Executive Summary
Financial Institutions, often held back by industry regulations, are rarely considered innovative when it comes to not only paid search, but also social media. However, incorporating Twitter into Paid Search strategies, vice versa is the perfect place for financial institutions to loosen their neckties, roll up their sleeves and show some personality into what the consumer is really looking for and/or leverage opportunities for their consumer audience. According to Comscore (2012) the audience for Financial Institutions is on Twitter.
The Twitter community wants to connect on a personal level, rather than learn about policy updates. This may sound like a challenging feat for those accustomed to financial institutes’ traditional platforms of communication. According to Bazaarvoice and Center for Generational Kinetics (Jan. 2012), 83% Of consumers say it would be important to read user-generated content before making a decision about banking or other financial services.” Reality is that search and social are becoming more and more similar, forming a grey line with online marketing, with each marketing tactic influencing the other in important ways. The main goal is to build brand value and connect with consumers. To explain the importance of incorporating Twitter and Paid Search into the marketing mix, we’ve put together a few dynamic ways that Chase can engage and importance of each.
Chase currently participates in Twitter and paid search. In general, Twitter is a medium that a Chase can create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving conversions. On the other hand, Chase uses paid search primarily to drive enrollments and conversion. But together, the two disciplines can increase the value that each program delivers. By creating social content that attracts an engaged audience, marketers can then craft targeted paid search campaigns to “capture” this audience and turn them into valuable Chase consumers.
1) Make your search and social campaigns aligned for further reach
Make sure your twitter tweets are appropriately tagged and aligned with paid search ads, this copy for our top keywords (including hashtag in copy to align with Twitter Tweets). This will allow people searching for your brand content to not only find your paid search ads, but to find your twitter content as well. In addition, include a link to the Twitter handled on Google and Yahoo/Bing Sitelinks. This helps close the circle between search and social. Plus, it is the first step to building brand engagement through twitter and paid search activities is to enable consumers to easily find your content. Example #flywithnoblackouts in your twitter tweets and align # into paid search copy and paid search sitelinks.
2) Keyword advertising on Twitter
Promoted trends/keywords within Twitter make your tweets heard by hitting users at times when they are most likely to read your tweet, see your comment or link, follow you, re-tweet, or even visit one of your landing pages. For example, promoted Tweets around holiday time highlighting the benefits of earning extra points with retailers (Earn up to 10 extra points per dollar when you shop top retailers online, like Best Buy®, Buy.com, Lowe’s, Macy’s and more.) Chase and Rosetta can use paid search insights on top keywords that people are searching on and incorporate into promoted tweets or trends.
Best time to utilize this program is to highlight incentives, offers and promotions (both national and geo-targeted).
3) Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns.
Closely analyze the topics and discussions taking place around on twitter campaigns, using tools such as Radian6. Using this tool, or similar ones will allow for the paid search teams to mine these discussions for new keywords that Rosetta can use in paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whatever sentiment is on twitter towards a specific topic we are measuring, bid on keywords that reflect these conversations within paid search. For example, we could measure on twitter what people think about reward programs and credit cards. Rosetta could then mine those conversations into keywords, which we can tailor specific messaging. For instance we could tailor dinner clubs with the Chase message: “consumers earning 2x rewards dining out with Chase Sapphire and the ease with the program.” This would be great at a local level, during top geo- restaurant weeks, or offer to an incentive to others to join to get the extra benefits of eating out. As always, Chase should measure the performance of these campaigns and increase investment on terms that are more likely to capture downstream conversions.
In conclusion, the main goal is to build brand value and connect with consumers. For Chase, integrating search and social media provide different benefits to your business. Chase should leverage their strengths instead of trying to force them to deliver results that aren’t suited to the medium. But by recognizing what each channel is good at, Chase can maximize overall effectiveness rather than operating your programs in silos.
Further Information Incorporating Paid Search and Twitter:
REBECCA KEEN
Director | Paid Owned Earned Media