Episode 90 Creating LinkedIn Articles and Newsletters

Intro

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 ledgers to laptops, typewriters to technology. One thing, however, remains the same banking. So people business and I'll be talking with those people who make banking grade here and Jack Rants with Modern Bankers.

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0:00:29 - (Jack Hubbard): Happy Thursday, everybody. Hi, Brynne.

0:00:31 - (Brynne Tillman): Hey, Jack. How are you?

0:00:33 - (Jack Hubbard): Well, it's a great day here in the second world headquarters in Elgin, Illinois. Hope it's good out in New Jersey.

0:00:41 - (Brynne Tillman): Beautiful day. Yes, it is great.

0:00:45 - (Jack Hubbard): We want to talk about newsletters and articles today. Something that I think every marketing professional should have their ear to the ground on, as well as people that might even have the opportunity to write newsletters themselves. I always say, know your bank's policy before you get started. It's fun to write newsletters, and Bryn's going to talk quite a lot about it. But do it within policy and know that you, in fact, can do it. Before I start, though, next.

0:01:16 - (Jack Hubbard): We had a great session yesterday on Jack Rants with Modern Bankers, with Mary Beth Sullivan. Big attendance and lots of great comments. Next week, we have Martha Bartlett Pyland, who's written a best-selling book. And Martha is an interesting lady. She has a board, an advisory board of millennials across the country. And she interviews them and talks to them a lot. And it's all about banking. So Martha does a great job with branding. And the following week, we have Neil Stanley, a good friend of mine for many years in the industry, talking about deposits, which continues to be a powerful thing. And in the summer, on July 3, we start the summer reruns, if you will, the Jack Rants with Modern Bankers summer series. We're going to do this with Jack Rants with Brynne as well. And I've got Susan Bell lined up on July 3, Martin Wise on July 10, and a couple of authors. And we'll have some fun in the summer.

0:02:18 - (Jack Hubbard): But today we want to talk about newsletters, Brynne, so let's start at the very top. Newsletters, articles. Where do we start here?

0:02:27 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, so newsletters and articles are a fabulous way to get our thought leadership out at scale. Articles. I look at articles on LinkedIn like a blog. It's like if you had a blog on your website. This is your blog that lives on LinkedIn. And this is great for bankers that don't have their own website, right? This is a perfect opportunity for them to share their insights and experiences as a blog post.

0:02:55 - (Brynne Tillman): Newsletters similarly, live in your LinkedIn profile and we're going to talk about the difference of both of them. But before we do that, I want to talk about the similarities or why we want to do it. Right. Well, number one, it establishes a thought leadership that you have a consistent blog post that's coming out. Maybe you decide, I'm going to do it twice a month or once a week, and people will start to expect and to see this content that's coming out.

0:03:29 - (Brynne Tillman): This is typically when you're talking about the article, it's typically original content. Newsletter can be a combination of things and we'll get to that kind of breakdown. Ultimately, this is about sharing insights and consistently putting original thought leadership out there. It will absolutely enhance your brand and it will drive different engagement, different people tend to see it. So you start to attract other folks who may not normally be seeing your posts.

0:04:07 - (Brynne Tillman): It's a great way to nurture your existing relationships so that we're staying in front of people on a consistent basis. It's top of mind, we know that not everybody is ready to switch banks, but when they are, we want us to be the ones that they're thinking about. And so when you're consistently putting out good content that is ultimately going to happen. You'll start to get inbound opportunities. The other piece around this, and we'll break the two down in articles is incredible search engine optimization.

0:04:49 - (Brynne Tillman): This is about being bound for your content. The interesting thing to me is when you share an article when you publish, really they call it published an article on LinkedIn, it gets very little organic reach. I don't know why it's, it does get shared to your, to the newsfeed, but it doesn't do nearly as well as a regular post unless you choose to promote it. So then you might say, well then why I'm doing this? Well, one, it lives like a blog post. With a blog on a website, you might have 20 different posts and you can see them all in one place.

0:05:30 - (Brynne Tillman): But Google loves articles. My articles on LinkedIn often come up way before they do on the website because LinkedIn has incredible SEO juice, right? Like even if you're IBM, LinkedIn has more juice in the SEO world. So when you are publishing on LinkedIn, there's a high likelihood that when people are searching for those keywords that your content is named after, your content is going to come up.

0:06:09 - (Brynne Tillman): If you look up LinkedIn symbols, I have an article from 2015 that's in the top three every single time. It's crazy. The articles are really important there. Newsletters are a little bit different newsletters. And we can. I'm going to throw it back to you because I know that you're in the middle of kind of putting a newsletter formula together. So I want you to talk about that. But what's great about newsletters is the first time you publish a newsletter, 100% of your connections are alerted that there's a new newsletter.

0:06:49 - (Brynne Tillman): So if you have 1000 connections, 1000 people are being alerted. And it only happens the first time you publish. So it's really important that you are ready like you're prepared. And it's the best thing you've ever created. Because then it will encourage them to subscribe and only the subscribers will see it moving forward. However, when you share that on your newsfeed, you have a newsletter. If you share it on your newsfeed or you link it in the featured section on your profile, you will get more followers. And when people engage in that newsletter, then their network will see it. So it's not that it's blocked from growing, but it only goes out to everyone.

0:07:34 - (Brynne Tillman): One time.

0:07:35 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah, one time. So you really need that first newsletter to be really fabulous and very, very engaging. So let's go back to articles for a second. Our friend Larry Levine has done this for five years. Every week for five years. And he sends me, he messages me every Sunday and he said, here's the article that I wrote. So this is original content. One of the things that's really good about this, Bryn, is that it is extremely cost-effective for you and very timely as well.

0:08:15 - (Brynne Tillman): That's 100%. I mean, it's free marketing. As a banker, you may not have a personal budget for marketing, but if you are doing a good job of connecting with your prospects your clients, and your referral partners, this is staying in front of them for free. So cost-effectiveness is huge. The other thing, so you said timely, and I think that's really important. And there are definitely evergreens articles that might go on LinkedIn, but the newsletter should be trending topics, you know, things that are happening right now. That, and it could be a new article. You could be linking it to a new article that you put out there. But the newsletter, it's news.

0:09:03 - (Brynne Tillman): It's new. Right, right. So we want to make sure that you're not putting old stuff out there. So I love that mindset, Jack. That's great.

0:09:16 - (Jack Hubbard): The other thing with newsletters that I really like is that you can, there's a lot of analytics associated with newsletters. And you can find out in a particular newsletter what's the level of engagement. And is it that article? It was at the time of day, the day of the week, whatever the case might be. And I think it's a really good time to bring in who I think to be. One of the great newsletter experts in our industry is Kevin Turner. Kevin D. Turner. Follow him on LinkedIn.

0:09:48 - (Jack Hubbard): You know, Brynne and I are kind of like professional golfers who have coaches. Brynne's got coaches. She's working on a couple of pretty exciting things that she'll talk about down the road. And she's got a coach. So I reached out to Kevin and I said, all right, Kevin, I want to pay you some money and I want you to help me. And the good news is, and we can certainly announce it today, that in the fall, I'm going to be putting out a newsletter.

0:10:15 - (Jack Hubbard): And one of the things that really was exciting to me, not only that first edition, which is sent out to all of your connections and all of your followers, is the idea that you can see who has read your articles in that newsletter, and therefore you can say, well, that content didn't work. Maybe it's a little bit better to do this kind of content. So that's kind of cool. Now you can have five or more newsletters. Brynne, you and I talked about this this morning.

0:10:53 - (Jack Hubbard): Five newsletters sounds like a lot. But if I've got my own personal page, my company page, my. And I've got some groups that I have. I don't want to have five newsletters. What are some options here for me if I have one newsletter? But I've got a lot of places I want to put it.

0:11:13 - (Brynne Tillman): So your bank newsletter is probably being run by marketing. And so I think that's fine. But if, let's say you're an entrepreneur or maybe you're hanging out here because you sell to bankers. So you love to be here, right? And so you may not have a marketing team. You can run your own newsletter from a company page. Recognize, however, that you don't have warm relationships. Typically from the company page, you may have followers, but it's not going to be nearly the same as your actual connections.

0:11:52 - (Brynne Tillman): So my opinion, and again, there's no right or wrong here. It's my opinion, is that you have one newsletter from your personal page and then share it in your groups. When you have five newsletters, you're literally splitting up your subscribers, right? So if I have one newsletter and I'm bringing everybody to one newsletter for subscription, that's great. If I have two, my subscribers will be split in half, between the two.

0:12:27 - (Brynne Tillman): So if you're going to invest in doing this from your personal page is great. If you have a marketing team, then you can have two. There's one that's driving subscribers from the marketing perspective and one from your personal.

0:12:44 - (Jack Hubbard): Connections, that makes sense. Here's another thing that you talked about that's really important. You can do a newsletter monthly, bi weekly, weekly, daily that you talked about the importance of consistency. Talk more about that. And when your audience sort of gets that first newsletter, the first couple, they're sort of expecting more from you. Talk about consistency.

0:13:13 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. I mean, people get into a habit of reading your stuff, which is great, like we do. Even if, you know, we'll do this show every Thursday. We're doing this at twelve noon Eastern, eleven Central. And our folks are used to that happening, right. They know it's going to happen. We jump on Saturday mornings, 08:00 a.m. Eastern for sales logic because we know it's going to happen. The interesting thing and this is where we make it, really.

0:13:44 - (Brynne Tillman): We're going to do these reruns, but we're still going to launch them at the same time. So they're still going, even though they're not actually live, they're going to run recorded live because we want to make sure that we're serving on that consistent basis that people know. So when you commit to doing, particularly a newsletter article, you don't need to as much because it's not pushed out to subscribers.

0:14:15 - (Brynne Tillman): But newsletters are. If they subscribe, they're going to start looking for it. So you want to make sure that you are committing to something that you will deliver on. You can start once a month if you want to and then move by twice a month and then weekly. But don't bite off more than you can chew because you'll disappoint your subscribers.

0:14:40 - (Jack Hubbard): Absolutely. So I made a mistake when this whole newsletter thing started and I went out and I just subscribed to a lot of newsletters. So let's talk about subscribing. So when somebody has a newsletter and you're following them or connected, they'll push the newsletter out to you and you'll see it in the, my Network tab. And then it's like a connection. You can choose whether you accept it or ignore it or subscribe or not.

0:15:12 - (Jack Hubbard): So I, I looked at these, some of these newsletters, I thought, oh, my God, these are fabulous. And the problem is that you can't, you don't always see when a new newsletter comes out. They reside in your, my network tab. So you have to go there and then you click on newsletters and then it'll cascade all of the newsletters to you. So that's it. That's really important. You have a newsletter for social sales links.

0:15:39 - (Jack Hubbard): You've had it for a little while. I would like to talk about content. What, how long have you had the newsletter and what kind of content do you put in there?

0:15:50 - (Brynne Tillman): So we made a decision, and there are lots of different ways to do this, but we made a decision, goes out once a week, and it's a culmination of all the posts that we did throughout the week. So it's like, here's a recap of what you might have missed kind of thing. And really we made that decision because of bandwidth, right? We have a newsletter that goes out to our 100,000 email list. We have, you know, announcements that go out to our subscribers of the library. Right. And so we knew we had to do LinkedIn, but I could not imagine more content, more original content. So we made the decision to just do, you know, here's the recap of the week. And actually, it revives, like Monday content.

0:16:41 - (Brynne Tillman): It's very interesting, right? Like, we'll send it out and all of a sudden will get, you know, content that's four or five days old is going to start to get some traction. So that's worked really well for us. But Jack, you have a very different perspective on the newsletter that you're going to launch. I'd love, for you to share what that's going to look like.

0:17:03 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah. You know, it was interesting. I started this whole Jack rants thing a while ago, and I can say the name of the bank now because it's been merged, was Fleet Bank. And my friend Brian O'Connor, I would write him every once in a while with a couple of things, and he says, boy, you rant really well. And he said, why don't you put something out, like an article or something? So I started out at Fleet, and every Saturday I would sit down in my office and I would just write an article and I would send it. And Brian said eventually, said, this is really good.

0:17:41 - (Jack Hubbard): Said, one of the things that you need to know is that our regional managers are using some of this content in their sales meetings. And so parenthetically, I need to tell you that just because you send out a newsletter and you don't get a lot of feedback, say, oh, this is wonderful. Don't think that people aren't using it. If your content is really good, it's evergreen. It's out there. So they were using it.

0:18:08 - (Jack Hubbard): So he said, you didn't need to expand this. So I got to the point where I was sending out about 1000 emails a weekend and I would group them on Outlook and I would send them out and it worked out really well. And so my son and daughter-in-law said, well, why don't you start Jack Rants. And so I did the newsletter. So I have a lot of content that is more evergreen because it's focused on sales. And so my newsletter is going to focus because you do so much on LinkedIn, I'm going to focus mine on sales.

0:18:43 - (Brynne Tillman): I love it.

0:18:44 - (Jack Hubbard): Sales and banking. And there'll be a primary article. This is my vision and Kevin and I are working on this. But my primary article, always a book review because there's new books coming out and I always want to amplify that. And then I want to do. And I want to get your feedback on this and see how you've done this. I want to make sure there's a couple of videos. The most recent Jack Rants with Modern Bankers and the most recent Jack Rants with Brynne.

0:19:10 - (Jack Hubbard): And then if we have a public workshop coming up, we'll do a little marketing around that. I'm curious about how around videos, because I know that in the past you couldn't do this, but now you can actually put links to videos in your newsletter.

0:19:27 - (Brynne Tillman): Brynne, you can actually embed it. You can go to YouTube and grab the embed code and yes, you can embed it. So what's really great about that is when people watch it, they're watching it inside your newsletter, but it is recording that view in YouTube. So if you get 50 people that watch the video from the embedded code, you're getting that YouTube SEO juice and, and it will show the count of how many views and all that fun stuff.

0:19:58 - (Jack Hubbard): So, yeah, I think, and I'd love to get your comment on this too. I think you've got to find your why. I think it's not just, let's put one out there because there are, believe it or not, millions of newsletters out there now. So you've got to find your why. And like Kevin taught me and talked to me about and you've discussed, you got to know your target, who is your target market for this? And so I'm curious about your conversation about the why and how important that is when you put content out there that it kind of reflects your own personal brand and the bank's brand.

0:20:40 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. Well, so definitely keep in mind the bank's brand. You are connected to the bank. And so everything you're doing, you need to keep it completely PC. Right? Like, no politics, no religion, no. Right. Like, keep it very neutral in those areas. So just keep that in mind. As a banker, that's really important, because no matter what, you'd upset 50% of the world, no matter what you say. All right. Like, so.

0:21:10 - (Brynne Tillman): So that that's important. As if you're, when you're representing the bank, but your voice is very important. And I would just keep it professional, keep it on trend economics, what's going on in the real estate market, what's happening with manufacturing and logistics, things that your audience would care about, but. Okay, so let's step back before we're thinking in that realm and say, what is our goal for the newsletter?

0:21:43 - (Brynne Tillman): The why is, what is our goal? Is it to stay top of mind around banking? Is that you may decide that you're a golfer and you want your newsletter to attract golfers. You may have a very different purpose for your newsletter. So you're going to decide, hey, who do I want to engage and what is the purpose of my newsletter? So once you've decided that now you're going to say, what do they care about? Not what do I want to tell them, but what do they want to consume, what content matters to them.

0:22:29 - (Brynne Tillman): And so when we can define that, we can start to put together a newsletter that attracts and engages the right audience.

0:22:39 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah. And I think that as a marketing professional, this is where you can really help your bank. One of the things I've always suggested, and I know a couple of banks do this, is to feature their bank CEO in an article or other bank executives, if you have a bank that has a decent-sized footprint. And maybe I'll give you an example of wind trust. We are now in Michigan, in Illinois, and in Wisconsin.

0:23:11 - (Jack Hubbard): Our CEO, Tim Crane, can't get around to everywhere all at once with a newsletter. And Wind Trust does have one, you can actually amplify the bank's brand and have Tim talk about economic conditions and what we're seeing down the line on regulations. It doesn't always have to be Tim. It can be another executive from commercial or from mortgage or whatever the case might be. You could highlight photos of things that you've done, community events that you do, things like that, Bryn, really do amplify the brand.

0:23:48 - (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. But I like the idea of having a consistent section. Right. So maybe you decide, my first thing is always going to be a sales tip. My next thing is always going to be a book review. And then I'm going to do this video. In this video, right? So you know what the sections are. And then maybe you have highlighted events as one of your sections, whether it's past or future events. And you can even say highlighted events. Here's what happened. Here's what's coming, right?

0:24:21 - (Brynne Tillman): But I like the consistency of, I know exactly what to expect because like when you open up the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, you know your sections. You know what sections you're going to, right? And so your newsletter should create habits with your audience. You know that they know the sections.

0:24:41 - (Jack Hubbard): Make this easy for your audience to read and engage. So 106 newsletters I have, we've talked about yours, the social sales link. I've also written down a few others that you may be able to amplify on because I know you know some of them sales Hunter edge this is Mark Hunter's newsletter, and one of the things he likes to talk about is prospecting. So that's a really good one. Another one that I like, and I know you're a fan, the digital first newsletter.

0:25:18 - (Jack Hubbard): And that's Richard Bliss.

0:25:19 - (Brynne Tillman): Yes. So that's outstanding, I love Richard Bliss.

0:25:23 - (Jack Hubbard): Another one for banking is Nimbus. Next. Nimbus is a great consulting firm, technology consulting firm. Alison Netzer is the chief marketing officer there. And they have some excellent, excellent articles on what's happening. And by the way, the most recent one for Nimbus next, there was an article and a recap of the financial brand conference which happened last week. Another one that I like is bankers hours.

0:25:53 - (Jack Hubbard): And this is the newsletter for the american banker. And the American Banker is cheap, and it's a great newspaper, that comes out every day. But this is kind of a compilation of some of the more feature-based articles. And it's free. And so I really like that one. There's another one called banker to the banker. And I like Elizabeth Cottrell's newsletter called the heartspoken connection. And then I have to give a shout out to Kevin.

0:26:22 - (Jack Hubbard): Keep rocking LinkedIn. One of the things that, it goes right back to our topic and your why. One of the things that Kevin started when he started his newsletter, it was, okay, I'm going to be really focused on a very vertical situation, which is how many changes are there in LinkedIn. And so his Keep Rocking newsletter is, amplifies all the changes that have been going on in LinkedIn over a particular period of time.

0:26:53 - (Jack Hubbard): And so all of these things are just, are just absolutely great, great ways to gain knowledge. But you have to know that when you're going to put a newsletter out there, as Brynne says. And I'll let you recap everything, too.

0:27:08 - (Brynne Tillman): You got a couple I'll share that I like, too.

0:27:12 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah, you got to be consistent and it does take time and you got to know that. What are some that you like?

0:27:18 - (Brynne Tillman): So one of my favorites is Colleen Stanley, sales, EQ and IQ.

0:27:23 - (Jack Hubbard): Great.

0:27:23 - (Brynne Tillman): It's excellent. Another one that I really like is social tips to make sales. Stacy hall. I'm actually going to meet her for the first time in Vegas next week at the CRO summit. But it's really good. So social tips to make sales. Excellent. Excellent. And then the Dory Clark has a great newsletter that is more. She's a Wall Street Journal bestselling author and she talks a lot about just deep thinking. But I just love it.

0:28:01 - (Brynne Tillman): It's not really sales. It's more of maybe a personal growth kind of newsletter.

0:28:10 - (Jack Hubbard): Yeah. And so there are a lot of newsletters. For example, let's say that you use Zoom quite a lot in your sales efforts or you have a big bank footprint. There's a Zoom newsletter that allows you to understand all the updates that Zoom is doing. Well, Brynne, this has been great. I like this conversation. It's just one of those unique things on newsletters that are on LinkedIn. It's kind of a hidden gem.

0:28:40 - (Jack Hubbard): So wrap up articles and newsletters for us.

0:28:44 - (Brynne Tillman): So this is more of a commitment than a lot of the things we teach and talk about. However, if you are someone who loves to share value and insights, if you're a banker that just tends to curate really great content or just that, you know, you've got industry trends that you just love sharing, consider creating an article or a newsletter and start with one. Start. You don't. Don't start with both. It's a big undertaking.

0:29:16 - (Brynne Tillman): But start with one. Start with it. Doing it once a month, unless you're really, really committed. And then the big piece of advice is to have a few on tap. Have a bench.

0:29:30 - (Jack Hubbard): Good idea.

0:29:31 - (Brynne Tillman): Right? Like, because life can get ahead of us. So I would say always be two or three weeks ahead of time. I know Jack, with your interviews for Jack Rants, with Modern Bankers, you're like two months ahead. And this is really important because there are weeks when Jack's traveling and he's going to miss one. So by having that bench. So I want you to think, have that bench of content that you can always go back to. So that's my final thoughts.

0:30:03 - (Jack Hubbard): Awesome. Great. And fast-paced program. You're out in Las Vegas next week, so we're not live. But you have a wonderful and safe trip.

0:30:14 - (Brynne Tillman): Thank you. I appreciate it. Bye, guys.

0:30:17 - (Jack Hubbard): Bye, everybody.

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Outro

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 https://www.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 iHeartRadio. We're on YouTube as well. Subscribe at https://www.youtube.com/@TheModernBanker. Finally, don't forget to make today and every day a great client day.