, in terms of a 25 or 30% click rate through it's tremendous.

Glen Senior (27:55):

The worst thing you can do is have a daily blog and it slowly gets pushed down by the date stamp. And then you go page 2, 3, 4, and all these blogs are in the system and sure the long tail, but actually, and I know we're in the content game, but it's not lots of content. It's carefully created content. And Gianna said that she talked to her frontline, what content do you want? What questions are you always being asked by small business customers? We'll create that content. And what goes online is linked to a product. You measure and track it and then you amplify it through all the other channels. And even doing look to about bankers, something simple would be do a little snip of the article or the piece of content, approve it and give it to them to paste into their LinkedIn channel with a link back to the content. Give them an email template. This is the email you send when you get a new customer to rewritten at the bottom is click on our resources. So simple, simple things done. Model times

Nick Miller (28:53):

Time for one more question. If anybody has one in consulting school, they tell you never to say that.

Audience Member 2 (29:01):

Hi guys, great stuff. I've been involved in a couple of content distribution initiatives of the big banks through SMB and commercial banking channels. And from a banker adoption standpoint, one of the biggest challenges that we always had was banker leverages some sort of industry content and is concerned that, alright, now I'm positioning myself as an industry expert and the client or prospect's going to come back to me with lots of questions that am not able to answer and I don't want, it's not a good look. How do you guys get past that if you run into that point of resistance at all?

Glen Senior (29:41):

For us, what we do is we always refer to the source of truth. So if we're talking about something around tax, at some stage you pass them off to the IRS. If there's something that's about a legal piece of content at some stage, maybe to a solicitor or so, if it's industry related, there's some stage you pass them off to the industry association or the source of that content because the bankers aren't experts in everything. So the content often is used as a conversation starter. If you're a vet, it's clear set and you go in and talk to them. So we've got content where here are the 10 key things that a vet might want to know about. Here are some of the challenges of mature businesses. Ask two or three of these questions, they'll bound.