How Do You C.U.? Blog Guidelines
CONTENTS Mission Vision Objectives Ideal Reader Keys to Success Categories Schedule/Approvals Blog Offerings Market Analysis Traffic Goals Promotions Calendar Content Calendar
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Mission How Do You CU? aims to become a financial resource to members and non-members alike by delivering quality personal finance content with warmth, enthusiasm and honesty.
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Vision To help members and non-members alike reach financial independence.
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Objectives 1. BUILD DIGITAL BRAND
2. ATTRACT LEADS
3. CONVERT LEADS
4. GROW SHARE OF WALLET
Investment in social must encompass more than Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn. We must create our own content that is unique to our brand, our members, and our organization’s goals.
A blog is the single best way to get potential new members to our website to learn more about our products. We don’t want just any traffic-we want the right traffic. Our content will target our member persona, attracting them to our website and other social sites. The ultimate goal?
Okay, so we’ve built a digital brand and attracted some potential new members. Converting and ultimately closing these leads comes next. By using our blog and a series of other digital strategies, we will ultimately convert and close new leads.
We would like to become the primary financial institution for our members no matter if they need a debit card, investment account, auto loan, or a mortgage. Inbound marketing through this blog is one additional way to support our brand promises: Assisting members with financial needs and goals, building sustainable relationships and supporting the community we serve...and more.
Why should our members invest in our social sites if they can easily obtain the information from USA Today, Bankrate, or even other local credit unions?
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New, happy members.
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Ideal Reader The Digital Window-Shopper
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Our ideal reader is the digital window-shopper. Skewed female, age 25-34. The digital window-shopper is less digitally engaged than younger counterparts, but is likely to be seriously persuaded by what she reads online. Having seen many tragedies in her lifetime, this reader seeks authentic relationships and is highly skeptical, especially of the banking world. While she does not necessarily have an affinity for credit unions instead of corporate banks, she will shop around for interest rates, deposit yields and checking fees. Accessibility is key for this shopper; she will seek out information online and expect to find high quality content. Major life concerns include navigating a career and children (for both men and women, but mostly women), having “enough” to feel successful, and paying down debt without sacrificing youth.
The Digital Window-Shopper Says
“I am a responsible consumer, but it wasn’t always like this. I grew up in a middle-class family and my parents never talked to me about financial responsibility. I had to learn the hard way-by taking on credit card debt and student loans, amassing around $35,000 in debt by the time I graduated from college. Now that I’m older, I save for retirement, make extra loan payments, and constantly research living for less. I am my friends’ go-to guy/gal when it comes to personal finance advice. I seem like I have it all together, and while I’m more together than most, I still struggle. I still want more ways to get ahead before it’s too late. I enjoy following self-help, DIY and personal finance blogs. I shop around online before I make purchasing decisions. I love my smartphone because it provides me with more tools to manage my money without a computer, but security breaches have changed the way I think about businesses-both big and small.”
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Keys to Success 1. TARGETED CONTENT
2. CELEBRATING & LEARNING
3. ASKING & APPLYING
4. SOCIAL INTEGRATION
Undoubtedly, there are many places our members can go to find information about paying down debt, how to use credit card rewards, or the financing process for buying a new car. The key advantage we have is our bloggers: three distinct perspectives on the same issues. You can’t get this human content from Bankrate, and while you can get it from a personal finance blogger, it still isn’t coming from your primary financial institution.
We will measure everything from click rates, average time spent on a post, popular content, downloads, comments, impressions, shares, referral sources, and anything else that comes our way. We will adamantly research new ways to drive engagement and track success so that we can always improve our methods and provide value.
Once our audience begins to build momentum, crowdsourcing will take our content to the next targeted level. We will not assume that our demographic is constant; as we grow, we will remain open to changing our content if necessary.
Per our social sharing timeline schedule, some content will be posted more than once, but never in a manner that could be perceived as “spammy.” Not every post will be shared more than once, but all “universal” and relevant posts will be pushed appropriately per social site.
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Categories 1. CURRENT PROMOTIONS Each quarter, our team will create content around existing marketing promotions. For example, if we’re promoting our annual scholarship, a strong blog would promote smart college borrowing, thrifty ways to save throughout college, or a financial checklist for both teens and parents throughout a student’s last year of high school.
2. PERSONAL FINANCE
3. CREDIT UNION DIFFERENCE
4. FREEDOM TO GROW
5. MEMBERS/SMALL BIZ
Each blogger comes with a unique perspective on finance and budgeting. It may not be smart for the 22 year old post-grad to tell her story about what it means to buy a home (because she doesn’t own one and her priorities are different). A better alternative would obviously be to let the homeowner or renter who is in the process of searching for a home write about that. These will also be targeted to our current promotions.
News giants like CNN Monday and USA Today often write about the differences between credit unions and banks. These are all, well, pretty boring. Posts coming from us have more potential for humor, emotion and honesty that will do well to attract new members.
Like the personal finance perspectives, this will be a portion that allows staff writers and guest bloggers to share their money lessons and how they grew from them. People don’t always want to read “10 Reasons You Shouldn’t Borrow Against Your IRA,” because posts like this have the same information (i.e. it’s bad, costs you money, long-term implications, etc.) This category will encompass more personal stories, such as if a guest blogger had to borrow against a retirement account to get through a really rough time. It’s all about creating human content that will resonate with our audience.
After we’ve built a presence, we will write about members who have been positively impacted by our credit union and local businesses who we’ve helped with business lending. More to come on that later.
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Schedule/Approval Our process Sample Timeline Final Blog Posting Date Thursday, November 23 at 8AM Draft to Editor: Monday, November 13 before EOD Editor to Blogger: Wednesday, November 15 before EOD Blogger back to Editor: Monday, November 20 before EOD Editor back to Blogger: Tuesday, November 21 before EOD Final Approval: Wednesday, November 23 mid-afternoon Schedule to post after approval is given.
SOCIAL SHARING SCHEDULE TIMELINE
ON PUBLISH SAME DAY NEXT DAY NEXT WEEK NEXT MONTH TWO MONTHS
GUEST POSTING GUIDELINES • All content, whether from employees of the credit union, local businesses, or personal finance bloggers, must be original and not copied from another personal blog. • Writing will be on target with our tone and voice. • Any sources used will be properly linked and attributed. With that being said, we will not post any content that is a part of a link-building scheme. Google doesn’t like that and neither do we. • Bloggers, whether internal or external, will unfortunately not be allowed to repost on to your personal blog, as (again) Google frowns upon this practice. Social sharing is warmly welcome, however.
Once posts are assigned for the month, they will be tracked via a “hot sheet.” *Posts will be published on Mondays at 11AM and Thursdays at 8AM to maximize our reach and engagement. How Do You C.U.? | 11
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Blog Offerings 1. FREEBIES We will sporadically offer free downloadables, such as budget templates or personal finance quotes.
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2. WHITEPAPERS
3. EMAIL
To assist with lead generation, we will also feature downloadable whitepapers on various topics, such as joining a credit union, refinancing your home, student loans through the credit union, and various other products our business offers. To download the guides, users must fill out a contact capture form. We will store this information in a database and forward to the appropriate team. Leads will be tracked throughout the sales cycle and we will apply findings to our current strategy.
Users will be allowed to subscribe to our posts via the third party email service MailChimp.
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Market Analysis The credit union industry lags behind corporate banking in many aspects, including content marketing. Many of our competitors are also just getting into blogging, while nearly every major corporate bank has established content marketing and a strong, hi-def video presence. Here are our current competitors, in the banking industry and personal finance blog-sphere alike: • • • • •
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Vantage Credit Union Tigers/West Community Credit Union Bankrate Lifehacker U.S. Bank
Why How Do You C.U.? Our blog will be relevant to anyone searching for personal finance tips on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or just around the internet, but it will be especially useful for our members. If a personal service counselor has an appointment with a member about opening a credit card, if there’s any email communication between the two, the PSC can send a relevant blog post to the member about what to bring and what to expect. In this instance, our blog has made the lives of our members and staff easier. This is just one of the many ways our blog will prove useful to our members, or anyone looking for this targeted information.
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Traffic Goals
Meet the Bloggers
At our blog’s launch, we hope to amass 200 unique visitors in the first month. Depending on our first month’s traffic, we will set a benchmark for engagement for the months to follow, such as a minimum of 10% more traffic per month. Obviously if the site gets 10,000 views in the first month, we may alter this number slightly, but we’re anticipating a more gradual (read: less viral) flow of traffic. We will drive traffic through an integration of evergreen content, urgent content, linking, email, web and social media outreach. See social sharing timeline schedule for more detailed information.
Michelle
Social Media Specialist
As a recent college graduate in her early 20s, Michelle’s perspective comes from navigating the newly discovered challenges of the adult world for the first time.
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TJ
Marketing & Communications Associate
T.J. is a professional marketer with a background in advertising and journalism. A student of the written word, he is also attracted to the power of video marketing. He enjoys eating tacos, watching hockey, and wasting time with his wife and cat.
Joel
Marketing & Communications Specialist
Joel is a ten year veteran of credit union marketing. No longer the new kid on the block, but more than 30 years from retirement, Joel offers the perspective of one balancing a young family and career.
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Dec14/1Q15 Promotion Calendar
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Dec14/1Q15 Content Calendar
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