Episode 34 5 Ways Community Bank CMOs Enable LinkedIn for Prospecting

Jack Hubbard  00:01

I've had the privilege of being in and around banking for more than 50 years. Lots of changes during that time. We've gone from Ledger's to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same. Banking is a people business. And I'll be talking with those people that make banking great here on Jack Rants With Modern Bankers. 

Hello, everybody. It's Thursday, it's Jack Rants with Brynne. Now, Brynne isn't here today, she is suffering from COVID. She was diagnosed yesterday with COVID. She's doing pretty well. And she certainly will be back hopefully next week. And we're putting you in our thoughts and prayers, Brynne as well as your husband and hope you both feel better very, very soon. I'm Jack Hubbard, managing partner of The Modern Banker. So I'm going to do this alone today. This is really challenging to get this technology working. Hopefully it all is. And for those of you that are here, we're thrilled to have you. 

Let's start talking about this whole idea of how marketing can help its bankers with using LinkedIn more effectively, let's put it that way. But before I start, I wanted to talk about something really exciting that's happening on the 15th of November, Brynne and I are going to be doing what I think is going to be kind of a groundbreaking webinar for an hour. And we're going to talk about what's going on in 2024. Boy, there's a lot of discussions around that isn't there about how this is all going to work but from a sales perspective. What does this mean? So we're going to talk about Heading Off Headwinds In 2024.

We're going to talk about a relatively new concept called Deep selling, and what that really means to you and your bank. We're going to talk about using polls and how you can use those really effectively. I saw an interesting post today by Richard van der Blom, who we follow and hope you do as well. He talked about the algorithms and how they're all really challenged but polls aren't challenged as much as the others. So we're going to talk about polls and how to make that happen. And certainly what's new for 2024. And all of that comes to you on November 15 at noon Eastern time, Brynne and I look forward to having you with us. 

So it's September 27. I'm at graduate school of banking. And I've retired from GSB. And it was a bittersweet time. And I've loved my 12 years up there and teaching several 1000 bankers, but we were at the Sales and Marketing School. And it was my day to do prospecting and sales, leadership and business development and LinkedIn. And so we took a three hour tour with some really powerful and really engaged community bank CMOS around what's going on with LinkedIn. Well, you don't have three hours, I don't have three hours. But I thought what we do today is to kind of give you the Cliff's Notes version of some of the things that we talked about at the School of Sales and Marketing School. 

So one of the things that I always suggest to marketing directors at community banks is to go out and take a look. And maybe it's just a sample of the profiles of your bankers, especially those that are client facing. And if you've never done this, bankers tell me that they get a real shock when they see what's going on. You see, if you talk to people like Amber Farley, one of the great branding aficionados of banking, she would talk about consistency, and how branding is so important and how critical it is to be consistent. Well, if you go out and look at your bank's LinkedIn connections, you might find a level of consistency that's far below what you want. So how do you approach this? Well, one thing you can do is to look at your photos of your bankers. And I can tell you that I know a couple of really good community banks, ones under a billion ones under 2 billion. And what they do is they have an annual LinkedIn photo day. 

Now this captures all the brand new bankers that come in. It also gets any of those people that have maybe looked at the profile may have fallen through the cracks. So this bank actually hires a professional photographer with a very nice professional background, and they actually go and take the photos of their bankers. This works out really well for them and it creates that level of brand consistency without harming the personal brand of the banker, and it allows them to do a lot of creativity within their profile. But yet, since they're a part of the bank, it allows them to do that as well. So that's kind of tip number one. Look at those profiles of your bankers. Where is the level of consistency? What do you want as far as consistency goes, and especially in the photos, make sure that if you need a professional photo, and you want a level of consistency, maybe a LinkedIn photo day might work out really well for you. 

The second thing is still at the top of the fold. You know, Brynne and I talk quite a lot about backgrounds and how important they are. And we know a couple of banks that have done really, really well with background. So here's where marketing again can serve as a tremendous partner. So in these couple of banks that we know, marketing has gone out and put together several templates that fit the format of the LinkedIn background. This could be their building. I know a bank, Centier Bank who has done a really good job because they have a beautiful building. And they've put their building in their background, Cape Cod 5, if you go out to Cape Cod 5, and you'll look at some of the folks there on LinkedIn, you'll see a really interesting way that they put a five with all of their people. And they took an aerial photo of that. So what does that look like from a brand consistency perspective? So as a marketing look, a commercial banker, a business banker, a branch manager, does not have the expertise, and certainly does not have the time to be doing this. But this is a reflection of your personal brand. Rather than have the generic background that LinkedIn provides, why not go out and take a few templates, it could be some community, a hallmark, it could be a building that everybody recognizes, or if you're out in the mountains, maybe it's a mountain that everybody recognizes are some scenes within the marketplace that people would say, oh, that's part of that bank, that's pretty easy to do. And again, this is a great thing to do for marketing, if you got four or five templates, and then taught your bankers how to go up and change that template. 

Now, within that template, they can put their phone number, they can put their email address, they can put a little bit of saying, and Brynne has taught me to use Canva, to be able to do that. So I'll change my background every single week, depending on who my guest is for Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. That show happens on Wednesday, every noon Eastern time, by the way, and my guest next week is my really good friend, Joe Sullivan. And you're going to want to see Joe on that but being consistent with the profile headline, or the profile photo, and the background is really, really good. 

So then the next thing is, think about this, you are very likely the best writer in the bank, it's very, very likely that you have the most skills around writing in the bank. Now if you don't, and somebody else at the bank does, then maybe it's their responsibility. But take a look at those profiles from your bankers. I've known some marketing professionals who one at a time have gone through especially the real key client facing bankers, and really helped make their profile into a resource and not a resume. That whole above the fold thing can be a great scroll stopper, and then help your bankers with their about section. I go through a lot of LinkedIn profiles. And one of the things I note significantly is the lack of the about section, which is absolutely so important in your LinkedIn methodology. And you as a great writer can at least help your bankers get started with some thoughts. Maybe you ask them some questions and put some notes down. I've seen bankers use chatGPT, take a few notes, put it in ChatGPTand then again, re-edit it for their own edification later on. So that's really, really powerful. 

And then the fourth thing is creator mode. So creator mode was launched a few couple of years ago, and of the 950 million people on LinkedIn, they're less than 10 million in creator mode. And a lot of people say to me, well, when should I get into creator mode? And I think it's when you really get to the point where you have a goodly number of connections, and a goodly number and a better number of followers. My number is 1000 followers and at least 500 connections but that creator mode when turned on allows you to do an awful lot of things. For example, I'm in creator mode. And I couldn't be doing this LinkedIn live program without being in creator mode. The other thing you can do with creator mode is you can have your bankers create a newsletter, a personally branded newsletter. 

Now again, you may have to help them do a little writing on that. But that could go out into the community as well. And then the audio chats that are becoming even more popular. I don't know if you know, Eric Cook, I'm sure many of you do. But he has a monthly audio chat on I believe it's the second Thursday of each month at 5 PM Central Time. And those are great, because you get a lot of people in a particular room, they're not recorded, but they're on audio and not video, it takes a lot less preparation, a lot less software to be able to do it. And what if you what if you helped your bankers create an audio chat, where they brought in several, let's say, gatekeepers, or office managers from pediatricians and veterinarians and chiropractors, and brought an expert in to talk about office efficiency, how to manage your boss better, whatever the case might be. And in creator mode, your bankers can do that. Sure, I know what you're thinking she's now I have to be a trainer. And I have to train my bankers how to do that. Yeah, absolutely, that could be a really important thing for you to do. But when you do that, your brand is amplified, and their personal brand comes to life as well. So think about creator mode, and helping your bankers decide if they go to creator mode, when to go to creator mode, etc. 

So that's number four. Number five. And this is something that a lot of banks have really ignored or not paid as much attention to as they could. And that's the LinkedIn company page, I've seen a lot of LinkedIn company pages that are job boards. Your LinkedIn company page is not a job board. In fact, the company page is a resource. It's a value based approach. It's another way to amplify your brand. Now, the really good news here is there really isn't a lot that LinkedIn allows you to do with your company page, you can have a graphic, you can have some content in there. And then obviously, it can connect to your website and other kinds of things. So it isn't a ton of work. The real work comes when you decide to post something, when the posts go out on your company page, then what do you do? Well, too often, what I've seen is when I go to the company page of a bank, and then I go to someone in the bank that maybe is a pretty active user of LinkedIn, I see a horrible disconnect between the company page content and the personal content of the banker. 

So one thing I really recommend is to have a great company page on LinkedIn, if you're a community bank, you're not too small to have a company page, get a company page, and don't make it a job board, make it a value board, and start to post some content. Sure, it can be things like when there's a new branch opening, or a product launch, or you've given $1,000 away to the Boys and Girls Clubs. But it can also be content that would focus on certain niches. So for example, five things to think about, if you're going into robotics, in 2024, you've probably got a few experts in your bank that again, could give you a few notes. And you could use ChatGPT, or you could write it yourself. I mean, you could post it on that company page. But whatever you post on the company page, whether it's your quarterly earnings, or another article like that, or a photo, let your bankers know that the content is out there and teach them how to get that content from the company page onto your personal page. 

And I would also say to you that when you go into, for example, creator mode, one of the other things that creator mode allows is moving that featured section right under your profile. And that, again, is another great way to take content from the company page. And to put it on their personal profile right onto their featured page. Well, there's a lot of things to think about as a community bank CMO, and certainly LinkedIn is not your only issue. You have a lot of issues going on, certainly but those are five things that I think could really benefit you. So I wanted to end this as I often do, with some questions. So one of the things that I always asked my bank CMOS, is how are you leading the way? In other words, if you want your bank's brand to be amplified on the profiles of your bankers, what are you doing to make sure that you're doing the same thing from a personal perspective? So the first question I always ask is, how likely is it that you are connected to all of the bankers that work with you on LinkedIn, it shocks me to the number of bankers that are not connected with each other inside the organization. 

Being connected to someone in your bank allows you to do a number of different things, one thing you can do is to message a particular banker and say, “Hey, Jim, or Mary, I posted something or there's some content available on our company page that you might be interested in, I think the marketplace would really benefit from.” So getting connected at the first level allows you to streamline your messaging with your bankers, it also allows you to see what else they're posting, who is really active on LinkedIn, who is not at all active on LinkedIn, but it isn't a market that could really benefit the bank, that might be a little bit of education. Sure. You don't want to usurp the power or the authority of the manager. But you could go to the manager and say, you know, I've done a little bit of an analysis. And Bart and Mary are in a really powerful market here. And I've noticed they haven't posted much on LinkedIn, let me know if I can help you with that. 

Sometimes simply doing that, and shining a light on that can really be of a benefit to you. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, what does your personal headline say? Does it say director of marketing? Well, if you're trying to help people improve their headline, and they go to your page, and it says, Director of Marketing" in the name of a bank? Well, it's no better than what they're doing right now. How about helping internal partners amplify our bank's brand? That is a great, forward moving forward thinking headline that sets a tremendous example for the rest of your bankers. What about your photo? What about your background? You know, if you wanted to have a LinkedIn photo day, maybe you're first in line, if you feel your photo is, you know, LinkedIn this year in 2050 things on their platform? How many of them do you know about? What do you do to forward that on to your colleagues that are in the field so that they can help themselves get better at LinkedIn? 

Oh, I know what you're thinking. How do I get close to all the changes that are being made on LinkedIn? How do I do that? Well, I would suggest three names to you. Number one, I've already mentioned Richard van der Blom. Richard posts, absolutely, brilliantly. He posts to the point and he posts regularly and it's all very, very practical. And Richard van der Blom every year comes out with a very complete analysis, look at the algorithm that LinkedIn is putting together, and it can really help you help your banks get better at that by following Richard, the second person, D. Turner, it's gotta D. there's a lot of Turner's in the epic Kevin D. Turner, Kevin is my go to person. As far as the number of changes that LinkedIn is making. If there are changes and things making me follow Kevin's content, I'm able to see it. And some of the changes are very minor, and some of them are pretty hefty. So you're going to want to follow Kevin D Turner to help you in that regard. 

And the last thing, of course, is my great business partner, Brynne Tillman. She was just named one of the 16 2024, LinkedIn Sales influencers. That's a tremendously high honor. And it's well earned Brynn is the one who should call her the LinkedIn whisperer? I don't think she whispers much. But I do think she knows an awful lot about what LinkedIn is doing, and what you can be helped for by LinkedIn. And by the way, that includes, and we didn't even talk about this Sales Navigator, which is a tremendously powerful, powerful Polaroid program. So that's all I have. It's kind of an abbreviated version of Jack Rants with Brynne because there's no Brynne. We certainly hope she feels better very, very soon. And I want to take this moment to thank our really good friends at RelPro, Martin Wise, and Lauren Meyers and heard their team as well as Bobby Martin, Susan Bell and David Buffalo over at Vertical IQ for supporting us so much for sponsoring this program. We also have a podcast. So if you'd like to message me or I can link certainly to you have the podcasts we put all of these in podcasts. And we've got several podcasts out there from great great guests, and LinkedIn and Vertical IQ and RoadPro sponsor those as well. 

And the last thing is I'm somehow my team made me a YouTube sensation. And so we'd love to have you follow us on YouTube at the modern banker, all of these programs as well as all of my LinkedIn. Jack Rants with Modern Bankers. And we're very, very excited that we've got some great guests. Absolutely fabulous guests coming up on the program from Meredith Elliot Powell and Neal Stevens, the president of Oconee. State Bank, Dave curmudgeon, we've got Ned Miller is going to come on late in the year. So we've got a lot of guests and again, those programs are on Wednesday at noon Eastern time. Well, we made it through, it probably wasn't as robust as Jack Rants with Brynne. I guess that's why I need Brynne here. She's the expert and it's good to bounce things off of her back and forth. 

But I really appreciate you joining the program today. And we will see you next Thursday. Because if it's Thursday, it's Jack Rants with Brynne. Thanks, everybody. Thanks for joining us for Jack Rants with Brynne brought to you by our good friends at Vertical IQ and RelPro. We're live on LinkedIn every Thursday at noon Eastern time helping bankers turn connections into conversations. Don't miss an episode, visit themodernbanker.com/tmbpodcast. Leave us a review if you would. You can also listen to this program and the new Jack Rants with Modern Bankers on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play and I Heart Radio. We're on YouTube as well. Subscribe at https://www.youtube.com/@TheModernBanker. Finally, don't forget, make today and every day a great client day!