Testing to Build the Right Content

At the bank, we knew our content strategy needed some attention. Existing material was mostly white labeled, shared by different business lines, or out of date yet repurposed to keep up with a monthly newsletter. Instead of making more content for the sake of consumption, we set out to understand what subjects our segments are naturally drawn to in order to build upon our brand value with expert thought leaders in their respective fields.

Problem

Our bank saw lower than expected customer growth compared to competitors and a growing need to address attrition. There was executive appetite to kickstart a new engagement model for the small-to-medium sized business vertical of the bank.

Empathize

We conducted interviews with customers, internal stakeholders, and looked at the competitive landscape to learn more about their unique experiences and consider where we had the right to win.

Define

With this research, we reviewed the feedback as a team to identify and root our strategy around four jobs-to-be-done.

Ideate

With the knowledge of what jobs are most impactful for an aspiring customer, we collaborated with internal partners across different disciplines and lines of business to brainstorm potential product solutions. We asked:

From the ideation session, we organized proposed tactics into the established jobs-to-be-done. Of the most impactful, we drafted prototypes. The team decided to more deeply explore content, lead routing, and multicultural.

With 2 sprints focused on content, we reviewed our existing materials – marketing messages, blogs/articles, and explored competitors'. Our existing blog site lived within a siloed experience, not the native bank CMS or primary domain. This made it difficult to track engagements and embed metadata into articles for search engines (Google) to find the content and populate it upon relevant user searches. In looking at competitors, their content pages were clearly accessible on their main pages and organized topics in uniquely defined ways.

To me, the "crown jewel" of these content hubs was owned by Square, the card processing fintech. Their use of layout gave the essence of being more newsworthy and organically branded with less stock imagery, which made the experience seem worthy of exploration. Traditional FIs like Bank of America and Chase have a more boxy, categorized approach and similar short-form content.

Prototype

For our big picture prototype, we requested a smarter tech stack with a desire to bring personalization from the modern era to the Bank. We strategically pitched a concept which could be a feedback loop for aspiring entrepreneurs to explore different facets of starting and running a business leveraging marketing tactics designed to bridge the gap between our customers and their dedicated local support team.

From customer and field feedback, and taking stock in where our bank has the right-to-win against competitors, we decided to focus content on 8 general topics for establishing a more modern content hub:

• Writing a Business Plan

• Raising Capital

• Managing Cash Flow

• Preparing Taxes

• Types of Fraud

• Fraud Prevention

• Multicultural & Diverse Entrepreneurs

• Marketing a Business

Test

As a starting point, we used white labeled content to gauge organic traffic. We saw this traffic engaging most with Planning and Funding a Business. Around these two themes, we built out short-form owned assets around topics research informed were important hurdles to overcome (i.e. "Writing a Business Plan" links out to "Presenting Your Business Plan" and "SWOT Analysis"). With additional exploration, we used SEO tools to build upon our content tree with high-volume search queries around more thorough questions and expertise within each topic.

In looking at the top articles viewed on the site, the majority of time was spent around the general topics of Funding a Business and Preparing for Taxes. Knowing these are the most popular organically visited pages, we opted to have paid marketing support (Google Discovery, Social, Native) around these two subjects to drive additional traffic.

In the last months of 2022, we saw:

• 87,000 unique visitors

• 23 Appointments Scheduled

• >2 mins time spent per page

Once we proceeded to get a more robust MarTech platform established, these learnings influenced how we cross-sold additional products in our 90 Day Business Owner Onboarding tactics.