InMarketing This Week: Going viral

Innovate > Interact > Influence

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it.

This week, you'll learn why:

① Digital is the most important channel when building a financial services brand.

② The best way to establish your brand online is to provide value.

③ Engagement online is driven by humanity, vulnerability and humour.

④ Credit Suisse is betting on wealth management and counting on digital.

⑤ The next battle ground in social media looks to be the humble newsletter.

⑥ Your brand is a promise: break your promise, break your brand.

⑦ Apple and Facebook are at war over the future of the internet.

What’s new?

There’s an adage I’ve always liked: a good journalist reports the story but never becomes part of it. I am not a good journalist. So, this week the news is about me and a LinkedIn post I wrote that has proved far and away the most popular I’ve ever published on the platform.

In short:

• On 19 January, without giving it much thought, I posted a job I’d seen advertised on LinkedIn with a lighthearted comment about how a staff discount on its products would save me a lot of money.
• As of 30 January 2021, the post had racked up more than 6,000 views, 65 engagements and 27 comments.
• Relative to my other LinkedIn posts, this thing went viral - it proved 25 times more popular than my average.

Why does it matter?

① Since you’re reading IMTW I’ll take it you already know why standing out on social media matters. Digital in general and social media in particular are crucial channels when building a financial services brand. You need a strong, engaging presence on social media because that’s where your clients are talking - and they may even be talking about you.

The challenge though is how noisy those social channels are. It’s ever more difficult to make your voice heard, to distinguish yourself from other brands. Not only does your content have to be liked by others but it needs to be something people want to engage with - that’s because engagement is a key driver of the networks’ algorithms. If a post has been commented on by others, that pushes it up the rankings and makes it more likely that others will see it too. So, how to you do it?

Define your audience, understand what matters to them, and be a valuable part of that community.

② My first piece of advice when it comes to building and growing a social media presence is to deliver value. To do that, you first need to define who your audience is and really understand what matters to them. Once you do - whether it be sharing useful content, providing insightful commentary or ideas, or helping others out by addressing their questions - the most effective way to enduringly establish your brand online is to be a valuable part of that community.

I stand by that advice. Except my LinkedIn post doesn’t do any of that and yet proved the most popular thing I’ve ever posted. Why? Turns out providing value isn’t enough - on its own - to make you stand out.

③ There is a lot of research on what makes a post go viral and by all means read it at your leisure. But it’s worth going back to my LinkedIn post because, accidentally, I think I wrote a post which illustrates three of the main drivers:

1. Humanity: People respond to people. Comments that are light-hearted and appear spontaneous feel more genuine. My post was off-the-cuff and it showed.
2. Vulnerability: Building on the previous point, nothing feels more human than demonstrating a little vulnerability. By mentioning my job hunt and my kids, I exposed myself a little and that tends to elicit engagement from others.
3. Humour: Everyone likes sharing a joke or - better still - getting in on the action. By referencing Lego and alluding to how much of it I had bought over the years, I raised a smile and kicked-off an avalanche of amusingly bad Lego puns in the comments.

What’s next?

Take action

I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when we discussed social selling, how your Marketing team should be your firm’s centre of excellence for social media. In addition to injecting humanity, vulnerability and humour into corporate posts, the team should also be empowering other staff to do the same in their own posts.

Part of that involves leading by example, part of it is providing a framework of support and training for those that need it. Their level of familiarity and therefore comfort will vary enormously. Some will need guidance with the basics, others will simply want to know what to share and where to find it. 

Get help

I’m currently looking for a full-time, in-house role but in the post-Covid age of depleted marketing budgets and remote teams with skills gaps, many organisations need marketing and communications support that’s agile, flexible, and risk free. That’s why I founded WhatsNext Partners.

Whether it be as a permanent member of your team or with 'on demand' support, let me know if you need my help.

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What else?

Three other articles from the last seven days that are worthy of your time.

FINANCE

Credit Suisse: Philipp Wehle Gives His Unit a New Look

④ Credit Suisse is betting on wealth management and counting on digital to deliver both client focus and operational efficiency.

• “Since the outbreak of the Corona crisis almost a year ago, Credit Suisse has recorded a third more client contacts in its international wealth management business – mainly digitally. This closeness to its clientele enabled the bank to grasp the needs of its clients more precisely.”
• “Overall, Credit Suisse plans to invest up to 150 million Swiss francs in its wealth management growth initiatives. In order to realize this savings target, he has already merged individual departments over the past year. Wehle also wants to further digitise certain processes.”
• “Wehle's division employs about 10,000 people and manages around 800 billion francs in client assets. Measured in terms of profitability, it generates a quarter of the group's pretax profit.”

TECHNOLOGY

Facebook is reportedly building a newsletter tool for indie writers

⑤ Following Twitter’s acquisition of Revue (even if, based on past performance, some are doubtful that it can make it work), the next battle ground in social media looks to be the humble newsletter, a market Substack has laid an early claim to.

• “Facebook is building its own newsletter tools, reportedly working on the initiative to offer more services to independent writers and journalists as part of the Facebook Journalism Project.”
• “It’s still in its very early stages, but the tools could have features similar to what other newsletter services have: features writers could use to curate emails, to manage paid subscriptions and to help them grow their followers on Facebook.”
• “The newsletter industry has been growing steadily in the past few years. Substack, founded in 2017, is one of the major players. It boasts 250,000 paying subscribers across its network and a list of top 10 publishers bringing in a total of $7 million in annual revenue as of September 2020.”

MEDIA & MARKETING

Robinhood destroyed its brand in less than a day

⑥ Your brand is a promise: break your promise, break your brand.

• “There's a lesson in the Robinhood saga that has nothing to do with stocks or finance or trading. This one is about perception. Perception matters. If it appears that you've done something that betrays what you say you stand for, you have a problem.”
• “If you're the app that is ‘democratizing finance for all,’ it's really bad when it looks like you're shutting down retail traders to the benefit of the big guys. If your brand is built on the outlaw hero who stole from the rich guys and gave to the poor, it's a bad look if it appears that it was all just a show - that you shut it all down after one when things got rough for the rich guys.”
• “Your brand is built on trust - trust you earn by continuing to deliver on the promises you make over a long period of time. It takes a long time to build a brand, but not long at all to destroy it. In Robinhood's case, it took less than a day.”

Quotable

⑦ Tim Cook, Apple CEO, on International Privacy Day (28 January 2021):

“At a moment of rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories juiced by algorithms, we can no longer turn a blind eye to a theory of technology that says all engagement is good engagement - the longer the better - and all with the goal of collecting as much data as possible.”

One more thing…

Last month I took part in a webinar organised by FinTech B2B Marketing that addressed how marketers should battle webinar fatigue and generate leads. This week, Payal Raina wrote a blog post summarising the top five tips we covered:

1. Define the webinar objective – ask yourself, will a webinar fulfil my requirements?
2. Understand who you are trying to reach
3. Craft a compelling story that truly aligns with your webinar objective and buyer personas
4. Focus on creating engaging, interactive content not lead generation
5. Be creative – think about audience experience, participation and preparation

About

Written for CEOs, marketers and other leaders in the financial sector, InMarketing This Week is a showcase for news likely to impact them - delivered with insight on why it matters and ideas on what to do about it. It’s published every Sunday evening to give you a head start on the week. Read it here, or have it delivered straight to your inbox at six, before it's available anywhere else.

InMarketing is a broader celebration of marketing that innovates, interacts and influences. It's available on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and as a Flipboard magazine.