Social Media Strategy

i thought for today um to be honest when when robina reached out and said michael do you want us to come speak at social media day the first thing that went through my mind was was because and that's because i work for an organization that like i said is a bank and it sits in a traditionally non-glamorous industry and i mean we've got some amazing speakers right how many people in this

room want to stand around and listen to a bloke that works for a bank talk about making content but like i said we've got some amazing speakers a lot of people from the wine industry the fitness industry food and manufacturing travel industry and that presentation that we'll just gave there i work for a bank go figure but they're in lies where i thought that i'd be able to bring at least the

smallest piece of value to you guys today and that was to talk about what it's like to market a service in an industry which is perceived to be traditionally a non-glamorous industry obviously there's been quite a lot of stuff happen over the last couple of years which have impacted the way we work and i'll go through the banking industry in a little bit but the banking industry is a very very interesting

one because it's never had an issue with awareness and so it's what i find so interesting about the banking industry is that no matter what's going on in the world there's there's no issue with awareness there's a lot there's a serious consistency of the awareness everyone always knows the banks that are in in the market at that particular time and what this means on the flip side of that is that you've

got all these very very talented marketers creating some amazing work some amazing advertising some amazing content which consumers frankly don't give a about and so what i wanted to chat through today was how we've worked as the bank's day marketing team over the last few years to try and reposition the brand in a way that our position in the market can guide the way that we actually make content um and i'll

go through how we've actually tried to try to navigate our way through the industry because there is as i'm sure you've all seen a bit of cliche advertising over over the last 18 months because of this little thing called covert 19.

um and in the bit in the banking industry i'm sure you guys who follow marketing opinion pieces and marketing news have seen quite a few opinions of how you should advertise during a pandemic or during a recession and if you do advertise what you should advertise and i just wanted to bring up a couple of examples um or a bit of commentary around how to advertise the first one was from peter

field he has been dubbed the godfather of effectiveness and whilst it wasn't related to covert 19 he talked back in 2008 2009 at the gfc um and he tracked some some organizations from american firms to see the impact of turning off your ad spend or reducing your ad spend during a recession and essentially his his story was that brand building is not just about the now and you've always got to invest

in the future and the results of his study showed that for those organizations that didn't invest in their brand when when times were tough whilst it's easier said than done those that didn't suffered up front for up to five years following the recession and that's backed up by roland bale and this is going back quite a while because this is going back to the great depression so nearly 100 years ago which

is a bit ridiculous to go back that far but he actually did a study off the back of the great depression in 1925 in america when he's doing his master's thesis at harvard he looked at once again similar to peter phil the impact of a recession on or the impact of businesses reducing their ad spend during a time which the majority of businesses would also reduce their ad spend um and effect

effectively what the results showed was those companies that reduced their ad spend would see a decline in sales and profit both during and after the downturn as opposed to those who either kept their ad spend the same or increase um which makes sense i think when you think about it and you put it up essentially spend more you get more leads right but what's interesting about this is that essentially what's happening

here is that your effective share of voice is increasing through this period um and that means that you're obviously going to cut through to your target market a lot better and then i'm going to quote somebody who is south australia's own here in byron sharp who in september 2020 and this is a little bit more relevant for covert he actually referenced he referenced what it's like for businesses to market during the

pandemic and he talked about how there's no better or less there's no value in coming out with something cliche during coverton that the best type of advertising to do during a pandemic was no advertising he termed it the incredible arrogance of marketers to um to think that they can change a consumer's perception when there's something a lot bigger going on i think as marketers that's something which we keep in mind that

you know how much do we influence somebody's actions really and certainly working for a bank especially you know in an industry where there's this negative perception we've gone from a royal commission in 2018 and then you've had all of this stuff with covert and the natural disasters there's um i guess trying to work through how you position yourself in that market in a meaningful way and produce meaningful content is certainly a

challenge and i just wanted to highlight because actually on byron's point of talking about the covert cliche it's certainly something which as a brand we were very very conscious of and we wanted to try and avoid um you know this this high awareness low cut through we wanted to be that high awareness high cut through brilliant um which pretty much goes against the the industry norm so looking at covert advertising now

i hope this this video will work because i actually went looking for one particular example and it is for admittedly another bank they will remain nameless but their colors are yellow and black and and they and they and they actually came out with an ad which they've now taken down i think they realize it's too covert cliche but it aligns itself with the we here for you message which we saw so

often during covert right they pretty much contained every covered cliche you could think of it was set to powder fingers these days so a very like beautiful song like a cover of it um and then it had pretty much the copper cliche if you take away coffees your homemade haircuts and had people getting dressed up to take their bins out although i'm not sure anybody ever did that and if you didn't

probably question that one but essentially what i'm saying here is that there's so much advertising which was the same and in the process of trying to look for this particular ad i found something which i think is even a little bit better so it's very north american but i think you'll get the point when we first opened our doors since 1926 since 1978 for 60 years for 75 years for over 80

years and 90 years over 100 years nationwide has been on your side restaurants have always been there for you nissan has been with you through thick and thin we will do what we've always done take care of people we're people people people people people people family family family family family family family family family families families families even now especially now especially now right now now more than ever more than ever today

more than ever today more than ever in times like this at times like these during these difficult times in these troubled times challenging times trying times in these times of uncertainty during this time of great uncertainty during these uncertain times during these uncertain times and uncertain times in uncertain times uncertain times unprecedented times unprecedented times unprecedented times this i think this is only half of the video i was debating whether i

played the whole video just to get my point across even more twists it goes on for another three minutes so i think it goes to show that and hindsight is a wonderful thing right there's this knee jerk reaction when when the pandemic came that everyone was all about speed to market um and everyone thought that maybe they'd be a little bit unique and brings up this the age-old debate of brand purpose

um and whether that really is a legitimate thing for a brand to have and whether it's something we as marketers tell ourselves um to keep ourselves in a job but i think it's interesting because the bank say team and when we're looking to reposition the brand we have a lot of things on our side which which other other banks don't um and we wanted to make sure that we could align ourselves

to have a legitimate brand purpose in a way that was meaningful for south australians and the outcome of that was that we would be able to align the content that we make without with the insight and the brand purpose and what matters most south australians so really the key for banks say was to differentiate ourselves from our customers to guide our content creation it's to stay close even so in part of

doing that there's this process of devising a strategy and being 170 plus year old bank i know that's pretty much using a line from that video but being a 170 year old bank we had an issue of getting complacent and thinking that just because we've been around for 170 years we'll be around for another 170 years and that's obviously a very dangerous very very dangerous spot to be in and i think

part of this repositioning strategy the most important thing that we did to kick off our process was to look internally and this won't come as news to any of you all right you're all marketing professionals or business owners who are well versed in this but i just want to give examples of what this meant for us the first one there is playing to your strengths and for thing to say that was

like i said this term of hyper localization we are the local bank the fact that we have sa in the name of our company makes us feel like we've had you know we've been granted permission to try and look after the state and that second point is about studying the competition now that sorry to go back to that first point is to look at where we've got a competitive advantage but that

second point of studying your competitors is to see where your competitors have their competitive advantage so using the banking industry once again another example is com bank or that yellow and yellow and black bank but they they have a very strong digital experience which frankly banks say doesn't have um you see at the moment there's all these digital and neo banks that are joining the banking industry and what they're doing is

they've recognized that they don't have the legacy of say your banker says your westpacs your nabs yeah amz but what they have it's exactly that no legacy they don't have any legacy systems and they have the ability to treat the digital experience or look at the customer and recognize what the customer wants and base their operation completely around that so what we're seeing from these companies is that they're treating their digital

experience or the customer experience as a distinctive brand asset and i think that opens up a debate around you know brand thinking and design thinking as well so it's a very unique competition at the moment that third point there is we wanted to figure out how we could provide commercial value and this comes down and i'll bring this up about trying to figure out how we had a legitimate brand purpose and

one that was meaningful for south australians but i think in a bank it's very easy to to make things just because you can and that's that fourth point there but we really need to be looking at our consumers and aligning ourselves to the inside of our consumers are actually giving to us um and some may think that it's a bank overplaying in a sector and like i said before you know maybe

they're being too arrogant about themselves and how much they can influence a consumer but to align ourselves with a brand purpose that is legitimate and aligns to what our customers believe in or our target customers believe in because we all know south australians are quite a unique bunch maybe it just works for us so part of this looking internally was to get our strengths look at our competitors and figure out where

we could play on our commercial value and i'll go into some of that in a second but when we looked internally the next step was obviously to know our customer and this once again doesn't come as a surprise to any of you right all of you are i'm sure done a bunch of market research in your time and it doesn't stop at market insight it could be anything from you know demographic

data psychographic data you could be looking at existing customer feedback you could be looking at all the a b testing that you've done in the past if you've done any of that what creative has worked for you and the best but but what we wanted to do from a strategy perspective was have a look at what is unique about the south australian market considering that's where we play what that meant for

us was doing a bunch of focus groups and a bunch of um in-depth research interviewing south australians to see what was meaningful for them the first point there is that south australians are ridiculously patriotic about their state i mean we've got world-class wine regions with a 30-minute city port adelaide football club we've got amazing beaches we've got the second biggest fringe festival in the world and i know that actually there was

this article that came out about a month ago and i'm sure you probably all would have seen it it was about how adelaide's the third most livable city in the world you best believe when the pandemic's over and i go overseas and people ask me where i'm from i don't say adelaide i'll say the third most livable city in the world and that's i feel like a very very common theme among

south australians we're very very proud of where we've come from that leads me to that second point of hyper local isn't a thing in south australia a lot of the time especially in the banking industry um we've been compared to sydney um or melbourne and in sydney you know you've got your northern beaches you've got you're in a city you've got the eastern suburbs um you've got greater western city so you've

got all these different pockets around the city but we all know that as the 30-minute city everyone can travel in south australia somewhere where they want to go with the experience or if the food's good enough then somebody will travel there i mean people go down to port elliott once a month to get a doughnut right so this level of hyper localization and i think code would put a bit of a

magnifying glass on it is that we should be supporting local um something which we've always been doing in south australia so that was a that was a big insight for us and that third point there is about business and consumer crossover as part of the business bank work that we do at bank sa we actually do a thing called the business focus magazine as well and there was a an insight in

there very recently which talked about the business and consumer crossover nearly 95 of total businesses in south australia are small to medium businesses and i don't think i'm sure there's a bunch of in the audience as well which which sit within is 95 right but i don't think that comes as a surprise to us and it's not to say that b to b and b to c marketing you know should be

treated exactly the same because they shouldn't but i think it shows if you can influence one that you've got a good chance of influencing the other and connecting with the same customer in a meaningful way i think that's quite unique to south australia and that fourth point there is that our people are a resource so south australia even pre-coded it's had less than one percent population growth um in the last couple

of years and i know there's probably plans to to change that but what that says to us is that a lot of the growth has to come from internal it has to come from where we are i mean south australians like to claim people that have lived here for more than three months so um the people are a resource and we've got to rely on the interconnectedness of the australian community you

always hear about this two degrees of separation um in south australia and i think that that's a very key point as to how we can focus on collaborating and leveraging some key partnerships so onto the work that we actually we actually created so the repositioning of bank assay like i said before was to try and give ourselves a brand purpose that would guide some guide some content now we're very very wary

of having a brand purpose which maybe looked a little ingenuine um and so we wanted to make sure that not only was it a creative execution which aligned with our customer insight but that we could walk the talk um and that goes back to that point of providing commercial value and being able to prove that to our people so what you can see here is our brief to our agency was to

be a catalyst for growth in south australia and this is the result here where it literally changed one letter in the name of the bank so i went from banker say to we back essay which is an unmissable court of arms for south australians and to drive growth in south australia this could easily be seen as kind of that smoking mirrors so i just want to go in go into a little

bit deeper about how we wanted to to walk the talk so to speak um and provide that commercial value i think actually will made a great point before as well talking about how we don't want to market two we want to market with our consumers so this is almost a thinking behind a lot of this is that we wanted to align ourselves on that inside as well so going into the collaboration

side of things and leveraging our partnerships south australia or vancouver rather is very very lucky and i admit this that we have two very unique sponsorship assets at the moment we sponsor as the principal partner the adelaide fringe and have so have done so for the last 16 years and we also sponsor the royal adelaide show as a principal partner and have done for 26 years now obviously that's all that's all

pre-covered um like that we had those sponsorships pre-code is what i mean but i think the important thing to note here is that the level of interconnectedness in the south australian community means that collaboration can be amplified to a whole new level in south australia it goes back to that two degrees of separation that i talked about before and how we can leverage that and the benefit of collaborating in south australia

is that of course we get new content opportunities new content ideas you get new networks you get increased brand recognition and it's all stuff which is so so valuable in this day and age and i think the banker safe adelaide fringe partnership is a good example of this because you don't like a bank and a fringe festival you think of the two poll officers right like you wouldn't think that a partnership

between them would work but i'll go into in a second but we knew the impact that the adelaide fringe has on the local economy and a bank can't go hold an arts festival so being able to align ourselves to what mattered most to south australians and like i said everyone's so proud of the fringe festival why wouldn't we align ourselves to that and try and make them even bigger we actually presented

at the world fringe congress last year and presented on how a corporation like a bank can partner with an arts festival wouldn't have been mutually beneficial and the number one point that came out of that was the alignment on shared objectives so in south australia what is a problem for you is likely a problem for another and that's just the way we are and so focusing on that collaboration and tackling the

problem together and relying on that shared resource with a shared objective was key so into what we look like at the fringe so we obviously wanted to provide this commercial value and we knew that the fringe did exactly that you can see there these stats are actually from the 2021 festival which i think is quite amazing because all over the world this was the center of the arts world right like at

this point in time there was no other event like this that could actually occur and they've gone and had over 5000 artists play at the friends you've had over 630 000 tickets sold 4 400 jobs created a gross economic impact of 56 million like how insane is that that during covert that arts festival can still produce that and so aligning ourselves with the fringe and recognizing that the partnership actually goes a

lot beyond the sponsorship fee it's not we give you x amount of dollars to try and push your event forward it's working in tandem to try and achieve those shared objectives um now the fringe obviously have objectives around around tickets sold um but there's a level of integration that that we can do from a bank to to try and allow banks say to to leverage that as well and then going on

to that second partnership as well it's bankers saying the royal adelaide show like i said this is the 26th year this year coming up that this this partnership has actually happened and you can see that even though it didn't go ahead in 2020 the amount of attendees actually go is over 500 000 so it's one of the biggest events on the south australian calendar and that gross economic impact whilst an annual

one by the royal adelaide horticultural society it's over 300 billion dollars to the local economy and i think it's important to point this out because we talk about that commercial value and how a bank could actually provide commercial value in no way do i want to be trying to claim that this is what we're providing but we've aligned ourselves to try and make this the best event you can be and do

what a bank can do to try and give ourselves a meaningful way to get behind what matters most to south australians and then throughout all of this we knew like i mentioned we had these two existing sponsorship assets which were very very unique and the repositioning of the brand which we realized because we're getting a little bit complacent we realized that we shouldn't just stop at what we already had with the

fringe festival partnership and we shouldn't just stop with the royal adelaide show partnership so in 2019 we produced the 2020 version up there but we produced the baka say christmas gift guide essentially what it was was a 40 page publication released on pageant day each year which featured local gifts from local consumers um and south australian businesses which we wanted consumers to actually go and shop at so i had you know

you give your kids had your gifts for mom gifts for dad gifts for teachers had unique recipes created by famous local south australian chefs that had unique experiences which were created by south australians in which every south australian should go experience and the point of this is is like i said to go a little bit above and beyond and do something a little bit selfless for the bank which will hopefully drive

business for these local customers and i think we we very very often get stuck in this get stuck in this rut um and we certainly did when we repositioned the brand around how do we create content that is that is meaningful and completely original now my managers and everyone at the bank won't like me coming out and saying this but we of course took inspiration for the back of say christmas gift

guide um the amex shop small campaign and the visa where you shop matters campaign we're very much used as inspiration for this and i don't think there's any shame in admitting that great ideas are exactly that great ideas and there's a book that i actually read recently from austin leon i'm sure a couple of people in the audience have read it and it talks about stealing like an artist and about how

nothing is original now i'm not going to say go plagiarize everybody's work because that's not what we want to do but he makes a great point that you can go out and take inspiration and put your own spin on things to make content that's meaningful and and drive your own business outcomes with your own spin that's certainly something which we try to do for bank sa we wanted to align ourselves to

what mattered most to south australians and that was driving the local economy in south australia and how we repositioned ourselves and the insight that we got drove the content that we created granite we had two unique sponsorship assets that we could leverage we've created content around them and then we've created a new piece of content which was the christmas gift guide and the christmas gift guide is something which i am very

very proud of to be honest like i don't want to come up here pumping out new tires but we actually won a content marketing campaign at the year award in 2021 which for a bank was like we were very very shocked as well but i think that was proof to us that even in a non-glamorous industry you can create content which is meaningful for customers um and that people actually want to

engage with and it goes far beyond a brand purpose for the bank um and obviously i'm not gonna lie there's a benefit to business outcome as well so that is i think i might have actually i might have raced through that a little bit too quick maybe i'll stop the video a little bit too early but um that pretty much wraps up the presentation for how bankers say is repositioned itself in

the south australian market over the last few few years and i hope that gives a little bit of an insight into the journey that we went on i'm more than happy to have a conversation with anyone who's got any specific questions around our insight on south australia and um yeah hopefully that was a quite helpful one for you thank you thanks michael that was great banks are not boring although they are

helpful that's actually a really good tip that you have in your little black box over there helpful things are really boring um i think will's content in particular the the canva video um yeah like i think that's kind of why that works because it was fast it was quick but ultimately helpful because oh my gosh i can see how that feature would work it's literally as easy as one two three press

those buttons um does anyone have any questions for michael from bank say um i actually do have a question for you um so working in a large organization uh where you know there are multiple layers of i guess management how do you go about creating content on a day-to-day basis or how does the team go about doing that and what kind of approval processes do you have it's a really dry question

but i actually really like to hear how that works and whether there's a bit of autonomy or yeah early and consistent stakeholder engagement is the key in the bank certainly um yeah it's certainly a great question because i think with all of this back sa work the key and what was most useful for us in terms of getting this content out the door and speed to market especially when you need to

be quick to market was we brought the leadership team and and those people that essentially make the decisions along you know on the journey of the reason why we repositioned the brand um it certainly wasn't just a marketing team decision to reposition the bank and i think that alignment on shared objectives um for the bank and that that greater purpose with the leadership team and there being no question over what the

intention of the bank was um i think that was key and it actually brings up a good point as well that it's not all about yeah a marketing campaign it's certainly more than just that it's about especially in a bank it goes to service as well and so actually being able to reflect the actions of the brand that you want to be goes way beyond advertising and marketing and having a line

alignment in the back in the banking industry that certainly helps yeah cool looks like we've got a question from will just wait for the mic please epic thanks a good presentation um just a quick one so i noticed i'm not sure if it was covered but um i noticed that you like banksters particularly use the piping strike like in a lot of the new uh like uh tv ads in particular that

i've seen um in a similar way i guess talking about the inspiration kind of thing like the compare the meerkat like market on ad um could you just like broadly explain that i guess so piping strike is a very polarizing character um it's very interesting we've actually got some of our ad tracking results back in the commentary is always very funny to read because you get people saying i love the bird

piping truck is humor haha but then you get people being like when we actually went through in 2015 to create piperine trike it was to make something a little bit more memorable for the brand um i think all too often we recognize that a lot of banks look the same and sound the same and pipeline strike gave us a unique voice and actually when we launched the campaign i'm not sure if

anyone remembers back to 2015 but it wasn't actually lined with bank essay at the start of the campaign he came out and he was the spokesperson um i shouldn't say cheerleader but he was a spokesperson for south australia and his mascot for south australia and talked about how great south australia was but nobody knew he was aligned to bankers say so this whole campaign was with the intention that you know bankruptcy

is here for south australians and so is pipe and truck and therefore they teamed up to help create you know a great south australia so um like you said is quite a unique device kind of like the compare the market um but yeah it's something which we've certainly relied on over the last couple of years to try and differentiate ourselves and add a little bit of humor i think like i said

in the bank it's all too often you see content which is maybe too similar and being able to have at least a little bit of flexibility um yeah it's it's a good good vehicle to try and use yeah sure thanks great thanks any other follow-up questions for will oh sorry not for well actually we could protect some foil too we've got a bit of time um sorry i think there's one there's

a one over here yes perfect and there's another one down here as well right i just hey sorry yeah i am i'd just be interested to hear about how you measure the return on investment on the sponsorships with the fringe and the show yeah no great question and it's something which we have a lot of questions internally about as well because i think when you look at the fringe and you say

that there's been over 630 000 tickets sold as he should be like oh yeah that campaign was a success um but obviously that's the french not us um from a fringe perspective i think it changes from sponsorship to sponsorship um we obviously have our own objectives for example during the fringe we have 25 off all fringe talk selected shows um if you're a bank of state customer so trying to focus on

getting customers to use their bank to say card during the fringe and increasing that over a period of time sorry year to year was how we actually measured our return on investments i guess one of our key messages for the brand element we focus on key metrics like awareness and consideration and especially looking at our target market which is a little bit of that younger demographic now in south australia so yeah

it's a bit of a mix of things and i think the key for us over the last couple of years has been consistency and what we've measured and consistency it offers as well through both partnerships i think we had another question just here rachel's just going to come up with the mic uh the royal commission's exposed some pretty bad behavior and uh so how is that impacted on you and how is

that it then informed what you've done going forward as far as your marketing is concerned yeah no that's a that's a great question so um 2018 a royal commission into the banking financial services industry i'm sure we can recognise this probably a few worse things for an industry to try and bring a brand out of something which is so negative um and i think the first thing and we actually talked about

this marketing team was we didn't want to try and pretend like we could solve the issues from the royal commission right we're not that arrogant to go and say that we can go change the perception of the bank um and so the alignment with our retail network our people that actually go serve customers was the most important thing so that consistency um also the alignment with other functions of our business who

actually relied on giving good service to our customers um was how we wanted to try and position ourselves as a marketing team now obviously there's a lot of work that goes on outside of the marketing team and someone placed to speak for the bank but it's obviously a journey to get to the point where you obviously can't read the damage that was happening during that but um yeah it's certainly a journey

for for the bank as a wider organization and when we repositioned ourselves that was in the back of our mind but it wasn't the catalyst for why we repositioned ourselves the catalyst was we looked at the inside of what south australians wanted and we wanted to align ourselves with that and we needed to make sure that our service matched what we were saying great any other questions from the audience looks like

we've got one from david over here i think rachel you're probably closer only just sorry i'm curious what you think about marketing from other banks um so for example i keep seeing an ad from westpac which is all fire rescue helicopters and emergencies and it seems like they're kind of focusing on being there for people during bad times whereas bank say seems to be focusing you know on fringe and royal shows

during all the good times um do you see any benefit in their marketing approach compared to bank assist i think what is when i talked about playing to our strengths the strength that bank state has is obviously that level of localization which you talked about which is why we can rely on say the fringe the royal show um response to puerto rico club as well which is i guess that's kind of

how we form our brand image but other banks for example like westpac i think maybe they are a little bit all the same um in some sense and it's certainly not a bad thing but they've got their own advantages with their service with their digital experience which i think helps bring to the forefront just how useful of a brand they can be and perhaps their utility is actually you know stronger than

some banks like i can say but westpac actually have recently gone through a major rebrand as well um so i'm not sure if anyone has seen their new tvc um but that was certainly focused around yeah being there in the moments that matter and helping people but i think it's a little bit of a dangerous territory sometimes to focus on maybe the negative or um kind of what has gone on obviously

we need to talk about it but certainly the attack that we've taken with bank assay is to focus on the positive forward to that okay i think we'll take one more if there is one more question okay i think it looks like we've exhausted the audience i'd like to just welcome bill giles back because i just realized i forgot to give him his wine so will could you come join us at

the front of the thing if you could please give applaud for our first set of speakers