Social media is a great place to start conversations with customers on a new purchase journey, and also plays a vital role in recognising and responding to their needs, Westpac's customer marketing chief claims.
Speaking at the Retail Financial Services event in Sydney, head of customer relationship marketing and digital, Australian Financial Services, Karen Ganschow, highlighted the importance of social and mobile engagement in the banking group's modern marketing strategy.
She also stressed the need to personalise and standardise customer experiences across whatever channels a consumer chooses to communicate and engage with a brand in.
Ganschow shared an example of how Westpac has generated qualified customer leads through Facebook by opening up conversations between prospective customers and home finance experts on first-time lending. Customers looking to take conversations further are then sent a direct message offering them their own personal finance expert within the bank.
"This is slightly less confronting than walking into a branch, and has been working well in helping generate real business leads," she told attendees. "It also helps us understand what's on our customers' minds."
Westpac is also supporting customers of its Westpac, Bank SA and St George brands through social. "Social can be scary as a brand, especially when bank bashing is a national past time, to put yourself out there. Yes, you will get people saying nasty things about you and your brand. But we've also learnt a lot about our customers through these channels," Ganschow commented.
"In digital [channels], you can see through a consumer's behaviour what really works, what they care about, and what doesn't work… we use search keywords for example, to know what's hot for customers and pull that through our whole customer journey."
In one case, social helped Westpac see the confusion customers were experiencing around fixed and comparison rates it advertised for new home loans, Ganschow said. Westpac responded to these comments by providing an external explainer website to help customers understand comparison rates.
"The joy with social media... was that we got to see that confusion and were able to respond to that," she said. "We received 800 comments, and the last 600 were positive, having established that precedence."
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