At the 2014 Chief Marketing Officer Leadership Forum for Financial Services, marketing leaders in the financial services space discussed trends in the industry. I was pleased to see that customer-centricity is a focus of many initiatives. Kathy Klingler, SVP & CMO for Santander, shared the brand awareness program they launched after acquiring Sovereign Bank in the midst of a global recession. Despite the challenges, Santander successfully entered the U.S. market and continues to see positive results. The reason for their ongoing success can be attributed to the bank’s strategic investment in consumer collaboration. By collaborating directly with customers, prospects, and team members they saw great success with their “become Santander” awareness program.
And while the financial services industry recognizes the importance of community development I think many lack the resources required to develop and maintain a community. This is a challenge felt by those outside of the FinServ space as well. According to Gartner, nearly 72% of customers never login to customer communities, and 70% of online communities will fail. Below are 3 areas to consider when embarking on community development. 
Change Management
Many marketers want to introduce new ideas into their organization, but they’re often met with resistance. This is very true in more institutionalized industries like financial services. Marketers will face resistance and a lack of understanding around the importance of community development. When looking to impact effective change remember the following.
- Avoid arguing opinions. Lead change management discussions with data, proof. Take an objective approach to these discussions.
- Align the defined change and change priorities with organizational goals. Explain the why behind the initiatives and demonstrate how you recognize the needs of the business and how these proposed changes will support them.
- Start small. Don’t approach change management with the expectation that you’ll create massive change. Effective change management takes time and it occurs through small victories. Create a road-map to reach your end goal and develop a process that aligns with the road-map.
- Focus internally first. Demonstrate change within yourself and your organization. Become your own case study and define those valuable lessons learned before you penetrate larger areas of the business.
- Explain where others fit into the changes. People fear change because of uncertainty. Put those fears at ease. Allow them to see the role they’ll play in this greater and progressive vision.
Community Development
It’s important to differentiate between community development and community engagement. You can’t have engagement without a developed community, and engagement is what will contribute to the ongoing growth of the community.
- Define the value to the community. Understand, and then communicate, that this gives the community control over what affects them.
- Don’t do it in a silo. When building out community frameworks and initiatives get out and talk to your customers. It’s their community so they should define what they want out of it and how they’d prefer to engage with others.
- Use multiple channels to collect this community input. Leverage social media, events, forums, and surveys.
- Recognize that they’re probably already talking with each other. Exercise social listening, or listening of any kind, to learn what they are saying. This will provide insight into how can you facilitate conversations.
Community Engagement
To avoid becoming the 70% of failed communities Gartner references, planning for engagement is imperative. How are you going to encourage activity amongst your community? Identify the mutual benefits in this relationship. What do you want out of it? What do they want out of it; reputation growth, career opportunity, perks and incentives, greater voice and contribution? What will you provide? What will they give back? What are the expectations of all involved?
- Select a platform and tools to facilitate engagement. This could be something as simple as Google Groups or Facebook pages. If you want to better capture engagement and calculate ROI on community development you may want to consider a tool like Influitive.
- Developing, maintaining, and growing a community is a commitment. Consider hiring a community manager who will own this program, innovate, develop relationships with community managers, and monitor analytics.
- Consult your content strategy. To drive engagement you need high-value and educational content delivered to the right community members. The content should be accessible across all channels utilized by your community members. Provide them the opportunity to offer feedback. You can also leverage the community to crowdsource content ideas.
- Ask for community input, don’t just push content for consumption. Run polls and ask people to vote on scholarship or nonprofit donations. Get topical, not just with current events, but find out what personally motivates your community and gets them excited and talking.
- Be relatable and relational. Don’t be afraid to show the human side of your organization. Let your community know who the people are that they interface with, and what those people are doing to contribute to the community and the business.
What steps are you taking to build out and engage your community?