Strategies and Best Practices for Maximizing Social Media for Financial Services

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E–coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today, we have Trey Robinson, who is the founder of Story Amplify with us. Hey, Trey.

How are you? Thanks for having me.

Lovely. Trey, let’s get to know the humans behind them. Why don’t you talk us through your journey thus far and how you landed in the digital marketing space? More about Story Amplify, what do you guys do, and what are your core competencies? We take it from there.

Yeah, that sounds great. I was fortunate enough to land in the financial services world back before the first internet bubble, so the late ’90s, and was with a digital trading startup as their head of marketing. I got bought by Schwab, and that sucked me into the big corporate world. I spent nine years at Schwab, and then four years at USAA, so insurance, banking, and brokerage. Did a little bit of consulting, and then Schwab asked me to come back, and I was the head of marketing for two or three of their divisions. At 18, I missed the entrepreneurial world, so I stepped out, did a little bit of work for a family office, and then ultimately started Story Amplify. We’ve been around since 2018. Now, we’re 24, pushing six years in business. Today, we focus on everything in the financial services segment from your local advisors and your local banks to corporate enterprise clients. It’s all in the marketing space.

Lovely. As you mentioned, Trey, you have worked with companies of all sides, that’s from startups to Fortune hundreds. What are some of the biggest challenges or learnings you have encountered along the way during this long journey?

Yeah, I think they’re different by the enterprise. The small firms are trying to get traction. They’re trying to break through. They’re trying to be differentiated. That’s hard. That’s taking something that’s not moving at all that you’re creating from scratch and getting it to get some of its inertia. When it comes to the small startup firms or the local advisors, we focus on strategies that help them get started, help them drive business, help them be different, and that work very quickly. In large firms, it’s the complete opposite. A Fortune 100 company has its ecosystem. It has its momentum. Things are going to happen because of the beast that has been created. The most important thing that we do there is we try to optimize what’s already working. We try to align the different departments working together. We try to help make sure that all the effort is focused in the right area. We’re harnessing the energy at that point versus trying to create it.

That is a huge difference there. The timeline is also very different for an enterprise versus a startup, right?

Yeah, absolutely. The best analogy is trying to turn a battleship versus trying to turn a motorboat. When you’re in a speed boat, you can zip around and go fast, but it takes a lot of effort to do all of that whereas a battleship just moves on its own. It takes a lot of effort to get it to turn, but when you turn, It’s a force multiplier.

Absolutely. Building an agency has its challenges. We all know how difficult it is to run the show successfully. Building a successful agency requires a blend of skills. How do you own your leadership abilities to create a high-performing team at Story Amplify?

Yeah, it’s a great question. I was fortunate enough to work at two large firms that valued leadership and management. Both USAA and Schwab spent a lot of time teaching me to manage, teaching me to work with folks, and teaching me to just respect what everybody brings to the table. When it came to starting our agency, one of the things that was important to us was that we brought an eclectic and diverse group of people to the table, and their skill sets were very complementary. But more than anything, they were aligned around a common goal. For us, that’s serving others. We want to make sure that we put our employees ahead of ourselves, and that we put our clients ahead of everybody else. We feel like when we make other people successful, then that’s the formula to make the agency work. It’s a lot of experience in there, but like I said, also a lot of blessing of a lot of very good leaders in management training along the way in corporate America.

Lovely. I like to say, that if your employees are growing, the company is growing, right? The numbers simply add up. You also mentioned you have been an advocate of documenting best practices and examples of when to use them. How do you feel it has helped your team or you guys at your agency?

You know what? I’m a big believer in mentoring and teaching. We spend a lot of time talking about our best practices at the agency. But then our account team puts those in action. We use a lot of very repeatable systems, whether that’s Asana or Airtable, and just ways that we build work management into the business practices. Then that allows us to understand how to do the same process over and over, and how to be efficient. For example, if we’re going to create a blog or a website or redo a brand, we pull a template off the shell, we follow a tried and true process, and we’ve got all that documented in a workflow system. It’s not just one person dependent, but multiple people know how to do it. It becomes very repeatable, becomes very knowledgeable. The output to the client gets better. But more importantly, from an agency management perspective, we’re very efficient, and so that helps drive margins, too. Both you have a happy client and you have a happy bottom line.

Lovely. Moving on to content marketing, which is in itself a vast field. What specific content strategy has three have you found to be most effective in generating credibility and increasing the for financial services clients in particular?

Yeah, I will say we always start with Google. We use several proprietary tools to go look and see what people are looking for. The first question that we want to answer is, is this a problem that people are trying to solve? You’ve heard the adage that if that tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If we write a piece of content that no one’s looking for or the term is not common, it doesn’t do anybody any good. It doesn’t get discovered. I was lucky enough to work on the search program at USAA. When I first got there, we were buying the term and writing on the term automobile advertising. But we realized that most people call it, excuse me, automobile insurance. But we realized that most people call it car insurance. We were using the wrong terms, even though we were technically writing about the right thing. That was a lesson that stuck with me. Go to Google, see what people are looking for, what problems are they serving, and how competitive is that search. Then how do we find a place where there are problems that people are looking for that are close enough to what their client is selling that we can write content on that will rank?

It’s this formula around volume, competitiveness, and a unique client solution. We put those three legs of the stool together. We usually get content that’s found and that people find valuable. Then when they find valuable, they come back for other content, and they sign up for lead forms. We’ve earned the credibility of the client by doing that. I could go into a 10-minute conversation where as we increased volume, we saw increased results. We’ve got case studies by clients where they’re seeing 80, 90% of their traffic coming out of organic search. That’s a magical thing because the customer acquisition cost is drastically low and you’re not paying for every click. There’s some real beauty in a well-honed organic search strategy.

Absolutely. I have had experiences where if you ask a client who you feel is your top competition, especially for local businesses. I’m not talking about the enterprise players, they would say names that they feel are their competition. But if you search for them online, they are not even their competition. Someone else is taking the part of the pie and they would not even know about them. It’s so important to understand which is your target market, and what. I’m taking this example from the keyword thing that you shared. You should understand where your business lies, what is your client searching for, and what they’re looking at, who is their immediate competition in that particular space over the internet, right?

Absolutely. Also, what’s their business footprint? For a startup that’s a nationwide startup that will take clients from anywhere in the US because that’s where we focus in the continental US, we’ll take one very national strategy, really around big problems that people are trying to solve. But on the other side, if we’re dealing with a financial advisor who might be in a small town USA, and their business is coming from 3-5 miles around their business, we won’t start with an organic search. We’ll start with their Google My Business or Google Business profile and make sure we’re optimizing the discoverability of their local office. We think when you’re talking about search, let’s start with, your point, who’s the target audience? What are we trying to solve? Where are they located? Then what are the best tactics and strategies for that particular client? Because they can vary drastically just based on where their customer is or how big their target is.

Absolutely. Can’t I be more with that? For B2B content marketing, it’s a different ball game altogether. B2b content marketing is crucial for lead generation as well. If we can share some effective strategies for creating compelling content that resonates with the target audiences, it will be great.

Yeah, absolutely. We look at B2B a little bit differently than we look at B2C for an individual consumer, we are very problem-focused. It’s all about discoverability and solving the problem then turning them into a lead by giving them more value, and then introducing the brand after we’ve captured the lead. We think on the B2B side, we’re doing sales support. It’s a blend of problem and product. On the B2B side, we will bring the product and the unique solutions much more forward than we will on the B2C That’s because you’ve got a more educated buyer. They typically understand the ecosystem a little bit better. They’re not starting at ground zero trying to understand what’s my problem. They’re farther down the funnel. They’re saying, I know what my problem is. I’ve got a solution set here. What other solutions Or why should I consider your brand to be part of my solution set? I think the B2B journey starts farther down the funnel, and it’s a little bit more product-forward than problem-forward, which is what I would say we do when we’re talking to the consumer.

Absolutely. In most cases, I think I would like to believe that you would have experienced the same. In most cases, they would already be using your client’s competition or any of the products that are your competition. The need is already there. You just have to replace the current player which is there versus your client and just have to make sure that you’re there in front of them so that you are in that category where they choose from. That’s right. As you mentioned, you don’t have to educate them about what their need is or what that particular segment is all about.

Yeah, exactly. We’ve developed a funnel if you will, a customer journey for content. At the bottom of the funnel, it’s your branded content, your company name, and your company’s solutions. Right above that is the product category you’re in. For example, if you’re selling 401k plans, all the product categories around 401k are your next level up. Then you get up into industry solutions. You might sell a specific type of 401k, but the next product level across is all the choices for your product. That’s a lot of times where we start the B2B marketing. In the choices, industry intersection. Above that, I say, are they problem-aware? And then above that, do they even understand the problem that they have at the very high level of the funnel? Rarely in the B2B world do we have to go all the way to the top of the funnel and start explaining the problem that they’re feeling and pull them down? Usually, to your point, they’re very aware of what they’re trying to do or the solutions in their space, and they’re looking for alternatives or better solutions. As I said, we tend to start more mid-funnel than the top of the funnel.

It would be to be more.

Absolutely. Today’s social media, Trey, is a powerful marketing tool as we all know. How can financial service providers best leverage different social media platforms that are there to reach their target audience? Or how do you guys play that game at your agency?

Yeah, I think the first question is, where is your target audience? Every social media platform has a very different target. Like, LinkedIn is a business play. TikTok or Snapchat tend to skew a little bit younger, although I know my mom’s on there getting reels from my kids. Facebook now is older than Instagram. And so a different target in each platform, and they’re on there for a different reason. So the first thing we talk about is, where is your target market? The second thing I will say is we use social for credibility, reinforcement, and brand reinforcement. So a lot of times the funnel doesn’t start with- I saw something, especially in financial services, they’re not buying a pair of jeans or a consumer product where they saw an influence or talk about it, and now they’re going to jump over and try the latest protein shake or exercise fat or whatever else the case might be. In financial services, a lot of them, hear about the problem or solution from a friend. They hear about it because they are researching a problem. Then they come to a brand they’re interested in, and they move to social to check out the credibility of the brand.

Is a brand in a having active conversations? Are people leaving good reviews? Is there an ongoing conversation Do I like the aesthetic? Are there spokespeople? Do I connect with them? In the financial services world, we tend to think of social as a reinforcement channel as opposed to maybe a discovery channel. I put it farther the funnel than you might in a consumer product.

Trey, yours has been a decently long journey so far, right? What has been the most rewarding aspect of your career journey so far, if you have to point out one?

For sure, it’s the people that you work with. For me, specifically, it’s the younger people that I get to work with. I’ve had the blessing of 30-plus interns, a lot of people first right out of college. In folks, People like that and team members like that are still trying to figure their career out or trying to understand how to act in the business world, for someone like myself to come along and be available to teach them marketing techniques, to talk to them about their career and their career journey, to help them figure out how they can get fulfillment out of their career, that to me is the best part of it all. I’ve done everything from coaching people to changing careers to helping people become better marketers, but there’s no better feeling than watching someone that you’ve worked with or someone on your team grow and succeed in their career and get fulfillment out of it. And so, hands down, the impact that you can have on people around you, and then the agency world, that extends to helping clients run their business. But the people impact, the positive part that you can have on them, their careers, ultimately their families, for me, that’s been the best part.

Lovely. If I have to ask you for some bits of advice that you’d want to give to our listeners today who are trying to make a mark in this digital space of trying to start their agencies? What would that advice be?

The first thing I would tell you is to find an area of expertise get deep in one area and be an expert. In some Enjoy what you love, enjoy what you do for a living, but be good in that one area. Then once you’re really good in one area, what are the complementary areas? Sit right next to that. I tell my kids all the time, that if you’re the best in the world at whatever you do, you will get paid handsomely for that. You can earn a living at anything there is in the entire world, the most obscure thing you’ve ever heard of if you’re the best at it. In the marketing world, how can we be the best? How Can we be an expert in one particular area? Then what are the complementary areas that impact that? Then once you’ve mastered that, the question is, do we want to go up into management and get broader, or do we want to just cement expertise by making it deeper and more solid? I think there’s a career decision along the way. But if you’re starting, let’s find a place that you’re good at, that you love, and that you can be known for, and then we can build everything else around that.

And talking about career, Trey, looking back, is there anything that you would want to have done differently than what you have done in your career?

I’ve been very blessed that my career has been taken care of by some really good mentors around me.

You did mention that, yes.

I’ve seen people close to me not have such a straight journey. And so what I tell a lot of young people is, have an idea of where you want to go. What does good look like? What’s the job you want in three years, in five years, in 10 years? Or what do you want to be doing? Or what parts of your job do you want to be maximizing? Let’s say you don’t know what the actual job is. That’s the first thing, is to try to look a little bit farther out and then make a decision that gets you that Am I adding to my skills? Am I growing my career? Am I adding a piece that I may have a gap in that I need to get to that next place? Go up the ladder one rung at a time. I find that a lot of times people chase. They just chase, and they move around, and it’s not addictive. They wake up in 5 or 10 years, and they’ve got a lot of really neat hobbies, but they haven’t built a really deep and strong resume around an area of expertise. Place. It has not been each of those jobs or each of those moves, or each of those projects has not been additive to the place they want to get.

I think some intentionality about the journey is something that I was told a long time ago, and I try to pass along to the people I talk to.

All right. Not really any further, Trey. You have been a spot. Thank you so much for taking your time and doing this with us. Appreciate it.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.