Differences in FMCG snacking & Retail Banking social media marketing, through the eyes of a guy who’s done both.
Episode 1: Brand-led content vs Customer Service
In FMCG snacking food, content is looked to being pushed out to more people than your fan base, in fact millions more. The make-up of the fans of your page is somewhat interesting data, but far from the most important data you have. Your content is created for your mass target market, and that’s who you look to serve the content too, mostly at mass scale.
The bad boyfriend (or girlfriend)
This is often reflective of the relationship snacking brands choose to have with their consumers. Many snacking brands end up being like a bad boyfriend, they accept a relationship where you tolerate them enough to keep going back to them, even though they will disappoint you every time you start to trust them again. Whether it’s down-weighting a bag of crisps, changing the recipe of a chocolate bar, or seemingly using palm oil or beef gelatine wherever they can, a scratch beneath the surface of your favourite snacking brand will no doubt reveal that feeling of having a bad boyfriend (or girlfriend).
Purposeful content
But when an FMCG snacking brand shows up on social, they more often than not dazzle us with the delight of strong, relevant, and timely content. Whether it’s Pepsi Max at a music festival, Cadbury Creme Egg in the run up to Easter, or Ben & Jerry’s communicating it’s core brand beliefs, snacking brands are great at putting together snackable purposeful content, communicating new products, partnership tie-ins, or content laddering up to a wider above the line campaign, all at the right time, and often in the right place. The content usually has a good reason to be there, the objective is clear, and as a result social becomes a really cost-effective mass communication channel for these brands.
Everyday banking challenges
In Retail Banking, the business first thinks of customer service when it thinks of social media. And you can’t blame them for thinking of that first for a multitude of reasons. Banks are an economy facilitator, part of the plumbing. When we think of the bank we bank with, we think of current accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, online banking, phone banking, and then possibly ISAs & mortgages… but that’s pretty much it.
So as a result the only time we think of our banks is when we need to do something transactional, and we most do those transactions via online/mobile banking, or telephone banking. So if we’re waiting too long on the phone, or if the banking app or website is down, we’re likely to first turn to social media to voice our unhappiness.
To keep up with this mass shift in societal trends, retail banks have set up social media contact centres that work as a cut down version of telephone banking contact centres, looking to aid customers on challenges with their everyday banking.
The mis-treatment of social media marketing
As a result of banks viewing social as a customer service platform, the knock on effect is the mis-treatment of social media marketing, often being mistaken as a service tool in itself for anyone and everyone in the bank to request a good news story be shared on social. Look at any of the major banks’ social feed, and every week you will see a good news story being shared, that didn’t make the cut for any other communication platform (TV, radio, out of home, PR, press release, print, website, sponsored content, etc…) but ended up being thrown on social. A lot of these stories are the warm and fuzzies, and the production is to a high standard, however looking at it from a strictly marketing lens, does the content ladder up to the brands’ marketing objective?
Brand-led marketing content
Despite the sometimes ‘bad boyfriend’ approach of FMCG snacking brands, their approach on social definitely leaves a learning opportunity for retail banks. Treat social like you would any other significant marketing channel, define it’s marketing purpose, and set your path toward that goal. Customer service is much more important to retail banking than it is to sweets & chocolate, however that doesn’t mean that customer service should blur the immense role that social could play for brand-led marketing content. Banks need to move away from the ‘stick any good news/warm-hearted story on social’, to marrying up all marketing content on social to very specific and key marketing objectives, just like you would for any other mass broadcast channel.